Mainlining Christmas

Another in a growing line of films I'd never seriously consider calling a Christmas movie, but it's old enough, interesting enough, and uses the holidays in an interesting enough (albeit limited) capacity to make it worth discussing here. The holiday, incidentally, is New Year's (I don't believe Christmas is so much as mentioned), and for the most part that holiday's role is symbolic - the leads discuss it several times, but it's in the context of plans that can never be. It's not technically part of the actual narrative, though there is a brief epilogue offering a glimpse of the day in question.  I should also note this movie is fantastic, offering a complex blend of drama and comedy, with the latter enhancing the emotional impact of the former, rather than detracting. The jokes, which I'll add are pretty hilarious, pull you into the sense of whimsy and hope that comes with falling in love, even if the situation is dire. Tonally, this is a fairytale set...

I found the key to unraveling this bizarre religious horror/action movie buried in its Wikipedia article: prior to falling in the hands of director Peter Hyams, End of Days was apparently offered to Sam Raimi and Guillermo del Toro, either of which would most likely have turned the seemingly bonkers premise of pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger against the devil into the amusingly bonkers farce it deserved to be. But they were both busy (or perhaps uninterested), resulting in Hyams taking over the project. To his credit, Hyams proves capable of delivering a sleek, visually impressive movie. The effects are solid, including some early CG that (mostly) avoids the pitfalls of looking cheesy or dated. But none of that means much, because he doesn't seem to be in on the joke here. Despite some objectively ridiculous dialogue, names lamp-shading campy origins (for Christ's sake, there's a priest named Thomas Aquinas), and - again - Schwarzenegger blasting the devil with enough firepow...

Kind of tough trying to figure out what tone to take on this, what with Rosemary's Baby New Year on the horizon and all. But that's not here yet, and I figure we all deserve a break before we start figuring out how to face the impending nightmare barreling towards us. So let's try and look back instead of forward, at least for today. In the case of this ridiculous blog, I guess that means taking a moment to consider what I watched that stuck with me. And this year, there was a lot. My favorite 2024 Christmas movie was easily  That Christmas . The overall response this movie's received from critics has been lukewarm, and I still can't wrap my head around that. This isn't a movie that struck me as pretty good or polarizing: That Christmas felt like a phenomenal animated movie that should should appeal to viewers of virtually every demographic. This should be (and perhaps will someday be recognized as) a holiday classic. Its reception honestly doesn't make sens...

The Preacher's Wife has been on our watch list for years, but it's one of those movies that never seems to land on streaming services, or at least not ones we're subscribed to. Eventually I broke down and ordered a DVD, which then sat in a pile beside my TV for months. There it remained until someone commented on our 10 year old review of The Bishop's Wife  politely calling us out for not getting to the remake. Guess what we watched that night.  My first observation watching it was that I was going to need to rewatch the original if I wanted to have anything more substantive to say than, "yeah, this one's really good, too." Fortunately, the 1947 film is a lot easier to watch online than the remake, which is why you're getting a hybrid article covering both versions. Looking at them together has the unusual effect of making both seem even better. The films start with the same underlying premise but approach it in such radically different ways they feel ...

All the Creatures Were Stirring is a low-budget horror anthology movie released directly to Shudder in 2018 written and directed by Rebekah McKendry and David Ian McKendry, who (as you probably guessed from their names) are married. As is often the case with low-budget productions, any discussion of the movie's quality is going to be riddled with caveats and sidenotes. Depending on what you're comparing this to, what you expect out of it, and how steep of a curve you're grading on, you could describe this as fantastic, horrible, or just about anything in between. The movie features five short films and a frame story, all of which is packed into a brisk hour twenty minutes. Unsurprisingly, that means the individual stories aren't given a great deal of space to breathe. For the most part, the characters are pretty one-dimensional, though that's not necessarily a bad thing here. The collection is basically comprised of short genre stories, each of which serves to offer...

Even the title of this animated movie is difficult to unravel. This was a Finnish production, but it was animated in English before being released with several different titles, including at least two English titles depending on which country you were in. "The Flight Before Christmas" is the title for the US release, the far superior "Niko & The Way to the Stars" is the title in other English-speaking markets, and "Niko – Lentäjän poika" (which translates to something like, "Niko: Flier's Son") is the Finnish title. And, as far as I can tell, none of these are any more or less official than the others. Despite a strong preference for "The Way of the Stars," I'm going with the US title, since that's how this is primarily listed in the US. Adding complications, there are a few different versions of this floating around, because at some point this was also cut down to 45 minutes and shown on TV. For better or worse, we watc...