Mainlining Christmas

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...

I need you to understand, before I type another word, that this movie is not normal. That's not intended to imply that this is good or bad - it's my opinion Holiday in Handcuffs exists outside of such a simplistic dynamic. Likewise, I'm not going to retreat to "so bad it's good," as I don't think that's an accurate description of the movie. I submit this movie is, instead, best described as "fucking bizarre." First some background, at least to the limited degree background information is at all available. The movie was produced by "ABC Family," which was something of a competitor for Hallmark in the TV Christmas movie field during the first decade of the millennium, before Hallmark reached a point where calling other entities "competitors" is something of a misnomer. ABC Family tended to be a bit more PG than Hallmark - really, the movies I've seen from them are closer to what Netflix and other streamers are now puttin...

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...

Small Things Like These is an Irish movie adapted from a novel about a coal merchant attempting to understand his past and find the courage to defy a powerful Catholic organization that's torturing single pregnant women and stealing their children. In short, it's the story of Ireland's own failure to address the Magdalene asylums within their nation for centuries, told through the prism of one man. The movie is exceptionally good by most metrics. Cillian Murphy plays the lead and seems to have been the main force driving the production - he's absolutely fantastic here. That goes for the rest of the cast, as well, but this is really Murphy's movie in more ways than one. Director Tim Mielants creates something impactful and memorable. The cinematography is likewise exceptional, capturing the grit of coal dust and soot that covers the buildings, just as the crime at the heart of the movie remains a blot on the nation (I said this was good, not subtle). It's an effe...

After watching this, I realized I'd made a mistake by not watching the original 1950 movie this is a (loose) remake of first, since I found myself unsure what was original and what was drawn from the source material. So, naturally, I watched the original as well. This is only a review of the 1988 movie, as the original is set in summer and we have a reputation to uphold. Aside from the vague premise, the two movies don't have much in common. Even some elements I'd have sworn were pulled from the 1950 version weren't, such as dated character names and explicit noir tropes. My guess is this was intended as a love letter to the noir era in general. Perhaps the Christmas setting was a nod to one of the many holiday noirs, since it certainly wasn't taken from the 1950 film, which was set sometime during the hot summer months. D.O.A. opens and closes with scenes shot in black and white that look and feel like something right out of a classic noir. In fact, the opening is ...

I'm convinced this would have broken into the canon of Christmas classics were it not for one extremely racist line of dialogue about eleven minutes into the movie. And, to be clear, the line in question (delivered as both a joke and a character beat) is quite offensive. War or no war, the line was bad then and is certainly bad now. The irony is other than that one joke, the movie holds up remarkably well in virtually every respect. It's a comedic Christmas murder mystery in the vein of The Thin Man starring Deanna Durbin as a fan of the mystery genre who jumps at the chance to investigate a murder she partially witnesses from the window of a train. The tone is closer to that of an adventure comedy than a noir, though it occasionally borrows stylistic embellishments from the genre it's poking fun at. If you took my advice a few years ago and watched Mystery of the Wax Museum , this strikes an similar balance between homage and parody (Durbin's character is also reminis...

I probably don't need to tell you what Poker Face is, but in the unlikely case someone finds this review in a couple decades, here goes: this series, created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne, is a throwback to episodic mystery-of-the-week detective shows in the vein of Columbo or Murder She Wrote, combined with a healthy mix of related genre tropes drawn from movies. The gimmick here is that Lyonne's character, Charlie, isn't a detective, nor does she have any professional expertise or background connected to the subject matter. Instead, she has a virtually superhuman ability to detect lies. The show is, in no particular order, bizarre, funny, and absolutely fantastic.  Consider that a recommendation for the series as a whole. This is good stuff, and if you're not already watching... actually, scratch that: you're probably already watching this. So... keep doing that, I guess. With that covered, let's talk about "One Last Job," a rare entry ...

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...

I feel like I have to start this review by saying I don't know anything about the Jonas Brothers, and I don't think I could name a single one of their songs. I'm not stating that up front to be negative or confrontational: I just don't want anyone thinking that my recommendation for this is in any way connected to me being a fan or something - I'm not. It's just... this is a good movie. I didn't expect that. Hell, I didn't expect it to be good or for it to be a real movie. And yet it's both: a musical comedy that emphasizes the comedy, to the point it borders on parody but stops just short of crossing over the line into farce. It walks right up to that line, though, allowing the title characters to play comically exaggerated versions of themselves who are the butt of the movie's jokes but avoid faltering into unlikability. In that respect, the movie's a choreographed balancing act that could have - and by rights probably should have - gone ho...

This is a French anthology of animated shorts, each written and directed by a female filmmaker, stylized to look something like a children's book brought to life. The movie was released in various overseas markets last year, but - as far as I know - is just reaching the US now. It's simple but beautiful, a throwback to old 2D animated shorts and holiday specials. A few of the sequences reminded me of animated Sesame Street sequences, though I assume the actual inspiration came mainly from French cartoons of the same era. Everything in this is intended for a young audience - there's no serious danger or animosity in any of these shorts, and nothing really gets hurt. I wouldn't hesitate to show this to a toddler or younger: any child old enough to look at a screen is old enough to see this. At the same time, it's all sweet and touching enough to appeal to adults who appreciate the medium. This is an all-ages film, excluding perhaps that 8 to 16 window where anything c...

You'd think after doing this for fifteen years I'd already know about a Christmas movie made by one of the most famous and revered filmmakers in cinema history, but here we are. Directed and cowritten by Akira Kurosawa, the legendary creator of Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo, The Hidden Fortress, and numerous other classics, Scandal tells the somber story of a painter and singer who are victims of libel, as well as their lawyer, who struggles after accepting a bribe to sabotage the case. The bulk of the film is set in December of 1949, with about fifteen minutes spent on Christmas itself, which serves several thematic purposes and sets up the movie's final act. The film is quite good, which should come as a surprise to absolutely no one after hearing who made it. The cast features some of Kurosawa's regulars, including Toshiro Mifune as the painter, Aoye, and Takashi Shimura as his lawyer, Hiruta. The singer, Miyako, is played by Yoshiko Yamaguchi (I'm just going ...

I find it interesting that Nicole Kidman has been in two high-profile sexual thrillers doubling as unexpected Christmas movies (side note: I really need to give Eyes Wide Shut another shot - my tastes in movies have changed a great deal in the past decade, and I am NOT proud of that review). The movies seem to be playing with different aspects of the holidays - Eyes Wide Shut was leveraging the otherworldly, dreamlike aspects associated with old ghost stories (see past-Erin: that wasn't so hard), while Babgygirl... Actually, Babygirl might be doing something even more interesting. By centering a story about power dynamics around the holidays, it evokes traditions of inverted power dynamics dating back to the solstice (the medieval Feast of Fools is probably the best known example, but there were numerous Christmas festivals and traditions centered around similar concepts). Echoes of that seem to be present in Halina Reijn's film about a high-profile CEO who engages in a submis...