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Showing posts with the label Movie

A Flintstones Christmas Carol (1994)

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This seventy-minute TV movie falls in a microgenre in which preexisting characters are acting out a version of A Christmas Carol as part of a play or movie. The original is of course the Mr. Magoo special, though Looney Tunes, Disney, and The Muppets all attempted a similar premise, with varying levels of fourth wall breaks. I'd argue this is a distinct approach to homages in which characters are visited by spirits or in some other way put through a Dickensian trial as themselves. In this case, the characters are treated as actors playing the cast of A Christmas Carol. Well, sort of. Flintstones Christmas Carol alters the formula very slightly in a couple ways. First, it embraces the play-within-a-play motif to a far greater extent than its predecessors. Magoo's Christmas Carol acknowledges the play mainly in an introduction and conclusion, but makes few references throughout. Mickey's Christmas Carol includes no explanation whatsoever for the casting choices (though I'

Marți, după Crăciun/Tuesday, After Christmas (2010)

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This is the second Romanian New Wave Christmas movie I've seen, though there's a good chance we'll run the review for this one first. Given you can strike the word, "Christmas," from the previous sentence and still have it be accurate, it should be noted I'm a novice to the genre. On top of that, anything I have to say about this should be filtered through the understanding I'm an American watching the film with subtitles and am therefore likely to miss nuances and subtext the intended audience would be expected to pick up on. But that's the case with virtually any translated work I review here. "Tuesday, After Christmas" is centered on Paul, a middle-aged man with a wife and child having an affair with a younger woman, who's also his daughter's dentist. The movie plays out over a few days leading up to Christmas. By then, he's confessed the affair to his wife, who throws him out. The movie concludes with them meeting up at Paul&#

So You're Planning to Remake A Christmas Carol...

If you've been following along, you know I've been watching adaptations, remakes, homages, and reimaginings of A Christmas Carol in bulk this year. As you might expect, I've got some thoughts about what makes an adaptation work and what doesn't. I figured I'd pass on my notes to whatever studio executive thinks it's a good idea to remake Scrooge for the [checks notes] I have no idea what number time we're up to. As a sidenote, this article is mainly going to concern itself with adaptations of the original book. I might turn to quasi-sequels like Scrooged and Spirited for guidance, but that's not what this is about. Do We Need Another Adaptation? I thought I'd start with some thoughts on whether there's even a point in doing this again. You may be surprised to hear my answer is, "Maybe." One takeaway from this whole project is that while there are a lot of versions out there, there isn't really a single definitive one that meets all

A Christmas Carol (2020)

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This 2020 British adaptation offers a somewhat unique approach to A Christmas Carol. It's actually a little hard to explain, because the short version, "A Christmas Carol reimagined through modern dance," doesn't actually convey the experience. Perhaps it should, though: the movie's main flaw is it tries to do too much at once and as a result kneecaps some of its best assets. The film starts with a Victorian family preparing a sort of miniature stage, complete with tiny paper characters. The kids are essentially cutting up newspaper and constructing a model using the illustrations and words. Once they've finished, the matriarch begins telling the story, heavily using Dickens's text. We then cut to the world of the model for the performance. This is one of the aspects that makes me almost want to recommend the movie despite... well, we'll get to the "despite" in a moment. But the sets are breathtaking and inventive. The story plays out in a wo

Holiday Heritage (2022)

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Over the past year or so, Hallmark has been quietly rebranding itself in an attempt to offer at least the appearance of representation. The area they've been attracting the most attention has been their recent pivot towards including same-sex couples, but that's hardly the only change in programming. After years of fixating only on Christmas, the company has finally decided to keep focusing on Christmas. But, you know, also toss in a Kwanzaa movie. That's also about Christmas. So a Christmas/Kwanzaa movie. That's where Holiday Heritage, a family dramedy with a side of romance, comes into the picture. The movie's main character is Ella, a successful Boston graphic designer planning to open her own company and go into business for herself. But that's an "after the holidays" thing - first she's going to return home to the small town in Pennsylvania where she grew up, because there's no way in hell Hallmark's going to make a movie about Kwanzaa

Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972)

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Buckle in, everyone, because even explaining what this movie is might get a little complicated. Here's the first issue: I fundamentally disagree with every synopsis I've seen of "Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?" on the internet. I'm not talking about whether the movie's good or not (though my opinion is significantly more favorable than the consensus). I mean, on a quintessential level I disagree with descriptions of what the movie's about, who we're supposed to sympathize with, the subgenre it's in, and - hell - even the overall genre. I don't really think this is a horror. Okay, I might be overstating things a bit. This was clearly marketed - and to some extent made - as a psychological horror, but I think it's better understood now as a dark comedy. One of the primary complaints I'm seeing skimming the handful of reviews present on Rotten Tomatoes is that this really isn't scary. Frankly, I don't think it's supposed to be. It&#

An American Christmas Carol (1979)

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Notable for having perhaps the least creative title among scores of loose adaptations, An American Christmas Carol is a 1979 TV movie that's sort of a mix of a retelling and a sequel of Dickens's classic. Like the big-budget musical that kicked off the decade, the lead role is played by an actor in his 30s with makeup used to effectively double his age. In this case, the actor is Henry Winkler, best known as Fonzie from Happy Days. And, for what it's worth, I think he works a little better as an old man than Albert Finney in 1970's Scrooge, despite Finney's makeup being quite a bit better. Winkler's physicality sells his age, which makes for a more convincing illusion. Because this is set in New Hampshire in 1933, Winkler isn't technically playing Scrooge - his character is Benedict Slade, which isn't quite an anagram for Ebenezer Scrooge, but if you squint you can see the game they're playing. Same with the name of his underpaid assistant, Thatcher.

Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki/The Night Before Christmas/Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1961)

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First, a note on the title. Or titles, more accurately. The book this is taken from is a collection of short stories that translates to "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka," and the story in question is "The Night Before Christmas." Because of this, it's not too surprising this has been released with both titles. In fact, both appear separately in the film, itself. It's not the first adaptation of the work - I've already reviewed the 1913 version, which introduced me to the story. This version was directed by Alexander Rou, who'd go on to make  Morozko a few years later. It shows: the two movies look similar in style. I'm not complaining, mind you - I enjoyed Morozko quite a bit. The plot to this is very close to that of the 1913 adaptation, so I'll forego repeating the full synopsis. There are some shifts in how it's all presented that are worth highlighting, though. The 1913 version presented the hero, Vakula, as something of a comically

Noch pered Rozhdestvom/The Night Before Christmas (1913)

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This 41-minute silent film is based on a 19th-century novel by Nikolai Gogol and directed by the legendary stop-motion pioneer,  Ladislaw Starewicz . It's the first adaptation of this work - expect a review of the 1961 version, titled "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka," soon, but for now let's focus on the 1913 adaptation, which is... well... it's bonkers. Let me jump right into the plot. The movie starts by introducing us to Solokha, the witch, and her demonic lover. Apparently, the book makes it clear this is a devil, rather than THE Devil, but it was a bit ambiguous in the movie (there's a decent chance that might be due to the translation, though). At any rate, they climb up Solokha's chimney, fly around on her broom, and briefly steal the moon before returning to her home. Around this time, Solokha's son, Vakula, is trying to convince Oksana to marry him. She dismisses the idea but mockingly offers him a chance: if he can bring her the Tsar's d

It's Christmas, Carol! (2012)

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I'm being particular about the title this time, because there seems to be some confusion. The movie is actually listed a couple times on Amazon, with different versions having different streaming tiers. The difference is a subtle one: one version includes the comma, while the other doesn't. It's clearly present in the title appearing onscreen in the movie, so that's the one I'm going with. Speaking of titles, this is far from the first modern re-imagining of A Christmas Carol I've seen where the role is gender flipped and the lead is named "Carol." These reviews won't be run in the order watched, but by my count this is the third, and I'm aware of at least one more. Hell, this isn't even the first I've seen produced by Hallmark featuring a legendary science-fiction star as a ghostly helper. The 2003 TV movie, "A Carol Christmas" included William Shatner, so for balance to exist in the universe I suppose we needed a similar ver

The Silent Partner (1978)

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Through the first two acts of this 1978 crime thriller, I was convinced I'd come across something truly special. Yes, there were flaws, along with plenty of things that aged poorly, but overall the experience was tense, engaging, and extremely rewarding. Then, sadly, came the third act, in which the plot unraveled. This isn't even one of those cases where they'd written themselves into a corner: there were easy, obvious ways to end this on a satisfying note. This just wanted to go in a different direction. It didn't invalidate what worked up until that point, but it still left me disappointed. The movie's protagonist is Miles, played by Elliott Gould, a bank teller frustrated by his job and most of his coworkers. It's not entirely clear why  he's so discontent - he doesn't seem to approve of the infidelity around him (it's kind of a running theme in the movie), but I don't think it's meant to be more of an annoyance. If anything, it feels a l

The Holiday Sitter (2022)

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I'm not sure Hallmark deserves much credit for producing their first Christmas romcom centered around a same-sex couple this late in the game. Lifetime, Netflix, Hulu, and virtually everyone else beat them to this, so the gesture feels a bit hollow. Still, late is better than never, and it really seems like they're taking steps to rectify their historic trend of focusing almost entirely on straight, white couples. The good news is that, to the extent these kinds of TV movies can meaningfully be called "good," this is pretty solid. It's still beholden to the usual ridgid formula, is forbidden from including any actual tension, and is as aggressively G-rated as the rest of Hallmark's annual yuletide offerings, but within the confines of the template, it's charming, sweet, and amusing. "Good movie" is a higher bar than "good Hallmark movie," and while it sails over the latter bar, I'm honestly on the fence as to whether it clears the f