Mainlining Christmas

I'm stretching to discuss this here - the combined time spent on the holidays (in this case a couple different New Year's Eves) accounts for a minuscule portion of the overall runtime. Granted, those moments are thematically important and one of them closes the film, but even so, I wouldn't review a modern movie with this little seasonal screentime. But The Divorcee was released in 1930, making it one of the earliest talkies with any holiday connections I've located, and it was extremely successful at the time, picking up nominations for Best Picture, Director, Writer, and winning Best Actress for Norma Shearer. And while it feels very different than later Hollywood genres, elements of the structure resonate with modern romantic comedies (though this is definitely a drama). And seeing as one of those elements is the aforementioned New Year's Eve conclusion, I felt like I should discuss it. Shearer plays Jerry, a woman destined to be the titular divorcee, though the

Last year we made time to review a decent number of Hallmark holiday movies and found the recent entries quite a bit better on average than we expected. The best of the bunch was Hanukkah on Rye , a delightful classic romantic comedy I found funny and sweet. The movie received a bit of backlash due to what some viewers felt were stereotypes  but otherwise seemed to be well received, so it's not too surprising to see a new entry this year. What is surprising is the premise: rather than play it safe with another straightforward romcom, Round and Round is a time loop movie in the vein of Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, both of which are namechecked and discussed by characters in Round and Round as they try to figure out the temporal disturbance at the movie's core. I'll cut to the chase and reveal I don't think Round and Round is in quite the same league as its predecessor, but it's nevertheless a solid TV movie and - largely by default - probably the second-best Hanukk

Despite not having a particularly complicated plot or premise, Sun Valley Serenade is the kind of movie that you almost have to see to believe. I say "almost" because, while there's a lot to like here, some dated stylistic elements hold it back from crossing that line into unconditional recommendation territory. It comes close, mainly thanks to the mid-movie sequences in which... well.... Okay, here's the thing: this movie occupies a very unusual place on the spectrum of movies best seen unspoiled. There's a delightful twist in tone and point of view that's entirely unintentional. Audiences in 1941 were already in on something that those watching eight decades later won't be, and it recontextualizes the movie in some fascinating ways. So, if you're a really big fan of romantic comedies from this era and have a high tolerance for musical numbers that are mostly video recordings of famous performers playing instruments (a substantial portion of this movi

While it's admittedly 1939's second-best Christmas movie about a woman down on her luck finding an abandoned baby that winds up changing her life for the better, Miracle on Main Street is still a solid, albeit weird, little film with notably progressive undertones. Moreover, those undertones are different than the likewise progressive ideas expressed in Bachelor Mother , the other film with that premise released the same year. But then there's actually a great deal separating them, starting with genre. Miracle on Main Street is a drama, a fact that does hinder its longevity - I'm finding comedies I'm seeing from the 1930s generally hold up, while dramas tend to feel dated. This stars an actress simply billed as "Margo," (her birth name was María Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estela Bolado Castilla y O'Donnell, so I can understand wanting to simplify it for film) who's pretty interesting herself. Born in Mexico, she moved to the US and worked began a

This movie should be much better known. Repeat Performance is a holiday fantasy/noir from 1947 about a woman who just killed her husband in self-defense at midnight on New Year's, wishes to relive the past year to change her destiny, and finds her wish is granted by the magic of the season only to learn that while the paths of fate can be traversed differently, the destination will always be the same. I don't feel too bad spoiling this, because the movie kicks off with Twilight Zone-esque narration that more or less spells all this out. So, this is basically a post-war fatalism entry for the holidays. Again, why in hell am I only just hearing about this now?!!! Okay, I can probably shed a little light on that now. First, if you're not thinking about the thematic and historical significance the holidays lend the movie, it's easy to gloss over them, as well as how much of the movie is actually set during the season. Second, the movie has some pacing issues: it drags a bit

On its most basic level, Cobra is an R-rated '80s action movie written by and starring Sylvester Stallone, but that doesn't begin to describe what makes it unusual or (with apologies for jumping right to the punchline) awful. Because at the end of the day, Cobra is bad, despite some impressive stunts and a genuine attempt to make something interesting. Let's back up. For a while, Stallone was looking to play Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, a role that would eventually go to Eddie Murphy. Stallone, of course, had a very different vision for that movie's tone, which (coupled with the budget his vision would require) seems to be the main reason that version ultimately fell through. I have no idea if he perceived Cobra as some sort of proof of concept, or if he just had a bunch of ideas floating around his head as a result of working on the other project. Regardless, he pulled his ideas together, combined them with ideas borrowed from a novel called Fair Game (which the cr

This noir film directed by Robert Siodmak stars Deanna Durbin, Dean Harens, and a relatively young Gene Kelly, which may be enough to pique some of your curiosity. Know the movie is extremely weird, with a plot that takes a while to establish what the story's going to be. That said, it's beautifully shot, with some impressive crane sequences, loads of shadows, and an appropriately dark story. This one's definitely not on the "feel good" end of the Christmas movie spectrum. It's worth noting this was loosely based on a novel, though there were some significant changes made to update the characters for an American audience and to avoid running afoul of censors. So a Russian prostitute is now a singer from Vermont, and the British POV character is transformed into an American soldier. The movie starts with the soldier, Charlie (Dean Harens), who's excited to be going on holiday, because he has plans to return to San Francisco and marry his fiancé. Only things

I somewhat jokingly referred to this as the anti-Love Actually after watching it, and think that would probably be a good selling line to convince American audiences to give this French dramedy a shot. In a sense, that seems accurate - like Love Actually, this follows an ensemble of characters navigating a web of relationships and emotions, but the movie is unambiguous in its assessment of long-term monogamy. Virtually every character over the age of eighteen has been unfaithful to a partner; quite literally, every romantic relationship in the film has an expiration date. However, I now think my immediate reaction was incorrect. Despite La Bûche's pessimistic view of coupling - the movie ultimately embraces love in all its forms and does so enthusiastically. In this sense, it might be better described as a companion to Love Actually (albeit one likely to please that movie's detractors). Regardless, La Bûche is either the most cynically sweet or sweetly cynical Christmas movie I

From the perspective of a Yuletide nerd, this is an interesting case. I actually wouldn't consider this a Christmas movie, despite the fact it technically passes my litmus test. The entirety of this film is set around the holidays, which is usually more than enough. But the specifics of the setting and story render the timing moot for the majority of the runtime, and neither the story or the themes are particularly connected to the holidays. Both those points could probably be debated. The premise uses the holidays as an excuse to bring the characters together, and some of the themes - connecting with old friends and growing older - have a history of being associated with Christmas media, but I don't really buy that these are causally connected to the frame story visibly being set over the holidays. Frankly, I think the Christmas connection appears here for the same reason the last movie included a coda set during the same time: this series has always been released at Christmas

For those of you who weren't reading last year, well... first of all, welcome to the party, pal! But second and more germane to the topic, I spent a comically large portion of 2022 watching and reviewing roughly fifty adaptations of A Christmas Carol, presumably making me one of the world's foremost masochists on the subject. This was still just a drop in the bucket as far as the breadth of TV and film versions of the story are concerned, but I managed to check off virtually every adaptation on my list. Virtually. There were a couple that slipped through the cracks. The most notable of which is an elusive 1940s version from Spain that's probably going to be one of those "white whales" I obsess over for decades. But after that, there was Ebenezer, a version starring Jack Palance, with the setting moved from London to the American West. This was an extremely late addition to my list - because the title differs from the usual pattern, it hadn't initially caught m