Mainlining Christmas

I'm grouping these two animated shorts from Ladislaw Starewicz, a pioneer of stop-motion, together despite them being made more than four decades apart. Both films are fairly easy to locate online and well worth tracking down. The Insect's Christmas (1911) I believe The Insect's Christmas is the first animated Christmas movie ever made, or at least the earliest surviving example. The Insect's Christmas is sort of a whimsical fairytale that admittedly becomes a bit less whimsical when you realize the titular insects are dead bugs whose legs have been replaced with wires, but it's worth overlooking that unpleasant detail. Before we get to the insects, the movie opens with a Father Christmas ornament coming alive on a Christmas tree and climbing down, accidentally shattering an ornament and waking a sleeping doll in the process. He travels outside and conjures a Christmas tree using his staff. Next, he uses his staff to clear away rocks and even break open the ground,

We don't cover many random sitcom episodes anymore, but this one has been on my list for a while. This isn't a case of a childhood memory for either of us or a show that someone recommended: this is an episode I saw on a Wikipedia list of Christmas episodes, and I said, "Wait, there was a show with WHAT premise?"  Someone finally uploaded it to YouTube, so I was able to watch it.  An overall note: if, like me, you flinch at characters embarrassing themselves and constant, loud laugh tracks make you wince... maybe brace yourself before you try this one. The Charmings was a short-lived sitcom in the late '80s about Snow White and her family (along with one of the seven dwarfs and her wicked mom) magically getting zapped to modern-day California and having to adjust to life there. Presumably this was pitched as similar to fish-out-of-water shows like Mork and Mindy. I thought it would be more of a secret-identity-in-the-suburbs show like Bewitched, but they don't

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

Aside from a short bit at the end (more on that in a moment), this six-minute film is essentially a "how it's made" documentary showing how Christmas Crackers are produced (or more accurately how they were produced in the early 1900s). Even that's an overstatement: we don't really get a good look at the process; instead we're seeing quick glimpses of the components being made. It's all done using machines by workers performing their tasks extremely quickly, so it's not easy to tell precisely what they're doing or how the machines work. We get a feel for the environment in which they're made, but that's about it. It's worth noting the factory is staffed by a mix of male and female employees. I don't have much sense of scale, but my guess is these are unique workstations (i.e.: I can't imagine demand was so great that there were dozens more employees off-screen performing the same functions). At any rate, the film ends with a brie

The Naughty Nine is Disney's new direct-to-streaming kid's heist adventure about a team of highly-skilled children breaking into Santa's workshop after being snubbed by the Jolly Old Elf on Christmas Eve. My guess is most of you are eyeing that premise the way I did, as a promising idea that most likely wouldn't be executed remotely well enough to work. Disney, after all, certainly wouldn't be my first choice of companies to tackle this sort of thing. But I was pleasantly surprised, at least for the most part. It's that "most part" that's going to be a sticking point: the second act drags, and there's an "obey authority" message embedded in the subtext that doesn't sit well with me. Despite those issues, the characters are fun, the first act is delightful, and the actual emotional arcs are fulfilling enough to justify a recommendation, albeit a tepid one. Lindsay and I had fun with this, and if you're intrigued by the idea of

I'll warn you upfront this falls in a sort of awkward space between "conceptually good" and "actually good," at least by today's standards. The fact I'm comparing a movie 116 years old to anything remotely modern should be an indication there's something pretty neat about this, so if you've got 14 minutes to kill and don't want to be spoiled, go look this up on Youtube: it's not hard to find. And make no mistake, there's absolutely something in this to spoil. Let's get into what this is, because I doubt it's what you're expecting from the title. Or more accurately, it starts like what you're expecting then goes in a wildly different direction about halfway through. The first half is a bit slow. We're introduced to the characters: a kind little rich boy with tons of toys, and a poor girl who lives in a small shack. While on a walk, the boy comes across the girl, who's standing in the cold. He gives her his coat

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

This is a short film from director Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the pioneers of early film who quite literally helped invent the form. She's arguably one of the most important contributors in the medium's history, and yes, it's maddening she's not more widely known and discussed (apparently she thought so, too, and spent a great deal of time later in life lobbying for her legacy). The Parish Priest's Christmas tells a fairly simple story of a priest trying to prepare for Christmas. The story is entirely told through visual media; there are no title cards and the only words we see are the date to inform us this is set at Christmas. The priest goes to the home of two poor members of his parish, who appear to donate a cradle full of straw that a figure of the baby Jesus can go in. Next, he goes to what looks to be a well-off man selling such figurines - I can't tell if he's meant to be an artist or just a dealer. Regardless, he has a figure the priest wants, but he

A few years ago, there's no way I'd have written this up here. That's not a strike against the movie - I liked this quite a bit - just an acknowledgment that it is absolutely not a Christmas movie. It is not set at Christmas, it does not reference Christmas (or any holiday, for that matter), and it is not about Christmas. However, the wintery setting and other elements (first and foremost the titular animal) resemble contemporary Christmas traditions and iconography. The movie also takes place in Lapland, a location with connections to the holidays, and folkloric winter horror has deep connections to the Christmas season, as well. In short, while this isn't a Christmas movie, the overlap with subgenres within the holiday film canon is substantial, and I suspect this will be of interest to readers of this blog. I know I'm stepping onto a slippery slope here, but I'm going to risk it to talk about this bizarre Finnish horror film about a woman who falls in love, g

As the title suggests, this is a loose adaptation of Clement Moore's A Visit From St. Nicholas (i.e.: 'Twas the Night Before Christmas), with title cards using excerpts from the poem. It starts with a brief look at Santa feeding a herd of reindeer before heading into his workshop to build toys. The sequence with the deer is fine, with the caveat that it's literally just a guy with a beard shoveling hay for a bunch of animals. The toy construction is well handled - he seems to be using real tools, and the workshop (while simple) feels lived in. We then cut to a living room where a family is hanging stockings on Christmas Eve (cue relevant passage from the poem). The set is well constructed, though you can absolutely tell it's not a real location, even if you overlook the fact the front edge of the stage it's built on is visible at times. Next, we get to the best gag in the movie. The title card quotes the passage about children being asleep in their beds; instead, we

Most descriptions you'll find of Love & Peace (including the next sentence of this one, I guess) focus on how many disparate genres are packed into the movie. And that's true: this is a musical kaiju fantasy Christmas family comedy, and there's no denying it's a bizarre film (which is apparently par for the course for writer/director Sion Sono). But opening with that is a bit misleading, as it implies the movie is some sort of random jumble of wacky ideas, which isn't the case. Yes, there are a lot of ingredients in this, but they're here for a reason, and the end result is both tonally and thematically coherent, even if the premise is complicated. I'm going to get to the plot in a moment, but... ugh. This one's awkward. Because, as usual, I'm going to spoil the hell out of everything in a movie I'm going to strongly recommend, which is normally your cue to head over to the nearest streaming service, watch this absolute gem of a movie, then c

I'm including both the French and English titles above, but it's actually more accurate to say I've seen The Christmas Angel, as the French version contained a very different ending. The original resolution sounds more interesting, but I haven't been able to find it and I'm guessing the sanitized, happy US version is the only one that survived (I should probably just be grateful any version of this survived more or less intact). The movie is around nine minutes long, and it was made by legendary French director, illusionist, inventor, and probably a whole host of other things, Georges Méliès. The film starts in the home of a poor family in winter around the holidays. The mother's sick and the father's tending to her. Also, there's a hole in their ceiling that snow's pouring through, and a guy I'm assuming they owe money to comes in and argues with the father. At any rate, their only hope seems to be their daughter, who goes out begging for charit

Right off the bat, I'm going to open with a simultaneous recommendation and a warning: this bizarre, British TV movie from the early '90s is well worth checking out provided you're able to stomach the racism. Because... yeah, the movie's approach to its subject matter, while clearly intended as tongue-in-cheek, absolutely exploits both the culture it's drawing its mythology from and the race of Lenny Henry, who plays the genie. For what it's worth, the movie's portrayal of race is good-natured and well intentioned, with the movie ultimately existing in part as an endorsement of diversity and immigration, but the subtext of a black immigrant being weird and silly by virtue of not understanding British customs is absolutely baked into the premise. I doubt it was a coincidence that the remake flipped the races of both the genie and Bernard (and, for what it's worth, the cast of the remake was one of its best assets). And speaking of the remake... I'm go