Mainlining Christmas

The original Prep & Landing continues to rank among my all-time favorite holiday specials. I love the way it reimagines Christmas elves through the lens of secret agents and high-pressure missions, building to a tense climax with stakes that feel important while still remaining within the scale of the story. Likewise, while Operation Secret Santa was only a short, it manages to capture the magic of the original, giving us the excitement of a life-or-death spy movie in the package of a sweet Christmas cartoon. Good stuff. After that, we got Naughty vs. Nice , a full-length special that sort of abandoned the tone of the original. There are still some good moments in there, but it's missing the sense of suspense. It's more a kid's cartoon playing with spy movie concepts, while the first two were legitimate spy stories told within a world of Christmas specials. But at least it remembered its roots. The third special in the series, The Snowball Protocol (directed by Shane ...

On one level, I appreciate what directors Zac Moncrief and Steve Trenbirth, as well as writer Jon Colton Barry (who co-wrote this with Moncrief), were trying to pull off here. These are all industry professionals - Moncrief and Barry are both veterans of Phineas and Ferb, which almost certainly ranks somewhere on the top ten list of animated series of the last twenty-five years - so this isn't going to be a by-the-numbers exercise in bland, inoffensive kid's media. You can tell they wanted to subvert expectations, push boundaries, and create something with a bit of an edge to the humor. And, again, they have experience in that department. I thought about that a lot while I watched A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas, the new 50-minute special currently streaming in a couple spots (including free on YouTube, in case there was any doubt this was financed as some sort of marketing promotion). I also thought a lot about the writing and the jokes, because... I think the writing might be oka...

I probably don't need to tell you what Poker Face is, but in the unlikely case someone finds this review in a couple decades, here goes: this series, created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne, is a throwback to episodic mystery-of-the-week detective shows in the vein of Columbo or Murder She Wrote, combined with a healthy mix of related genre tropes drawn from movies. The gimmick here is that Lyonne's character, Charlie, isn't a detective, nor does she have any professional expertise or background connected to the subject matter. Instead, she has a virtually superhuman ability to detect lies. The show is, in no particular order, bizarre, funny, and absolutely fantastic.  Consider that a recommendation for the series as a whole. This is good stuff, and if you're not already watching... actually, scratch that: you're probably already watching this. So... keep doing that, I guess. With that covered, let's talk about "One Last Job," a rare entry ...

I feel like I have to start this review by saying I don't know anything about the Jonas Brothers, and I don't think I could name a single one of their songs. I'm not stating that up front to be negative or confrontational: I just don't want anyone thinking that my recommendation for this is in any way connected to me being a fan or something - I'm not. It's just... this is a good movie. I didn't expect that. Hell, I didn't expect it to be good or for it to be a real movie. And yet it's both: a musical comedy that emphasizes the comedy, to the point it borders on parody but stops just short of crossing over the line into farce. It walks right up to that line, though, allowing the title characters to play comically exaggerated versions of themselves who are the butt of the movie's jokes but avoid faltering into unlikability. In that respect, the movie's a choreographed balancing act that could have - and by rights probably should have - gone ho...

It's weird Netflix dropped this in April, right? Particularly after having so much success with Carry-On last year (assuming their reporting can be trusted), you'd expect they'd want to hold something like this over to December and try to build a reputation as a service providing Christmas action flicks. Perhaps executives felt Havoc's less-than-jolly ending wouldn't play as well in the holiday season, or maybe there were business reasons for wanting to get Gareth Evans's film out as soon as possible. But whatever the logic, it strikes me as odd that they had a Christmas movie starring Tom Hardy, Forest Whitaker, and Timothy Olyphant directed by the guy behind The Raid movies and couldn't see the value in putting it out during that season. I should note I didn't love The Raid movies. I know, I know: heresy, but I feel I should be upfront about these things. Now that I've killed my credibility among fans of that genre, I'll say I actually did lik...

Novocaine is, at least on a surface level, a high-concept action/comedy about a timid man physically unable to experience pain turning his disability into a superpower in order to rescue his girlfriend after she's taken hostage by a group of bank robbers. I say "surface level," because the movie's focus is fixed as much on the character journey of its protagonists as on the comically brutal sequences you'd expect from that premise. Though before we get into that... Okay, first of all, I like this movie overall - I'd give an at least tentative recommendation. However, part of me is a little uncomfortable with the premise. CIPA, the condition the movie's hero supposedly has, is real (though the film conveniently leaves out details such as the inability to sweat and associated health issues). You can read about it here - it's terrifying. The movie does pay lip service to some of the more frightening aspects of the rare condition (the possibility of bleed...

There's probably no more damning indictment of this movie than the fact Shane Black released a Christmas action/comedy based on a beloved crime series, and no one seemed to notice or care. I think that's a fair response, too: while there are some strong elements here, the movie as a whole doesn't work. Black can't seem to settle on a tone, the action set pieces feel uncharacteristically uninspired, and the main character is shockingly dull. It's difficult to say to what degree Parker's shortcomings are due to the script versus the casting. Mark Wahlberg is so wrong for this role, you're left trying to piece together how he ended up in the part. He doesn't come off as likeable, intimidating, or really much of anything. The character is just sort of an empty void. And before someone chimes in, I realize some of that is an apt description of the character in the books. I've read most of the... okay, I've only actually read the Wikipedia summary of t...

The Electric State is not a Christmas movie, at least not in my opinion. It only has two scenes which incorporate holiday elements: a flashback to a holiday interaction and a sort of virtual reality recreation of that same holiday at the end. Had the context been a little different, the finale set at the virtual holiday might be enough to justify arguing this counts as a Christmas movie (plenty of romcoms - including the classic Holiday Inn - have effectively claimed the label under similar circumstances). But for reasons we'll go into, the context here is a little different. So why talk about it at all? Well, because I've got some thoughts about the Christmas elements, and I think it makes for an interesting case study in the way holidays are often utilized in film. I should note this is one of the very few aspects of The Electric State I found remotely interesting. I'll start by saying I'm not approaching this with any kind of axe to grind against the Russo brothers....

Note: A digital copy of this book was provided by the publisher for review. What really jumped out at me as I read through the new edition of Alonso Duralde's guide to holiday movies (and looked back on the original) was how far ahead of the curve Duralde's been. For those of you unfamiliar with the first edition, "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas" is a guide designed to streamline the process of finding holiday movies you may have missed or forgotten about. The original came out fifteen years ago, and it remains pretty much the only book of its kind on the market (or at least the only one I've been able to find... and I've been looking). I'm not forgetting Jeremy Arnold's "Christmas In The Movies" - that's also quite good, but Arnold's approaching the concept of the holiday movie from a very different, much more focused perspective. What sets "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas" apart is that it's collecting a...