Mainlining Christmas

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

This 9-minute film from 1928 represents something of a transition between silent film and talkies. Technically it's neither, as it includes a synchronized musical soundtrack but no spoken dialogue. In addition, it's shot in two-color Technicolor, similar to Mystery of the Wax Museum (though that movie features a much more technically advanced execution of the process). Between those features and an extremely intricate fantasy effect at the heart of the short, The Toy Shop must have amazed audiences ninety-five years ago. I still found myself surprised and intrigued today. There's not a lot to the plot. The movie opens with a poor beggar girl (presumably an orphan) begging outside a toy shop on what I'm assuming is Christmas Eve (all we get from the title cards is that this is happening in France). Visually, we only get a couple hints at the season: there's a wreath on a door in the background, and later we'll see some garlands inside the shopkeeper's home.

Well, I probably shouldn't be reviewing this. First, a little background. Or in this case, lack thereof, because that's sort of the problem. I put this on having no clue what it was after seeing it on a list of science fiction films on Criterion. I'd seen virtually everything else on the list, but I'd never even heard of 2046, so I trusted it would be at least interesting and pressed play. The short version is that it is interesting, it is not  science fiction, but it was (surprisingly) a Christmas movie. Well, sort of a Christmas movie. I'll get to that. Also, it's not entirely not science fiction. I'll get to that, too. But first I want to highlight another aspect I wasn't ready for: it's the third movie in a trilogy. Sort of. I'm... not really going to get around to explaining that, because I'm still a little unclear on the details. Okay, my understanding is the main character of this appears in an earlier movie, and a minor character from

This is either the third or fourth adaptation we've covered of the classic western Christmas novel, The Three Godfathers, depending on whether you consider the 2003 anime Tokyo Godfathers  adapted from or inspired by the original. Of the relatively straightforward versions, the 1929 version, Hell's Heroes , by William Wyler remains my favorite, while the 1948  3 Godfathers  starring John Wayne, is my least favorite, and this one - directed by Richard Boleslawski - lands somewhere in the middle. Well, the middle leaning closer to Hell's Heroes, if I'm being specific. Unlike the 1948 movie, this one doesn't pull its punches in the second and third acts, or the first as far as the bank robbery is concerned. I know the John Wayne version has its fans, but this is one of those stories I don't like watered down (unless, I suppose, the water in question is poisoned). The rough outline is basically the same as the earlier version and source material: three outlaws find

I'm worried this is going to get lost in the shuffle because we're looking at so many silent movies this year. This one's a little different, though, both because it's an incredibly influential and important work and because the subject matter is probably going to resonate more with the sort of people I expect (or at least hope) read this blog. The Phantom Carriage is a silent Swedish horror/drama hybrid built around a New Year's Eve legend in which the last person to die before the stroke of midnight is cursed to drive Death's carriage through the following year, collecting souls. The term "folk horror" isn't generally applied to movies prior to the 1970s, but this certainly feels like a pretty good fit. You could argue it's the first film in that subgenre, and one of the first horror films in general, coming out a year after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and a year before Nosferatu. Before anyone gets too excited, I should add a great deal of i

Executioners is the sequel to The Heroic Trio, a Hong Kong superhero team-up movie built around three superheroines: Wonder Woman (not that  Wonder Woman), the Invisible Woman (not that Invisible Women, either), and Thief-Catcher (not that... no, wait, I think we're good here). I should note that I have no idea whether the monikers of Wonder Woman and The Invisible Woman correspond with the respective names of the Marvel and DC heroes in Cantonese. The characters don't seem at all connected, for what that's worth. It's also worth noting that both films were released in 1993. If you're wondering whether Executioners feels rushed as a result... yes, of course it does. Obviously. But we'll circle back to that. Let's talk a little about the heroines. Wonder Woman, played by Anita Mui, is essentially a masked ninja, more akin to Batman than Diana Prince. Of the three, she's the most unambiguously heroic. Thief-Catcher (Maggie Cheung) starts out more in the ve

This might be the last holiday movie I remember seeing as a child that we'd yet to get around to. The reason it took so long was, despite remembering a handful of moments and details, I had no idea what this was called. My best guess is that I probably watched this sometime in 1985 or 1986, possibly on VHS at a daycare I went to back then, though any of those details could be wrong. What's clearer was my reaction to the movie: I remember being mostly bored by the thing. And unfortunately, that assessment holds up pretty well. This TV movie has an obnoxiously slow pace, some awful directing, and very little action. In short, this isn't worth tracking down despite a surprising number of merits. I'm feeling jolly, so let's run through those first. This uses some solid matte paintings, backdrops, and miniature work to create the North Pole (technically North Pole City, but I said we were going to cover the good stuff first). Actually, that may be selling these features

This fifteen-minute film tells a story about conjoined homes housing two families, the Giltons and the Biltons. The Giltons have no children but are well off financially. Mr. Gilton is curmudgeonly and selfish, though his wife seems nice enough. The Biltons, in contrast, have three kids and are relatively happy, but they are poor and struggle to make ends meet. So, yeah, we're doing a Scrooge riff, minus the ghosts.  Anyway, the film takes us through a number of brief interactions, the first few show us that Mr. Gilton is a dick. He does have a dog, though, so I guess he's not all bad. Correction: he had a dog - it gets poisoned pretty quick. We never actually learn how the dog got poisoned, and the sparse use of title cards makes it difficult to tell exactly what's going on. My impression is that Gilton suspects his neighbors were somehow responsible, though it's a safe bet they're innocent (they're pretty much paragons of virtue; besides, they liked the dog).

Sitting right on the overlapping portions of a Venn diagram encompassing things that are "very good" and "completely insufferable," the new Apple TV+ live-action/animation hybrid special (they're trying to sell it as a movie, but don't be fooled) feels like the sort of thing that would be divisive if it were streaming on a platform more people actually used. The book this is based on meant a lot to me growing up, though I was a bit taken aback by some of the subtext rereading it now, which comes off as a bit ableist. This is of course far from the first adaptation of the classic children's book, though it's the first I remember encountering that qualifies as Christmas media under most definitions of the term. While you could make a case that the original is incorporating a trope in which a special Christmas present comes to life, Christmas is basically an afterthought in the book, compared with - say - a similar idea forming the backbone of The Nutcr

I recently watched and wrote up the 1938 remake of Holiday before realizing it was, in fact, a remake. Since I'm prioritizing pre-war holiday movies this year, I didn't want to skip over its predecessor. In earlier years, I'd have given it some time to avoid watching the same basic story twice in quick succession, but last year's Christmas Carol project warped my brain to the point that sort of thing no longer bores me. That does place me in the somewhat awkward position of talking about a film that - at least as far as story is concerned - is virtually identical to one I just discussed. Since I neither want to reword the same synopsis nor copy and paste what I wrote before, when the time to talk plot rolls around, I'll just direct you to that review and discuss elements that were different between versions. First, though, I want to get to the unfortunate business of measuring the two films overall. Normally, I tend to favor earlier adaptations (as my picks for  Th

Rather than running these individually, I'm posting reviews for five shorts, each of which is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. This is far from an exhaustive list, of course, but this covers every surviving version through the 1950s I was able to locate. For those of you who don't feel like digging through my notes, I'll save you a little time - these are all good for when they were made. The two that really stood out were the 1928 silent French version and the 1937 animated version. The animated probably aged the best of the bunch, as far as general audiences are concerned, while the 1928 film was the one I found the most fascinating from a technical standpoint. So, if you're interested in old movies, that's a good one to see (actually, all of these are good to see, but that's a great starting point). Those are the two I was thinking of when I slapped a "Highly Recommended" label on this post, though in both cases