Mainlining Christmas

Actually, you probably don't know what that means, at least as far as this site is concerned. Hell, I still don't entirely know what it means, and I'm writing this. Last year, it meant a Christmas horror movie a day, every day, for the entire month of October, followed by daily holiday movies through November and December. Let's just rip the band aid off now and make it clear that isn't happening this year. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say my free time has been largely taken up by other commitments in 2026, leaving me with a fraction of the time I'd require to watch and review 90+ movies. What fraction? About half. Maybe a little more, depending on how things go between now and December 25th. But daily updates starting on October 1st are right out. That said, I don't want to throw out all the changes we made last year. Spreading these out meant fewer reviews got lost in the commotion, and I think there's something to the "Ch...

As is customary in these situations, I'll start by stating the obvious: One Battle After Another is a movie with Christmas-related elements, but it's not something I'd describe as a Christmas movie. The elements in question are interesting, unusual, and initially confusing, as is the movie itself. To a degree, I think that's intentional - One Battle After Another exists in a world similar to ours but more exaggerated, one where both the right and left sides of the political spectrum are sort of caricatures of their real-life counterparts, as imagined by their opponents. Or at least I think that's what Paul Thomas Anderson intended while writing and directing the film, only reality sort of intervened in ways that leave you feeling as though his movie wasn't just set in a different universe but was imported from one, as well. The revolutionaries of the film are essentially the lawless renegades described by Fox News when they warn their viewers about armed Antifa ...

I remember watching this anthology at least a few times back in the '90s - while it didn't have much of a theatrical run, it was weird enough to be a popular VHS rental (at least in circles I hung out with) back when that was a thing. The gimmick here is the movie tells four stories, one after the other, about four bizarre experiences a new bellhop has on New Year's Eve, with each of the four stories set in separate rooms and written and directed by different filmmakers: Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino. The two names in that list you recognize are the two whose segments work, though it's not at all clear which way the causal relationship goes there. Apparently there were some major cuts required by the producer, and those came from Anders's and Rockwell's segments (the "producer" in question was Harvey Weinstein, in case you needed more reason to empathize with those directors). Since the uncut versions were ...

As someone old enough to remember the kind of movies Y2K is an homage to, this one's kind of difficult to rate objectively. Because on one hand, this is a damn near perfect recreation of a type of late '90s genre/comedy hybrid that permeated the era. Aside from the genre-pivot (which feels like it's reverse-engineered from Krampus ) and some of the gore effects being a little too advanced, this is more or less exactly what this movie would have looked and felt like had it been released in 1999. And making fun of Y2K paranoia was absolutely a popular pastiche as the millennium approached, so this wouldn't have felt out of place in theaters. Hell, I half suspect the only reason something with this exact premise wasn't released was studios, which relied much more on DVD sales and TV rights at the time, would have assumed there wouldn't be any interest in the film after January 1st, 2000. So on one hand, this is the movie it sets out to be, which should be a win. On...

 I suppose the theme here this year was horror, but then wasn't that the theme for 2025 everywhere? Regardless, we mixed things up by starting far earlier than we ever have in the past, posting a Christmas horror movie review every day in October. I'm not planning on doing that again next year, but then again I wasn't planning on it this year, so who knows? There's certainly more than enough holiday entries in the genre to make it possible. We are planning to come back in some capacity next year, though I'm not sure what that will look like in terms of duration or frequency of reviews... or even if I want reviews to remain my focus. Over the past decade or so, I've been interested in exploring the ways that holiday media evolved, and I actually think I'm starting to get a grasp on that. At some point, I should probably consolidate those theories into a form that's intelligible. But that sounds like a "next year problem." For now, let's take...

The Merchants of Joy is a documentary looking at several families operating Christmas tree lots in Manhattan. It focuses much more on the personalities of those involved than it does on the business side, in no small part because none of those profiled were willing to open their books and reveal trade secrets. We get a little behind the scenes information surrounding the bidding process for lots, how hard it is to turn a profit, what they do during the off-season (mostly operate other seasonal stands), and that big box stores operating at low margins are an existential threat to this business. We also learn several of the sellers largely source their trees from the Pacific Northwest, which surprised me a bit (I'd have assumed Maine or Canada). But the bulk of the documentary was focused more on them as people. It all works because it's an interesting, quirky collection. The year the documentary was recorded (I'm assuming 2024) also turned out to be a significant one, as two...

This was a nice surprise. I'm not talking about the quality - I expected this to be good - but I'd more or less given up hope of ever getting a third season of this show. The first two installments streamed in 2019 and 2020 , so I assumed the promised finale was yet another victim of the pandemic. But it turns out this was either popular enough or those involved were invested, because the show's back after a five-year hiatus. That break does affect the tone, as well as the story and characters. This is no longer about a woman in her early 30s trying to sort out adulthood - when we catch up with Johanne (Ida Elise Broch), we find she's matured quite a bit in the intervening time. Well, okay, when we're first  reintroduced to her, it's en medias res , she's dressed as a giant rat, and she's frozen in place on a stage surrounded by kids. But once that teaser's done and we back up to the start of December, we find she's grown quite a bit between sea...