Mainlining Christmas

By my math, approximately 20% of Bi Gan's ode to cinema is set at New Year's, which is another way of saying one of the movie's six mini-stories plays out over that holiday. I don't really consider that sufficient to describe this as a "Christmas (or New Year's) movie," but the nature of the holiday section was interesting enough I wanted to write it up here, if only to catalog as an example in a surprisingly rich sub-subgenre of holiday media. First, let's talk about the work as a whole, or at least attempt to, because... this one's a doozy. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. In fact, I think the movie is fantastic and absolutely recommend it to any cinephiles... with a caveat. At risk of breaking my own rule about spoiling great movies without a warning, there's something I really wish I'd understood about Resurrection before watching: the movie both is and is not presented as a sort of anthology of shorts. The opening of the fi...

Christmas episodes continue to struggle to adapt to the era of streaming. The standard model of dropping entire seasons at once doesn't align with the tradition of planning an episode's release around the holidays. Granted, we've seen entire seasons - heck, entire series - set during the holiday season, but shows with narratives spanning months find themselves in the position of choosing to either ignore December altogether or release a holiday episode along with the rest of the series. Or, you know, just release that as a standalone Christmas special , but weirdly that solution has been underutilized. That brings us to Caped Crusader, a noir-heavy Batman series from Bruce Timm, one of the masterminds behind Batman: The Animated Series, the gold standard when it comes to this stuff. I should note I'm halfway through the second season (I'm writing this right after watching the episode in question), so my thoughts may shift down the road. For now, however, I find th...

The Naked Gun reboot is set during the holidays (mainly New Year's Eve) as a thematic anchor exploring the ways recurrent franchise media intersects with primal, underlying concepts linked to the changing of the calendar, and moreover I am very clearly fucking with you, and in actuality the setting of this movie - to the very limited extent its virtually non-existent continuity permits any kind of temporal setting to be established - is most likely just an excuse to make a visual joke comparing New Year's balls with testicles. Still, it is set just before New Year's, which means it qualifies as a "Christmas movie" albeit on the loosest technicality possible and therefore should be discussed on this site. Also, I'm forced to admit that setting your film around the holidays just to make a joke about balls is - again, on a technicality - a fairly novel justification for the timing, whether I like the joke in question or not. In that particular case... the answer ...

The 1970s remain something of a mystery when it comes to holiday movies. There are, of course, a handful of high-profile Christmas films  from the decade, but on the whole it's probably better remembered now for its   holiday specials than its movies. I'm skeptical that this is an accurate reflection of the era. In recent years, a number of significant '70s movies have gotten attention for being set around Christmas , leading me to suspect it's less a case of scarcity than of lack of attention. All of which is a longwinded preamble explaining why I'm perhaps a little more liberal when deciding whether or not to write up movies with debatable holiday credentials from that decade than more recent ones. And that leads us to Mitchell, a movie that may or may not count as Christmas media. A portion of the movie is definitely set around Christmas, though due to a vaguely defined timeline, it's somewhat unclear just how large a portion we're talking about....

This will most likely be a short review, as well as an incomplete one. I typically write up these reviews the day after watching a movie (if not the same day), but I held off on Death is a Caress for a couple reasons. First, I was busy, but second... this isn't a Christmas movie (at least not using most definitions). I didn't put it on as such, and I've never heard anyone claim otherwise (though I haven't checked, either, so who knows?). The movie only features one sequence explicitly set during the holidays - New Year's Eve, specifically. It's about ten minutes long and is set around two-thirds of the way through the film. My initial instinct wasn't to write it up, at all. But as I digested the movie, my opinion shifted. The holiday's use as a thematic device is rather interesting and worth exploring. I'd still hesitate to call this a Christmas (or New Year's) movie, but it's certainly relevant to the topic of this blog. First some backgroun...

 Ah, November. Time to celebrate American democracy, at least in memoriam. And, of course, time to take a breather between kids extorting candy from us to kids extorting toys. Though around here we need no such respite. Christmas never really ends here, and so it never begins. That's why you won't catch us whining about Fred Meyer selling Santa ornaments midway through October. For us, it's always Christmas, at least as far as content is concerned. Speaking of October, we continued the tradition from last year of posting horror reviews through the month, albeit not as consistently. We did, however, manage to exceed 50%, if only barely, by posting reviews sixteen days last month. So... I don't know... be impressed or something. I'm certainly not committing to maintaining that pace this month. However, I will be posting new reviews when time allows, prioritizing material where Christmas isn't the main draw. I'm talking about movies that don't pass our usua...

So long as you're interested in the journey, no matter how unsatisfying the destination proves to be, the majority of The Legend of Hell House makes for an enjoyably quirky haunted house flick from a time when science (or at least semi-respectable pseudoscience) was considered compatible with the supernatural. To put that another way, this is the kind of thing Ghostbusters was parodying, a world where psychic phenomenon is considered commonplace and spiritual questions can be studied scientifically and associated problems potentially addressed with technology. That's one of several elements that make this entertaining, if not good. Likewise, the story (adapted by the legendary Richard Matheson from his own novel), populates the cast entirely with characters who are professionals in their field. This means the characters reacting (or through the first half of the movie mostly not reacting) to what's occurring around them have incentives to see this play out and unravel the m...

I'll grant it'd be a stretch to call this a Christmas movie. Only the last fifteen minutes or so are set at Christmas (and even then there's a little ambiguity surrounding the timeline), but that sequence is both thematically rich and interesting as a case study in how the holidays were viewed in the 1920s. More than that, if you think I'm above grasping at any opportunity to discuss a movie made by F. W. Murnau, the director of Nosferatu, through the prism of holiday media, you're seriously mistaken. In some ways, Faust is an even more impressive accomplishment than Nosferatu. The design and composition of some of these shots is incredible. Make up effects, set decoration, lighting, and camera angles are used to create some gorgeous sequences that - in the expressionist tradition - warp reality into something new. There were moments when actors almost looked more like stop-motion marionettes or animated figures than real people. Likewise, the balance between shadow...

Let's kick this off with a disclaimer. In fact, let's do a slew of disclaimers. I haven't seen the first Maniac Cop movie, nor have I seen the 1980 movie, Maniac (which I understand to be a different series, but I'm guessing there's some sort of tenuous thematic or conceptual connection, given both were directed by William Lustig). More than that, the Maniac Cop movies are drifting either into or adjacent to the exploitation genre, an area where my experience is limited. If you're a fan of that stuff, you're probably not going to think much of my opinion (though, for what it's worth, I do have a few nice things to say about aspects of this movie). But the corollary of that is if you're not a fan - or especially if you have no idea what I'm talking about or who William Lustig is - you're probably better off taking my advice and steering clear of this. For the most part, I found this boring, which is a surprising complaint given this movie is a...

Of the four Christmas or New Year's themed installments in the Blumhouse/Hulu "Into the Dark" series of holiday movies, this was my least favorite, though I should qualify that by acknowledging I'm not the target audience for this either way you slice its hybrid queer slasher genres. That said, skimming the Letterboxd reviews implies this was divisive among that audience, with some loving the exploitation angle and some finding the story and characters dull. Hopefully some context will help you determine where you'd fall in that continuum. At least according to my reading, the point of Midnight Kiss is metatextual, which is to say what the movie is  is more significant to understanding it than what it's about. The movie is essentially using the classic slasher formula, framing, and perhaps most importantly gaze to tell a story about gay men. Rather than exploiting female bodies for a predominantly straight male audience, Midnight Kiss focuses on male bodies fo...

This is the third movie I've seen that was produced as part of the Blumhouse/Hulu collaboration Into the Dark, a holiday-themed streaming series of horror movies. The other two, both set at Christmas, were pretty good (and more importantly interesting), and this maintains that trend. "New Year, New You" is a thriller co-written and directed by Sophia Takal, who'd go on to make the 2019  Black Christmas remake (also produced by Blumhouse) the following year. This also maintains the trend of feeling like it may have been reworked into a holiday movie, rather than originally envisioned as one. I'm not sure that was actually the case with any or all of these, but the holiday elements keep feeling somewhat peripheral to the stories and primary themes. To be clear, this is in no way a complaint; only an observation. I'll also add that if I'm right and some of these were existing scripts adjusted to work with the holidays, they justified the alteration by making...

I think the worst way to watch The Oracle is to go in blind, the way I did, without knowing anything about the background or filmography of director Roberta Findlay. Granted the second-worst way to watch it would probably be after reading up on Findlay's history, but I wanted to provide a bit of context before saying I spent the first hour of this movie utterly baffled by what I was watching, or at least why it was made. The acting and direction are bad to the point I found myself wondering if it was intended as satire or parody, the pacing is glacial, and there's little internal logic to the plot. The good news is one of those elements - the pacing - improves significantly in the last half hour, at which point the movie does sort of coalesce into something semi-coherent (at least from a genre standpoint). I wouldn't call the final film good , but it turns into something of substance. Let's back up. Roberta Findlay helped her then-husband, Michael Findlay, develop the g...