Mainlining Christmas

Our rule of thumb is to consider virtually any movie set primarily at Christmas as a Christmas movie, a litmus test significantly more liberal than most. I'm sure a lot of people roll their eyes at hearing Jaws: The Revenge or Alien: Covenant described as holiday entertainment, but I'm really not trying to play with technicalities or make a joke. These movies are, in my opinion, as much about Christmas as, say, The Shop Around the Corner , and shouldn't be excluded on arbitrary decisions based on which traditions they're part of. I'm opening with this because Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film, Psycho, serves as a rare counterexample. While it's set entirely during the Christmas season (between December 11th and the 20th, to be specific), I do not seriously consider it a Christmas movie, and the reason why highlights why I consider the aforementioned rule of thumb so useful. First, let's talk a bit about the movie, which I'm kind of embarrassed to admit I ...

I haven't seen nearly enough yakuza films from any era - let alone the early '60s - to weigh in personally on how abnormal "Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards!" is, but the blurb on Criterion implies it deviates from director Seijun Suzuki's other productions by leaning further into a whimsical, silly tone and style. Regardless of context, American audiences going in with existing expectations based on the subject matter are likely going to be surprised to find what's ultimately a pretty ridiculous film with bright colors, over-the-top characters, and a meandering storyline. This reminded me more of early Bond movies than of anything else I've seen out of Japan, though - again - I'm not at all an expert on Japanese cinema. Still, I suspect it's not entirely coincidental that Dr. No came out just a year beforehand. That said, this has a far sillier tone than any Bond installment until Diamonds Are Forever, so I suspect most of the similaritie...

This is one of those times the lack of a film studies background is especially palpable. This 47-minute black-and-white film was made by French New Wave auteur Jean Eustache, who Wikipedia assures me was an incredibly important figure in both the movement and film history as a whole. Since my background on French New Wave more or less begins and ends with the only other Christmas movie I've found from that subgenre , I won't have much to say about how it fits in. But the holiday setting, on the other hand, is something I've got some experience with, so - as always in these situations - please take any non-yuletide opinions or interpretations I express with a few extra grains of salt. The movie is set in a small French city and tells the story of a young man attempting (and failing) to navigate adulthood and women. The narrator and main character is Daniel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who Wikipedia informs me is also damn important to French cinema). He scrapes by as a pett...

Assuming I'm counting right, Christmas takes up between three and four minutes of screentime in this 1961 Hammer horror film, which tells you two things off the bat. First, this isn't a Christmas movie. And second, something about those three-to-four minutes must be pretty damn interesting if I'm writing about it here (particularly because this isn't one of the studio's better regarded films). Before we get into any of that, let's tackle the most pressing question for most of you: should you bother watching this? The answer, as is often the case, depends. The Curse of the Werewolf has a number of factors in its favor, including some gorgeous, colorful cinematography, an updated take on the wolf man popularized by Universal a few decades earlier, bits of authentic folklore (including that Christmas bit we'll be getting back to), and some impressive makeup and visual effects. At the same time, the movie's structure meanders more than it should, the Spanish...

There aren't a lot of definitions of "Christmas movies" that would include this, and I'm not about to claim otherwise. Despite that, I wanted to share a few thoughts for a couple reasons. First, this is an incredibly important and influential movie, which naturally makes me inclined to loosen my criteria. It's also a foreign film (French, if it wasn't clear from the title), which means it's providing us with at least a little insight into how another culture views the holiday season. Most importantly, while it only contains two relatively brief holiday sequences, one of those uses Christmas in a fairly unusual way, which - unless I miss my guess - reflects back on American Christmas movies. More on that later. The film is a colorful musical drama about a couple torn apart by a combination of forces beyond their control and their own decisions. It's notable for its operatic approach - although the music is fairly modern (or modern for 1964 musicals), ev...

This is one of seven "Holiday Noir" movies streamed by Criterion this month. A few of the movies they included aren't exactly what I'd call "Christmas movies" (not that Criterion promised they would be), but Blast of Silence passes my litmus test with flying colors (or in this case, flying black and white). The entirety of the film plays out during the holiday season, starting a few days before Christmas and ending on or around New Year's. The movie's "noir" credentials are a bit more complicated. Technically, this falls outside the window of what generally qualifies - Wikipedia identifies it as "neo-noir," which seems a more accurate designation. Essentially, this acts as a bridge between the dark melodramas of the '40s and '50s we now call noir and the gangster epics that would become popular over the next few decades. At least on the surface, this is a focused, contained crime story built around a single character. The ...

Often regarded as one of the worst, if not the worst, American sitcoms in history, My Mother the Car ran for thirty episodes between 1965 and 1966. The premise of the show is that the main character, David Crabtree (played by Jerry Van Dyke, the younger brother of Dick Van Dyke), discovers his dead mother has been reincarnated in the form of a 1928 Porter who talks to him through the radio when no one else is around. I should add this was written and produced by some of the greatest legends in television history - Allan Burns and Chris Hayward created the show, and James L. Brooks wrote for it. As explained by Burns in this clip , the series was envisioned as a satire of the sub-genre of '60s sitcoms built around an absurd fantasy gimmick (think Mister Ed or Bewitched), but something went wrong and the satirical elements were lost in production. In that interview, Burns blames it on the show becoming too cute, but I think the issue was intrinsic to the premise. The shows they were ...

Placido, a 1961 Spanish Christmas film by Luis García Berlanga satirizing performative charity, places me in an awkward position in which my opinion and appraisal of the movie are very different from the experience I had watching it. To be clear, this is a fantastic film - my issues are not with the movie, at all. The problem is me , and unfortunately, I expect a lot of people would run into a similar issue, which is why I can't quite recommend it to most of you. The problem is one of translation, and it's not the issue you're probably expecting. But before I go on, I will say it doesn't apply if you're able to speak the language. If that's the case and you're a fan of movies from this era (or most eras, really - the comedy here is pretty timeless), by all means track this down at once. But as for the rest of my fellow dumb Americans (or British or whoever else stumbles across this blog), you'll probably want to read on. Because, while I think the movie...

This 45-minute-long Australian animated adaptation of A Christmas Carol is sort of a mixed bag, which frankly is quite a bit better than I was expecting. It stars Ron Haddrick as the voice of Scrooge, apparently for the first of two times - he's credited in an animated '80s version as well (no promises, but I'll try and get to it). I'll start with the visuals. The backdrops vary in quality and style from scene to scene. At times, they look like pastel crayons, like something out of a children's book. But there are also moments, particularly some early establishing shots, where they're more evocative, almost like it's mimicking Van Gogh. I have no idea how intentional that was, but a few of the scenes are surprisingly atmospheric for a low-budget animated special from this era. The character animation is at least easier to summarize: if you've seen early Scooby-Doo, this is virtually indistinguishable. That's not a bad thing! Scooby-Doo featured good ...

This is one of those times where I find myself a bit lost. Ostensibly a comical retelling of A Christmas Carol, this is really better described as a farcical sketch special loosely tied together with a frame story about Scrooge. The key word here is "loosely," in that the majority of the sketches have nothing at all to do with the story or its characters. Also complicating matters is the fact it's part of a franchise of comedic British films with what I assume is a similar style of humor. That style, incidentally, is a longstanding British tradition utilizing innuendo, absurdity, and intentional shock. While I suspect this is a form of comedy deserving of respect, it's also kind of the forerunner of what would eventually turn into things like Scary Movie. In short, I didn't like this, but I'm having a hard time parsing out whether that's because it's bad, it's dated, or I'm simply lacking the context necessary to appreciate what they're doi...

First, a note on the title. Or titles, more accurately. The book this is taken from is a collection of short stories that translates to "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka," and the story in question is "The Night Before Christmas." Because of this, it's not too surprising this has been released with both titles. In fact, both appear separately in the film, itself. It's not the first adaptation of the work - I've already reviewed the 1913 version , which introduced me to the story. This version was directed by Alexander Rou, who'd go on to make  Morozko a few years later. It shows: the two movies look similar in style. I'm not complaining, mind you - I enjoyed Morozko quite a bit. The plot to this is very close to that of the 1913 adaptation, so I'll forego repeating the full synopsis. There are some shifts in how it's all presented that are worth highlighting, though. The 1913 version presented the hero, Vakula, as something of a comically...

What kind of fever-dream-caused-by-too-much-eggnog is this? On the topic of Rankin Bass animated specials that we heretofore missed, we actually bought this on DVD years ago and then forgot we never watched it. And we definitely hadn't watched this before, because we definitely would have remembered it. We were left with the overall impression of an animation director with a lot of big artistic ideas, a contracted number of songs, and absolutely no interest in whether the final product makes a speck of sense. The animation designs are stylized in such a way that they don't move well, and the whole experience is best summed up as "odd." The story of the special isn't actually the story of the novella; the credits even say "suggested by," rather than "based on." I think this is a shame, as I actually enjoyed the original story (despite it not really being set at Christmas at all). The character list is pared down drastically and several character...