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...

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...

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...

I'm betting this would be better known if it hadn't named itself after that particular song. Not that there's anything wrong with the 1970 holiday song; it's just that the last few decades have been filled with a barrage of movies with similar names. When you hear a movie is titled, "This Christmas," the song isn't what pops to mind, but rather movies like Last Christmas , That Christmas , The Holiday , along with God knows how many Hallmark movies. The title of This Christmas simply isn't memorable. That's somewhat true of the movie, as well, though I want to stress this isn't necessarily a flaw. This Christmas sets out to deliver a a relatively traditional Christmas movie experience: a dysfunctional family confronting the holidays, renewing their commitment to each other, and going into a new year with more faith and optimism than they had during the last. The template is boilerplate; the variation comes from a change in setting and character...

Nutcrackers feels like a good movie, which is to say it's well shot, it (mostly) maintains a whimsically somber tone, and it features a relatively high-profile lead actor in an otherwise low-budget production. I've seen countless holiday movies with a similar premise (or at least a similar initial premise), but very few that veer away from the Hallmark vibe this completely. Before you read any of that as an outright endorsement, however, I want to draw your eye to a key detail in the opening sentence: I said this feels  like a good movie. Actually, it feels like two good movies. Or perhaps the first third of a one decent movie followed by the second half of an exceptional one. The problem here is the pieces don't snap together. The payoffs at the end of the movie are largely covering stuff hastily established directly beforehand. There's a series of comedic set-ups and ideas introduced early on that are just kind of forgotten. The disconnect isn't quite as jarring a...

I'm curious whether this was just in a blind spot for me, or if various factors surrounding the film resulted in an exceptional Oscar-nominated comedy/drama Christmas movie anchored by a legendary actor (and supported with an incredible cast) to fade from collective memory. Or maybe it never embedded itself far enough into cultural memory to begin with: it was at best a modest box-office success, so any real staying power would have come from VHS and cable. And while its Christmas credentials are in my mind unimpeachable, they're far less prominent than those in holiday movies from the same era now considered classics (few of which are anywhere near as good as Nobody's Fool, but we'll get to that). If it hadn't gotten a mention in Alonso Duralde's "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas," I might never have found it, which makes me wonder how many other brilliant forgotten holiday movies exist. At any rate, this one's very good and well worth track...