Mainlining Christmas

Okay. Going to need a big old disclaimer for this one. I'm Jewish. Also, I'm not Jewish. Depends on what you mean by "Jewish", really. My mother is Jewish and grew up in a Jewish household. My father was raised Christian, though I don't believe he ever identified as such in my lifetime. I was raised celebrating Hanukkah and Christmas, both in a secular context. I grew up thinking of myself as Jewish. I even got to experience some antisemitism in grade school in rural Maine (lucky me). I never learned to speak Hebrew, I didn't have a Bar Mitzvah, I wasn't raised in a Jewish community, and I've only stepped into synagogues for weddings and funerals. When I was a kid, I didn't think these were relevant as far as my identity was concerned. And depending on who you ask and what the term means, they may not be. However, from a cultural perspective at the very least, I am most certainly not Jewish. The reason I'm bringing all this up is I'm about

This seventy-minute TV movie falls in a microgenre in which preexisting characters are acting out a version of A Christmas Carol as part of a play or movie. The original is of course the Mr. Magoo special, though Looney Tunes, Disney, and The Muppets all attempted a similar premise, with varying levels of fourth wall breaks. I'd argue this is a distinct approach to homages in which characters are visited by spirits or in some other way put through a Dickensian trial as themselves. In this case, the characters are treated as actors playing the cast of A Christmas Carol. Well, sort of. Flintstones Christmas Carol alters the formula very slightly in a couple ways. First, it embraces the play-within-a-play motif to a far greater extent than its predecessors. Magoo's Christmas Carol acknowledges the play mainly in an introduction and conclusion, but makes few references throughout. Mickey's Christmas Carol includes no explanation whatsoever for the casting choices (though I'

This is the second Romanian New Wave Christmas movie I've seen, though there's a good chance we'll run the review for this one first. Given you can strike the word, "Christmas," from the previous sentence and still have it be accurate, it should be noted I'm a novice to the genre. On top of that, anything I have to say about this should be filtered through the understanding I'm an American watching the film with subtitles and am therefore likely to miss nuances and subtext the intended audience would be expected to pick up on. But that's the case with virtually any translated work I review here. "Tuesday, After Christmas" is centered on Paul, a middle-aged man with a wife and child having an affair with a younger woman, who's also his daughter's dentist. The movie plays out over a few days leading up to Christmas. By then, he's confessed the affair to his wife, who throws him out. The movie concludes with them meeting up at Paul&#

This is one of those times where I find myself a bit lost. Ostensibly a comical retelling of A Christmas Carol, this is really better described as a farcical sketch special loosely tied together with a frame story about Scrooge. The key word here is "loosely," in that the majority of the sketches have nothing at all to do with the story or its characters. Also complicating matters is the fact it's part of a franchise of comedic British films with what I assume is a similar style of humor. That style, incidentally, is a longstanding British tradition utilizing innuendo, absurdity, and intentional shock. While I suspect this is a form of comedy deserving of respect, it's also kind of the forerunner of what would eventually turn into things like Scary Movie. In short, I didn't like this, but I'm having a hard time parsing out whether that's because it's bad, it's dated, or I'm simply lacking the context necessary to appreciate what they're doi

If you've been following along, you know I've been watching adaptations, remakes, homages, and reimaginings of A Christmas Carol in bulk this year. As you might expect, I've got some thoughts about what makes an adaptation work and what doesn't. I figured I'd pass on my notes to whatever studio executive thinks it's a good idea to remake Scrooge for the [checks notes] I have no idea what number time we're up to. As a sidenote, this article is mainly going to concern itself with adaptations of the original book. I might turn to quasi-sequels like Scrooged and Spirited for guidance, but that's not what this is about. Do We Need Another Adaptation? I thought I'd start with some thoughts on whether there's even a point in doing this again. You may be surprised to hear my answer is, "Maybe." One takeaway from this whole project is that while there are a lot of versions out there, there isn't really a single definitive one that meets all

This 2020 British adaptation offers a somewhat unique approach to A Christmas Carol. It's actually a little hard to explain, because the short version, "A Christmas Carol reimagined through modern dance," doesn't actually convey the experience. Perhaps it should, though: the movie's main flaw is it tries to do too much at once and as a result kneecaps some of its best assets. The film starts with a Victorian family preparing a sort of miniature stage, complete with tiny paper characters. The kids are essentially cutting up newspaper and constructing a model using the illustrations and words. Once they've finished, the matriarch begins telling the story, heavily using Dickens's text. We then cut to the world of the model for the performance. This is one of the aspects that makes me almost want to recommend the movie despite... well, we'll get to the "despite" in a moment. But the sets are breathtaking and inventive. The story plays out in a wo

Over the past year or so, Hallmark has been quietly rebranding itself in an attempt to offer at least the appearance of representation. The area they've been attracting the most attention has been their recent pivot towards including same-sex couples, but that's hardly the only change in programming. After years of fixating only on Christmas, the company has finally decided to keep focusing on Christmas. But, you know, also toss in a Kwanzaa movie. That's also about Christmas. So a Christmas/Kwanzaa movie. That's where Holiday Heritage, a family dramedy with a side of romance, comes into the picture. The movie's main character is Ella, a successful Boston graphic designer planning to open her own company and go into business for herself. But that's an "after the holidays" thing - first she's going to return home to the small town in Pennsylvania where she grew up, because there's no way in hell Hallmark's going to make a movie about Kwanzaa