Mainlining Christmas

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...

Yeah, we probably should have gotten around to this last year when it was relevant, but trying to prioritize the seemingly infinite number of streaming holiday movies is an exercise in futility. By the end of last year it became clear Carry-On was something of a hit, at least to whatever extent that term means for streaming, so... well... here it is now. Cutting to the chase, I liked this one despite a plethora of pretty serious issues. It's the sort of movie that has dozens of things wrong with it but a handful of strengths redeem the experience. In this case, those strengths mostly boil down to Jason Bateman and Danielle Deadwyler elevating this from a tedious unnecessary throwback to '90s suspense flicks to... well... a pretty entertaining unnecessary throwback to '90s suspense flicks. The premise focuses on a TSA employee who dreams of being a cop getting targeted and blackmailed by powerful forces who are attempting to get a chemical weapon onto a airplane on Christmas...

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...

I heard this classic Hong Kong action movie was technically a Christmas film, so I decided to give it a rewatch, only to discover that wasn't possible. To rewatch a movie, you need to have seen it before, and I discovered a ways in I actually hadn't. I'd have sworn otherwise, but while I've seen numerous of the movie's various stunts and set pieces in clips, the rest was new to me. First, let's jump to the Christmas stuff, with the caveat there's very little. For the record, I'm going to defend this as a Christmas movie for the same reason I defended the label being attached to  Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! - films set at Christmas in a time and place where the holiday is afforded less importance tell us about how those cultures relate to Christmas. The holiday doesn't belong to Hollywood or the United States, and I think it would be a mistake to limit our viewpoint to the tropes, conventions, traditions, and assumption of our own nati...

I've previously mentioned Jurassic World as a movie that challenges (some might say "breaks") my primary litmus test for a Christmas movie : that any movie clearly and unambiguously set at Christmas must be considered as part of the canon. At the time, I brought it up to acknowledge the existence of counter-examples, and I had no intention of ever discussing it in further depth. But as the focus of this blog has expanded, I've come to believe there may be value in a closer examination of movies both on the line and - as I think is the case here - just on the other side of that line. To be clear, my opinion of whether this counts as a Christmas movie hasn't changed on rewatch. While a handful of elements early in the film establish the events are set near the holidays (I'll be more specific in a moment), their use is fleeting, trivial, and somewhat contradictory. It's a detail that seems to be present for tonal and character beats that I can only assume mad...

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....

Pinning this down to a genre - or even a short list of genres - is virtually impossible. The movie, for better and worse, plays like a barrage of ideas and imagery drawn from Ghostbusters, Blade, Marvel movies (Doctor Strange in particular), The Matrix, Men In Black, as well as more obscure fare - there's a surprising amount of The Frighteners in this. Meanwhile, the pacing feels like it's right out of a Michael Bay Transformers movie, which I promise is only 50% intended as an insult (Nekrotronic, for all its faults, is consistently interesting to look at, which is no small feat on a limited budget). If I had to try to classify this, I'd settle on action/adventure/comedy/horror/fantasy/superhero. More than any of that, this feels like a tongue-in-cheek two-decade-late adaptation of Mage: The Ascension (ask your parents to ask those weird people they knew in college). You'll note something was missing from that long line of genres: Christmas movie. And that's going ...

It's not hard to see why this thriller was forgotten despite starring Kim Basinger as a suburban housewife being hunted by murderers in the woods on a rainy Christmas Eve in what could have been sold as an R-rated, feminist response to Home Alone, had the movie been good enough to capitalize on any of that. The last few minutes, for what it's worth, are actually pretty good and provide something of an demonstration of what the movie as a whole was going for. This wants to be a sort of modern parable, meant to be experienced viscerally, rather than considered rationally. If it were being made today, the last decade of horror would offer a template for managing this effect. Unfortunately, it was made in 2008, and as such mostly leverages the cinematic language of suspense from that era. The story here is bare bones. Della is a housewife with two kids she loves, an abusive husband she does not, and an immense amount of anxiety and regret. After a harrowing encounter with said husb...

I'd say this low-budget sci-fi/horror flick was surprisingly good, but the truth is I chose it among a list of other low-budget Christmas movies because it had an unusually good reputation. Despite having the hallmarks of a small production - contained setting, small cast, mostly shot in the dark - this one manages to deliver a solid survivalist horror movie. The caveat to that is Alien Raiders doesn't deliver anything on top of this: the movie is a good entry in the genre, but it's not subverting, advancing, or transforming that genre in any way. If you've seen movies like this before (and if you're watching something called Alien Raiders, you almost certainly have), you also know the plot beats, premise, and twists. I'm not trying to take anything away from this movie or what first-time director Ben Rock was able to accomplish. Low-budget horror flicks are dime-a-dozen, and they're almost never handled with anywhere near this level of skill. This practical...