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| Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell in "Moon" |
by Andy Nowicki
In many ways Christmas is a highly cinematic season. The feelings that surround the holiday are finally ineffable, better expressed in images than words. Language, wonderful tool of communication though it is, sometimes fails us when it comes to conveying the glory and beauty of truly profound occasions.
That is why, when pondering the "meaning of Christmas," one often thinks of movies: Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life, the many and varied cinematic incarnations of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and so forth. Highly as I regard these and other explicitly Christmas-themed films, however, they were not the formative movies of my youth. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and from an early age imbibed and internalized the science-fiction ethos of that time. The original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies thus appeal to me with more immediacy than countless, no doubt superior films from previous eras and separate genres.
That is why, when pondering the "meaning of Christmas," one often thinks of movies: Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life, the many and varied cinematic incarnations of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and so forth. Highly as I regard these and other explicitly Christmas-themed films, however, they were not the formative movies of my youth. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and from an early age imbibed and internalized the science-fiction ethos of that time. The original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies thus appeal to me with more immediacy than countless, no doubt superior films from previous eras and separate genres.
