For a film that’s ostensibly about a person who hates Christmas with such a ferociously ill-tempered passion that he steals it away from everyone else, The Grinch wears its Christmas-loving heart very much on its tinseled sleeve. Which really makes perfect sense since at heart The Grinch, like Charles Continue Reading
A Christmas tree you can see from space: Come join the apocalyptically-festive LEGO party!
It’s fair to say that celebrating Christmas is not exactly high on the list of priorities in your average garden variety apocalyptic wasteland? After all, resources are slim to none, it’s really dusty and bleak, and there’s all that time that must be devoted to brooding sessions. There surely isn’t Continue Reading
On 5th day of Christmas … I listened to A Legendary Christmas by John Legend
There is a lush musicality to pretty much everything that John Legend creates and performs. It comes from an innate understanding of the smoothness and richness of his music, a sense of how it and his voice work together, all of it coming perfectly together to lend his songs an Continue Reading
Movie review: Can You Ever Forgive Me?
One of the great pleasures of postmodern storytelling is its willingness to go beneath and beyond the obvious and explore what lies beneath the easy-to-access tropes and cliches. This means that in a film like Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the “villain” is rendered not as some ne’er do Continue Reading
On 4th day of Christmas … I read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
There are some figures that loom so large in the public consciousness that it’s easy to feel like you know, or you can imagine, pretty much everything about them. Santa Claus is one of those figures. We owe our collective modern idea of Santa Claus to the Greeks (Saint Nicholas, Continue Reading
The short and the short of it: The intriguing stopmotion beauty of Fabricated
SNAPSHOT A stop-motion film ten years in the making, ‘Fabricated’ is a journey through an alien world which was once our own. (synopsis via Vimeo) There is not a lot of correlation, in general, between the natural and mechanical worlds, the two quite inimical to each other in a Continue Reading
On 3rd day of Christmas … I watched Anna and the Apocalypse
If you’re a Christmasaholic, you may well wonder what zombies are doing shambling their way through your favourite holiday. After all, isn’t the song-evoked “most wonderful time of the year” a joyous time of peace and goodwill to all, chestnuts roasting over open fires and sleigh rides through the Continue Reading
Husband and husband: True love in graphic novel form
SNAPSHOT Time and time again we are reminded that we are better together—and it all started with Husband & Husband! When we launched our webcomic we thought to ourselves, ‘Wait, why isn’t this name taken yet?’ And then we realized, ‘Oh, yeah! It’s because we were just recently allowed Continue Reading
Can a naughty kid become nice? Air NZ’s Christmas ad answers the question
Ah, the age-old Naughty and Nice list. The bane of kids with poor behavioural karma the world over, Santa’s obsession with “making a list and checking it twice / Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice” forms the centrepiece of this year’s Christmas ad from Air New Zealand. Reflecting Continue Reading
On 2nd day of Christmas … I listened to Songs for the Season by Ingrid Michaelson
It’s a reasonably safe bet that anyone who records a Christmas album is in love with the festive season and all its multitudinous warm-and-fuzzy trappings. That’s certainly the case with indie pop artist Ingrid Michaelson whose holiday album Songs for the Season released on 26 October. In a recent Continue Reading