Carl Curtis, Author at Catholic Herald

Carl Curtis

How Woodstock ended in a trash-strewn quagmire

August 29, 2019

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation (BBC iPlayer/Amazon Prime/PBS) offers a somewhat unexpected picture of the 1969 rock festival. Its producers wisely chose not to present a bunch of rock acts – the film Woodstock (1970) does that – preferring to go behind the scenes and recount the difficulties in choosing a site and

No chastity please, this is Amazon Prime

August 15, 2019

Amazon’s Prime’s The Boys (8 episodes) has a contemporary setting, except for its superheroes and the fact that they’re an accepted part of the everyday world. More than merely accepted, they’re celebrities. When one (of seven) retires, their sponsor/owner Vought corporation rolls out the replacement in a televised gala reminiscent of the BBC’s announcement of

A four-hour masterpiece that you simply have to see

August 01, 2019

The opening of Burning Bush has the look of a Sixties teen movie, with grinning kids gyrating to rock ’n’ roll – almost Beach Party without the beach. But the impression doesn’t last as the scene cuts to a caravan of tanks creeping along dimly lit streets and shortly into broad daylight. The kids are

The Last Czars on Netflix: What did the Romanovs do to deserve this?

July 18, 2019

The Last Czars, on Netflix, juggles documentary and drama with mixed results. The documentary sections, with commentary from a half dozen or more historians, present the cataclysmic downfall of the Romanovs from Nicholas II’s coronation in 1894 to his family’s murder at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1918. From my knowledge of Russian history,

An old-fashioned whodunit – without the class and wit

July 11, 2019

Mystery fans will recall their favourite husband and wife teams: Tommy and Tuppence, Lord Peter and Harriet, and, especially from film, Nick and Nora Charles. Netflix’s Murder Mystery updates the formula and banks on a similar chemistry. Taking its cue from The Thin Man, it offers a new Nick (Adam Sandler) and a new Nora,

Good Omens is a travesty of eschatology

June 13, 2019

Good Omens on Amazon Prime is a five and one-half hour exercise in schoolboy humour, that is, a brand of humour practised by witty adolescents – not an easy thing to pull off either. Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett, Good Omens does indeed howl away nicely for much

To hell with moral equivalence: the Soviet spies helped advance evil

May 23, 2019

Set in post-war Britain, Traitors (Netflix Originals) plunges its viewers into the world of espionage, chiefly of Soviet infiltration of Attlee’s government around 1946. Soviets are there all right, along with dozens of bureaucrats and the Americans, whose agents are convinced that the Russians are up to no good. And they’re willing to use any

The men who stopped Bonnie and Clyde

May 02, 2019

They’re young, they’re in love, and they kill people.” That was the famous tag-line for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), as unforgettable now as it was then. The film was about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker who, as an FBI website reports, killed 13 people in a “crime spree” that lasted 18 months and

Beneath the tawdry surface, Fleabag has surprising depth

April 11, 2019

At the start of the first series of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, the eponymous protagonist and her café-owing partner, Boo, sing: “We’re oh so happy to be a modern woman.” It’s a flashback. As it turns out, Boo is dead, a suicide, and Fleabag, played by Waller-Bridge, must try to be a “modern woman” on her

Ricky Gervais’s bleak sitcom for atheists

March 28, 2019

In Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold tells his “love” that the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” Tony in Ricky Gervais’s series After Life might have said the same, only he’s lost his beloved wife to cancer, posing the question: can he be true to

Miracle Workers: Daniel Radcliffe’s heaven-set comedy fails miserably

February 28, 2019

Has Hollywood ever really cared about God – I mean the true God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Probably not. The great god Mammon is another business entirely. The movie and now television industries exist for one reason: to make money – pots of it. But regarding God, producers, directors and screenwriters have not been

It’s satisfying enough, but true Agatha Christie fans should avoid The ABC Murders

February 14, 2019

Despite the evident distaste of possibly the most celebrated mystery novelists of the past 80 years (PD James and Georges Simenon), there can be no doubt that the public continues to love the amateur sleuth. People can’t get enough of Holmes (any incarnation), Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, which seems sufficient grounds for the recent

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