The 19th Military History Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. For my pick from this edition I can’t go past the first entry, on the interwar RAF at Thoughts on Military History. It’s part of the first chapter of his thesis, and it’s a very good overview of the financial and operational […]
This post will only be of interest to Melbourne readers. Melbourne Cinémathèque is holding a season of 1930s Howard Hawks films this month, including three of his aviation classics: Only Angels Have Wings, Ceiling Zero (both on Wednesday, 3 December) and The Dawn Patrol (Wednesday, 17 December). They’re showing at ACMI. I don’t think I’ve
Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that I stand
This week is the 25th anniversary of the Australian cinematic release of WarGames, which is mainly significant because I missed the anniversary of the US release a few weeks ago! There were a few retrospectives floating about then, which focused on the movie’s importance as an early popularisation of the hacking and phreaking subcultures, and
This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in
Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) has been working on a new film, called Australia. As the name perhaps suggests, it’s a sweeping saga of this wide, brown land of ours: the men who conquered it, the women who loved them, the cattle, the dust, the flies … well, it sounds pretty dull to
What was the first post-apocalyptic film? This is something I’ve wondered for a while. First, I should define what I mean by a “post-apocalyptic film”. It’s one which posits some great global catastrophe which shatters civilisation.1 It can show that catastrophe but the focus has to be on what happens afterwards: how do people survive,
I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge — predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank — which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city’s landmarks, kills a couple of
As part of the BBC’s Summer of British Film, The Dam Busters will be showing next week at selected cinemas across the UK. I’ll be seeing it, with at least one Airminded regular, at the Peckham Multiplex next Tuesday at 7.30pm, for the surprisingly reasonable price of 99p. Any readers who would like to come
For a long, long time, there was only Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls: the poster. Then there was ZvP: the movie mashup, followed by ZvP: the cartoon mashup. And now there’s ZvP: the webcomic, along with ZvP: the t-shirt! I obviously wasn’t responsible for creating any of this. I wasn’t even the first to blog about ZvP.
