Mainlining Christmas

A Tale of Winter is to Sleepless in Seattle what Dial Code Santa Claus is to Home Alone . Okay, that's probably unfair to Sleepless in Seattle, which I don't actually think is a knockoff of Tale of Winter, but the parallels are interesting: French movies exploring similar ideas released a year earlier that are (in my opinion) significantly better than their American counterparts. A Tale of Winter is the second Christmas movie I've seen written and directed by French New Wave auteur Éric Rohmer, who also made My Night at Maud's  twenty-three years earlier. I should also mention A Tale of Winter is the second of four films each representing a different season. At the very least I should probably have seen the first of those before attempting to write about this, but... well... I'm busy and have too many other Christmas movies to get to. Just in case it wasn't obvious from that "better than their American counterparts" gag, I liked this quite a bit. Tha...

I'm curious whether this was just in a blind spot for me, or if various factors surrounding the film resulted in an exceptional Oscar-nominated comedy/drama Christmas movie anchored by a legendary actor (and supported with an incredible cast) to fade from collective memory. Or maybe it never embedded itself far enough into cultural memory to begin with: it was at best a modest box-office success, so any real staying power would have come from VHS and cable. And while its Christmas credentials are in my mind unimpeachable, they're far less prominent than those in holiday movies from the same era now considered classics (few of which are anywhere near as good as Nobody's Fool, but we'll get to that). If it hadn't gotten a mention in Alonso Duralde's "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas," I might never have found it, which makes me wonder how many other brilliant forgotten holiday movies exist. At any rate, this one's very good and well worth track...

I'd never seen this before, but the art in the opening credits really took me back to 1998. I was just starting college and I had a new computer (an Aptiva), which included a number of programs. I didn't have Office (that would have cost extra), but I had a suite of knockoffs, including a rudimentary paint program. I mention this because the art in the movie is about on par with what I could have whipped up at the time. That sets a pretty good expectation for the rest of the movie, which has the feel of a made-for-TV production that probably wasn't quite polished enough to actually air on television. Or maybe it did. Honestly, I don't know where this did or didn't air or screen, if it went direct-to-video, or what. I don't know much of anything about "The Boy Who Saved Christmas" that wasn't in the movie itself, because there doesn't seem to be much information available - no Wikipedia page, a relatively barebones IMDB entry , and no readily av...

A rare example of a Christmas movie set in June, A Different Kind of Christmas is a 1996 TV dramedy starring Shelley Long (Diane from Cheers) originally airing on Lifetime and supposedly based on a true story about a district attorney whose mayoral candidacy and relationship with her son are strained by the reappearance of her estranged father, Santa Claus. Well, kind of. He identifies as Santa Claus, both professionally and in his personal life, however this isn't a Miracle on 34th Street situation. He knows what his legal name is, he realizes he isn't immortal, and he has a firm grasp on reality. At the same time, it's more than a professional gimmick: he wishes to appear "as Santa" at all times. In a sense, it's who he's decided to become. If you've seen enough documentaries about professional Santas this won't seem all that unusual: the role often elicits a degree of commitment you don't get from conventional parts. Hell, some have gone fur...

It's taken me fifteen years, but I'm ready to make a case for 12 Monkeys being a Christmas movie. That's fifteen years of blog time - like most nerds of my generation I caught this in theaters 30 years ago. It left an impression, too - this is on the short list of my favorite movies of the 90s, as well as my favorite of Terry Gilliam's films (though in the interest of full disclosure, there are several I'm overdue for a rewatch and even a couple I've never seen, so that could conceivably change). If I'm remembering right, I last saw this about ten years ago when I wrote an article about the intersection of science fiction and the holidays , at which time I claimed (incorrectly) it couldn't reasonably be considered a Christmas movie. In the same article, I argued (correctly) that Prometheus could. What I hadn't pieced together at the time is that these are using the holidays for similar purposes, and further that 12 Monkeys is essentially a forerunner...

There's a real possibility this is the lowest-budgeted production I've ever looked at for this blog. Even the term "micro-budget" doesn't convey the experience of watching this. I've seen student films with significantly higher production values. And, for what it's worth, that's all intentional. This isn't trying to be "good" for any meaningful definition of that word. It's very clearly aiming for the sort of movie a group of friends might rent in the late '90s and laugh at. This was, of course, the decade of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (unsurprisingly, both Feeders and Feeders 2 were eventually covered by RiffTrax). The filmmakers behind these movies are twin brothers John and Mark Polonia, credited as co-directors on Feeders 2. Mark is also the star and wrote the script under a pseudonym. The main cast members also appear to be Mark's family, though the kids were credited under different names (possibly his wife, too - she...

The case for Jacob's Ladder being a Christmas movie is a weak one, no matter how you cut it. But it's also a weird case, which makes me more interested than I'd otherwise be in a movie where holiday credentials are relatively ephemeral. In the past, I've argued any movie where half or more is set around the holidays should be considered holiday media, even if visual reminders or references to the season are scant or intentionally obscured. In the case of Jacob's Ladder, the majority of the movie is set during this period. And also it isn't. That contradiction is quite literally built into the framework of the movie, though whether its (extremely loose) holiday connections are meaningful or trivial is less clear. In a moment, I'll try and provide at least a little context for all this, but - considering this movie has some passionate fans - I feel like I should at least give anyone who hasn't seen this a chance to jump ship before I spoil the film's s...

1997's second-most famous movie about a sociopathic felon (played by an iconic Hollywood star) taking control of the aircraft carrying him across the country and forcing the protagonist to fight to minimize the number of innocent victims, Turbulence has mostly (and understandably) been forgotten. But unlike Con Air, Turbulence was set on Christmas Eve (aggressively so, as we'll discuss in a bit), so that's the one we're going to be talking about. I should acknowledge comparisons to Con Air are entirely surface level: Turbulence is a relatively contained suspense movie owing as much or more to '70s disaster flicks as '80s action, while Con Air is a grandiose action/adventure that seems to wear its "Die Hard on a plane" designation like a badge of honor. Turbulence has a minimal cast and with minor alterations could probably have been made on a shoestring budget, though somehow they managed to balloon this into costing 55 million dollars (roughly 110 mil...

I found the key to unraveling this bizarre religious horror/action movie buried in its Wikipedia article: prior to falling in the hands of director Peter Hyams, End of Days was apparently offered to Sam Raimi and Guillermo del Toro, either of which would most likely have turned the seemingly bonkers premise of pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger against the devil into the amusingly bonkers farce it deserved to be. But they were both busy (or perhaps uninterested), resulting in Hyams taking over the project. To his credit, Hyams proves capable of delivering a sleek, visually impressive movie. The effects are solid, including some early CG that (mostly) avoids the pitfalls of looking cheesy or dated. But none of that means much, because he doesn't seem to be in on the joke here. Despite some objectively ridiculous dialogue, names lamp-shading campy origins (for Christ's sake, there's a priest named Thomas Aquinas), and - again - Schwarzenegger blasting the devil with enough firepow...

The Preacher's Wife has been on our watch list for years, but it's one of those movies that never seems to land on streaming services, or at least not ones we're subscribed to. Eventually I broke down and ordered a DVD, which then sat in a pile beside my TV for months. There it remained until someone commented on our 10 year old review of The Bishop's Wife  politely calling us out for not getting to the remake. Guess what we watched that night.  My first observation watching it was that I was going to need to rewatch the original if I wanted to have anything more substantive to say than, "yeah, this one's really good, too." Fortunately, the 1947 film is a lot easier to watch online than the remake, which is why you're getting a hybrid article covering both versions. Looking at them together has the unusual effect of making both seem even better. The films start with the same underlying premise but approach it in such radically different ways they feel ...