Mainlining Christmas

I've seen at least three genre films titled "Silent Night", and none were what I'd call a slam dunk. This comes closest, between John Woo's stylish direction, a clever gimmick, and an impressive performance from Joel Kinnaman - it's by no means a bad revenge flick, but the elements making this distinct don't overcome the ones making it feel generic. Specifically, the movie's sparce use of dialogue doesn't have the intended effect, so you're left feeling like the film is incomplete. That's the gimmick, by the way: this has essentially no dialogue other than radio transmissions and video clips watched and heard by characters in the movie. I actually think this would have worked better if they'd found ways to cut those as well - the handful of spoken words we hear don't add much and water down the effect. It's not that I found myself missing the dialogue itself - if there's one thing this movie succeeds in, it's demonstrati...

There are quite a few movies named, "Silent Night," so - just to be sure we're all on the same page - the one we're looking at today concerns a Christmas gathering coinciding with an apocalyptic event in which a massive toxic cloud is sweeping over the globe killing every living human and animal in its wake. The movie is sort of a jumble of genres, incorporating comedy, drama, horror, and science fiction. By far the most famous member of the cast is Keira Knightley, who - between this and the criminally underrated Seeking a Friend for the End of the World - is amassing a background in the quirky apocalypse microgenre. Unfortunately, this doesn't work anywhere near as well as Seeking a Friend, though there's still a great deal to appreciate here. The movie's narrative is almost entirely focused on a group of adult friends and their children who are coming together for a Christmas celebration/suicide party. The poisonous cloud I mentioned earlier isn't q...

For better or worse (or more accurately first for better then subsequently for worse) this 2009 movie written and directed by Richard Kelly (the Donnie Darko guy) based on the 1970 short story by the legendary Richard Matheson leaves you utterly perplexed as to what it is you're actually watching. "Button, Button" (the story it's adapted from) is fairly straightforward as far as these things go, based on the idea a box is dropped off containing a button which if pressed will result in a financial payout but also the death of someone the presser doesn't know. In the original story, the death was the husband of the woman who pressed the button (the loophole being she supposedly never really knew him); when this was adapted for the Twilight Zone series in the '80s, they altered the ending to instead imply the next recipient would be someone the previous holders didn't know. This... I mean.... Okay, spoiler warning, I guess. This isn't a movie I'll be ...

Book Review: Faking Christmas Kerry Winfrey, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Whether Christmas in Connecticut is a holiday classic is debatable, but it has inspired several adaptations and remakes, including this one.   Premise: Laurel didn't mean to lie to her boss. She just really needed a job, and one misunderstanding spiraled out of control. Now she has to pretend that her sister's life is hers for one memorable Christmas.  You know what? I liked this one!  Laurel is funny and relatable. She's acknowledges that she's made bad decisions and is trying to do better, gets frustrated, wears her heart on her sleeve, and is fundamentally optimistic, despite also being hugely self-deprecating.  The best parts of Christmas in Connecticut (the banter, the humor and the fun characters) are largely intact, while the occasional sexism of the original is left behind. Laurel got her magazine website job that she's t...

This sequel's title is literal: the story in After the Thin Man is set immediately after the events of the 1934 film , which of course took place at Christmas. I actually think they're quietly retconning the timeline in that one a bit to allow time for protagonists Nick and Nora to reach California before New Years, but - if so - it's fairly trivial considering the events within this movie seem to be set over a minimum of three days between the evening of December 31st and January 1st. More on that later. The tone (and debatably genre) of After the Thin Man undergoes at least a moderate shift from the earlier film. The first movie is really a farcical parody of the detective/mystery genre. While there's a pretty standard plot going on, The Thin Man takes pains to prevent the audience or leads from becoming too engrossed in what's going on or becoming invested in the characters impacted by the resolution. The side characters were basically comedic caricatures; even t...

We last looked at The Thin Man back in 2013 - I'm grateful Lindsay reviewed it at the time, because (as she says in a note at the bottom) she was able to appreciate it a lot more than I was. In my defense, I really hadn't had much experience with movies from the 1930s back then, so I wasn't prepared for some stylistic choices and conventions the film employs. While I still don't love this quite  as much as some of its most vocal proponents, I've come around on it for the most part and more or less agree with Lindsay's conclusions: it's a delightful, comedic adventure anchored by its leads that would have benefited from more equable screentime for Myrna Loy's Nora. That's hardly a dealbreaker, obviously, but I do think it's worth emphasizing it is a flaw that the most interesting aspects of the film are largely sidelined, either because of fidelity to the source material or the garden variety sexist outlook that women couldn't or shouldn'...

This 1972 TV suspense movie is mainly notable for two things: having a bizarrely impressive cast, and for being well ahead of the curve by delivering what's essentially a Christmas slasher before "slasher" even coalesced into a subgenre. This beat Black Christmas by two years, though it's worth acknowledging that being first is the only  metric in which this could ever seriously be said to "beat" Black Christmas. Not that it's a fair comparison: Home for the Holidays was made for the ABC Movie of the Week series, not a theatrical release. Which of course raises the question of how much of a curve we should be grading this on. It's not bad for what it is, but "what it is" isn't exactly good. There's not much tension, it's not at all scary, and the characters aren't particularly entertaining outside of the novelty of seeing Sally Field, Eleanor Parker, Jessica Walter, and Julie Harris in a proto-slasher TV movie produced by A...

I actually wasn't going to write this one up. My initial reaction was this film had some interesting moments set at Christmas, but for a number of reasons neither qualified as a "Christmas movie" (at least by my definitions) or leveraged the holidays in ways that were thematically noteworthy enough to count. Obviously neither of those reactions reflect on the movie itself, which is a fantastic (albeit disturbing) entry in the Italian Giallo movement, a sort of quasi-genre that paved the way for the modern slasher and has influenced countless films across virtually every genre. But the movie got me wondering whether there were any Giallos that used the holidays in a more sustained manner, so I did a simple web search for "Giallo Christmas movie" to see if anything popped up. And the only thing that did was Deep Red. While I didn't (and still don't) really consider this a Christmas movie, articles on Collider and Slash Film  were more generous in their la...

Depending on how you want to define your terms, Destination Tokyo might be the earliest Christmas war movie, though this is absolutely one of those times the qualifiers have qualifiers. The 1927 silent film, Barbed Wire , at the very least includes a memorable Christmas sequence which thematically shapes the movie around it. Likewise, the 1936 science-fiction film, Things to Come , opens at Christmas and plays with the tonal dissonance between the holidays and war (something Destination Tokyo largely sidesteps). Neither of these feature the holidays centrally enough to unequivocally be considered Christmas movies, though I'd argue both are at least debatable. The 1939 animated short,  Peace on Earth , is a more clearcut case - this is absolutely a Christmas war story, though its brief runtime might disqualify it as a movie if the difference between "short" and "feature-length" matters to you. Destination Tokyo comes closer to a clear-cut case, but even this has ...

Barbed Wire is one of several films mentioned in passing in Jeremy Arnold's Christmas in the Movies book that I figured I should track down. I should note Arnold is clear that the movie doesn't qualify as a genuine Christmas movie under his definition, which is quite a bit more restrictive than those we use. Even with our more expansive approach, Barbed Wire is a marginal case. The holiday section certainly doesn't come close to encompassing half the runtime, nor is it particularly important to the plot (Arnold places a great deal of significance on this metric throughout). The holiday does resonate with the movie's theme, however, which is why I think it's at least ambiguously a Christmas movie. Regardless, between being nearly a hundred years old and featuring a thematically relevant extended holiday sequence, I feel this is at least worth discussing, whichever side of the "Christmas movie" line it actually falls on. Released less a month before The Jazz...