Mainlining Christmas

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...

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...

There's virtually no information about this on its Wikipedia page, but between the fact this came out in 2022, the isolated setting, and the cast almost entirely consisting of three characters, it seems like a safe bet this was produced and filmed during the Covid lockdowns. It was ultimately released by Shudder, where it received a tepid response from viewers and critics. I can't help but suspect some of that reaction may have been due to exhaustion with minimalist productions at the time - for a few years there, it felt like everything  was made with a couple actors and a skeleton crew to comply with restrictions on crowds. In addition, horror fans tend to react poorly to non-horror movies marketed in that genre, and The Apology is ultimately more a psychological thriller. That's my guess for why this didn't get a better response at the time, because I thought this was quite good as a suspenseful character drama. Just be warned it goes to some dark places... though it...

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...

I spent a significant amount of 'R Xmas's runtime trying to unravel what this was supposed to be. There's nothing inherently wrong with a movie refusing to adhere to the conventions of any one genre, but it's the kind of gamble that either pays off or falls flat. This one didn't pay off. Instead of building on various tropes to construct a film greater than the sum of its parts, this wound up landing in a sort of empty void between genres: not suspenseful enough to work as thriller, lacking characters interesting enough to function as a crime story or gangster flick, no real mystery coalescing around the bizarre events until we receive a logical if unsatisfying explanation... it's bizarre. In the end, this winds up feeling more like an odd drama masquerading as the genres above, and the drama here just isn't all that compelling. The movie tries to make a point about crime and government policy, but there wasn't much substance to what it was saying then a...

This was one of a handful of adaptations of "A Christmas Carol" that were on my list when I binged fifty or so of these back in 2022, but I was unable to get to it at the time. I've been meaning to rectify that since, but it never seemed to be on the right streaming services at the right times. Well, that finally changed, so at long last I was able to sit down and watch it. The movie is quite a bit more ambitious than most low-budget versions. The story is set in what was then the present-day, song and dance numbers are added (though the music is diegetic, save for when the source is explicitly supernatural), and the majority of characters - included Scrooge himself - are gay. Several characters are gender-flipped to accommodate this: nephew Fred is now niece Freda, Belle becomes Bill, and so on. Sequences and minor characters are added to expand on this idea, however the core of the story is unchanged. In fact, in several respects this adheres closer to Dickens's blu...

A Tale of Winter is to Sleepless in Seattle what Dial Code Santa Claus is to Home Alone . Okay, that's probably unfair to Sleepless in Seattle, which I don't actually think is a knockoff of Tale of Winter, but the parallels are interesting: French movies exploring similar ideas released a year earlier that are (in my opinion) significantly better than their American counterparts. A Tale of Winter is the second Christmas movie I've seen written and directed by French New Wave auteur Éric Rohmer, who also made My Night at Maud's  twenty-three years earlier. I should also mention A Tale of Winter is the second of four films each representing a different season. At the very least I should probably have seen the first of those before attempting to write about this, but... well... I'm busy and have too many other Christmas movies to get to. Just in case it wasn't obvious from that "better than their American counterparts" gag, I liked this quite a bit. Tha...