Mainlining Christmas

This was one of a handful of adaptations of "A Christmas Carol" that were on my list when I binged fifty or so of these back in 2022, but I was unable to get to it at the time. I've been meaning to rectify that since, but it never seemed to be on the right streaming services at the right times. Well, that finally changed, so at long last I was able to sit down and watch it. The movie is quite a bit more ambitious than most low-budget versions. The story is set in what was then the present-day, song and dance numbers are added (though the music is diegetic, save for when the source is explicitly supernatural), and the majority of characters - included Scrooge himself - are gay. Several characters are gender-flipped to accommodate this: nephew Fred is now niece Freda, Belle becomes Bill, and so on. Sequences and minor characters are added to expand on this idea, however the core of the story is unchanged. In fact, in several respects this adheres closer to Dickens's blu...

Okay, that wasn't half bad. Actually... hold on. Let me double-check my math. Actually, I take it back: this was exactly half bad. But that does mean it was half good, which is a hell of a lot better than the first installment . The improvements are mainly in the animation, which received a substantial upgrade, likely due to the first being fairly successful. This wasn't giving Disney or Dreamworks a run for their money, but to my eye it looks about on par with most of what Blue Sky was putting out around that time. Given this was probably made for a tiny fraction of the money US studios have, that's pretty impressive. The characters interact better with their environments (though the lighting still looks off at times), and - more importantly - the action sequences are kinetic and engaging, both in how they're storyboarded and brought to life. This was a huge issue with the first movie, so I was happy to see the course correction. Unfortunately the writing didn't im...

For those of you who have never heard of this (which I'm assuming is basically everyone), ATM is one of a large number of claustrophobic horror movies exploiting the idea that a minimal number of actors can be filmed in a single location for a hell of a lot less money than it costs to make a standard movie. In this case, the location is (spoiler alert) an ATM in an empty parking lot right before Christmas. Speaking of spoiler alerts, there's very little here to discuss that doesn't reveal crucial details about the plot and resolution, so if you're a fan of being bored out of your goddamn mind, you should probably stop reading now and endure this as it was meant to be endured. To be clear, that was not a recommendation. To be fair, there are a couple positives, starting with the opening credits. More accurately, the song playing over those credits isn't one I've heard before, which is virtually unheard of in this kind of thing. Typically they either play one of a...

Here's one that's been on our list for a while. This is a 2012 South Korean disaster movie set on Christmas Eve directed by Kim Ji-hoon. The effects and overall production values are, for the most part, at the level of a Hollywood blockbuster, and the movie was a massive success in South Korea. It was so well executed, I found myself a little surprised it hadn't received a US release... until it got to the third act, when it became extremely clear why this particular market wasn't an option. The premise is going to be familiar to anyone who's heard of the 1974 film, The Towering Inferno, whether you've seen it or not (which is fortunate, because that's another one I still need to get around to). At its core, The Tower is about people trying to escape a burning skyscraper, with the complexity coming from who the characters are, what their relationships are to each other, what they're willing to risk or sacrifice for each other, and so on. While the premis...

This low-budget Irish production sells itself as the "darkest" adaptation ever made, which is what put it on my radar. Before we even touch on that - or anything else about this - I need to take a moment and focus on another adjective in my opening sentence, namely "low-budget." Because when I say this looks as though it was made for very little money, I'm not exaggerating. The phrase "independent movie" covers a large range of films, from student projects to elaborate arthouse pieces that look as good or better than Hollywood productions. Sadly, this is closer to the former. Much closer. Honestly, I wondered if it might be a school project for a while. That's not to say it's bad, exactly. When you're looking at movies made under these kinds of constraints, that term loses significance. This is an ambitious movie, and without fully understanding the filmmakers' goals in undertaking the project, I can't even begin to offer insight on...

I'm not going to go in depth into the intricacies of the Romanian New Wave movement, mainly because I know absolutely nothing about the Romanian New Wave movement, aside from what I can glean from Wikipedia. The short version seems to be a focus on realism and grounded storytelling - those are certainly qualities on display in "A Month in Thailand," a film which is set neither in Thailand, nor over the span of a month. Instead, the movie takes place over approximately 24 hours starting on the morning of New Year's Eve. The title refers to a theoretical vacation the movie's main character wants to go on with a girlfriend that also serves as a sort of stand-in for the kind of person he aspires to be and the sort of relationship he wants to be in. By design, the plot here is fairly sparse. The movie opens with the main character, Radu, in a relationship with Adina. It's clear early on that Radu isn't completely satisfied, but things really take a turn after t...

I'm being particular about the title this time, because there seems to be some confusion. The movie is actually listed a couple times on Amazon, with different versions having different streaming tiers. The difference is a subtle one: one version includes the comma, while the other doesn't. It's clearly present in the title appearing onscreen in the movie, so that's the one I'm going with. Speaking of titles, this is far from the first modern re-imagining of A Christmas Carol I've seen where the role is gender flipped and the lead is named "Carol." These reviews won't be run in the order watched, but by my count this is the third, and I'm aware of at least one more. Hell, this isn't even the first I've seen produced by Hallmark featuring a legendary science-fiction star as a ghostly helper. The 2003 TV movie, "A Carol Christmas" included William Shatner, so for balance to exist in the universe I suppose we needed a similar ver...

I was genuinely shocked when the end credits for Elf-Man rolled and revealed a full cast worked on the picture. With the exception of a few decent shots and a couple actors who deserved better, this thing looked and felt less like a "real" movie than... God, I'm struggling to find some point of comparison. Some of it felt like the low-budget direct-to-video production it was, but it was rare for the movie to hit even that mark. More often it felt like a cheap sitcom, and even those sequences accounted for fifty percent or less. Most of the rest felt like a college project. At times, I'd have believed a handful of high schoolers were somehow calling the shots. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about the premise of Elf-Man, a 2012 fantasy/superhero/comedy serving as a vehicle for Jason Acuña, here credited as "Wee Man." The story centers around two kids and their father, an inventor whose wife died a few years before. On Christmas Eve,...

As a CG show aimed at children, this was not even close to the best of the crop. However, it's not completely egregiously offensive to the eyes, ears, or brain, either. Pablum is a good word. These two episodes didn’t air anywhere close to each other, but the second literally takes place the next day. Holiday Hics For a 22-minute episode in which very little happened, this dragged a surprisingly small number of times. As a Christmas episode, this was actually quite interesting, as it’s a fairly significant outlier. It’s a fantasy version of Christmas that isn’t explicitly set in the winter. I don’t know whether there are seasons in Care-a-Lot in this series, but this episode was not wintry in any way. However, “Great Giving Day” is still clearly Christmas. Not just because it’s a holiday with an “Eve” that involves caring and giving gifts. Nope, we have a genuine magical gift-giver. The Great Giving Bear has red fur, a kindly-sounding, older voice actor, a present sy...

Silent Night is a quasi-remake of the 1984 cult classic, Silent Night, Deadly Night, which - I'll be the first to admit - I really  need to see. Not that I really want to see it, mind you, but it's probably one of the more significant holiday films I've yet to get around to. At any rate, let's talk about the 2012 version, which - judging by the plot synopsis I just skimmed for the 84 film - is probably is more of an homage than a remake. The only scene that reads the same is one where the killer impales a woman on deer antlers. To be fair, that accounts for a good 20% of the plot. Or, to put it another way, this movie is light on substance. The premise is pretty much summed up in the movie poster: killer Santa. The one innovation present is setting the killing spree during a "Santa parade", making it virtually impossible for the police to identify a suspect. That should have been an interesting twist to a cliched formula, but they didn't really use...

Let's be real. Here's what I want you to take away from this review: BUNHEADS IS STREAMING AGAIN. It's on Hulu. Go. Get thee to Hulu. If you are a musical theater nerd like me, go watch the first couple episodes of Sutton Foster and Kelly Bishop snarking at each other and see if you don't fall hard. I'll pause here for a quick moment of silence for the fact that this show only received one season. The basic premise is that Foster plays Michelle, a professional-dancer-currently-slumming-as-a-Vegas-showgirl who decides to change her life by getting married and moving to a tiny upscale California town, where she helps her mother-in-law (Bishop) run a dance studio. The show is by the woman behind Gilmore Girls and features her standout themes: intergenerational female friendships and pop-culture snark. I prefer this to the earlier show because this one is also about dance and art and living a creative life. (I promise The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is on my to-watch li...

Well, that was odd. We’d never seen an episode of The Amazing World of Gumball before, and it seems unlikely that we ever will again. Not that this was bad or anything, it just seems like the kind of thing you might watch if A) you had cable and B) you had a lot of time on your hands and were prone to watching whatever came on next. I mean, it’s on Hulu, but so are a lot of other things. This show seems to follow a family of animals - the mom’s a cat, the dad’s a rabbit, and there are three kids: a cat, a rabbit, and what Wikipedia tells me is an adopted goldfish. Eh, all the character designs are round enough that the distinctions don’t seem to matter. The animation style is the most striking thing about this show - highly stylized cartoony characters are layered over real-world backgrounds and combined with occasional CG and stop-motion. This episode opens with a little Christmas singing, abruptly cut short when the dad hits a man with his car who’s dressed a little like ...

According to the internet, a lot of people were devastated when this series was cancelled after its third season. This knowledge leads me to one of three conclusions: 1. This is one of those shows you need to watch for a while before it gets good. 2. This is a case where some episodes are much stronger than others. 3. This show's fan are extremely generous viewers. We absolutely hated these two episodes. The characters felt two-dimensional and dull, the stories were absurdly idiotic, and the tone didn't gel with the writing. I kept thinking I was watching a live-action show set in the world of Family Guy. This is (yet another) circle-of-friends sitcom in the vein of, well, Friends. It goes for a farcical, over-the-top tone, like the far superior Community, but I didn't feel like it committed enough to sell it. As a result, it came off as unrealistic people behaving unrealistically. I knew intellectually that was supposed to be funny, but I just didn't enjoy it...

"A Fairly Odd Christmas" is the live-action made-for-TV sequel to the similarly live-action made-for-TV movie "A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!" which is itself a sequel to the Nickelodeon series "The Fairly OddParents," which had a Christmas special of its own , though that featured an entirely different version of Santa Claus and therefore doesn't seem to be in continuity with this film. I should probably add that I've never seen the first live action movie or any of the animated series other than the aforementioned Christmas special. This apparently opens where the previous movie left off: the now grown-up Timmy, Tootie, and the CG fairy godparents are circling the world in a magic flying van granting wishes to anyone who's sad. They give one young girl a magic unicorn, another a monster truck, they turn a boy's small toy into a giant monster and set it loose on Tokyo, and they help a bunch of robbers empty out an electro...