Frasier is a brilliant sitcom any time of the year you care to watch it (and honestly that should in copious amounts and often). But there’s something about the show’s Christmas episodes which really brings out what makes Frasier, which ran for 11 seasons from 1993 to 2004, such a Continue Reading
Christmas 2018
On 8th day of Christmas … I read Seven Days of Us by Francesca Hornak
Christmas is, by any measure of popular culture, supposed to be a time when we cleave close to our families, joining us together in an unmitigatedly positive festival of joy, love and inclusivity. It’s a tantalising ideal, all right, but as many of us, even those of us in functionally Continue Reading
Thoughts on A Charlie Brown Christmas
In a world of dazzling CGI special effects and ever more postmodern, cleverly-interwoven stories, the beautiful simplicity of 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas is striking. Holding close to the look and spirit of Charlie Schulz’s immortally-brilliant comic strip Peanuts, the animated Christmas special features, as you might expect given the Continue Reading
On 7th day of Christmas … I watched Christmas in Connecticut #retroreview
If you think that creative fabrication is purely a product of our digital Fake News what-you-see-isn’t-necessarily-what-you’re-getting age, then 1945’s Christmas in Connecticut is proof that humanity has long had a talent for pulling the wool over others’ eyes, especially if it aids in building and sustaining a career. You could Continue Reading
It’s a Giant Days Christmas! Where Women Glow and Men Plunder
Apparently as an Aussie guy, I am, so says the iconicly-famous song by Men at Work, supposed to be engaged in regular bouts of plundering (and chundering too but that’s a whole other thing) while the women around me are reported to glow from perspiration, nuclear fallout residue or some Continue Reading
On 6th day Christmas … I watched The Grinch
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 Dickens’ 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
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
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