Mainlining Christmas

As someone old enough to remember the kind of movies Y2K is an homage to, this one's kind of difficult to rate objectively. Because on one hand, this is a damn near perfect recreation of a type of late '90s genre/comedy hybrid that permeated the era. Aside from the genre-pivot (which feels like it's reverse-engineered from Krampus ) and some of the gore effects being a little too advanced, this is more or less exactly what this movie would have looked and felt like had it been released in 1999. And making fun of Y2K paranoia was absolutely a popular pastiche as the millennium approached, so this wouldn't have felt out of place in theaters. Hell, I half suspect the only reason something with this exact premise wasn't released was studios, which relied much more on DVD sales and TV rights at the time, would have assumed there wouldn't be any interest in the film after January 1st, 2000. So on one hand, this is the movie it sets out to be, which should be a win. On...

I guess you can add "Home Alone" to the growing list of Christmas movies the British do better than us. That seems to be the primary point of reference in Bad Tidings, with the caveat the protagonists are adults, not kids. Still, the premise of this TV movie centers on unlikely protagonists alone on Christmas Eve dealing with ostensibly dangerous robbers. The complication here is the heroes are engaged in a bitter feud and need to overcome their issues with each other if they want to survive the night and save their neighborhood. Oh, right: it's a neighborhood this time, rather than a house. At any rate, that's the gist. This is fusing an enemies-to-friends motif ( take your pick ) with the Home Alone home-invasion-lite template. If it had been made here a decade ago, I have no doubt it would have been awful. But the UK, for whatever reason, seems preternaturally good at this stuff, so the movie winds up delivering something funny and entertaining. It doesn't rea...

  The second figure in the Four Horsemen Studio's line of A Christmas Carol figures is, naturally, their take on The Ghost of Christmas Past. If you missed my review of Marley's Ghost , this line (or sub-line) recreates characters from Dickens' classic as seven-inch action figures. These aren't cheap (the first two figures ran me $70 each), but the quality, attention to detail, and generous accessories go a long way towards justifying that price tag. They've followed the lead of several adaptations in making the spirit female. Dickens' original implies the spirit itself is non-binary, shifting between forms as its light flickers like a candle's (that's also the rationale behind the figure having four arms, an image pulled from the original story). Because the character's always shifting, you could make the case any visualization is accurate to the source material. Personally, I like this interpretation quite a bit. As was the case with Marley, the bo...

   Even for action figures, that title's a mouthful. Let me attempt to break this down: Four Horsemen Studios is a company producing toys for collectors, which means the quality is going to be several steps above what you'll find in the toy aisles, and the same goes for the price tag. This seven inch figure ran me seventy bucks before tax and shipping - roughly three times what you'd expect for a similar size toy from a mass-market toy company. Was it worth it? Yes, actually, it was absolutely worth it, but I'll get to that in a moment - first I need to finish explaining the name and what it is. Four Horsemen Studios mostly produces original fantasy and sci-fi figures. The "Figura Obscura" line is used to make figures drawn from myth, folklore, and classic literature. They produced a Krampus a while back, but I balked at the price tag. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't regretting that, by the way. That brings us to their sub-line within Figura Obscura de...

Small Things Like These is an Irish movie adapted from a novel about a coal merchant attempting to understand his past and find the courage to defy a powerful Catholic organization that's torturing single pregnant women and stealing their children. In short, it's the story of Ireland's own failure to address the Magdalene asylums within their nation for centuries, told through the prism of one man. The movie is exceptionally good by most metrics. Cillian Murphy plays the lead and seems to have been the main force driving the production - he's absolutely fantastic here. That goes for the rest of the cast, as well, but this is really Murphy's movie in more ways than one. Director Tim Mielants creates something impactful and memorable. The cinematography is likewise exceptional, capturing the grit of coal dust and soot that covers the buildings, just as the crime at the heart of the movie remains a blot on the nation (I said this was good, not subtle). It's an effe...

Nutcrackers feels like a good movie, which is to say it's well shot, it (mostly) maintains a whimsically somber tone, and it features a relatively high-profile lead actor in an otherwise low-budget production. I've seen countless holiday movies with a similar premise (or at least a similar initial premise), but very few that veer away from the Hallmark vibe this completely. Before you read any of that as an outright endorsement, however, I want to draw your eye to a key detail in the opening sentence: I said this feels  like a good movie. Actually, it feels like two good movies. Or perhaps the first third of a one decent movie followed by the second half of an exceptional one. The problem here is the pieces don't snap together. The payoffs at the end of the movie are largely covering stuff hastily established directly beforehand. There's a series of comedic set-ups and ideas introduced early on that are just kind of forgotten. The disconnect isn't quite as jarring a...

The third Niko film is the best to date, at least as far as the writing is concerned. The eagles in the second movie basically filled the same role as the wolves in the first , which made it feel somewhat recycled. This time, the primary antagonists are a rival group of reindeer with an axe to grind against Niko's father and Santa's Flying Forces, which makes for a more compelling arc, particularly because the series has always made it clear there are good reasons to hate those guys. It also plays with its genre references in more interesting ways, adding in elements of sports movies into the mix. That's hardly new to animated media about reindeer, but this time it means the story's destination isn't quite as obvious from the start. That's the good news. The bad is the animation feels like a slight step backward. I'm sure it's technically more impressive than the last movie (they had more than a decade of technological advances, after all), but whatever...

When trailers for this dropped last year and a huge portion of the internet got excited, I had no idea what was going on. I'd never seen the 1983 TV movie (still haven't, but it's on the list!), never read the book, and forgotten either existed. I realize that's an odd admission from someone who's been obsessed about holiday media for the last fifteen years, but keep in mind that covers a lot of material. This one just slipped through the cracks for me. Lindsay reviewed the book a decade ago , so I'm sure I was at least briefly aware of it at the time, but we're pushing something in the ballpark of 1500 reviews on this site: not everything sticks in the memory. And while I understand this one is really important to a lot of people, it wasn't part of my childhood. But the new movie made a splash, both among fans and critics, so I decided to prioritize it this year. I also figured I might as well read the 80-page kid's book it's based on. That may ...

This is a French anthology of animated shorts, each written and directed by a female filmmaker, stylized to look something like a children's book brought to life. The movie was released in various overseas markets last year, but - as far as I know - is just reaching the US now. It's simple but beautiful, a throwback to old 2D animated shorts and holiday specials. A few of the sequences reminded me of animated Sesame Street sequences, though I assume the actual inspiration came mainly from French cartoons of the same era. Everything in this is intended for a young audience - there's no serious danger or animosity in any of these shorts, and nothing really gets hurt. I wouldn't hesitate to show this to a toddler or younger: any child old enough to look at a screen is old enough to see this. At the same time, it's all sweet and touching enough to appeal to adults who appreciate the medium. This is an all-ages film, excluding perhaps that 8 to 16 window where anything c...