Mainlining Christmas

I always love stumbling across a Christmas movie while catching up on genre fare I missed. Is that weird? Most likely, but then so is this movie, so that's appropriate. I should acknowledge this is one of those times viewers of the film are likely going to be surprised to hear it described as a Christmas movie, as references to the season are relatively sparse. However, the timing is unambiguous and noted on multiple occasions - in fact, the movie goes out of its way a few times to keep Christmas present. There's no reason that Orlok's familiar needed to be captured in the Christmas market, for example, but the movie drops in that detail. The second half of the film is explicitly set during the holidays (possibly the 24th through 28th, though I'm making a few assumptions to get that specific), which is plenty to cement this as a Christmas movie, albeit a subtle one. Backing up, Nosferatu is a remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent horror film, which in turn was an uno...

1997's second-most famous movie about a sociopathic felon (played by an iconic Hollywood star) taking control of the aircraft carrying him across the country and forcing the protagonist to fight to minimize the number of innocent victims, Turbulence has mostly (and understandably) been forgotten. But unlike Con Air, Turbulence was set on Christmas Eve (aggressively so, as we'll discuss in a bit), so that's the one we're going to be talking about. I should acknowledge comparisons to Con Air are entirely surface level: Turbulence is a relatively contained suspense movie owing as much or more to '70s disaster flicks as '80s action, while Con Air is a grandiose action/adventure that seems to wear its "Die Hard on a plane" designation like a badge of honor. Turbulence has a minimal cast and with minor alterations could probably have been made on a shoestring budget, though somehow they managed to balloon this into costing 55 million dollars (roughly 110 mil...

The Preacher's Wife has been on our watch list for years, but it's one of those movies that never seems to land on streaming services, or at least not ones we're subscribed to. Eventually I broke down and ordered a DVD, which then sat in a pile beside my TV for months. There it remained until someone commented on our 10 year old review of The Bishop's Wife  politely calling us out for not getting to the remake. Guess what we watched that night.  My first observation watching it was that I was going to need to rewatch the original if I wanted to have anything more substantive to say than, "yeah, this one's really good, too." Fortunately, the 1947 film is a lot easier to watch online than the remake, which is why you're getting a hybrid article covering both versions. Looking at them together has the unusual effect of making both seem even better. The films start with the same underlying premise but approach it in such radically different ways they feel ...

A musical retelling of the New Testament that feels like a mashup of Bollywood and the Star Wars prequels should be more fun than this. To be fair, there's still some fun here, but we're talking "Disney Channel original" with improved production values fun, not Chronicles of Riddick-level fun (despite Herod's soldiers' armor kind of looking like that of the Necromongers). It's bizarre, bordering on so-bad-it's-good, and may even cross that line, depending on your inclinations towards cheesy teen musicals. Because, to be clear, that's what this is. Hell, it's what it's going for! The movie, directed (and co-written and bunch of other stuff) by music producer Adam Anders, is aimed at teens, and the central message of the thing is "Mary and Joseph were just like you!" Well, that and variations on "you can make a difference, too," "you're part of God's plan," and "shut up and have babies." Okay, t...

Book Review: The Merriest Misters Timothy Janovsky, 2024 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. This romantic spin on The Santa Clause makes for some real holiday magic. Premise: Patrick and Quinn met, fell in love, got married, moved into their own house. Everything you're "supposed" to do. But their marriage is cracking under the pressure of family expectations, unspoken resentments, and unfulfilling careers. That's when Patrick unexpectedly gets a most unusual opportunity, and Quinn's along for a wild ride all the way to the North Pole.  Well, the library gods were kind to me and provided this last-minute holiday gift! This might be my favorite Christmas read of the season.  Think The Santa Clause, except instead of a guy killing Santa, becoming Santa, and fixing his relationship with his son, Patrick injures Santa (who unexpectedly quits), becomes Santa, and fixes his relationship with his husband.  Santa is mag...

I'll be arguing that You've Got Mail is, in fact, a Christmas movie and further that the movie implicitly tells us as much, despite simultaneously going out of its way not to set the bulk of its runtime on the holiday (at least not clearly), and further to obfuscate and play down the significance of holidays in general. However, from the perspective of a viewer, this is going to feel more like a movie with a few scenes around Christmas than anything you'd typically think of as a holiday movie, which is why I'll also be tagging this "Not Christmas." Its holiday connections aren't quite as much of a puzzle as, say, Alien: Covenant , but it's relationship with Christmas is more similar to that than, say, The Shop Around the Corner , despite being a loose remake of that film. It's worth noting that the majority of the runtime of The Shop Around the Corner isn't centered around Christmas, either, but that film concludes with the holiday, using assoc...

Novella Review: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Julianna Keyes, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  I've been reviewing a bunch of retellings this year, and this very nearly qualifies. It starts with a writer on a Christmas Train, after all.  Only in reality, it's more a funny subversion of Hallmark tropes with a happily-ever-after.  Eve and Will are travel writers, and their boss somehow sent them both to cover Christmas in this special holiday resort town. Whoever writes the best article gets a pending promotion. (This is a set-up that makes no sense. Not because of the promotion, but because you wouldn't write about a special (probably prohibitively expensive) Christmas experience in a travel magazine AFTER the holiday.) The problem is that both Eve and Will are Christmas cynics, but their boss isn't at all. They know she's going to want the schmaltzy, feel-good story, and they both str...

Book Review: You're a Mean One, Matthew Prince Timothy Janovsky, 2022 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, although despite the title, it turned out this story is more inspired by/related to Grinchy themes than a retelling of any kind.   Premise: Matthew can't believe he's spending Christmas in the tiny town his mom grew up in, instead of with his friends in NYC, preparing to throw another epic New Year's Bash for the (other) richest kids in town. But apparently he made one mistake too many and has been banished while PR is spun. Making things worse, he's sharing space at his grandparents' home with a local student who is entirely too self-righteous (not to mention gorgeous).  Okay, I might have an addition to my list of favorite romance authors. (I have enough for a list now! Years ago, I never would have thought it.) This was delightful.  First I want to acknowledge the biggest things that make this story work,...

Book Review: Faking Christmas Kerry Winfrey, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Whether Christmas in Connecticut is a holiday classic is debatable, but it has inspired several adaptations and remakes, including this one.   Premise: Laurel didn't mean to lie to her boss. She just really needed a job, and one misunderstanding spiraled out of control. Now she has to pretend that her sister's life is hers for one memorable Christmas.  You know what? I liked this one!  Laurel is funny and relatable. She's acknowledges that she's made bad decisions and is trying to do better, gets frustrated, wears her heart on her sleeve, and is fundamentally optimistic, despite also being hugely self-deprecating.  The best parts of Christmas in Connecticut (the banter, the humor and the fun characters) are largely intact, while the occasional sexism of the original is left behind. Laurel got her magazine website job that she's t...

We last looked at The Thin Man back in 2013 - I'm grateful Lindsay reviewed it at the time, because (as she says in a note at the bottom) she was able to appreciate it a lot more than I was. In my defense, I really hadn't had much experience with movies from the 1930s back then, so I wasn't prepared for some stylistic choices and conventions the film employs. While I still don't love this quite  as much as some of its most vocal proponents, I've come around on it for the most part and more or less agree with Lindsay's conclusions: it's a delightful, comedic adventure anchored by its leads that would have benefited from more equable screentime for Myrna Loy's Nora. That's hardly a dealbreaker, obviously, but I do think it's worth emphasizing it is a flaw that the most interesting aspects of the film are largely sidelined, either because of fidelity to the source material or the garden variety sexist outlook that women couldn't or shouldn'...

Barbed Wire is one of several films mentioned in passing in Jeremy Arnold's Christmas in the Movies book that I figured I should track down. I should note Arnold is clear that the movie doesn't qualify as a genuine Christmas movie under his definition, which is quite a bit more restrictive than those we use. Even with our more expansive approach, Barbed Wire is a marginal case. The holiday section certainly doesn't come close to encompassing half the runtime, nor is it particularly important to the plot (Arnold places a great deal of significance on this metric throughout). The holiday does resonate with the movie's theme, however, which is why I think it's at least ambiguously a Christmas movie. Regardless, between being nearly a hundred years old and featuring a thematically relevant extended holiday sequence, I feel this is at least worth discussing, whichever side of the "Christmas movie" line it actually falls on. Released less a month before The Jazz...

I don't expect we'll watch a lot of Hallmark movies this season (nothing against the company; we just have too much else on our plate), but The Christmas Quest promised a premise too interesting to pass up. The gimmick this time was to fuse the usual romantic comedy with a National Treasure/Romancing the Stone/Indiana Jones style fantasy/adventure treasure hunt set in Iceland based loosely on folklore surrounding the Yule Lads (a group of Icelandic trolls who have become somewhat analogous to Santa as their more monstrous aspects became subdued over the centuries). That's certainly the kind of thing that gets our attention. Sadly, the premise turned out to be much more interesting than the movie itself. As is often the case with Hallmark productions, the genre elements wind up feeling superficial: they drop in a handful of casual references, but when push comes to shove this is a Hallmark Christmas flick to the core. There's no real danger, no suspense, no excitement......