Mainlining Christmas

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...

The cliche, "so bad it's good," doesn't begin to convey the unprecedented absurdity that is this movie, an experience so unique as to feel alien in its approach to human emotion and storytelling. The existence of this film defies easy explanation. It is blatantly a marketing exercise attempting to promote the brand of Thomas Kinkade, a producer on the film, that inexplicably features a cast including Peter O'Toole, Ed Asner, and Marcia Gay Harden, along with talented character actors such as Chris Elliott and Richard Moll. None of them are phoning this in, either - everyone involves pours their heart into this thing, and the result is almost indescribable. Visually, this pointedly is not stylized to look like one of Kinkade's Candylandesque dreamscapes. Instead, it aims for realism, invoking the style of 70s dramas. Director Michael Campus made a handful of well-regarded blaxspoitation films and seems to have reemerged from a thirty-two year hiatus to make Chr...

Small Things Like These is an Irish movie adapted from a novel about a coal merchant attempting to understand his past and find the courage to defy a powerful Catholic organization that's torturing single pregnant women and stealing their children. In short, it's the story of Ireland's own failure to address the Magdalene asylums within their nation for centuries, told through the prism of one man. The movie is exceptionally good by most metrics. Cillian Murphy plays the lead and seems to have been the main force driving the production - he's absolutely fantastic here. That goes for the rest of the cast, as well, but this is really Murphy's movie in more ways than one. Director Tim Mielants creates something impactful and memorable. The cinematography is likewise exceptional, capturing the grit of coal dust and soot that covers the buildings, just as the crime at the heart of the movie remains a blot on the nation (I said this was good, not subtle). It's an effe...

After watching this, I realized I'd made a mistake by not watching the original 1950 movie this is a (loose) remake of first, since I found myself unsure what was original and what was drawn from the source material. So, naturally, I watched the original as well. This is only a review of the 1988 movie, as the original is set in summer and we have a reputation to uphold. Aside from the vague premise, the two movies don't have much in common. Even some elements I'd have sworn were pulled from the 1950 version weren't, such as dated character names and explicit noir tropes. My guess is this was intended as a love letter to the noir era in general. Perhaps the Christmas setting was a nod to one of the many holiday noirs, since it certainly wasn't taken from the 1950 film, which was set sometime during the hot summer months. D.O.A. opens and closes with scenes shot in black and white that look and feel like something right out of a classic noir. In fact, the opening is ...