Mainlining Christmas

This one got on my radar because William Shatner plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, and I really wanted to be able to say I've seen versions of A Christmas Carol starring four Starfleet captains. As the title implies, this is a gender-flipped adaptation. Set in the present day (or at least what those of us who are growing old still think of the present day), this Hallmark movie focuses on self-centered TV personality, Carol (Tori Spelling), who's preparing to do a live broadcast on Christmas Eve and who... Hold on. That sounds kind of familiar. Let me check my notes... Undervalued assistant who purchases presents for boss's sibling's family... Love interest who's devoted their life to helping the homeless... Comedic ghosts played by famous actors... This isn't based on A Christmas Carol: it's a knock-off of Scrooged. Okay, maybe not tonally. This is far more... well... Hallmark in its approach. At least it's 2003 Hallmark, before the studio mandated

I heard about this in a Twitter thread about another Canadian science-fiction Christmas special . Someone commented with a link to this with the addendum it was from Gerald Potterton, the director of the 1981 animated film, Heavy Metal. I'm not really a fan of that movie, but damned if it didn't pique my interest. Christmas science fiction is a weird subgenre in general, and this looked even more out there. This special starts with George decorating his Christmas tree. All that's left is to put a star on top, but the idea of using a common paper one depresses him. He decides what he really wants is an actual star, so he builds a working spaceship and heads into the cosmos to bring back the brightest one in the heavens. He crash-lands into an outer space motel, where he meets a friendly robot pianist named Ralph. The motel business isn't thriving in the vacuum of space, so Ralph joins George on his quest. Next, they're picked up by Space Rangers (not the Lightyear ki

Despite being a longtime fan of children's media, I admit that Bluey might not have been on my radar if I wasn't the parent of a young child. And that's a shame, because I think this show is funny and poignant enough to charm almost anyone. The show follows the everyday adventures of Bluey and Bingo Heeler, two young sisters (ages 6 and 4) who can and do turn anything into a game. Their parents encourage and play along with the kids' imaginations, and the show is a fantastic portrait of great parents who are still realistic parents. While there are lessons to be learned, they are often subtle, blended into the stories, and sometimes for the adults rather than the kids. The show has honestly made me tear up on more than one occasion. It's popular worldwide for very good reasons. It's also one of the most fascinating exercises in anthropomorphic animal fantasy I've seen in a long while. All the characters are dogs. But they are also people. They have houses an

Well, that's certainly not what I expected. As a rule of thumb, animated adaptations of A Christmas Carol with runtimes between an hour and an hour and a half tend to be pretty by the numbers, as far as the scripts are concerned. Occasionally they'll toss in an animal companion, but the basic story almost always sticks to the source material. I've seen quite of these now, and all follow more or less the same formula. Until now. This one is... it's weird. Really, really weird. Let's back up. This is a British animated movie released direct to video in the US. To the limited degree it's remembered, it's due to the relatively impressive cast, which features Kate Winslet, Michael Gambon, Rhys Ifans, and Nicholas Cage, among others. Simon Callow voices Scrooge and plays Charles Dickens in live-action segments at the start and end, a role he'd reprise on Doctor Who a few years later. It's also worth noting this is directed by Jimmy T. Murakami, who made Th

We meant to get to this back when it came out, but for whatever reason missed it in its first year - most likely a combination of negative reviews and high rental price convinced us to hold off and catch it on streaming. But this thing kind of disappeared into the ether immediately afterwards, and we forgot it ever existed until we stumbled across it on Netflix. And now that we've seen it... well... we found out why it disappeared into that ether. Pottersville is pretty bad. Actually, that might be overly generous: the movie is a train wreck on a scale rarely seen with a cast this impressive. The movie's lead is Michael Shannon, with Judy Greer, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, and Ian McShane all playing major roles. That's a hell of a cast for a low-budget holiday satire. Assuming this is satire. Honestly, it's difficult to identify what exactly they were going for, because - whatever it was - it missed the mark by light-years. I'll get to the plot, I promise, bu

One of the main plot threads of Yogi's First Christmas is that the bears - Yogi, Boo Boo, and Cindy - are constantly struggling to stay awake. In a stroke of artistic genius, the producers of this hour-and-thirty-eight-minute TV movie found ways to not just depict this on screen, but fully immerse the audience in the story by lulling us into the same state. I am not exaggerating when I say I found myself physically and emotionally drained when I paused this movie to discover I was less than thirteen minutes in. I should mention this seems to borrow heavily from Casper's First Christmas, a half-hour special also from Hanna-Barbera, released the previous year. The cast of characters is virtually identical, including Yogi and Boo Boo. Technically, I suppose this could  be a prequel to Casper's First Christmas, though I doubt anyone was worried about continuity when making this. On top of everything else, this includes a couple songs from the prior year's special (as well a

Part of me thinks it's odd this slipped through the cracks for so long. As far as I can tell, it's the first Looney Tunes TV Christmas special, and it features some huge names in animation (Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Mel Blanc). On that level, it feels like this is something that should be important. Or at least it does until you watch it. It's not that this is bad - I'd describe two of the three segments as "fine" and the third as "pretty good" - but there's nothing in here that makes it feel bigger or more memorable than three random Looney Tunes shorts. And the one segment that might have left an impact, Bugs Bunny's Christmas Carol, was supplanted four years later by the far superior Disney film with a similar premise. After a brief (though maybe not brief enough) intro sequence with Looney Tunes characters caroling, the special moves on to its spin on A Christmas Carol. This does actually feel like a transition between Mr. Magoo'

I watched and "reviewed" this back in 2011 , but those quotes are there for a reason. This is far from the only version of A Christmas Carol I'm revisiting as part of this year's project. I didn't much care for this when I last saw it, but I've seen some endorsements online and decided it was worth giving it another shot, if only to add some depth to the snarky, uninformative diatribe I wrote eleven years ago. I'll start by saying the re-watch didn't improve my opinion much, though there were a handful of good moments and aspects I failed to credit the first time around. I'll get around to those in a bit. First, let's do something else I apparently didn't feel was relevant in 2011 and actually describe the damn special. Bah, Humduck! is a homage/parody of A Christmas Carol featuring Looney Tunes characters as versions of themselves. This of course differs from versions where established characters are playing the actual characters of A Chri

Let's start with the disclaimer: The Best Man Holiday is the sequel to The Best Man, a 1999 dramedy I haven't seen, meaning thematic and story connections between the films almost certainly went over my head. As such, I'm only able to review this as a standalone installment, rather than a piece of a longer story. There's a popular perspective that this shouldn't be a shortcoming in my ability to review a work, as movies supposedly need to be able to stand on their own. I do not share that ideology - I believe that presumed context isn't an unreasonable assumption on behalf of filmmakers and that those of us lacking that context should at the very least be upfront about it. Hence this paragraph. I don't feel quite as bad about this as I sometimes do, because the bulk of what I have to say is going to be positive and most of my complaints relate to story beats and character choices wholly contained within the narrative of this film. On top of that, I found eve

2020 was the year studios and TV networks simultaneously decided to acknowledge the existence of same-sex couples in Christmas romcoms. The highest profile example was of course Happiest Season  (still great). That year also saw the release of Lifetime's first holiday romcom with gay leads, The Christmas Setup . Around the same time, Hallmark released The Christmas House, their first Christmas movie with.... er... This is actually a bit complicated. The Christmas House is not centered around a same-sex couple, though the movie includes one in a significant supporting role. To put this in perspective, this is one of three couples the movie showcases, and they're given the least plot. Just so we're clear on how small a step forward this actually represents for Hallmark. That's not to say the gay characters in The Christmas House are bad. Brandon and Jake are given some good lines and some fun moments, and the movie does a decent job avoiding cliches and stereotypes. It a

I almost skipped over this one. It's one of several produced in part by Hallmark Entertainment, and I haven't been particularly impressed with the others I've seen from them. And while I want to see as many adaptations as humanly possible, the reality is there are a lot  of these out there. Since it's impossible to see them all, I've been prioritizing the best regarded, then mixing in as many that seem notable or unusual as possible. On the surface, this one seemed pretty unremarkable, and I hadn't come across any diehard fans or proponents.  It stars Kelsey Grammer, who has a less than stellar track record for choosing Christmas movies, and an even worse record when it comes to this particular story . On top of that, I'm not a fan of the guy as a person (his politics are awful, and - before anyone asks - given how bad the world's gotten, I absolutely think it's fair to let that factor into your opinion of a celebrity). All that said, he's certa

Along with The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music is one of two movies that have sort of broken into the canon of established Christmas movies, despite containing no scenes set at Christmas. Normally, we don't review movies simply because they've become associated with the holiday, but due to the significance of these two classics, along with the sustained connections they've formed, we're making these exceptions. For the time being, these are the only two movies we're granting this honorary status: maybe we'll revisit a few others in another decade or two. For Oz, we dedicated an entire article about the convoluted history between that and the yuletide season. I think The Sound of Music's Christmas credentials are a bit simpler, so let's get them out of the way upfront. The simplest and most straightforward holiday connection comes from the fact the song, My Favorite Things, has long been associated with Christmas and appears on numerous Christmas albums.