Mainlining Christmas

This has been my on my list for years, but I kept tabling it in favor of movies that were better regarded or where the holiday connections were (based on the synopses) less dubious. I didn't doubt there'd be Christmas elements in Fitzwilly, but in my experience movies made prior to the '80s where Christmas doesn't feature heavily in the description are often edge cases. This one... no, this is very much a Christmas movie. Unambiguously, unquestionably Christmas. Also, I'm going to deviate from the consensus and say, in my opinion, it's a very good Christmas movie. I'm honestly a little surprised to find this is widely considered somewhat of a middling film. I'm not seeing much online concerning its release, and only a handful of critics seem to have considered it worth reviewing it retroactively. Reviews I skimmed on Letterboxd tend to lean towards "underwhelming," though several acknowledge it was fun. While I can understand where its detracto...

I've observed in the past that Great Britain tends to be noticeably good at producing family Christmas movies. Granted, some of this could be sample bias - presumably most of what makes the jump is at least pretty good, so I'm likely being spared their equivalent of the worst US media (well, most of the worst anyway ) - but I do think there are elements common to their holiday films that make them at the very least refreshing to those of us used to American productions. While British Christmas media tends to share America's portrayal of Christmas as a melancholy time, it's far less fixated on nostalgia. Modern American Christmas is tied to a post World War II shift from urban to rural America, coupled with a regressive shift in politics. For various reasons, this results in media recycling themes and symbols from 1940s Americana. There are exceptions, of course, and it's worth noting we're starting to see more variation, but on the whole US Christmas movies tend...

By my reasoning, adjusted for inflation Love Story is the second highest grossing Christmas movie in history in the US and Canada , with only A Hundred and One Dalmatians beating it out (though it's not particularly close). I should also add I'm not counting a couple movies with ambiguous holiday credentials in that ranking: if you're of the opinion Ben-Hur and/or The Sound of Music are Christmas movies, you'll want to push this back two or three spots respectively (hell, Sound of Music would take the top spot). Either way, Love Story beats out Home Alone, if you want a sense of just how successful this was back in 1971 (it opened in New York in December of 1970, but didn't get a wide opening until June the following year). I blame Wikipedia's list of Christmas movies for the fact this one slipped under my radar as long as it did - it's on there but for whatever reason it's currently separated into a category containing only itself. That's absurd, b...

I spent a significant amount of 'R Xmas's runtime trying to unravel what this was supposed to be. There's nothing inherently wrong with a movie refusing to adhere to the conventions of any one genre, but it's the kind of gamble that either pays off or falls flat. This one didn't pay off. Instead of building on various tropes to construct a film greater than the sum of its parts, this wound up landing in a sort of empty void between genres: not suspenseful enough to work as thriller, lacking characters interesting enough to function as a crime story or gangster flick, no real mystery coalescing around the bizarre events until we receive a logical if unsatisfying explanation... it's bizarre. In the end, this winds up feeling more like an odd drama masquerading as the genres above, and the drama here just isn't all that compelling. The movie tries to make a point about crime and government policy, but there wasn't much substance to what it was saying then a...

Christmas at the Women's Hotel Daniel M. Lavery, 2025 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  This is a holiday-themed spin-off from a longer novel (titled simply Women's Hotel) imagining the lives, loves, tragedies, and triumphs of a group of women living in a fictional women's hotel.  The real-life women-only residential hotels were a phenomenon created by a specific time in history, from about the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Young, single women wanted to move to a city to get work, but they didn't have family to stay with. Enter the women's hotel, seen as a safe, respectable place for unchaperoned middle-class secretaries and assistants to live (until they marry and move to the suburbs). I read half of a nonfiction book about one of the most famous women's hotels years ago and found the concept fascinating. I hadn't heard of the original Women's Hotel novel, but I am a fan of Daniel Lavery from back...

Okay, here's the disclaimer: I watched the version of The Christmas Martian that was readily available to me on streaming, which was a mangled, outdated US release. In addition to being badly dubbed, this version features scenes with what appear to be jaw-droppingly bad exposure, washing out entire sequences to the point they're barely discernable. There is now a better option - the movie has been remastered and released on blu-ray through Vinegar Syndrome, and if you're planning to watch this... Actually, why exactly are you determined to watch this? I don't mean that in a snide way way. Literally, what is inspiring you to track down this micro-budgeted, presumably drug-fueled children's movie (or maybe special) from Canada? Because if this is something you remember from your childhood or want to see for academic reasons or anything of the sort, by all means spend the money to get the good version - because it absolutely  matters. But if you're looking for some...

I've reviewed quite a few of these over the past few years, so by now I'm assuming you know the drill. But in case anyone new is joining us, Fresh Monkey Fiction is an independent toy company catering to collectors. They finance their releases through presales, and for the past three years they've been producing Christmas action figures in a 6-inch scale. Mostly these have been variations on Santa and Krampus , and the subject of today's review is no exception. Father Christmas, of course, is England's version of Saint Nick. Well, sort of. Okay, it's a little complicated, as it's not clear how much of his genesis was inspired by Saint Nicholas of Myra as opposed to alternate traditions, and for a while he became something of an unrelated political symbol opposing Puritanism, but over the last few centuries depictions of Father Christmas converged with other yuletide gift-givers, and now he's as likely as not to just look like Santa, red suit and all. Re...