Mainlining Christmas

I remember watching this anthology at least a few times back in the '90s - while it didn't have much of a theatrical run, it was weird enough to be a popular VHS rental (at least in circles I hung out with) back when that was a thing. The gimmick here is the movie tells four stories, one after the other, about four bizarre experiences a new bellhop has on New Year's Eve, with each of the four stories set in separate rooms and written and directed by different filmmakers: Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino. The two names in that list you recognize are the two whose segments work, though it's not at all clear which way the causal relationship goes there. Apparently there were some major cuts required by the producer, and those came from Anders's and Rockwell's segments (the "producer" in question was Harvey Weinstein, in case you needed more reason to empathize with those directors). Since the uncut versions were ...

As someone old enough to remember the kind of movies Y2K is an homage to, this one's kind of difficult to rate objectively. Because on one hand, this is a damn near perfect recreation of a type of late '90s genre/comedy hybrid that permeated the era. Aside from the genre-pivot (which feels like it's reverse-engineered from Krampus ) and some of the gore effects being a little too advanced, this is more or less exactly what this movie would have looked and felt like had it been released in 1999. And making fun of Y2K paranoia was absolutely a popular pastiche as the millennium approached, so this wouldn't have felt out of place in theaters. Hell, I half suspect the only reason something with this exact premise wasn't released was studios, which relied much more on DVD sales and TV rights at the time, would have assumed there wouldn't be any interest in the film after January 1st, 2000. So on one hand, this is the movie it sets out to be, which should be a win. On...

This was a nice surprise. I'm not talking about the quality - I expected this to be good - but I'd more or less given up hope of ever getting a third season of this show. The first two installments streamed in 2019 and 2020 , so I assumed the promised finale was yet another victim of the pandemic. But it turns out this was either popular enough or those involved were invested, because the show's back after a five-year hiatus. That break does affect the tone, as well as the story and characters. This is no longer about a woman in her early 30s trying to sort out adulthood - when we catch up with Johanne (Ida Elise Broch), we find she's matured quite a bit in the intervening time. Well, okay, when we're first  reintroduced to her, it's en medias res , she's dressed as a giant rat, and she's frozen in place on a stage surrounded by kids. But once that teaser's done and we back up to the start of December, we find she's grown quite a bit between sea...

We reviewed this twelve years ago and at the time more or less agreed with the consensus that it's a good movie, slapped a recommendation on it, and moved on. We never mentioned The Three Godfathers, because at the time we'd never seen a single adaptation or read the book ( we've rectified that since ). At some point, I picked up a copy of the film on blu-ray and dropped it in the "rewatch this soon" pile of discs sitting beside my television. That was probably three or four years ago. Last night I popped it in, hit play, and discovered a few things. First, I discovered my memories of the movies were comically inaccurate. If you'd asked me to give you a brief rundown of the plot, I'd have given you a synopsis bearing absolutely no resemblance to anything after the first ten or fifteen minutes of this movie. Second - and related - I discovered it is not, in any meaningful way, an adaptation of The Three Godfathers, but rather inspired by that story (or m...

This is another in a long line of films straddling the line between "Christmas movie" and "has Christmas in it," to the point I'm torn which bucket to drop it in. The holiday sequences don't take up a significant portion of the runtime, and seasonal elements don't really permeate the movie in ways that make it feel particularly seasonable - I probably wouldn't recommend this specifically for holiday viewing, though I would recommend it as a movie. However, the holidays are referenced enough to signal the filmmakers considered them significant, and I have some thoughts on why that might be. In fact, the use of the holidays might be the one subtle thing in an otherwise fairly unsubtle dramedy. To clarify, I'm not describing the bulk of About a Boy as unsubtle as a criticism - I liked it quite a bit. But the movie as a whole is fairly upfront about the points it's making and the ideas it's playing with. For example, it's clear from the s...

I guess you can add "Home Alone" to the growing list of Christmas movies the British do better than us. That seems to be the primary point of reference in Bad Tidings, with the caveat the protagonists are adults, not kids. Still, the premise of this TV movie centers on unlikely protagonists alone on Christmas Eve dealing with ostensibly dangerous robbers. The complication here is the heroes are engaged in a bitter feud and need to overcome their issues with each other if they want to survive the night and save their neighborhood. Oh, right: it's a neighborhood this time, rather than a house. At any rate, that's the gist. This is fusing an enemies-to-friends motif ( take your pick ) with the Home Alone home-invasion-lite template. If it had been made here a decade ago, I have no doubt it would have been awful. But the UK, for whatever reason, seems preternaturally good at this stuff, so the movie winds up delivering something funny and entertaining. It doesn't rea...

I really want to force a bunch of Hallmark executives to sit down and watch Jingle Bell Heist. Conceptually, the movie is built on a similar framework to the one used in last year's The Christmas Quest  (both also feature a Notorious-style kiss), but this delivers what Hallmark's attempt lacked: a bit of actual payoff in the genre department. Before you read this as too complimentary, I'll add that this is also within the ballpark of what Hallmark could achieve. It's a solid little Christmas romantic comedy with a significant number of heist elements, but I don't expect it to land on anyone's top 10 lists in either genre. Still, it's a good pick for anyone looking for a holiday romance delivering the warmth of Hallmark that doesn't need to adhere to every regulation regarding sex and language. So basically a lighthearted, PG-equivalent romantic holiday adventure. This was directed by Michael Fimognari, who's main claim to fame is frequently serving a...

The best summation I can offer for the tone (and therefore the experience) of The Baltimorons is a cross between a '70s dramedy and When Harry Met Sally . This is an independent production from director Jay Duplass and comedian Michael Strassner. They scripted the movie together, and Strassner plays a character whose backstory is loosely based on his own life, including struggles with alcoholism, attempted suicide, and disappointment stemming from nearly making it big. There's some real drama here, but the movie finds humor within it. This is, after all, ultimately a romantic comedy, albeit one grounded in believable emotion. The leads are deeply flawed, and - like When Harry Met Sally - this understands the goal is to help them come to terms with those flaws and find a way forward together, rather than pretend they can (or should) be wiped away. All of which is a longwinded way of saying I liked it a great deal and absolutely recommend it as a funny, melancholy alternative to...

We probably should have watched this back in 2021. We must have run out of time or something. Or maybe we deprioritized it on the grounds it felt a year late - this Netflix-produced Hallmark-style Christmas romantic comedy constructed around a same-sex couple was released on the heels of several similar high-profile entries from Hulu , Lifetime , and (with caveats) even Hallmark , all of which delivered in this sub-sub-genre a year earlier. And while Single All the Way may be the first gay Christmas romantic comedy produced by Netflix (I've seen that honor bestowed upon it in several places), it's certainly not the first of its kind released  by the streamer. The distinction between in-house productions and acquisitions may mean something to executives, but to those of us watching, it's hard to differentiate between something like this and, say, A New York Christmas Wedding , which came out on Netflix in 2020. Okay, maybe not that hard: Single All the Way is, by virtuall...

This has been my on my list for years, but I kept tabling it in favor of movies that were better regarded or where the holiday connections were (based on the synopses) less dubious. I didn't doubt there'd be Christmas elements in Fitzwilly, but in my experience movies made prior to the '80s where Christmas doesn't feature heavily in the description are often edge cases. This one... no, this is very much a Christmas movie. Unambiguously, unquestionably Christmas. Also, I'm going to deviate from the consensus and say, in my opinion, it's a very good Christmas movie. I'm honestly a little surprised to find this is widely considered somewhat of a middling film. I'm not seeing much online concerning its release, and only a handful of critics seem to have considered it worth reviewing it retroactively. Reviews I skimmed on Letterboxd tend to lean towards "underwhelming," though several acknowledge it was fun. While I can understand where its detracto...

I've observed in the past that Great Britain tends to be noticeably good at producing family Christmas movies. Granted, some of this could be sample bias - presumably most of what makes the jump is at least pretty good, so I'm likely being spared their equivalent of the worst US media (well, most of the worst anyway ) - but I do think there are elements common to their holiday films that make them at the very least refreshing to those of us used to American productions. While British Christmas media tends to share America's portrayal of Christmas as a melancholy time, it's far less fixated on nostalgia. Modern American Christmas is tied to a post World War II shift from urban to rural America, coupled with a regressive shift in politics. For various reasons, this results in media recycling themes and symbols from 1940s Americana. There are exceptions, of course, and it's worth noting we're starting to see more variation, but on the whole US Christmas movies tend...

By my reasoning, adjusted for inflation Love Story is the second highest grossing Christmas movie in history in the US and Canada , with only A Hundred and One Dalmatians beating it out (though it's not particularly close). I should also add I'm not counting a couple movies with ambiguous holiday credentials in that ranking: if you're of the opinion Ben-Hur and/or The Sound of Music are Christmas movies, you'll want to push this back two or three spots respectively (hell, Sound of Music would take the top spot). Either way, Love Story beats out Home Alone, if you want a sense of just how successful this was back in 1971 (it opened in New York in December of 1970, but didn't get a wide opening until June the following year). I blame Wikipedia's list of Christmas movies for the fact this one slipped under my radar as long as it did - it's on there but for whatever reason it's currently separated into a category containing only itself. That's absurd, b...