Mainlining Christmas

I originally saw and "reviewed"  Black Christmas back in 2010 , and if you're wondering why "review" is in quotation marks, go ahead and click on the link. For what it's worth, we weren't exactly trying to write actual reviews in those days - this all started out as sort of a novelty Christmas blog where the gag was we were binging as much holiday stuff as possible and writing about the experience. Sharing our discomfort as we sat through genres we didn't enjoy was all part of the fun. Or so we hoped. But over the years this site has evolved, as have my taste in movies and my knowledge of the history of Christmas media. Even back then, we knew Black Christmas was important (which is why we included it that first year). And as I've encountered various think pieces exploring the film , it became clear I really needed to revisit it. Having rewatched it, I still wouldn't say I enjoyed the experience, but it's far more nuanced and interesting ...

I'm stretching to discuss this here - the combined time spent on the holidays (in this case a couple different New Year's Eves) accounts for a minuscule portion of the overall runtime. Granted, those moments are thematically important and one of them closes the film, but even so, I wouldn't review a modern movie with this little seasonal screentime. But The Divorcee was released in 1930, making it one of the earliest talkies with any holiday connections I've located, and it was extremely successful at the time, picking up nominations for Best Picture, Director, Writer, and winning Best Actress for Norma Shearer. And while it feels very different than later Hollywood genres, elements of the structure resonate with modern romantic comedies (though this is definitely a drama). And seeing as one of those elements is the aforementioned New Year's Eve conclusion, I felt like I should discuss it. Shearer plays Jerry, a woman destined to be the titular divorcee, though the ...

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...

I'm worried this is going to get lost in the shuffle because we're looking at so many silent movies this year. This one's a little different, though, both because it's an incredibly influential and important work and because the subject matter is probably going to resonate more with the sort of people I expect (or at least hope) read this blog. The Phantom Carriage is a silent Swedish horror/drama hybrid built around a New Year's Eve legend in which the last person to die before the stroke of midnight is cursed to drive Death's carriage through the following year, collecting souls. The term "folk horror" isn't generally applied to movies prior to the 1970s, but this certainly feels like a pretty good fit. You could argue it's the first film in that subgenre, and one of the first horror films in general, coming out a year after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and a year before Nosferatu. Before anyone gets too excited, I should add a great deal of i...

I'm grouping these two animated shorts from Ladislaw Starewicz, a pioneer of stop-motion, together despite them being made more than four decades apart. Both films are fairly easy to locate online and well worth tracking down. The Insect's Christmas (1911) I believe The Insect's Christmas is the first animated Christmas movie ever made, or at least the earliest surviving example. The Insect's Christmas is sort of a whimsical fairytale that admittedly becomes a bit less whimsical when you realize the titular insects are dead bugs whose legs have been replaced with wires, but it's worth overlooking that unpleasant detail. Before we get to the insects, the movie opens with a Father Christmas ornament coming alive on a Christmas tree and climbing down, accidentally shattering an ornament and waking a sleeping doll in the process. He travels outside and conjures a Christmas tree using his staff. Next, he uses his staff to clear away rocks and even break open the ground, ...

I've got two pieces of business before I start describing this movie in detail. The first is that this is a remake of a 1930 film of the same name , with both versions being based on a play. I'm not certain which order we'll wind up running the reviews, but - just to be upfront - I watched and am writing up the remake first. The second piece of business I want stated upfront is that this movie rules, and you should watch it. The jokes are hilarious, the performances are fantastic, the characters are extremely likeable, and the politics hold up. But more on that (a lot more, in fact) later. While I don't think knowing more is going to seriously impact the fun of seeing it play out, consider this your mandatory spoiler warning, in case you want to track down and watch an eighty-five-year-old romantic comedy before learning more. The movie opens with Johnny (played by Cary Grant) returning from a vacation. He meets a couple friends and reveals he met a woman and they'r...

Rather than running these individually, I'm posting reviews for five shorts, each of which is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. This is far from an exhaustive list, of course, but this covers every surviving version through the 1950s I was able to locate. For those of you who don't feel like digging through my notes, I'll save you a little time - these are all good for when they were made. The two that really stood out were the 1928 silent French version and the 1937 animated version. The animated probably aged the best of the bunch, as far as general audiences are concerned, while the 1928 film was the one I found the most fascinating from a technical standpoint. So, if you're interested in old movies, that's a good one to see (actually, all of these are good to see, but that's a great starting point). Those are the two I was thinking of when I slapped a "Highly Recommended" label on this post, though in both cases ...

I should start by acknowledging I've previously said Little Women wasn't Christmas media and that we wouldn't be covering it here. I still stand by the first part, incidentally - most adaptations of Little Women don't pass our personal litmus tests - but obviously, I reconsidered the second half. As I've been diving into the origins and evolution of Christmas movies, I've concluded Little Women may be quite a bit more important to the history of the quasi-genre than I'd given it credit for, this version most of all. So I decided to watch through the theatrically released adaptations to explore how this story influenced and/or reflected that evolution. I'm not going to do full reviews for these, since - again - it's not a Christmas movie, and I assume you know what Little Women is anyway, but I'll offer some general reactions and thoughts. I want to acknowledge two video essays I found extremely useful in this project - Be Kind Rewind's Compar...

I'm including both the French and English titles above, but it's actually more accurate to say I've seen The Christmas Angel, as the French version contained a very different ending. The original resolution sounds more interesting, but I haven't been able to find it and I'm guessing the sanitized, happy US version is the only one that survived (I should probably just be grateful any version of this survived more or less intact). The movie is around nine minutes long, and it was made by legendary French director, illusionist, inventor, and probably a whole host of other things, Georges Méliès. The film starts in the home of a poor family in winter around the holidays. The mother's sick and the father's tending to her. Also, there's a hole in their ceiling that snow's pouring through, and a guy I'm assuming they owe money to comes in and argues with the father. At any rate, their only hope seems to be their daughter, who goes out begging for charit...

This is one of two surviving Christmas movies I know of from Georges Méliès, though unfortunately, I'm using the term "surviving" somewhat loosely. For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Méliès is one of the film directors who invented film directing. Also visual effects. And editing. And making really goddamn cool movies. I don't want to get lost on a huge tangent, but if you have any interest in the history of film and haven't seen his work, look him up. A great deal of his surviving films are easily accessible through YouTube and numerous other online sources. He was creating and colorizing lavish fantasy films with monsters and magic in the early 1900s. He's one of the first film directors in history, and his work was easily half a century ahead of his time. Some of his movies are nothing short of incredible. The Christmas Dream is far from his best work, but it's still an impressive visual experience. Unfortunately, as I hinted at earlier, the mov...

If you've been following along, you know I've been watching adaptations, remakes, homages, and reimaginings of A Christmas Carol in bulk this year. As you might expect, I've got some thoughts about what makes an adaptation work and what doesn't. I figured I'd pass on my notes to whatever studio executive thinks it's a good idea to remake Scrooge for the [checks notes] I have no idea what number time we're up to. As a sidenote, this article is mainly going to concern itself with adaptations of the original book. I might turn to quasi-sequels like Scrooged and Spirited for guidance, but that's not what this is about. Do We Need Another Adaptation? I thought I'd start with some thoughts on whether there's even a point in doing this again. You may be surprised to hear my answer is, "Maybe." One takeaway from this whole project is that while there are a lot of versions out there, there isn't really a single definitive one that meets all ...