Mainlining Christmas

Often regarded as one of the worst, if not the worst, American sitcoms in history, My Mother the Car ran for thirty episodes between 1965 and 1966. The premise of the show is that the main character, David Crabtree (played by Jerry Van Dyke, the younger brother of Dick Van Dyke), discovers his dead mother has been reincarnated in the form of a 1928 Porter who talks to him through the radio when no one else is around. I should add this was written and produced by some of the greatest legends in television history - Allan Burns and Chris Hayward created the show, and James L. Brooks wrote for it. As explained by Burns in this clip , the series was envisioned as a satire of the sub-genre of '60s sitcoms built around an absurd fantasy gimmick (think Mister Ed or Bewitched), but something went wrong and the satirical elements were lost in production. In that interview, Burns blames it on the show becoming too cute, but I think the issue was intrinsic to the premise. The shows they were ...

I somewhat jokingly referred to this as the anti-Love Actually after watching it, and think that would probably be a good selling line to convince American audiences to give this French dramedy a shot. In a sense, that seems accurate - like Love Actually, this follows an ensemble of characters navigating a web of relationships and emotions, but the movie is unambiguous in its assessment of long-term monogamy. Virtually every character over the age of eighteen has been unfaithful to a partner; quite literally, every romantic relationship in the film has an expiration date. However, I now think my immediate reaction was incorrect. Despite La Bûche's pessimistic view of coupling - the movie ultimately embraces love in all its forms and does so enthusiastically. In this sense, it might be better described as a companion to Love Actually (albeit one likely to please that movie's detractors). Regardless, La Bûche is either the most cynically sweet or sweetly cynical Christmas movie I...

From the perspective of a Yuletide nerd, this is an interesting case. I actually wouldn't consider this a Christmas movie, despite the fact it technically passes my litmus test. The entirety of this film is set around the holidays, which is usually more than enough. But the specifics of the setting and story render the timing moot for the majority of the runtime, and neither the story or the themes are particularly connected to the holidays. Both those points could probably be debated. The premise uses the holidays as an excuse to bring the characters together, and some of the themes - connecting with old friends and growing older - have a history of being associated with Christmas media, but I don't really buy that these are causally connected to the frame story visibly being set over the holidays. Frankly, I think the Christmas connection appears here for the same reason the last movie included a coda set during the same time: this series has always been released at Christmas...

For those of you who weren't reading last year, well... first of all, welcome to the party, pal! But second and more germane to the topic, I spent a comically large portion of 2022 watching and reviewing roughly fifty adaptations of A Christmas Carol, presumably making me one of the world's foremost masochists on the subject. This was still just a drop in the bucket as far as the breadth of TV and film versions of the story are concerned, but I managed to check off virtually every adaptation on my list. Virtually. There were a couple that slipped through the cracks. The most notable of which is an elusive 1940s version from Spain that's probably going to be one of those "white whales" I obsess over for decades. But after that, there was Ebenezer, a version starring Jack Palance, with the setting moved from London to the American West. This was an extremely late addition to my list - because the title differs from the usual pattern, it hadn't initially caught m...

It's actually a little weird I've never seen this before. I was in high school when Grumpy Old Men came out in 1993, so the fact I never bothered seeing it on VHS or even caught it on television is a little unusual. Likewise, it has to be one of the most famous Christmas movies that somehow fell through the cracks this long. Part of that has to do with the fact it intentionally downplays some aspects of the holidays - more on that later - despite absolutely qualifying as a Christmas movie. The movie's primary selling point and presumably its reason for being made is its cast. The film stars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as the titular grumpy old men, and if there's a reason to see this, it's them. Whether that's enough or not is a more difficult question. The movie is right on the line between "not quite good enough" and "just good enough." Frustratingly, it contains moments and elements of greatness it can't quite maintain. Lemmon and M...

The first thing that jumped out about this 1943 French Christmas film was that it's a movie released in France in 1943. History was never my best subject, but even I know France was occupied by Nazi Germany during that time, which raised a substantial number of questions, some of which I've found answers for and some I haven't. The first and most relevant is confirmation that this is, in fact, a French film, as opposed to a Nazi film made in France. The director, Claude Autant-Lara, seems to have hated the occupation, and his work at the time is seen as fairly progressive. I should pause to highlight the significance of the phrase "at that time," because it doesn't take much time on Wikipedia to find that in later years Autant-Lara's politics mutated into something disturbingly similar to Nazis, complete with right-wing nationalism and antisemitism. He was actually elected to Parliament in the late '80s, though he didn't stick around long - some p...

There have been a substantial number of Christmas romcoms released direct to streaming over the past few years, too many for us to even try keeping up with. We attempt to get around to the most notable ones, but even then it's felt like a race against a malfunctioning automated assembly line. Christmas at the Ranch got on our radar because it's one of a small (though thankfully not as small as it once was) number of LGBTQ+ holiday movies. For better or worse, that turns out to be most of what makes Christmas at the Ranch different from the scores of other Christmas romcoms: aside from the fact both leads are women, this is fairly generic as far as these things go. I'm aware that can be a selling point to a number of people who love the subgenre and have been starved for representation. There's nothing wrong with making what amounts to a Hallmark romcom with a lesbian couple, since Hallmark's been slow to meet that demand (to be fair, they've made a few now, but ...

Long Live the Royals was an extremely brief miniseries that aired on Cartoon Network back in 2015. When I say extremely brief, I mean it's just four 11-minute episodes long. But this was the year after Over the Garden Wall, and the bar for Cartoon Network miniseries was impossibly high. That's probably why this mediocre absurdist piece seems to have vanished almost without a trace.  (It's currently available to stream, though, which these days might just mean that the people who worked on it didn't have great contracts so it's cheap to keep up.)  The setting here is somewhat muddy. A royal family presides over someplace (all the descriptions of this show say Britain, but that isn't corroborated in the actual show as far as I remember) that at least includes a castle, a forest, and a town of peasants. It's a mashup time period, with most people dressed vaguely medieval-ish or "old-timey" and a strongly feudal society, but also smartphones and laptop...

Night of the Comet joins I Come in Peace and Trancers  on a list of low-budget cult Christmas science-fiction movies from the '80s and early '90s. All three flew under our radar for years, so I'm left wondering if there are more out there. Night of the Comet is unquestionably the best of those three, incidentally. I'm not sure I'd recommend this to someone who isn't a fan of genre (and perhaps more importantly genre history, as we'll get to in a moment), but any connoisseur of '50s drive-in fare, early zombie movies, or '70s post-apocalyptic films will find this well worth checking out. It's also notable for the impression it left on popular culture: it's been cited as an inspiration for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and while watching I saw ideas I'm fairly certain were borrowed for Cabin in the Woods and Zombieland, among others. All of which is to say this is a neat, clever film. Perhaps a bit too clever in some ways, honestly - its mashu...

Bridget Jones's Diary appears on a fair number of lists of Christmas and New Year's movies, usually with the caveat that most of the movie doesn't take place on the holiday, which is probably why we glossed over it for as long as we did. But now that we're exploring less restrictive definitions of "Christmas movie," I thought it was time to give this a watch, which led to a couple surprising revelations. First, while only a fraction of the movie is set over the holidays, this would have applied under even our stricter criteria, as its thematic use of those celebrations (particularly New Year's) permeates the entire film. But second and more important is that this movie absolutely fucking rules. I'll be honest - I hadn't expected that. I'm not sure why I assumed it wouldn't, but I suspect it has something to do with the trailer (I just looked it up on YouTube, and it certainly isn't doing the movie any favors). But the film itself is hil...