Tag: history
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Dudes in the woods
Robin Hood is a Mediaeval superhero. He doesn’t care much about emancipation, but he loves to skip through the trees. — Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.…
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Learning from old movies
GROSS is my first Substack thing. It’s film reviews, which I hope are funny and interesting and unpretentious. — It’s also my personal low-effort way to learn about the whole…
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Chaps in trouble
We’ve got to 1919. The officer class over-reaches itself and gets stuck on the ice. It’s a disaster but it all works out in the end. — Every year’s top-grossing…
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This review turned into a disquisition on underwater storytelling
This adaptation of Jules Verne’s great submarine romance was the top-grossing film of 1916 – and it wasn’t even the first movie version — 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, STUART…
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A visionary work of art, a hateful apologia for slavery and Jim Crow… and a really bad film
The Birth of a Nation was the top-grossing film of 1915… — THE BIRTH OF A NATION, D.W. GRIFFITHS, DAVID W. GRIFFITH CORP., 1915 So I did it, I watched…
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Ten times the Labour party stood behind workers in Britain
Actually, there aren’t any. Sorry. — The conventional wisdom is that Labour is the only major socialist party in the world that emerged directly from organised labour—every other important party—in…
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Competence can fuck off
I learn that Photoshop is thirty. The small revelation that goes with this information is that I’ve been using Photoshop for thirty years. That’s more than half of my life…
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Seven things I learnt from the British Library’s Magna Carta show
The British Library has a terrific, totally absorbing show about Magna Carta – which is the cornerstone of world democracy or a sort of baronial shopping list weirdly granted in…