Mainlining Christmas

This is one of seven "Holiday Noir" movies streamed by Criterion this month. A few of the movies they included aren't exactly what I'd call "Christmas movies" (not that Criterion promised they would be), but Blast of Silence passes my litmus test with flying colors (or in this case, flying black and white). The entirety of the film plays out during the holiday season, starting a few days before Christmas and ending on or around New Year's. The movie's "noir" credentials are a bit more complicated. Technically, this falls outside the window of what generally qualifies - Wikipedia identifies it as "neo-noir," which seems a more accurate designation. Essentially, this acts as a bridge between the dark melodramas of the '40s and '50s we now call noir and the gangster epics that would become popular over the next few decades. At least on the surface, this is a focused, contained crime story built around a single character. The ...

Animated Christmas specials serving as stealth pilots is something of a tradition in its own right. The most successful example, of course, was The Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire , but a number of other properties attempted to use the format , as well, including the one we're looking at today. Astonishingly, this one seems to have been successful, as it spawned a number of additional specials and eventually a series that lasted for five years. Lindsay grew up watching said series - I did not. She assures me that the kids who appear in the frame story of this special would be dropped pretty fast, with the world defaulting to one entirely occupied by anthropomorphic animals. That premise does sound at least marginally better than what we just watched. Let's start there. We're introduced to a park ranger, his two kids, and their dog, Schaeffer. The forest they're living in (and that the ranger is looking after) is being mysteriously cut down, so he goes to investigate ...

Morning for the Osone Family is the rare war story that doesn't show the war at all. Instead, this is interested in the ordeal of two women dealing with family politics, cultural constraints, and grief as the war claims those they've loved and threatens their hope for the future. It's a fascinating film, though I want to acknowledge my background leaves me underqualified to discuss it in any real detail. This is, of course, a Christmas blog, so that's going to color how I approach the film. But while this has a great deal to offer in that context, the holidays are really more a side thought. They serve enough symbolic and tonal purpose to warrant discussion here, but this certainly wasn't intended as a "Christmas movie," nor would I describe it as such. I'll do my best to at least touch on the other themes, but anyone interested in the film's place in Japanese culture or post-War cinema will probably want to find a resource more equipped to discuss...

I'm stretching to discuss this here - the combined time spent on the holidays (in this case a couple different New Year's Eves) accounts for a minuscule portion of the overall runtime. Granted, those moments are thematically important and one of them closes the film, but even so, I wouldn't review a modern movie with this little seasonal screentime. But The Divorcee was released in 1930, making it one of the earliest talkies with any holiday connections I've located, and it was extremely successful at the time, picking up nominations for Best Picture, Director, Writer, and winning Best Actress for Norma Shearer. And while it feels very different than later Hollywood genres, elements of the structure resonate with modern romantic comedies (though this is definitely a drama). And seeing as one of those elements is the aforementioned New Year's Eve conclusion, I felt like I should discuss it. Shearer plays Jerry, a woman destined to be the titular divorcee, though the ...

While it's admittedly 1939's second-best Christmas movie about a woman down on her luck finding an abandoned baby that winds up changing her life for the better, Miracle on Main Street is still a solid, albeit weird, little film with notably progressive undertones. Moreover, those undertones are different than the likewise progressive ideas expressed in Bachelor Mother , the other film with that premise released the same year. But then there's actually a great deal separating them, starting with genre. Miracle on Main Street is a drama, a fact that does hinder its longevity - I'm finding comedies I'm seeing from the 1930s generally hold up, while dramas tend to feel dated. This stars an actress simply billed as "Margo," (her birth name was María Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estela Bolado Castilla y O'Donnell, so I can understand wanting to simplify it for film) who's pretty interesting herself. Born in Mexico, she moved to the US and worked began a ...

This movie should be much better known. Repeat Performance is a holiday fantasy/noir from 1947 about a woman who just killed her husband in self-defense at midnight on New Year's, wishes to relive the past year to change her destiny, and finds her wish is granted by the magic of the season only to learn that while the paths of fate can be traversed differently, the destination will always be the same. I don't feel too bad spoiling this, because the movie kicks off with Twilight Zone-esque narration that more or less spells all this out. So, this is basically a post-war fatalism entry for the holidays. Again, why in hell am I only just hearing about this now?!!! Okay, I can probably shed a little light on that now. First, if you're not thinking about the thematic and historical significance the holidays lend the movie, it's easy to gloss over them, as well as how much of the movie is actually set during the season. Second, the movie has some pacing issues: it drags a bit...

Christmas Holiday William Somerset Maugham, 1939 I had been reading a number of brand new holiday books that feel as though the authors hope they'll be turned into movies, so I felt like switching gears to try a much older book that was actually adapted for film. If you read our review of the movie , you may remember that Erin mentioned that a lot of aspects were changed in the adaptation. The largest is that in the movie, the main female character gets the most emotional development, and her story, told mostly in flashback to the ostensible point-of-view lead, gets the most screen time.  The novel, on the other hand, actually has a main character. Charley Mason is not an American GI with anger issues, but a British dilettante. His wealthy parents have pretensions of being knowledgeable about art, and at one time he wanted to be an artist himself. At the time of the novel, he's been talked out of that, and instead, he has been preparing to take over his father's safe, sensi...

On its most basic level, Cobra is an R-rated '80s action movie written by and starring Sylvester Stallone, but that doesn't begin to describe what makes it unusual or (with apologies for jumping right to the punchline) awful. Because at the end of the day, Cobra is bad, despite some impressive stunts and a genuine attempt to make something interesting. Let's back up. For a while, Stallone was looking to play Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, a role that would eventually go to Eddie Murphy. Stallone, of course, had a very different vision for that movie's tone, which (coupled with the budget his vision would require) seems to be the main reason that version ultimately fell through. I have no idea if he perceived Cobra as some sort of proof of concept, or if he just had a bunch of ideas floating around his head as a result of working on the other project. Regardless, he pulled his ideas together, combined them with ideas borrowed from a novel called Fair Game (which the cr...

This noir film directed by Robert Siodmak stars Deanna Durbin, Dean Harens, and a relatively young Gene Kelly, which may be enough to pique some of your curiosity. Know the movie is extremely weird, with a plot that takes a while to establish what the story's going to be. That said, it's beautifully shot, with some impressive crane sequences, loads of shadows, and an appropriately dark story. This one's definitely not on the "feel good" end of the Christmas movie spectrum. It's worth noting this was loosely based on a novel, though there were some significant changes made to update the characters for an American audience and to avoid running afoul of censors. So a Russian prostitute is now a singer from Vermont, and the British POV character is transformed into an American soldier. The movie starts with the soldier, Charlie (Dean Harens), who's excited to be going on holiday, because he has plans to return to San Francisco and marry his fiancé. Only things...

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...

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...