Mainlining Christmas

I try not to be overly dismissive of movies in genres I'm not entirely familiar with, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to find anything in "Last Stop on the Night Train" (or whatever they're calling it these days) that justifies it being made. I should note I haven't seen either "The Last House on the Left" or "The Virgin Spring," the movies this is apparently emulating ("Second House on The Left" is one of many titles this was released under in English). I take some solace in the fact that the consensus among genre fans seems to lean towards this being a cheap knock-off, rather than existing in conversation with its predecessors in any kind of interesting way I'm missing. That's not to say "Last Stop on the Night Train" isn't saying anything - it has themes and was competently filmed. But an extended series of sexual assaults overtakes the film in a way that feels grossly exploitative and leaves you with ...

Well, this is the worst thing I've seen this year. I mean, okay, the year isn't over yet, and I'm playing a little fast and loose with the term "worst". They poured time, money, and effort into this stop-motion special, and the finished project reflects that. It's just... that's part of the problem. If you're going to invest in this art form, I expect something notable about the end result. And this... it's just empty. Soulless. Pointless. It feels like executives went over the script with a magnifying glass and meticulously removed anything anyone could conceivably find objectionable. What's left is less a story than a branding exercise showcasing the studio's intellectual property in the least interesting way imaginable. To the limited extent it matters, let's talk about the plot. This special starts with Mickey decorating a cabin for Christmas and picking up his friends, who have been celebrating in town. Through it all, Mickey's...

By their nature, movies with titles like this always fall into one of three buckets: either they're inexplicably amazing, bad in an amazing way, or just borderline unwatchable. I went in hoping for that middle option, as those are the most fun, with "amazing" as a second choice. Unfortunately, neither was to be, so we were stuck watching just a godawful low-budget kids' flick. The primary issue here isn't the story or dialogue, though neither is particularly good. Rather it's the pacing that makes this drag. Most of the time when I refer to pacing as an error I mean structural pacing: the length, arrangement, and layout of scenes. Typically, pacing complaints fall on the writer and editor. But Unicorn for Christmas doesn't even reach that point: the problem here is how each and every scene is directed and acted. Characters speak slowly, as if concerned the audience will be unable to follow along. Running this movie at 125% speed would honestly help. Becaus...

The late '80s/early '90s were an odd time for comedy. The classics of the previous era had landed on VHS and television, where they were embraced by kids. It didn't really matter most of those classics weren't intended for young audiences - we found them all the same. And it created a bizarre landscape where the concept of what was and wasn't appropriate for "all ages" was skewed. On some level, as long as kids laughed and didn't get the joke, (almost) no one considered it an issue. That's how you get a franchise like the Look Who's Talking trilogy, which is best described as a kid-centered live-action cartoon intercut with microscopic footage of semen and jokes about marital infidelity. The series is a raunchy sex comedy aimed at six-year-olds.  They were almost certainly trying for a family comedy with something for everyone, but the mix of styles and tones is completely off the mark. This isn't a case where innuendo is used to deliver an...

The first thing you need to understand about 1941 is the level of talent - both in front of and behind the camera - is unmatched in its genre. The cast includes Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, John Candy, Slim Pickens, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty, Patti LuPone, and Toshiro Mifune, just to name a few. It was written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, who served as producers alongside John Milius. The movie was scored by John Williams, who belongs on the shortlist of greatest film composers of all time. And speaking of "greatest of all time," it's directed by Steven Spielberg. The second thing you need to understand is the movie is absolutely godawful. Just horrible. An utter mess of a film. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe you should flip those two bullet points, so "it sucks" is the first thing, and "it's made by unbelievably talented people" is #2. Before I go on, I need to specify there are two cuts of this movie. Right now, I'm reviewing ...

Credit where it's due: Netflix has mastered the art of producing low-to-mid budget TV Christmas romcoms capable of garnering far more attention than they deserve. This time, they managed to lure Lindsay Lohan into taking the lead role, presumably by offering her an ungodly amount of cash. The investment seems to have paid off, at least from a marketing perspective. The movie apparently attracted a great deal of interest and - assuming Netflix's numbers mean anything - quite a few views. As for the movie itself... well... you probably have a fairly good idea what I'm going to say. As a rule, I don't like these things. Falling for Christmas, like so many pseudo-fairytale G-rated holiday romances before it, seems to flaunt the fact the script isn't trying. It adheres to its formula and fills in the blanks with some of the worst dialogue I've heard in... well... honestly, I watched a Hallmark Christmas movie two days earlier, so the worst dialogue I heard in about 4...

This is one of those movies that's sort of on the boundary of what we'd consider discussing. It's not set at or about Christmas, but depending on your point of view it's either derivative of or based on arguably the most famous Christmas story set in December (we all know the manger thing happened in the fall, right?). On top of that, An American Carol has particular significance to another project I'm working on for later this year. For reasons not even I can explain, I seem to have decided 2022 would be the year I finally watched through the various adaptations of A Christmas Carol, or at least all the significant ones. And while this falls near the low end of the spectrum of both the significance and adaptation metrics, it was released theatrically, so I decided to give it a watch. Set in America in the "present" of 2008, the movie applies the "Christmas Carol" template to the 4th of July and the War on Terror in order to lampoon liberalism. I...

This is an odd one. Less Than Zero was supposedly adapted from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, though there seems to be a consensus the movie has almost no relation to the book. I haven't read it, but apparently there was virtually no plot, so rather than attempt to adapt it, the producers had a series of writers create an entirely new script with an entirely different nonexistent plot. The non-plot centers around Clay, a college freshman who returns to his upscale LA home to find his best friend, Julian, has become an addict. Clay's girlfriend, Blair, is also an addict, but isn't quite as out-of-control as Julian, who we eventually learn is being forced into prostitution by his dealer. There's a love triangle, as well, since Julian and Blair had an affair while Clay was gone, but this feels oddly tacked on. Apparently, in the book Clay was supposed to be bisexual, a detail that was removed by the studio, presumably to make the movie more boring. The movie just kind of ...

This episode has actually been on my radar for a while. I have vaguely positive memories of the show being around, even though I was in high school when it premiered, and we're always looking for ways to build up our archive of Hanukkah content. So when I saw that the show landed on Disney+ this year, I sought it out.  Unfortunately, this is just a boring episode of what (judging only by this episode) was a mediocre example of animation in the 90s. In fact, between the fashions, the inline skates in the opening, and the character dynamics and stereotypes on display - this is aggressively 90s content.  The only thing I remembered about the show was the absolute earworm of a theme song, but the animation of the song opens with a few seconds of a dream sequence where the main character is fighting off some... racist caricatures of native people? Yikes. So it's obvious from the beginning that not everything has aged well about this series.  On the other hand, some brief resea...

I want to start by saying upfront: you should discourage your kids from watching these. I'm not joking. And I'm not saying that because these are awful - they are, but that's the least of their problems. These specials cross a line between obnoxious and inappropriate in how they market their toys to kids. I'm not just talking about using animation as an extended ad, either -- this goes way beyond GI Joe or Transformers. GI Joe never explicitly told kids owning their crap would help save Christmas; these specials - all three  of these specials - quite literally convey that message. You want Santa's sleigh to fly? Help by "caring for" one of these three magic toys. I am not exaggerating. I don't recall ever seeing a show or special do anything like this before. With that out of the way, let's talk about the specials themselves, or rather the specials as a group. While all three contain unique characteristics, the overall concept and structure is iden...

I'm torn on this. On one hand, this is a cheap ad for Elf on the Shelf, poorly disguised as an animated special. But on the other hand, it's so badly made, I think it actually may have contributed to the downfall of the brand, which is unquestionably a benefit to humanity. The special's protagonist is Chippy, an elf assigned a very important mission to help a boy recover his belief in Christmas. The boy, Taylor, hasn't undergone any sort of hardship or anything, and aside from being kind of a dick around his younger sisters, isn't a bad kid or anything. So the stakes here are pretty damn low. This is just about Santa sending one of his minions to police the beliefs of a random upper-middle-class kid. That's it. Chippy arrives in an Elf on the Shelf box, along with the stupid book, because we're really selling the hell out of the illusion any of this counts as Christmas lore. The family reads the book together, and we get the basic rules: the elf flies back t...

This is going to be one of those incredibly awkward situations where I'm looking at a Christmas installment in a series where I didn't see the earlier films. I'm not sure if it makes it more or less awkward that this one was reviewed far more harshly than the original (the middle installment wasn't received any better). So obviously take my opinion with a grain of salt. And that opinion seems to be in line with the consensus. Overall, this didn't work for me, and a lot of the jokes have aged badly. The series stars and was co-created by Ice Cube. Stylistically, it's reminiscent of Clerks, particularly for the first half. The story here is incredibly thin, which isn't necessarily a bad thing in a comedy, so long as the jokes pick up the slack. Again, they didn't work for me, though I'm not really the target audience and there's absolutely a possibility a lot of the humor went over my head. The movie opens with a thief dressed as Santa breaking int...

I was genuinely shocked when the end credits for Elf-Man rolled and revealed a full cast worked on the picture. With the exception of a few decent shots and a couple actors who deserved better, this thing looked and felt less like a "real" movie than... God, I'm struggling to find some point of comparison. Some of it felt like the low-budget direct-to-video production it was, but it was rare for the movie to hit even that mark. More often it felt like a cheap sitcom, and even those sequences accounted for fifty percent or less. Most of the rest felt like a college project. At times, I'd have believed a handful of high schoolers were somehow calling the shots. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about the premise of Elf-Man, a 2012 fantasy/superhero/comedy serving as a vehicle for Jason Acuña, here credited as "Wee Man." The story centers around two kids and their father, an inventor whose wife died a few years before. On Christmas Eve,...