Category: Film Review

Remember the Night (1940)

Review Essay

Remember the Night is another of these 1940s films, and one that would merit a nearly unreserved positive recommendation if not for a few minutes’ worth of totally unnecessary and irrelevant-to-the-plot racial material.  In this case, just to be up front about it, we have a Black servant in a couple of scenes at the beginning of the film who’s either a savvy man pretending to be a fool, or else just a character written as a foolish Black servant: either way, too, his employer treats him pretty condescendingly.  It’s certainly not the worst racism of the era on film, but it doesn’t need to be that to be uncomfortable and even unsettling.  As always, I don’t mean to make excuses for the media of the past, and if for you that kind of material is a deal-breaker, I respect it and wouldn’t want to waste your time.  But if you’re someone who can enjoy a film while deploring that kind of element, I think you’ll find this one has artistic value that’s worth appreciating.

The first ten minutes of the movie were its least successful (to me) so I do recommend hanging in there — not only do they feature most of the racial element I just mentioned, but they also largely feature people who aren’t our leading actors, and in particular a tedious, egotistical lawyer whose blathering on is a little tough to sit through without impatience (even though, to be clear, the movie knows he’s tedious — part of the point is that he’s long-winded and short on substance).  Those minutes, though, establish the premise: that a woman shoplifter is, thanks to the skillful maneuvering of the DA assigned to prosecute her, about to spend Christmas behind bars waiting for an expert witness in her trial.  He feels a little badly about the maneuver, enough that he arranges for her to get out on bond.  But through a mixup, they find themselves in a car together, driving into the American Midwest to both of their family homes for the holiday.  Elaborate, sure, but also a very solid basis for a romantic comedy to unfold.

The poster for Remember the Night features Barbara Stanwyck on the right in a red dress, standing next to Fred MacMurray (who is dressed in a dark suit and tie) and placing her arms around him.

And the setting is brought really to life by the fantastic casting of the two lead roles.  Fred MacMurray always was a chameleon, able to project such a range from sweet naivete to hard criminal purpose — I grew up with him as the sort of ideal Disney dad in films like The Shaggy Dog or The Absent-Minded Professor, but in this film, he’s excellent at managing the tougher balancing act of playing John “Jack” Sargent, a kindly smalltown fella who made good as one of the savviest minds in the New York City DA’s office.  But here even Fred’s considerable talent is really getting blown out of the water by Barbara Stanwyck at basically the height of her powers — and she’s not just acting the hell out of the role, but she’s doing it in absolutely classic Edith Head costumes while speaking words out of a Preston Sturges screenplay (Sturges, for the unfamiliar, basically invents and achieves the apex of the screwball romantic comedies of the late ‘30s and early ‘40s that we now think of as classic Hollywood).  Here, as Lee Leander, she has to run the gamut from exhibiting the kind of brassy self-confidence that’s helped her survive as a con and a thief for basically her whole adult life to the kind of fragile self-doubt that emerges as the fearful center around which she’s erected that facade to avoid confronting the pain of her upbringing.  It’s an incredible performance, good enough to make me wonder why I’d never heard anyone talk about this film.

The funny thing about the film — given the fairly ridiculous premise and the snappy dialogue that Sturges is known for — is how naturalistic it so often is.  Whether it’s moments where we hear Jack and Lee connecting over some shared memories of small town Indiana life, or the way Lee seems to shrink and tighten up with every mile she gets closer to home, there’s something honest about the emotions the two actors are working with — they don’t feel like they’re falling in love because of some machination in the script.  They feel like they’re falling in love because it was meant to be — they almost feel like a couple that had been in love the whole time, and it’s only the movie that’s catching up to them.  It’s pretty magical.

The magic of the film is less Christmassy than other films on this blog — to some extent by design, since really the film only feels like Christmas in two places.  Either it’s the hyper-commercialized high street shopping of a bustling New York City, or else it’s the cornpone, apple-bobbing at a rummage sale, country Christmas energy of Jack’s hometown Indiana village.  Everywhere else doesn’t seem to have the spirit at all, almost like it wasn’t Christmas anywhere else, really.  That journey from Christmas to Christmas — from the one where Lee’s an operator who is never on the wrong foot, to the one where her defenses are laid bare and her authenticity can unfold in the softer light of home — is central, I think, to the movie’s thematic message.  And I like how the film works in that way, but it hurts the holiday score a little, there’s no doubt.

In the end, it’s a film about love — love from the moment Jack realizes what he needs to do for Lee, just out of compassion for another human (and not yet thinking of romance), to the final….well, I won’t spoil it for you.  And there’s so many kinds of love at work in this film — not just their love for each other at its best, but also the ways their love for each other trips the other person up or interferes with their designs, like it’s an O. Henry short story.  There’s love here from family — both love that builds up and a love that can feel closed off.  Even just the gentle moment of two elderly sisters, one a widow and the other a spinster, kissing each other on the cheek cheerfully as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve.  There’s such remarkable strength, too, fueled by that love, and none of it stronger or more remarkable than what we see in Stanwyck’s performance as Lee in the film’s final act.  She’s the best.

I Know That Face: There are SO many options here, it’s embarrassing, so I’ll pick just a few.  Now, she’s not exactly inconspicuous, so I don’t want to dwell on her, but it would be silly not to remember that Barbara Stanwyck goes on to be Ann Mitchell in Meet John Doe, which reaches its climactic moments at Christmas, not to mention Elizabeth Lane in the by-now classic Christmas in Connecticut.  But there’s other faces here you’ll recognize, and a voice too — the mothers in this film both have spots in other ‘40s Christmas flicks.  Georgia Caine, Lee’s horrible mother, plays the minor role of Mrs. Johnson in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek — another film culminating at Christmastime (and another Preston Sturges film).  More memorably, Beulah Bondi, who here plays Jack’s much kinder yet still complicated mother, will be very familiar to many of us as George Bailey’s mother in the totally iconic It’s a Wonderful Life.  And lastly, a voice — because Willie, the oddball servant in the Sargent home in Indiana, is portrayed by Sterling Holloway, of all people.  Holloway’s utterly distinctive voice is best known to you as Winnie the Pooh, or the voice narrating Lambert the Sheepish Lion or The Little House or Ben and Me or any of dozens of other Disney short films, so much so that it’s hard for me to accept that that’s the voice of a regular person and not a cartoon character.  Anyway, Holloway voices someone called Northwind in an animated TV movie called Tukiki and His Search for a Merry Christmas.

That Takes Me Back: Again, the 1940s films are generally an endless source of nostalgic elements and moments, but here’s a few that stuck out to me.  I loved the moment early on when they’re reading a paper map while trying to manage detours in the middle of the night: I remember both the confusion and the exhilaration of that kind of navigating, which I was usually pretty good at, and it’s a bit of a shame that at this point GPS and a smartphone have taken over about 99% of that kind of human travel guidance.  And then they haul out sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper — other than for crafting, I can’t think of the last time I used waxed paper, but it reminded me of my grandmother making sandwiches to take somewhere (I’m not sure this memory happened more than once or twice).  And then later on, the “down home” Indiana Christmas involves both stringing popcorn for the Christmas tree, and bobbing for apples — the popcorn garland in particular is such a delightful glimpse of the much simpler Christmas trees of days past, and it made me smile to see the string on the tree in the background in a later scene.

I Understood That Reference: I know, I know, this is a weird category to include when it’s so often empty, but I think that in itself is interesting — it would have been easy, I think, for Sturges to incorporate some elements of Christmas stories (indeed, of THE Christmas story) here, and so it’s at least a little interesting to me that he doesn’t.

Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): So, as mentioned above, a lot of the film doesn’t really feel like Christmas — not the courtroom scenes, and almost all the travel from New York to Indiana seems to pass through towns and houses where no one is getting ready for Christmas at all.  I do think there’s some thematic reason for it, so it’s not a critique of the film, but it does also consolidate the film’s holiday vibes into a pretty tight 25-30 minutes in Jack’s childhood home.  As you can likely tell, I like this movie a lot, but I don’t think its evocation of Christmas is one of its strongest elements — I can easily see myself watching it at another time of year without it feeling out of place.

Actual Quality (9/10): I really enjoyed this movie, coming to it with almost no preconceptions at all.  Sure, the opening ten minutes are both a little tedious and more than a little racially problematic: there’s no getting around it, and if you bail on the movie then, I get it.  But after that, from costume to script to two stellar lead performances (and a couple of really great turns from the supporting cast, as well), this is a romantic comedy that’s really hitting all the moves the genre does best.  Stanwyck is electric on film and MacMurray’s wonderfully subtle and loyal, and the two of them together manage both the surreality of the quick banter old Hollywood romance AND the reality of the emotional roller coaster two people might ride by falling in love in this way.  If you like a good romantic comedy, I think you’ll love it, and if you usually find romantic comedies either squirm-inducing or silly, I think this is the kind of film that might make you say, “well, okay, THAT one is admittedly a solid movie”.

Party Mood-Setter? I mean, I would like to tell you no — as romantic comedies go, it’s leaning more on realistic emotion than on quips, so it’s a film that rewards your full attention and that might be hard to connect with if it’s just on in the background. But the film’s pretty great at conveying the combo of 40s nostalgia and fabulous Edith Head costumes, so if you want to do the movie a bit of an injustice and treat it as occasional eye candy, I think it could work in the background.  I just also think that, when you’re really paying attention to it, it’s so good and human that it deserves the spotlight and I’m hoping you’ll give it center stage.

Plucked Heart Strings? For sure — I got genuinely choked up more than once, basically always at moments where Stanwyck as Lee really successfully conveys the feeling of a woman who’s never been given any tenderness or compassion in life experiencing the sudden shock of someone’s loving care.  Especially because, at first, that’s all it is — not Jack trying to woo her, but just Jack (and later his family) seeing a person in need and reaching out to support her like it was the most natural thing in the world….because it is, to them.

Recommended Frequency: Oh man, this one feels like a candidate for “every year” to me; it’s certainly one I want to own so I can keep it in my regular rotation, and I feel like it’s a film that will reward future viewings.  I think if the film as I’ve described it sounds appealing to you, it’s one to schedule for yourself this very holiday season: don’t delay!

Shockingly (to me) the only place I can find Remember the Night streaming right now is on Plex, the ad-supported free streaming service that shows up in this paragraph pretty frequently. It doesn’t look to me like it can be rented anywhere, though, which is unusual.  It’s purchasable in a variety of media formats, though, on Amazon (and elsewhere I’m sure), if you’re willing to wait for delivery of physical media (and willing to trust me that it’s worth owning).  And as always, try your local library — Worldcat tells me that there are hundreds of libraries with a copy on DVD.

Scrooge (1970)

Review Essay

In gearing up to create Film for the Holidays, one of the things I resolved to do early on was to spread out and cover at least one film from every decade in the “talkie” film era if I could.  This is a simple enough task for every decade but one: the 1970s are an extraordinarily holiday-free zone.  I couldn’t tell you if it was the oil crisis or stagflation or the Watergate scandal, etc., but something seems to have knocked the holiday spirit right out of Western filmmaking.  Take a gander at Wikipedia’s list of Christmas films (and I sure wish you would: goodness knows I’ve spent enough time there in the last year) and you’ll find that the list of theatrical releases amounts to a handful of horror movies, a Norwegian fairy tale classic that’s basically unavailable outside Norway, and a Santa Claus bank heist filmed in Canada (okay, that one sounds pretty interesting to me).  I’ll admit, 1970s TV movies do try to fill in that gap a bit, but still, I was trying to stick mostly to theatrical releases here and I was feeling stuck, until I remembered that Scrooge was released in 1970: I’ve always been fascinated by this particular version of A Christmas Carol, and I’m delighted to get the chance to unpack both what I think it does really wonderfully and what I think it really fumbles.

Scrooge is, if you’re unfamiliar, a musical adaptation — not the only such adaptation of Carol, of course, but the first musical film version I know of.  And it’s one that seems tailor made for me as a viewer: the screenplay and music are by Leslie Bricusse, a talented British composer who created the music and lyrics for 1967’s Doctor Dolittle (a film I have loved since childhood even though I will admit its every flaw to you) and 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (a film I have loved since childhood and which I would gladly and spiritedly defend as being nearly flawless).  You’d also know his work from James Bond songs like “Goldfinger” or “You Only Live Twice” — Bricusse is a pro, in other words, and that should set this film up for success.  Add in Albert Finney, a marvelously charismatic actor, in the title role, and some seasoned British pros in the other roles (most notably the wonderful Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley), and I always end up thinking, “wait, do I love this movie?”  But then I rewatch it, and remember, oh right: I don’t love it.  I don’t hate it!  But I don’t love it.  Let’s try and sort out why, shall we?

The movie poster for Scrooge features the tagline "What the dickens have they done to Scrooge?" arcing above a crowded street scene in Victorian London, with a dancing Scrooge in the foreground, looking directly at us.

First, let’s give Scrooge credit for some things it gets very right: A Christmas Carol is a ghost story.  Much of the time, though, the ghost experiences are more thrilling than they are chilling, and while I enjoy those versions, I really admire Bricusse and company leaning into the creepiness of this story.  From opening titles that carry a sort of eerie Edward Gorey quality to the (mostly invented for this version) sequence in which Jacob Marley flies Ebenezer through the ghostly skies above London to the (totally invented for this version) plummet of Scrooge into literal Hell at the end of the Yet to Come experience, this movie often achieves something at least uncomfortable if not unsettling.  And yet another thing this version gets right is an investment in joyful characters — the Cratchit children, in particular, get more of the spotlight here (thanks in part to the early segment in which they accompany their cheerily elfin father through the streets of London doing last minute Christmas shopping).  I like the sweetness of the moments we get with the Cratchits, and I think the film at least sometimes accomplishes something really moving by juxtaposing such light-heartedness with the sort of nightmarish threat that lurks in Scrooge’s experiences.  Also, while the casting of Albert Finney as Scrooge is more than a little strange — at 34, surely he’s about the youngest actor to play Scrooge in any production outside of a high school or collegiate setting — I’ll get to my larger assessment of him in a later section.  Here in my list of the film’s strengths, I do just want to note that Finney’s undeniably talented and energetic, and I think he’s giving this character a lot of spark and liveliness, which is very watchably compelling in a number of scenes.

The film does a lot to displace Scrooge’s experiences into more cinematic spaces, and I’m not sure that always works: seeing him bedevil debtors in the streets does drive home his malice, but it also creates scenes that just don’t feel as true to the original novella, to me.  I can’t imagine men collecting for charity chasing an elderly man down the sidewalks after he’s turned them down; I also can’t really follow what we’re supposed to understand about his relationship to these scamp urchins who taunt him in the streets.  While we sympathize with them, I expect, they’re also not really winningly kind or charming themselves, and the movie doesn’t develop them as characters enough to clarify why they’re getting so much screen time.  Later in the movie, Christmas Past shows him this lush springtime picnic with Isabel Fezziwig (since in this version it’s the boss’s daughter he falls for), and while it’s a compelling visual, it also makes no sense to me at all: isn’t the logic of the ghosts that they only have access to Christmas Days, those past, those yet to come, or the one we’re experiencing at present?  It sort of felt like they wanted to broaden the landscape for Finney to inhabit, but again, I just don’t think it adds more than it detracts from the immersion.

And I’ve been putting off saying this, but it really has to be acknowledged: this is one of the least hummable musicals I’ve ever encountered.  I have seen Scrooge at least five times in my life, probably more than that, and yet if asked to sing more than a line of any of its songs, I think there’s only one of them that sticks (I’ll get to it in a moment).  I’m not sure what Bricusse, who has a track record of writing some very memorable songs, was thinking with numbers like “I Hate People” and “December the 25th”, but they rarely manage to get beyond serviceable melodic moments that are far too easily forgotten.  The one really successful song, which includes a full-energy dance choreography through the streets of London, is ”Thank You Very Much”, but even that song fits so strangely into the story — the song, in which Scrooge joins with lusty enthusiasm, is actually being sung by Scrooge’s many debtors after his death, “thanking” him for dying and setting them free from his oppressive control.  Scrooge, though, totally ignorant of what the song is about, treats the whole number as a delightful lark, maybe even as a chance to revel in the feeling that he can start to envision himself thanking people openly?  It’s a strange scene, where we as an audience can appreciate the awful but profound irony of Scrooge gleefully capering amid the throng, loudly and unknowingly singing a song about how wonderful it is that he’s dead.  What a macabre film.  Anyway, when the most hummable, toe-tappable song in your musical is an ironic celebration of the main character’s death, I would argue that the musical probably missed a chance or two to connect, but there’s no accounting for taste, and I bet one of you loves this soundtrack: I wish I could agree, since I sure do love Bricusse’s other work.

Ultimately, I think this is the challenge Scrooge poses those of us who love A Christmas Carol — it’s a whole that’s somehow a bit less than the sum of its parts.  Conceptually, it seems like it could deliver the best Dickens has to give us, both in terms of dialing up the horror elements in the story and in terms of sweetening the sentimental moments with song.  But I’d argue that in fact it gets out of step with itself enough that often the points in the narrative that most need chills are lacking in them, and the most soaring musical phrases don’t sit very neatly on the story beats that ought to feel emotionally overwhelming.  I think my ultimate conclusion is that Bricusse simply wasn’t inspired by this material the way he was by Hugh Lofting’s characters, or Roald Dahl’s novel: whether it’s because Dickens’s story is too iconic, or perhaps just a fallow period for Bricusse between other, more engaging projects, he couldn’t get a hold of this one, and the resulting script and soundtrack feel like a first draft more than a final one.  I’m glad it exists, and I do return to it, hoping each time to get something I’m sure is in there somewhere — so far, though, I’ve always been wrong about that.

I Know That Face: Edith Evans, who here I feel isn’t really well cast or written as the Ghost of Christmas Past, is a central and to me successful figure as the rich old Miss Victoria Woodworth in Fitzwilly, which I’ll cover elsewhere here on the blog.  Also appearing in Fitzwilly (uncredited in that film as Mr. Cotty) is Laurence Naismith, who here is the giddily dancing Mr. Fezziwig.  And Geoffrey Bayldon, who in Scrooge plays the astonished Pringle, the owner of the toy shop Scrooge visits on Christmas Day, later plays Jacob Marley himself on the final episode of the British television series Hallelujah! — an episode entitled “A Goose for Mrs. Scratchitt” that, as far as I can understand it, loosely adapts A Christmas Carol.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: I do like that Scrooge sees ghosts abroad in London at the end of his Marley confrontation.  It’s much different in the book than it is here, of course, and to me that diminishes the success of its inclusion, but as I keep saying, I admire the ambition here of working more of that paranormal content into this adaptation.  And I am always enthusiastic when a Carol adaptation remembers to include Ebenezer’s sister coming to school to bring him home to a kinder Father; who, the ghost reminds us, is Fred’s mother.  I found a lot of the Christmas Past sequence in this version really flat (whether Evans was directed to be detached or whether the writing just wasn’t there for her, I don’t think her performance ultimately works), but the film’s calling attention to Scrooge’s painful upbringing, along with the feeling that there was joy to be had, and love too, in the family he’s distanced himself from, is an important elevation of a couple of lines in the novella that I find really significant.  Lastly, the confrontation we get between Scrooge and Isabel as she leaves him is really very close to the book, in terms of the dialogue itself — adaptations often don’t know how to wrap things up between the two of them, if they bother to do it at all, and I liked the commitment here to the original Dickens text.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: There’s a fair amount missing in this version, in part because they wanted to develop the Cratchit family differently: as a result of that intention, Bob and Tim haven’t been to church prior to their coming home for Christmas Present, nor is there a Martha in the family, waiting to surprise her father.  As I noted, I do like the family dynamic we get, but there’s no denying they’ve gone well off the characters as Dickens presents them.  And the Yet to Come sequence is much altered, without the same scenes making him aware of a recent death — after all, if he knew more about the death, there’s no way he would sing along gaily and obliviously to “Thank You Very Much” — and the segment concludes with a totally original plummet to Hell along with some grisly conversation there.  Marley reappears at that point, to offer some pointed and stinging commentary back in Ebenezer’s direction.  As someone who’s seen plenty of Carol adaptations, I did find the novelty interesting, but I have to be honest: tonally, I just don’t think it works, and it muddies more than a little the arc that Scrooge is on by the film’s end.

Christmas Carol Vibes (8.5/10): Without question, this film does a lot to capture the spirit of the original for long sequences, and its commitment to creating a visual spectacle of Victorian London certainly succeeds at times, but there are enough unusual departures here that, as more or less “straight” adaptations of A Christmas Carol go, this one’s a bit further from the mark.  If you want the Carol experience, this will certainly deliver a lot of what you’re looking for, but I doubt it’ll be The Christmas Carol for almost any viewer: if that’s you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Actual Quality (7.5/10): It’s really hard to answer this, but I think that fundamentally this is an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that gains little and loses more than it gains in monkeying with the underlying narrative.  And on top of that, I think this is a musical that, purely as a musical, just doesn’t drop enough great songs into your ears as you take it in.  A not-musical-enough musical that’s also a not-christmas-carol-enough Christmas Carol…but it’s good enough that I keep going back to it hoping it’ll deliver on either or both fronts?  I don’t know — that feels like a film that got about ¾ of the way up the mountain, to me, and that’s where I’ll mark it.

Scrooge?

As Ebenezer Scrooges go, I found this portrayal to be a very affected performance, which often feels like it’s playing up his frailty and his unwillingness to be affected by anything other than booze.  Finney’s charismatic, but either the writing or acting damage things a little here, and honestly, I wonder if it’s not simply the fact that they’ve cast a man in his 30s to play an elderly miser?  Under the circumstances, perhaps either a caricature of outrageous frailty or else a doddering drunkard were the only ways he felt really comfortable playing a role twice his age.  Certainly Finney is a good actor in general, and I think in the late 1990s (with a stronger script) might have been an excellent Scrooge, but this particular intersection of performer and material doesn’t really land the plane, for me.

Supporting Cast?

I’d call the performances across the rest of the cast very uneven, personally — as already noted, I think the Cratchits really work, anchored by some fine performances from Bob and Tiny Tim, in particular.  But, also as already noted, the Ghost of Christmas Past feels to me like she doesn’t want to be there.  And, maybe most astonishingly, Jacob Marley as performed by Alec Guinness is so incredibly bizarre, it’s hard to pay attention to the script.  Guinness uses these strange, inhuman gestures in a portrayal so outlandish and attention-grabbing, I was most reminded of John Cleese as the conjurer “Tim” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I’ll grant him this: he presents a Marley who would freak almost anybody out, but it ends up being distracting (and, with apologies to Sir Alec, if you’re casting for a role in a musical, you need an actor who can sing, and to my ears that is not true of Guinness).  It’s harder to judge Tom Jenkins and some of the other minor roles that don’t appear in other adaptations since they’re invented here, but I do think most of those go fairly well.

Recommended Frequency? For me, as I’ve noted, it’s a once in a while choice — this definitely isn’t in my top two or three Christmas Carols, and a person only has time for so many of them in any given December.  But there are undeniably good things about this version, and some undeniably singular elements in it: when I do revisit it, I can invest myself in enjoying these things, or at least appraising them thoughtfully enough that I think the movie was worth my time.  If you’ve not seen it in the last decade, you should give it a whirl sometime.

Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

Review Essay

Right off the bat, I just have to admit — Tokyo Godfathers is surely one of the more potentially polarizing “holiday films” I’ve watched for this project.  The essential premise — three homeless people on the streets of Tokyo find an abandoned infant in a pile of trash on Christmas Eve night and disagree about what to do about it — is wild by the standards of the genre, almost too wild for a filmmaker to seriously attempt to portray it on screen.  You can envision, though, Hollywood entrusting the movie to some safe director and screenwriter who turn it into a gentle comedy about how hard it is to change a diaper on a park bench, I guess.  In the hands of Japanese auteur Satoshi Kon, however, Tokyo Godfathers presents an anime vision that is simultaneously much more realistic and much more fantastic than that, and in the process achieves some incredible moments of artistry.

The realism is where this film is most likely to lose a viewer, if it’s going to — our three protagonists are Gin, a miserable middle-aged alcoholic driven to the streets via more than one kind of addiction; Hana, a trans woman under basically constant criticism and threat from a society full of people that won’t accept her for who she is; and Miyuki, a teenager on the run for months now from her middle class home, about which she doesn’t want to talk and towards which she has no intention of returning.  The three of them live in genuine squalor, a ramshackle construction of cardboard and odds and ends, and the world around them is relentlessly hostile.  The movie pulls no punches, literally — we see the violence of the streets (especially violence directed at the homeless by bored, moneyed young men), we hear the coarse and sometimes vicious language of the streets, and we fully encounter the desperation of the streets as people with no resources and few options try to work out their own issues without totally tearing apart the lives of every other human they touch.  Yeah, yeah, I know — it doesn’t sound much on the surface like a Christmas story.

The movie poster for Tokyo Godfathers: A Film by Satoshi Kon. In the background, Tokyo skyscrapers tumble at strange angles in a dark, reddish light. In the foreground, the three main characters, Hana, Gin, and Miyuki, look directly at us. Hana smiling joyously as she holds the baby Kiyoko; Gin screaming in fear as he holds his hat on his head with one hand; and Miyuki, enigmatically grinning as she gestures to both sides, as though dancing.

Unless we consider the first Christmas story — a couple on the streets, no place to lay their heads but a barn, a child born amid squalor.  That might seem a stretch to you, but the film is transfixed by the divine, opening on a Tokyo church service in which Hana is moved to ecstasy contemplating the Christmas message of hope to the poor even as, right next to her, Gin scowls and grumbles as he observes all the ways that message doesn’t seem to touch the life he’s living.  Hana — whose own understanding of herself as a trans woman is so complex (she at one point says proudly, in response to someone calling her a “mistake”, “I am a mistake made by God”) — is the catalyst for the movie’s action, since when they discover a child in the trash while scrounging, the other two want to give the baby to the police immediately, but Hana throws herself protectively into action, insisting that this is her chance to be a mother.  She wants one day — Christmas day — to experience God’s miracle for her, the child she never thought she could have.  And the other two (who, in their very tortured and sometimes torturing ways, love Hana) relent.  What a strange miracle, you can see them both thinking.  And both the strangeness and the miracles persist.

Hana names the baby “Kiyoko”, inspired by a phrase from the carol “Silent Night” — the name will matter by the movie’s end, but at first it feels like just another inscrutable nod to Christmas itself.  Something about the baby provokes all three of the main characters into introspection, and sharing more of their life before homelessness and what drove them here.  And before too long, they settle on a plan — Hana wants to bring the baby back to its mother directly (it was found with a key to a bus station locker that they see as their first clue) to confront her and see whether or not she’s worthy of the child.  So, off across Tokyo they go, and the movie never totally slows down again after that — at least one of them is almost always running somewhere.

And my earlier mention of miracles is an honest use of the word — somewhere amid the gritty reality of this Tokyo, we repeatedly encounter the impossible.  A resource available right when it’s needed; help from an unlikely friend; the perfect gust of wind; even the miracle of pain or harm bringing one of them exactly to the place they needed to go.  As Hana repeatedly observes, there does seem to be something divine about little Kiyoko, in whose presence something like peace just might prevail on earth (well, for a broad definition of “peace”).  We even get the exchange between Hana and an embittered Gin, in which she tells him “Kiyoko is God’s messenger: we are her servants.”  To which Gin replies, “Unpaid servants, then, paying for a father’s sins.”  This is the tension surrounding the Christmas message, I feel like, or at least that’s the tension this film wants to explore — it’s easy to see the wondrousness of a blessing falling into the life of one impoverished, but then you have to reckon with what Gin’s observing.  Why is he here in the first place, in need of blessing, and what’s he going to have to go through to get it?  It hardly seems fair.

This is the remarkable thing about Tokyo Godfathers.  In a movie full of obscenities and street violence, gang assassinations and car crashes and substance abuse, what the film seems most interested in is beauty, harmony, and hope.  Hana’s haikus, when she speaks them, appear as calligraphy on the screen.  Beethoven’s 9th Symphony repeatedly drifts into the background, so that when at a climactic moment in the screenplay suddenly we and the characters both hear over the radio the triumphant chorus of the Ode to Joy, it doesn’t feel forced, it feels like a celebration the film itself has been building towards.  The film’s about the ways people trick themselves, and the mistakes we make in trying to fix things.  It’s about the pain of honesty, and its power.  It’s about Christmas’s promise and the ways we feel it lets us down.  As two characters observe to each other, late in the film — one says, “God must be busy this time of year.”  And the other says, “Better once a year than never.”  

I Know That Voice: For animated films, the only “familiar” performers will be voice actors, of course — the voice cast of the Japanese original film are not, as far as I can tell, folks who ever appeared in another film involving Christmas.  But the dubbed GKIDS release of the movie might be the one you’d see — and they did a great job with the voice casting for the dub, including a couple of trans actresses to play the trans roles, which I’m glad about and curious about (I only had access to the original with subtitles, so I haven’t heard the dubbed cast).  If you do watch the dubbed version, you might hear Kari Wahlgren as the voice of Kiyoko, the baby, and recognize that she also voices Jojo in both Christmas Chronicles movies, and both Dorothy and Ozma in Dorothy’s Christmas in Oz.  Crispin Freeman (the voice here of Ishida, Miyuki’s policeman father) also voices the character of Fabian Menkle in Scooby-Doo! Haunted Holidays.  And finally Gloria Garayua (the voice of Maria, the Hispanic woman who connects with Miyuki despite their not speaking the same language) later plays the live action role of Daphne in Christmas Staycation, a 2020 pandemic Christmas movie set entirely on Zoom — that feels like one I’ll have to try, one of these days, just for the novelty of it.

That Takes Me Back: The early scenes where there’s more focus on the “trash” surroundings inhabited by the main characters give us a number of glimpses of throwback items.  Hana, for instance, has a boombox in her corner of their little cardboard home, though as I recall we never hear it played.  We do see them rely multiple times on access to a pay phone, initially to call the “hostess club” they find out about from the materials in the locker.  It’s wild watching someone looking at a photograph and trying to figure out where it was taken, without them just being able to open up Google Street View to check if they’re correct — literally running up and down streets in a neighborhood trying to figure out what vantage point you need for a specific view.  Lastly, I did spot a copy of Star Wars on VHS, which in 2003 is already at least slightly outmoded, and now seems like another world entirely.

I Understood That Reference: You know, a bit surprisingly for a film set so far outside the boundaries of the usual holiday film, there’s at least a couple of references to classic Christmas tales.  I mean, most significantly, there’s a fully-fledged Christmas pageant at the church in the opening scene — we hear some lines from it spoken aloud, and perhaps our glimpses of the three Magi adoring the Christ child help prefigure what’s ahead for us.  And this is more of a stretch I guess, but early on in the film, Gin jokes that Santa Claus may have made off with the baby when he and Miyuki wake to find that Hana’s run away with the kid — the notion of Santa showing up not to leave gifts but to steal a baby was amusing enough that I made a note of it, and it’s fun to see characters a long ways from Santa’s cultural home base still using him for that kind of purpose.

Holiday Vibes (3/10): It’s really hard to grade the “holiday vibe” of something so far from the usual, but the opening scene is very classically Christmas, and the film keeps playing with imagery from the Christmas story (and thematic allusions) in ways that maybe were subtle, but that I kept picking up on.  In other words, in strictly literal terms this is probably closer to a 1 or 1.5, just barely any on-screen holiday stuff to latch on to.  But in terms of giving me Christmas feeling, well, it’s doing more than you can see — enough that it’s hard to score, but 3/10 feels right to me.

Actual Quality (9/10): The experience of watching the film directly is more challenging — at least for me as someone not familiar with Kon’s visual style, which is really aggressive and not at all like the kinds of Japanese animation I’m more familiar with (Miyazaki and Takahata).  Also the setting is so gritty and often grim that I was feeling a lot of things as the film went by and I didn’t always find myself connecting fluidly to what was happening on screen in the moment.  But this is one of those films that gets under your skin — I keep thinking about it, and the film improves the more I reflect on its use of symbolism and the ways the characters sprang to life and how the progression of the plot unfolded things at just the right pace, etc.  I do think there are some places where it’s just a little too operatic or melodramatic for me — I enjoy the surrealism but it’s hard to dial it in just right.  But I liked it a whole lot.

Party Mood-Setter?  Ha!  I cannot imagine this being just an “on in the background” kind of movie — love it or hate it, you won’t really be able to take your eyes off it (unless you’re turning it off).  I’m recommending it, sure, but not for this.

Plucked Heart Strings?  It’s a yes for me — there’s real emotion in what a couple of the characters go through.  Don’s style is not to dwell on those moments, so unlike a lot of other films, my guess is you won’t feel the emotion as strongly in the moment as you will when you look back on the movie and reflect about it.  

Recommended Frequency: A really tough call — the movie is intense enough (and weird enough) that I wouldn’t always be in the mood for it.  But there’s no denying its quality, for me.  I’d say this is one I will revisit over the years as I age, hoping to find new things in it: at first I thought it wouldn’t likely be an “every year” movie for me, but the longer I think about it, the more I want to engage with it again, and soon.  As long as the intensity of the film (and its bold, disruptive animation style) doesn’t put you off, I think you should definitely give it a watch, and if you tried it a long time ago but haven’t gone back, I really think you should.

If you decide to take my advice and watch Tokyo Godfathers, you’ve got options for viewing it: Amazon Prime will show it to subscribers, and you can watch it free (with ads) from Tubi, Pluto, or the Roku Channel. All the usual places will rent it to you, too.  As far as I can tell, all the streaming copies are the original Japanese audio performances with subtitles (which is how I watched it), but if you’re looking for a dubbed version, I believe the Blu-ray copy available at Amazon (and anywhere else that sells movies on disc) has the English audio track that GKIDS created.  The movie’s good enough that I may acquire myself a permanent copy this year — if so, I’ll report back.  This is a movie less widely held in American libraries, but Worldcat says there are 31 copies on disc out there, and maybe one of them is near you — worth a look, if that’s your preferred method of movie watching!

Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

Review Essay

Beyond Tomorrow is very much a film of its era, which means that I suspect it’ll land very differently for different folks, more so than usual.  If you’re a fan of standard-issue 1940s movies to the extent that you even admire their quirks – the relatively stationary camera in most scenes, the forced Transatlantic accent, the aggressively sentimental orchestral scores, etc. – then there’s plenty to appreciate here.  If you find most of that stiff and stagey, well, this may not be such a “forgotten classic” for you.  I lean in favor of appreciating 1940s filmmaking, so for me this was a fun movie to encounter, at least as an object to examine and analyze.

There’s a strange A Christmas Carol quality to the setup in Beyond Tomorrow – it’s the night of Christmas Eve, we’ve got multiple rich old guys and a couple of people who work for them, we’re about to see three ghosts on screen, and the movie’s ultimately interested in questions surrounding whether or not a life can be redeemed and a mistake put right.  And yet it’s not really structured in imitation of Dickens at all: in the long run, it’s the rich old men who, for the most part, are teaching a lesson rather than understanding one, and it’s the simple, humble young working class couple they come into contact with who have something to learn.

The movie poster for Beyond Tomorrow shows three old men in tuxes in the background, toasting towards the movie title and a young man and woman kissing each other. The tagline reads "A picture so far off the beaten track -- so beautiful in its theme of life 'beyond tomorrow'... so full of rich human hope and love and desire that it merits attention as the outstandingly different attraction of the season!"

The first half of this film is where almost all its best moments live.  It’s bursting with holiday energy, a montage of wreaths and bustling shoppers and a big old house getting ready for Christmas Eve dinner.  For a film of its era, it’s at least nodding in the direction of diversity – the all-white cast, anyway, encompasses folks speaking with lilts and brogues that run the gamut from English patrician to Texas buckaroo, from Russian emigre to Irish blarney.  There’s something nicely cosmopolitan about the energy, and the setup is cheerfully Christmassy, as the three old guys realize they’re running out of friends (in part because, as we learn, one of them has recently been in some kind of ethical or criminal scandal, and basically everybody but his two closest buddies has deserted him, and therefore all three of them).  That’s not what’s Christmassy, of course – the holiday vibes here come when the three of them place a bet, tossing three wallets into the snow out their window, with nothing inside but ten dollars and their three business cards.  Two of them are sure humans are good and will return the wallets with money intact; the third is at least allegedly misanthropic enough to believe they won’t, but you sense right away that it’s mostly bluster.  The film’s charmingly open about its philosophy – a character says out loud “There are no strangers on Christmas Eve” – and the outcome’s a lovely dinner with two young people, Jimmy and Jean, who are young and single and attractive and talented….exactly the sort of people who it’s most difficult to imagine finding themselves without a place to go on Christmas Eve, but whatever, this is a holiday fantasy and it’s fun.

At first it seems like we’re probably being set up for the old guys acting as a kind of three-headed Cyrano for Jimmy, but instead they all die in a plane crash.  Yeah, sorry, that was abrupt and spoilery, but a) it’s the movie’s actual premise, even if it arrives 35 minutes in, so I couldn’t figure out how to talk about the movie without acknowledging it, and b) it’s that abrupt in the movie too.  After that, this is actually a moral fable, as Jimmy turns the money and encouragement he got from the three old guys into the kind of A Star Is Born quandary that Hollywood loves – it turns out that being a celebrity means encountering unscrupulous people (especially, of course, she-devil women who want to lure you to the dark side).  Jean’s job is to be sad about things in general but not to talk too much about it.  The three old ghosts are allegedly here to help sort things out, but they seem to have almost no power over the living, and in any case the rules of the afterlife seem to slowly interfere with the possibility that they’ll be able to do much of anything at all.  I won’t spoil the ending but also if you think you know how this will end, I bet you’ll be at least partly right.  It’s a 1940s moral fable: it’s not trying to surprise you much.

And to be clear, it’s a very 1940s film in ways that will rightly bother some people – I think the only sign of a person of color is a single Black taxi driver who is at least given a generous tip from the one person who found a wallet and didn’t return it.  The old Englishman, Chadwick, says some truly appalling things about colonialism and how nice it is for the world that the United Kingdom conquered so much of it – he has other good qualities, but oof, that one conversation’s rough.  The cinematography (and writing) of the era doesn’t lend itself to naturalism, which means that depicting grief on screen doesn’t hit all that hard (Jimmy and Jean’s mourning the loss of the old guys never really resonates, though a couple of other characters manage to convey real loss, at least in a moment or two).  And, yeah, as aforementioned, the whole “Jimmy may get lured to his ruin by the sexuality of an eeeeevil woman” is pretty bad in terms of what it implies about the genders – there’s no sense that this woman might have any complexity (she’s called “soulless” at one point, not as an insult but as an implicitly “accurate” description), and there’s also no sense that Jimmy bears literally any moral responsibility for, you know, being a grown adult man who’s entertaining the idea of cheating on his fiancee.

If you’re not up for that kind of thing, I get it.  I get enough out of the movie’s first half to be able to let the second half stumble along past me, but I’ll admit, the messages I want to take away from the film are not probably the principal messages the filmmakers wanted to convey.  To me, this is a tale about generosity and the possibility of a Christmas peace being so pervasive that it can remake not just moments but lives.  I don’t have much interest in what it goes on to say, either about men and women, or about “young people these days”, or even about fame and fortune (though the movie’s probably not completely wrong to be wary of them): there’s one good thing about the 1940s, though.  They keep their feature films short.  If you like it, it’s breezy fun, and if you don’t, it’s over fast. 

I Know That Face: There’s surprisingly little overlap here with the prominent Christmas classics of the 30s, 40s, and 50s – I was expecting someone to have played a bit part in Miracle on 34th Street or to have been in a crowd scene in It’s a Wonderful Life.  Still, though, there’s some interesting intersections with more holidays-adjacent movies.  Alex Melesh, playing Josef the Russian butler, had played a waiter in The 3 Wise Guys, which is a flick co-written by Damon Runyon that opens on Christmas Day, with later climactic and culminating events on subsequent Christmases – not one I’ve seen (yet).  Harry Carey, who plays the curmudgeonly George Melton, starred as Bob Sangster in the original 1916 silent film The Three Godfathers, and the remake 3 Godfathers in 1948 is actually dedicated to him – both films are Westerns that pull some elements of the Magi from the Christmas story into the tropes and conventions of that genre, and tomorrow, in fact, I’ll be reviewing a movie that’s (very) loosely inspired by them.  And two cast members appear in different Little Women adaptations: Little Women famously opens at Christmas, and basically every adaptation of the novel involves some fairly prominent holiday scenes as a result.  From the Beyond Tomorrow cast, C. Aubrey Smith (the aging Brit, Chadwick, here) plays Mr. Laurence in the 1949 adaptation of Alcott’s novel, and Jean Parker (Jean Lawrence, the sweet young romantic interest here) plays Beth March in the 1933 adaptation.

That Takes Me Back:  Again, this is such a 1940s film – there would be plenty to call attention to, much of it both nostalgic and yet also not exactly fondly recalled, you know?  I mean, there’s an old-fashioned zing to the sight and sound of fingers tapping furiously at a typewriter, but of course here (as often, in the old days) it’s a bunch of nameless women taking dictation while one or more important old white dudes talk, and then they’re out of the way before we can learn anything about them.  It’s a reminder, I guess, of the ways that technology has leveled certain things about the world, even as it in many other ways hasn’t.  More pleasantly, I did enjoy the old school vibe of these senior citizens drinking Tom and Jerrys, a classic holiday 19th century punch that really doesn’t get much play these days (but maybe it should? If you’re drinking one tonight, let me know in the comments).  Also, one method by which exposition is delivered is a montage of images from a handwritten daily diary, and it reminded me of diary entries and letters I’ve seen from my own family from earlier decades, where just noting things they did that day was commonplace.  And sure, in a way, it’s what we do with social media, except it’s also not, you know?  Overall, if you want to glide back in time, Beyond Tomorrow will gladly take you there, but whether or not you like what you find will vary widely.

I Understood That Reference: Despite the setup being, as I noted above, something like a forgotten Dickens novella or an O. Henry short story, as far as I could tell there wasn’t a mention of any classic Christmas tales or figures of any kind.

Holiday Vibes (5/10):  It’s just all so front-loaded – if somehow the whole film could have taken place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, they really had it working.  I felt like I was at a celebration worth attending, and I was mostly enjoying the old fellows in the room while trying not to pay too much attention to the occasional racist remark….some of you are saying “hey, uh, that is actually just how Christmas with my family goes,” so it’s hitting the mark there.  I liked the messaging, too, around belief in humanity’s capacity for good, etc.  It’s just that the film wanders away and never really comes back to it – in the end it didn’t feel as Christmassy as I was expecting from the opening scenes.

Actual Quality (5.5/10):  I mean, it’s hard to pick a number here.  The Jimmy and Jean plot is so rough: she has so little agency, and weirdly, so does he?  But the three old guys, there’s really something there – the power of friendship, the desire to see people happy, etc.  It sucks that their version of the afterlife is a lot kinder to the most vocally racist of the trio than it is to the guy who’s challenging his colonialist paternalism, though.  I get some good feelings from some scenes later on in the film that do carry some emotional heft about the question of being ready to go, or what you’ll find on the other side.  But the film hasn’t really set up the rules or expectations of the afterlife in a way that the audience can follow.  Ultimately it’s both an underbaked film about ghosts and letting go of the Earth, and an underbaked 1940s romance.  I wish it had been courageous enough to do one of them well (ideally the first of those options).

Party Mood-Setter?  I think no, overall – there’s just not enough holiday here.  Though since the movie’s best stuff happens early, and after that you really only want to pay attention to the big splashy moments, it could work for a gathering where you just kind of want to be able to tune out over time, or chuckle occasionally at the ways it gets increasingly weird and outdated?

Plucked Heart Strings?  Okay, so, hear me out – I became genuinely emotional when one of the old guys got ready to step into the beyond, and suddenly out of the shadows emerged a dead loved one, who died too young, years before.  So, is this a great or even a good film?  I am (clearly) not making that argument.  But I can’t deny, there was a moment (and maybe one other, even closer to the film’s end) where I felt really moved.  The premise has power.  This is one of those 1940s films that really deserves a thoughtful remake.

Recommended Frequency:  Honestly, unless the 1940s stuff I’ve mentioned is just too likely to trigger bad reactions for you, I’d suggest you watch it once, sometime when you haven’t got anything else to do.  The premise and some of the acting/writing do enough that thinking about what you’re liking (and what’s not working) is honestly really interesting, I think, and again, you’ll get enough of a holiday kick from the first half that you’ll enjoy thinking back on that dinner table (while you look up a recipe for Tom and Jerrys).  I think once is all I’ll ever bother with, but I’m glad I did.
If you’d like to watch Beyond Tomorrow, Amazon Prime is streaming a colorized version with ads (it’s their Freevee service), and if you’d rather watch ads on a non-Bezos-related site, this old movie is available almost everywhere on free ad-supported services like Tubi and Pluto and Plex (and more).  Tubi and Plex are showing the original black and white version, and Pluto’s is in color.  You can, if you find ads too tedious, pay to rent it at Amazon Prime, Fandango, or Apple TV, and Amazon will also sell you a DVD version if this is one you want to own.  It’s on DVD in libraries, too, of course – more than a couple hundred, according to Worldcat.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

Review Essay

Ugh, this one’s going to get me in trouble.  Okay, fair warning’s warranted here, since there are a few Christmas movies that a ton of other people think of as “classic” or “traditional” that I think are….well, I think are mediocre, if not flat-out bad.  And wow, is National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation one of them: I had never seen it before watching it for this blog, and so alas I had to make this discovery as an adult and in real time while I scribbled down notes.  So, if hearing about this film from the perspective of somebody who was dismayed and surprised by how much it did NOT work for him is going to bother you, this is probably a post to skip, since I’ll be honest about how this one struck me as an audience member.  Obviously, this is no judgment on anybody’s holiday spirit (or taste in film) if you disagree with me!

Okay, for everybody who’s staying, let’s roll on: if you’re unfamiliar (or have forgotten), the premise of NLCV is really incredibly simple.  A man named Clark Griswold, living in the suburbs of Chicago, is trying to engineer the perfect family Christmas — decorations, guests, presents, the whole nine yards.  And the universe, in big and small ways, from his terrible overbearing boss to his terrible overbearing family to every atom and microcosm within a ten block radius of his house, seemingly, wants to ensure that nothing of the kind will occur.  It’s a premise I can imagine working.  But boy howdy, does it NOT work for me.

The poster for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation depicts an artistic rendering of Chevy Chase, dressed as Santa Claus, levitating off of his snowy rooftop due to the electricity coursing through his body from an improperly shielded strand of Christmas lights. The tagline promises, "Yule crack up!"

There’s a ton of humor coming at you in NLCV — broad physical performances and also a ton of scripted jokes from John Hughes, a man who wrote plenty of movies I liked a lot better (including a couple of pretty iconic holiday films).  I think part of the struggle for me was that it was really hard for me to locate the movie’s tone: is this a silly, Three Stooges-esque film to watch with a bunch of kids laughing at cartoonish sight gags?  Or is it a much more adult movie that’s best watched without anybody under the age of 13 in the room?  Is Clark Griswold a kind of indestructible Wile E. Coyote, or a naive Christmas-loving simpleton, or a sleazy yet clumsy asshole, or a sympathetic and downtrodden protagonist?  The answer is….kind of all of them?  Whichever one of them allows for a quick gag or an attempt at humor in the moment is who he is for the 30 seconds surrounding the gag.  Because my sense of this Hughes script is that it’s not written out of much real interest in the characters or the setting: instead, it strings together a series of sketches in which a loosely consistent cast of characters sets up joke after joke (no matter how painfully unfunny….or painful and unfunny….they often are) and then moves on to the next scene.  Is this a Christmas Monty Python and the Holy Grail?  If so, I can only wish that the members of Python had given this script a quick once-over, since the wit and intelligence of Grail’s writing are how it gets away with an otherwise probably unworkable structure.

Casting Chase as the center of the film is truly puzzling, to me — Chevy’s a guy who made a career out of portraying a condescending, snide prick who, at best, you can’t help but admire for his slick skill.  And this makes him a really weird choice for someone you’re asking to land the plane as a world-weary everyman who just wants to recreate the feeling of one classic childhood Christmas morning.  There’s a truly uncanny element to his performance sometimes, too, that weirdly resembles Johnny Depp’s performance as Willy Wonka twenty years later — that manic open-mouthed grin, the detached fifty-yard stare, the sense of utter dissociation from at least half of what’s going on around him most of the time.  Wonka, though, is written in that film as a troubled freak, a character in need of growth and self-awareness who only achieves it after first confronting his own demons on some level: love it or hate it, it was a choice, and it imbued that character with some kind of dramatic or emotional weight.  I don’t know what Clark Griswold’s deal is, and I’m not sure the script does either.  He sure doesn’t confront anything about himself, or grow even a little, and if he was meant to be nothing but a punchline that would be fine, but I felt like the movie kept trying to make me empathize with him.  Maybe Chase was once a little more personally appealing than I find him now, but to me, a Christmas movie with Chevy as its star has to be one in which I’m rooting AGAINST him, not for him.

I’m not going to say that nothing in the movie worked for me — there were some moments of mayhem that did feel real (as opposed to either tired or else feverish), and as a guy who spent some happy Christmases in Chicago, I did love the glimpses of the city dressed up for the holiday.  I could have used a lot more of that.

Otherwise, watching this movie genuinely felt like a chore to me from about the 45 minute point onward: almost every joke in this film is either announced with a fanfare and an elaborate overture, or else it’s beaten to death with ruthless excess, and in either case, it just wrings what little fun I was going to have out of the moment.  And to be clear, part of what makes this dreary is just the waste of talent — it’s an impressive cast and a famously gifted screenwriter, and somehow I just feel like nobody’s being asked to do anything near their level of talent.  Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s skill as a comedienne is wasted on a minor and unhinged role as an operatically mean-spirited neighbor, E.G. Marshall’s knack for playing a cantankerous old man is here reduced to such a one-note performance that he might as well be a cardboard cutout in the scenes he appears in, etc.

I think part of what makes it hard to use the cast well is that, as designed, it’s difficult for me to make any sense of what this film is supposed to be.  Satire of the Christmas movie genre?  Broad slapstick comedy, but with enough profanity and sex jokes that it’s for adults and not kids?  Black comedy about the horrors of suburbia?  It could have been any of those things and I’m still not sure it wasn’t trying to be.  My guess is, if it works for you, it’s one of those things, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out which of them it would be.  The one thing the movie fully commits to communicating is how painfully awful it is to share Christmas with literally any member of your spouse’s immediate family….it’s a slightly atonal message to make central to your holiday movie, but it’s a message of some kind to start with.  But I can’t say it felt either keenly insightful or bleakly hilarious about this particular kind of social agony, and without achieving either of those, I’m left puzzled about how this could be a classic in annual rotation on cable channels.  I’m sure some of you will tell me (I hope politely, but I guess I did just say a lot of rude things about this movie) in the comments.

I Know That Face: The cast, as aforementioned, is stacked, but I’ll choose a few Yuletide crossovers from some of the lesser-known names.  Diane Ladd, perhaps best known for parts in 1970s classics like Chinatown and here playing one of many thankless roles as Clark’s mother, appeared in Christmas TV movies in 2018 and 2020: she’s Grandma Frances, whose heirloom ornaments are the missing McGuffin in Christmas Lost and Found, and she’s Nana in Charlie’s Christmas Wish, a Christmas movie about a veteran and a dog, so I’d rate that as having about 100% likelihood of getting a “Yes” for Plucked Heart Strings in a FFTH review, if it ever got one.  Brian Doyle-Murray, who you’ve seen in a lot of things (I think of Groundhog Day first, but you might easily be thinking of anything from Caddyshack to JFK to Wayne’s World) and who in this took on the thankless role of Clark’s horrible employer, has of course picked up spots in a couple of recent TV movies of his own: he plays a fellow surnamed Holliday in 2014’s Christmas Under Wraps and 2022’s A Cozy Christmas Inn, as well as appearing as Noel Nichols in 2015’s The Flight Before Christmas, a Christmas romantic flick that looks like a classic example of the Only One Bed trope, if that’s your thing.  Lastly, Sam McMurray plays Bill, Clark Griswold’s office pal — he might be a bit less recognizable to you (though to me he was instantly familiar from his role as the slimeball mattress king, Lester Leeman, in the aggressive beauty pageant satire, Drop Dead Gorgeous) but he’s still an actor with a ton of supporting credits over the years.  Sam McMurray offers at least a little variation on this category’s frequent theme of recent Netflix/Hallmark fare: he played Herman Munster, of all people, in the 1996 television movie, The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas, and IMDB says he voices an unnamed character in Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street, a direct to video Christmas anthology movie from 2001 based on the Saturday morning cartoon series, Disney’s Recess.  What a rich tapestry the holiday movie “genre” is, eh?

That Takes Me Back: I have to be honest — I found the movie so alternately distasteful and boring that it was hard to fixate on the nostalgia material on offer, of which there was surely a fair amount.  Probably the most nostalgia-inducing slices here had to do with the light display — whether we’re talking the cumbersome string of lights (a modern Clark would have gone with one of those laser projection doohickeys and saved a ton of fuss) or the fact that serial wiring meant that in the old days one bulb being unscrewed could prevent the whole string from lighting up, or just the chaos of nine hundred plugs plugged into other plugs (which I feel power strip / surge protectors have now functionally put an end to).  I wonder if the tension of getting the perfect light display will rapidly fade from Christmas movie trope expectations now that there are so many simple ways to coordinate really dazzling light displays?

I Understood That Reference: There were a couple of nods to more iconic (and artistically successful) media products in NLCV: early in the film, Rusty’s watching the end of It’s a Wonderful Life (“teacher says, every time a bell rings”) right as the doorbell starts ringing, which to me implied that a bunch of angels were being made, or else It’s a Wonderful Life was being mocked….as always with this film, it’s slightly hard to tell.  And very late in the movie, Clark recites The Night Before Christmas for the family on Christmas Eve, right before a character arrives with his kidnapping victim and the movie changes tone another three times in three minutes.

Holiday Vibes (8.5/10):  Look, there’s no question that basically the entire film is about things that are closely tied to holiday experiences, from painful family gatherings (hopefully rarer and less painful for most of us than what the Griswolds endure) to light displays to figuring out how to keep the magic of Santa alive for children.  Whatever else the film is, in my opinion, not doing right in its attempt to be a Christmas classic, it’s making serious efforts here on the vibes front.  Why only 8.5 out of 10, then, you might ask?  To me the film is a letdown by being unrealistic in a bad way — I don’t mind an unrealistic happy Christmas, since half of what we’re chasing every year is a mirage of the perfect holiday we’ll never achieve.  But this isn’t a holiday experience that makes me want to immerse myself in it — to the contrary, I found the viewing experience so off-putting that it dimmed my Christmas enthusiasm by more than a little.  I didn’t identify with the bad feelings; I just wanted to escape them.  Any movie that’s doing that can’t really reach the heights of a 10/10.  I mean, I think an artfully constructed bad Christmas that’s reminiscent of painfully real holiday memories could win me over (in the right mood), but whatever else this movie is, it’s not that.

Actual Quality (3/10):  I know, folks, I know, it’s a John Hughes movie and it’s full of great comedy stars and some of you grew up on this movie, and honestly, you can have it.  It’s competently made in terms of editing/set direction, and there are elements of good performances in spite of the script, but there’s just too many other complaints to offer, all of which I have already offered above.  This is, as always, not meant as an “objective” measure of the movie’s effectiveness for all viewers — just a loud wail of honest regret from yours truly, a deeply disappointed audience member.

Party Mood-Setter? Probably not.  I mean, this really isn’t for little kids, and it’s not for most grandparents either (the grandparents I had, anyway!).  The one thing I would say in its favor on this front is that I think a lot of the sight gags and slapstick would play better if it was something I was just catching a glimpse of as I moved around hanging ornaments, etc.  If you’re with a crowd that likes this movie already or if they don’t mind the edgier elements in the story, I can see it working as a background piece, especially on low volume.

Plucked Heart Strings? Haha, not even a little bit.  The film goes for sincerity about once every half hour as part of its cavalcade of tones, etc., but none of those moments came close to landing actual emotional connection, let alone tears, for me.

Recommended Frequency:  I’m never watching it again.  You’re welcome to, if somehow this sounds appealing (or if it’s an old favorite of yours).  If it’s your first time, my guess is you’ll either be more or less instantly aware of whether it’s your kind of movie or not.  If it’s a perennial classic for you, more power to you: I’ll just leave the room if you put it on, but that’s why most houses have more than one room.  If you haven’t seen it and you do want my advice, there are SO many other films to enjoy this holiday season — find another one, on this blog or elsewhere, and give it a whirl instead.

To stream this movie, as of right now, it looks like your easiest options are either Hulu or Max, if you subscribe to either one.  If you’re a cable subscriber, it looks to me like TBS will stream it for you, also.  You can pay to rent it at all the usual places (Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV, Fandango, etc.), and if you like this movie a lot more than I do, it’s pretty cheaply available on Blu-ray or DVD at Amazon.  And as always, don’t forget about your local libraries!  Worldcat tells me there are copies of NLCV on DVD, available for checkout from 750 libraries — cheers to them all, and best of luck to you if you give this one a spin!

Boxing Day (2021)

Review Essay

It might be easy to feel like all the good holiday film premises have already been made: as this blog will make clear, there’s no shortage of “Christmas movies” for consumption.  But I think one thing that’s easy for at least some of us to forget is how restricted the storytelling base has been for a long time: the pool of people getting the opportunity to screenwrite, direct, and star in movies has been limited in this country to a fairly white crowd (and not just white Americans, but white Americans from certain demographic categories of geography, class, etc.).  Boxing Day, then, is a great reminder of how a pretty ordinary premise — a dude is bringing his new loved one to meet his family at the holidays but uh oh there’s some unexpected secrets to be revealed! — can take on some new life and offer a meaningfully different experience when the directing, writing, and performances are coming from a cultural space that’s been underrepresented.  Here, Aml Ameen takes us right inside the world of Black British-Caribbean people in London, and the extended networks of family and friendship that tie them together, and the result is a pretty charming (though, again, fairly simple) piece of holiday entertainment.

Again, the writing isn’t really where the film’s breaking ground, at least on the level of the big plot elements.  This is the story of Melvin, a newly-successful Black author, who’s returning semi-triumphant to his hometown of London at Christmas to promote his new book, accompanied by his lovely African-American girlfriend (practically-but-not-technically fiancee) Lisa who’s never been there before.  It’s also the story of Georgia, Melvin’s childhood sweetheart but now ex, who (we learn early in the film) got left in the lurch when Melvin fled the family drama across the ocean — and Georgia (or “Gigi” as she’s mostly referred to) has spent the intervening years becoming a massive pop star while remaining incredibly close to Melvin’s family.  But in a larger sense it’s a whole family wrestling with change — can we move on from Mom and Dad getting divorced, can we accept new partners if they’re not British (or not Black?), can we accept that the next generation thinks and acts differently than we did, etc.  Melvin’s having changed in ways they didn’t expect (or welcome) is just the catalyst for a lot of bigger conversations that are had — some of them resolved and some not so much.  That’s all right, I think: family is often messy, and the film’s reasonably honest about that.

The poster for Boxing Day carries the tagline, "It's not going to be a quiet one". Visually, eight members of the primary cast are arranged in a 3x3 grid of open cardboard boxes, each one in their own box like the opening of the Brady Bunch. The 9th box, at bottom center, is filled with gifts, one of which bears the Union Jack flag emblem.

A lot of what’s fun about the film, for me, is just seeing into the context of a family very unlike mine, and lives unlike mine.  Whether it’s Gigi and Melvin’s sister (nicknamed, I swear, “Boobsy”) playfully arguing about how their different skin tones are perceived, or Melvin’s brother Josh in a fight with his cousin Joseph over who gets to flirt with the alluring Alison, or just Melvin’s “auntie” Valerie — who, to be honest, I have no clue whether she’s his actual aunt or his mom’s cousin or just some lady from the block — shouting about how he doesn’t need an American, she’ll find him a good Jamaican church girl?  You just feel immersed in someplace that I sure hope and expect is authentic, given that the writer/director’s coming from that world.  And honestly, it was a fun place to visit — a holiday gathering that felt alive and lively even when it was uncomfortable.

There’s no denying that at times the film creaks a little — production values can feel a little more like a TV movie at times, and not all the cast was quite experienced or steady enough to make their scenes pop.  The script, too, can be a bit rushed, so that sometimes key pieces of information slip by too fast, or I find myself watching a scene without 100% understanding who’s who here, and what they’re here to do.  The tone of it carries it through, though, and I liked that the script avoided the really hack moves you might otherwise have expected.  A big Hollywood film, for instance, might have had Lisa act out in dumb ways when she realizes her fiancee’s ex is essentially Ariana Grande — had her try to climb out a bathroom window and get stuck, maybe, or sabotage the ex in some way that backfires, etc.  Instead, Lisa just settles into the social space, giving as well as she gets when talk is lively, and slipping in slightly more barbed words via innocent-seeming asides when she can’t help but take a swipe (or riposte in response to one).  It’s what a real person might do, in other words, and when it blows up (as it inevitably would) it feels more honest.  In the end there’s some movie magic, of course, but I liked that for the most part the film wanted me to just believe in these characters rather than go for a cheap joke it could use in a trailer.

Characters grow up a little quickly here, but the movie needs them to, and in any case, I felt like the movie’s message in part was that nobody here was all that messed up in the first place, really.  Sometimes people are more ready to be responsible or tolerant than even their loved ones would guess; sometimes people are better able to move on, or to accept other people moving on, than they’d have even thought was true of themselves.  We know what kind of movie we’re in, of course, from the very beginning.  And what’s a holiday film for, after all, if not to persuade us that our natures do in fact have better angels, and that sometimes we listen to them?  In a December like the one many Americans are living through in 2024, a message like that might be more than a little necessary: I was glad to get it, myself.

I Know That Face: One delightful surprise here was that Lisa Davina Philip (who plays Auntie Valerie here) is the same actress who played the widow-seeking-widower postwoman Ms. Johnston in Jingle Jangle — she’s putting down absolutely scene-stealing performances in both movies, but the roles are so different that I literally didn’t realize the two actresses were the same person until IMDB told me so.  You can see my thoughts about Jingle Jangle on that blog post.  Claire Skinner (who plays Caroline, who is Gigi’s mother and Shirley’s good friend) played Madge Arwell, one of two title characters in the Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.”  And lastly, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (who plays Shirley here) is Veronica in New Year’s Day, a movie in which two teenage boys complete a lot of dangerous dares on the titular day — and yeah, I guess that film is a stretch as a “holiday movie”, but New Year’s Day is undeniably a holiday in the wintertime so I think it should count.

That Takes Me Back: This movie’s too recent yet to really take me back to any particular nostalgic sight or sound….it sure won’t be long, though, before it’s reminding me of the good old days of 2021, huh?  It felt of its moment, anyway, and we’ll see how that feels, in time.

I Understood That Reference: Lisa has fun teasing Melvin a bit about his Britishness, which comes out in a couple of A Christmas Carol quips as she says “Damn, Scrooge!” and “Good luck, Tiny Tim!” to him on different occasions.  At one point, in the background, someone playing Santa nearly falls over at Shirley and Richard’s amateur Christmas theatrical, which as far as I can tell from the glimpses we get is a very strange nativity play, its own Christmas story of course.  And lastly, a guy standing in the street while music plays, showing one after another the set of cue cards that spell out a message of love….that just has to be a Love Actually reference, doesn’t it?  

Holiday Vibes (8/10): In terms of strict depiction of “American classic Christmas”, maybe this doesn’t hit every mark.  But in terms of bringing us into multiple lively and socially complex family spaces in the context of holiday traditions, this is firing on all cylinders — there’s no question that the movie does a lot to bring me the feeling of visiting family at this time of year.  It’s a different enough family experience from what most of my envisioned audience would encounter that I think it’s not quite to the apex of my imagined ideal, but it’s unquestionably a solidly holiday flick.

Actual Quality (8/10): So, with a lot of holiday films, there’s this balancing act between your emotional and your intellectual reaction to the film (this is true for me, anyway), and I think that’s certainly the case here.  My assessment of the film’s quality, then, is to say it’s good but not great: there’s an honesty to the writing on the level of dialogue, but the plot is a little goofily over the top at times, and the uneven range of acting experience and skill in a very classically indie movie cast means that some scenes are great and others have a harder time engaging my attention.  It’s not award-worthy work, but it’s definitely solid film-making.

Party Mood-Setter?  The film’s got great energy and some quotable moments, and if you and a bunch of your youngish adult friends are getting together to have cocktails and decorate sugar cookies or do a secret Santa exchange I can easily imagine this on the TV at a low volume for you to pay a low, casual level of attention to.  

Plucked Heart Strings?  Hmmm.  I can imagine a couple of moments later in the film being emotionally resonant, since the script is often handling something real about family, and if that’s intersecting with your particular experiences of family, I think the authenticity could get to you.  I didn’t feel those moments myself, though, and I’m hesitant to give it the nod on the basis of my guessing how others might react.

Recommended Frequency?  I mean, I’ve seen it only once, but this feels like it could be an every year movie for me.  It’s warm and sweet and silly in just the right kinds of ways: it makes me feel like I’m eavesdropping on a family I’ll never be a part of but would get a kick out of joining for a potluck.  As I said earlier, there’s a gap here — I can tell you intellectually what’s not totally working about the movie.  But I liked it a lot on that emotional level, and I think if you give it a try, it would probably win you over in that same way, and I hope you give it a chance.

Amazon Prime will show this to you, if you’re subscribed, and if not, Tubi will show it to you for free (with ads).  As far as I can tell, the film had such a limited (and UK focused) release that there’s either no DVD/Blu-ray copy available anymore, or it never really had a release on this side of the Atlantic.  As a result, this may be a rare film that won’t be accessible via your local library, but it couldn’t hurt to ask, in my opinion.

Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

Review Essay

The definition of a “Christmas film” is always negotiable — yes, Die Hard fans, I know you’re still out there, and no, I won’t be covering Bruce Willis and his machine gun, at least not in 2024 — and that’s certainly true here.  My general rule is that if Christmas is a key setting for more than a few minutes of the movie, it ought to count, and this film, which opens on a snowy scene with Jingle Bells playing in the background as people carry trees down a New York City sidewalk, really has to count.  But as I’ll discuss, it’s among the less seasonally oriented flicks I’ll cover here at Film for the Holidays.

The initial premise is more traditionally rom-com than anything else — stiff middle-aged publisher Shep (played by Jimmy Stewart) lives upstairs from “exotic” art dealer Gill (played by Kim Novak).  She thinks he’s attractive, he’s polite but has a fiancee, and she….well, she’s a witch, and one or two little spells couldn’t hurt, could they?  If it sounds like a Bewitched prequel, it basically is: that series was created after this film came out, by Columbia who released this movie in the first place.  And I’d love to tell you this movie charmed me as much as episodes of Bewitched did, once upon a time.  But it didn’t really land for me — and the reason I think the movie doesn’t work was honestly a real surprise to me.

The movie poster for Bell, Book and Candle offers the tagline "Getting here is half the fun". The top half of the poster features Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, barefoot on a chaise longue, embracing, with a Siamese cat sitting atop them both. The bottom half is divided into multiple boxes announcing the supporting cast: Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Hermione Gingold, Elsa Lanchester, and Janice Rule.

First off, though, quite a few individual elements here do work.  I love the late 1950s aesthetic — sure, the 1940s classics really established the genre of the holiday movie, but as a kid growing up in the late 20th Century, it was the 1950s that seemed to have created the Christmas look I think we were all nostalgic for, less wartime optimism and more the shimmer of the postwar boom.  Kim Novak as Gill is sensational most of the time — sultry and alluring in ways the ‘40s films wouldn’t really have let her be, and clearly presented as “daring” (Novak is barefoot basically the whole movie, which felt both avant-garde and playfully flirtatious, given that it’s New York City in December and her ground floor retail establishment can’t be all that warm).  Her brother, Nicky, is played by a really dazzlingly talented young Jack Lemmon, who pulls off a range from simpleton to scheming and makes the character feel coherent throughout — sure, it’s a comedic performance, but that doesn’t make his skill LESS impressive.  If anything, it’s a bit more impressive that he’s applying so much talent to a role that’s honestly not very consistently or compellingly written, on the page.  The two of them are on screen much of the movie’s running time, and thank goodness for that, since they’re usually doing something worth watching.

The big problem here — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — is that I think Jimmy Stewart’s performance is a distracting mess.  Now, Stewart’s one of the finest American actors of his generation, if not ever: I love his work in It’s A Wonderful Life, and if anything he’s even better in The Shop Around The Corner, both of them iconic holiday films and likely to be coming soon to a blog near you.  Here, though, everything about his presentation of the character goes weird from the beginning.  Stewart’s not helped by the fact that he looks all of the 50 years old he is when this movie comes out, and Kim Novak is very 25 — sometimes there’s a chemistry between them, but much more often you just really wish each of them would find someone their own age.  (And yes, folks, I know they’re also in a romance in Vertigo — I’m not telling you anything about that movie, I’m just telling you what I think doesn’t work about this one.)  Shep is written really oddly: at times he seems naive (his calm response to finding a strange old woman inside his locked apartment is very odd) but at other times he feels almost rakish, talking about the Kinsey Report with Gill when he barely knows her, or telling his secretary he wants her to have the negligee he had ordered for his fiancee.  And fundamentally, the thing Shep needs to pull off is the feeling that we’re watching a man gradually become unsettled, even haunted, by the feeling that his own emotions and thoughts have been invaded by magical compulsion, and that he’s so horrified by the thought that he decides to run away from his brand new fiancee who….well, who looks and acts like a sultry Kim Novak who’s half his age.  Stewart, to me, just doesn’t land the plane at all — his attempts to convey pretty simple experiences like “allergic to cats” or “scared of witchcraft” feel like awkward flailing by someone in Drama 101.  I can’t really explain why it’s not working, since Stewart clearly knows how to act (he was, I think undeniably, among the finest performers of his generation) — I can only think either that he felt the script was beneath him enough that he decided to ham it up, or else that maybe he felt a little embarrassed that they were casting him as a 25 year old’s love interest, and his feelings of unease or awkwardness emerged in his performance as a result.

The film has other issues, to be sure.  My notes as I was watching remarked on multiple occasions about pretty terrible sound editing — there’s a LOT of ADR (where an actor re-records their lines in the sound booth, after the fact), and it’s just not mixed well, so that it doesn’t sound like the actor is talking naturally in the room we see them in, but instead they sound like they’re in a recording booth talking directly into a microphone.  The script’s silliness is sometimes hard to follow: for instance, a character promises to keep a secret, but then almost immediately is handing out information left and right, and the film never seems to present it as a flub-up or subversion of the promise.  The movie struggles too, I think, to convey what tone we’re supposed to be picking up on: is this light-hearted or spooky?  Is Gillian basically well intentioned or basically self-serving?  And to be clear, I think intentional ambiguity in a movie is just fine: really good, even.  But there were too many moments for me where this felt less like conscious ambiguity and more like carelessness, or else honest confusion.

As a holiday film, well, I’ll give it a rating below, but I’ll admit, after the first 35 minutes or so, we leave Christmas in our wake completely, other than a scene in which kids are throwing snowballs and skating (which felt holiday-adjacent to me?).  And even in that first half hour, these are people who don’t seem all that interested in Christmas — we’re given some traditional music here, but these adults don’t seem to have gatherings to attend, last minute gifts to buy, etc.  They spend Christmas Eve in a nightclub without seemingly a care in the world.

Ultimately the film’s got fun moments where it cheekily gets close to breaking the “code” for films at the time — one bold line of dialogue occurs when Shep tells a character, late in the movie, that Gill is a witch, and the character replies “A witch?  Shep, you just never learned to spell.”  Which is maybe the classiest (and possibly only, in 1958) way you could call a character a….well, it starts with a b.  Again, though, it can’t ever really commit to a tone, since I think the whole premise leaves us caught between seeing Gill’s bewitching of Shep as lighthearted fun and a deep betrayal, and it’s just a bit too hard to square those things no matter how you squint at them.  So the fun, for me at least, is intermittent, and the lasting impression is more confused than classic when I think about the movie as a whole.  Scene by scene, or line by line, though?  There’s some real gems in this one when remembered in that way, and it’s a flirtatiously fun changeup to throw into the catalog of holiday films I’m taking on here.

I Know That Face: Obviously, Jimmy Stewart who plays Shepherd Henderson in this film is better known to Christmas movie fans as the star of Frank Capra’s classic It’s A Wonderful Life or of the less-famous but also brilliant The Shop Around the Corner — most of us probably see his face every single Christmas season, perhaps multiple times.  And Elsa Lanchester, the mischievous Aunt Queenie here, plays Matilda the housekeeper in the household of the Broughams in another half-forgotten mid-century Christmastime film, The Bishop’s Wife.

That Takes Me Back: This “takes me back” even farther than I was alive to see, but I was charmed that we don’t just see characters using a rotary phone, but we hear them referencing a phone number that begins with a word.  I’m tempted to start handing out my office extension on campus as “HArrison Six Two”.  A less appealing hit of nostalgia came along with the sight of someone smoking casually indoors (as Merle does at the Zodiac) — I was describing to my daughter just a few weeks ago how the world used to have things called “smoking” and “non-smoking” sections, a thing she can’t really envision.  And I don’t know that this is actually a throwback, but the work “negligee” feels SUPER old-fashioned to me for some reason.  If you all are constantly talking about negligees, I mean, a) I bet you throw a great party, and b) clearly you and I are having some of your most boring conversations (my apologies).  Oh, and I chuckled at the line, “A typewriter: I’ve got to get a typewriter.”

Sadly, I didn’t find that this film yielded anything at all in the I Understood That Reference category; better luck next time, maybe.

Holiday Vibes (2/10): This was a fun film to include on the blog, and it does come up as a “holiday movie” on some lists, but as noted above, the actual festive content is really brief, and we don’t even really get much of a “Christmas” for the film’s one Christmas Eve sequence.  If you’re someone who likes to think broadly about what counts as a holiday movie, it’s not like there’s nothing here for you….but there’s not a whole lot here for you.

Actual Quality (7/10): Bell, Book and Candle is a movie I wish I could recommend with more enthusiasm, since there’s undeniably some worthwhile things to enjoy here.  I have the feeling it’s one I’ll rewatch in a few years, thinking maybe I judged it too harshly….and find myself saying again “ah, right, it just doesn’t work as a romance”.  I do think that almost everything around the romance DOES work, and for that reason I hate to be so down about it.  But in a romantic comedy, if the romance ain’t working, I don’t know that the film has anywhere to go in the end.

Party Mood-Setter?  I mean, if you’re having a flirty, fun, fifties shindig this holiday season, throw Kim and Shep on the screen and don’t pay that much attention, maybe?  But honestly it’s got to be a “No” since what this question is asking is, can this background a festive holiday gathering, and here I don’t think it’s anywhere close to being enough of a holiday vibe.

Plucked Heart Strings?  There’s emotion on screen, but I don’t feel pulled in by any sentiment — Gill is certainly going through it, especially late in the film, but I never found myself feeling anything along with her.  Again, I think the tone is the challenge here, since it’s not clear to me who’s wronged who, or how, or even if anybody’s really been wronged at all, and the main characters became just a little too caricatured along the way for me to connect deeply with them like this.

Recommended Frequency? Look, if you’ve seen it and it didn’t win you over, I’m definitely not here to tell you to put it on this December.  But if you’ve never seen it, honestly, I think you could give it a go for Kim and Jack: Novak and Lemmon are really on their game here, and even if the film is only “fine” overall, I doubt you’ll regret getting to see the movie’s best scenes and lines. As for me, having seen it once already, I do think this will be a once a decade kind of movie for me — if it’s more than that for you, though, I’m delighted and hope you have fun in the fifties!

You can stream Bell, Book and Candle if you’re an Amazon Prime member, and Tubi will play it for you for free (with ads).  It can, of course, be rented from most of the usual places online.  Amazon will sell it to you on Blu-ray, or DVD, or VHS (is VHS making a comeback, folks, and nobody told me?).  And as always, I encourage you to make use of your local library: mine has the movie on DVD, at least, and I bet yours will too.

Jack Frost (1998)

Review Essay

There’s this hack comedy quality just oozing from Jack Frost from the jump — it’s hard to say what it is exactly.  Could it be that the main character is actually named Jack Frost, which we know because he’s a musician in a group called the Jack Frost Band, which we can see displayed prominently behind him, while he sings the lounge lizardiest version of “Frosty the Snowman” I’ve ever heard?  And in the audience an enthusiastic record company exec literally places a cellphone call and tells the person on the other end to “listen to this”, holding the phone up pointed at the stage like someone whose only image of a great concert is from Back to the Future?  Oy.  We haven’t even met the child actors yet, and this is already so painfully a mediocre ‘90s family movie, which, as a kid who grew up in the ‘90s, I sure have a deep experience of as a milieu.

Because yes, on the one hand, this is a story about magic — about a child who resurrects his dead father in the body of a snowman by means of an unexpectedly magical harmonica and then the dad can learn some Lessons about Parenting and the Value of Family.  But it’s also a movie that’s picking through ideas cut out of other, better-but-still-not-amazing ‘90s movies, and deciding to shove all the schoolyard snow bullies and ridiculously self-important children’s fantasy into the film it can manage to hold.  Our main child character, Charlie Frost, is a hero, smart and friendly and skilled, and his only enemies in life are the dumbest and most mindlessly aggressive of meathead elementary schoolers — squinting, scowling menaces who use the word “twerp” like it’s going out of style and prioritize actions that will cause emotional harm since they have no ambitions in life beyond being screenplay villains.

The movie poster for Jack Frost features a huge snowman in a top hat and red scarf with an eerie, menacing grin on his face, looming in the background behind and above the title of the film and the movie's principal cast members, Michael Keaton, Kelly Preston, and Joseph Cross, plus an adorable dog. It was the 90s.

Part of what’s exhausting about the movie — and I’m sure it’s partially because I’m not a kid anymore, I’m a parent, and I see these things differently now — is that in the cinema of the 1990s, few things were worse than a parent whose job was important or demanding enough that they couldn’t devote 100% of their time to teaching their kid how to play hockey or bake cookies.  I mean, Keaton as Jack Frost is not that bad a parent — he’s curious about his kid, he’s been thinking about him while he was away, he prioritizes time with the kid the moment he’s home, including playful midnight snowman building, etc.  Sure, he makes a promise he couldn’t keep, but it just feels like a pretty minor sin in the grand scale of things — but the movie subsequently punishes him by killing him off, and then restoring him to life solely so that he can learn how important it is to self-destructively indulge every wish Charlie has.  Am I reading too much into a screenplay that didn’t honestly think that hard about this?  Sure, I suppose — you can expect more of this kind of overthinking on other films too, I suspect!  I just think that the film already had a pretty massive idea here in the snowman that’s a resurrected human being — lashing that kind of elemental magic to a story this pedestrian just seems so foolish and tedious.

I mean, surely there’s a limit to how many butt jokes you can make in a film and expect to be taken seriously.  Add to that the fact that they take advantage of a major character who’s a snowman to make multiple PG-acceptable (apparently) BALLS jokes?  Like, I guess that’s what a snowman’s constituent elements are — they’re balls?  What am I even talking about anymore?  And the screenwriters know how hack this movie is, since early on in his second, crystalline existence, we even hear Michael Keaton comment on how bad a joke it is that a man named Jack Frost became a snowman after death.  I have to say, fellas, it doesn’t make it less goofy and ill-advised to have you acknowledge it.  But “goofy and ill-advised” are the constant drumbeat of this movie — at one point, Jack Frost tells Charlie, “you da man!” To which his son replies “no, YOU da man!”  To which Jack replies….can you guess?  “NO, I’m da SNOWman!”  I was shocked there wasn’t a laugh track.  Later in the movie, a character says to Jack and his son that “a snowdad is better than no dad.”  That’s a line so howlingly awful that my wife and I have been saying it to each other at every opportunity, ever since I accidentally made her watch this with me.

I will say, though, that I think it’s possible the movie is hampered by factors external to the script — any movie reliant on the naturalism of its child acting performance is likely to have a really rough go of it unless it’s very lucky with casting.  In this one, for instance, Joseph Cross was a kid with some talent — he’s grown up to be a very solid performer in the films I’ve seen, at least.  But as a child actor in Jack Frost, he’s pretty rough — and he’s acting opposite an animatronic/early CGI snowman effect that on the one hand is pretty incredible for the technology at the time, but on the other hand is still pretty limited in its ability to convey Keaton’s emotion and energy.  The movie’s best on-camera performer (once Keaton’s trapped inside Frosty) is Kelly Preston as his wife, but the film’s so engrossed in Jack Frost’s need to fix his allegedly terrible parenting that it pays really no attention to his relationship with his wife, and as a result she’s far too sidelined.  Essentially, I’m arguing, the screenplay was doing no favors of any kind to the movie in the first place, but the premise worked against its ability to put compelling performances on the screen — maybe there are folks out there who feel nostalgia about this (or can still marvel at the snowman: again, it’s honestly pretty cool as a practical effect), but for me, it’s just a reminder of all the ways a movie can go wrong.

I Know That Face: Michael Keaton, of course the leading role here as Jack Frost, is also the title character in Batman Returns — a film that, like Die Hard, is set at Christmastime and has Christmas elements, but was never marketed in that way, yet now it’s amusingly contrarian to claim it’s one of your favorite Yuletide movies.  Hey, you do you.  Andrew Lawrence, who plays Tuck Gronic (one of Charlie’s hockey teammates), voices T.J. Detweiler on Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street, as well as directing and co-starring in Mistletoe Mixup, a holiday romance flick involving a couple of other Lawrence brothers, to boot.  Lastly, Mark Addy, who plays Mac MacArthur, the improbably British man who is somehow also a local retail employee in this tiny Colorado mountain town, appears as “Ass” in The Flint Street Nativity, a television movie from Great Britain in which adult actors portray children acting in a school Christmas play.  Ugh, heaven help me, I am intrigued: what a bonkers premise.

That Takes Me Back: Man, the ‘90sness of the film was such a nostalgic rush that picking out individual elements was a bit difficult, ironically.  Things I noticed in particular included the kid needing a bag full of “Game Boy batteries” for his trip to the cabin, him having a lava lamp on his bedside table (what was it about the ‘90s and lava lamps? Did we have some technological leap forward in lava lamps in that era?), snowboarding being treated as something new and edgy, and lastly, having actual independent radio stations where there’s a live local DJ talking to you.  That last one’s sad.

I Understood That Reference: Frosty the Snowman, of course, looms large over this film — it’s the only piece of Christmas media I detected, but we do get a double dose, both of the song (oozing with lounge singer charm) and later a glimpse of the animated Rankin/Bass television special itself in all its tacky glory.

Holiday Vibes (3.5/10): Jack Frost himself, of course, is a figure who doesn’t really play into any particular holiday pantheon, and this snowman phenomenon doesn’t really play with either the Jack Frost mythology or the idea of Christmas’s magic.  Though the film takes place around the idea of celebrating Christmas, honestly the movie is so busy being a ‘90s kids’ comedy full of bullies and butt jokes that there’s not all that much holiday energy on display?  It’s about as Christmassy as any film set in December in the United States, which is to say, a bit, but not that much.

Actual Quality (3.5/10): Surely I’ve already given you enough commentary on this — it’s a bad movie.  All the good things about it are Michael Keaton trying his best under pretty dire conditions (he’s badly miscast as a relaxed lead singer in a band, and the snowman’s lamentable dialogue has already been referenced) plus a decent adult supporting cast (Preston and Addy have talent, to be sure), and a snowman effect that’s genuinely impressive (while also being creepy and chunky, especially when viewed from the vantage point of 2024).  All of that adds up to a film that still really lacks any reason for existing, let alone for taking 100 minutes of your evening.  If you’re not already pretty deeply nostalgic for this, watch the trailer and you’ll know all that you need to.

Party Mood-Setter? No.  At least I can’t imagine a party that would be enhanced by it — there’s so many better family films that have both better quality and more holiday energy.

Plucked Heart Strings? No!  It’s honestly kind of incredible that a movie about a dad dying on Christmas Day, and then being restored to half-life only to then basically die on Christmas Day…again…somehow never once made me feel emotionally invested, but it really didn’t.  The movie’s tone (and everything else about it) works relentlessly against this.

Recommended Frequency: NO.  Just, no.  If you didn’t already form an attachment to this movie at a young age, I would steer you to so many other, better movies.  I’m not really thrilled I watched the whole thing, and I definitely won’t be touching it again.

Well, friends, if you have cable television (I know, I know, it’s 2024, but SOME of you statistically must still have it!), TNT will stream this to you for free.  You can buy or rent a digital copy from all the usual places — YouTube, Google Play, AppleTV, etc.  Amazon, in addition to renting it to you on Prime, would sell you a DVD copy or, astonishingly, a copy on VHS, of all things.  But, don’t?

Scrooge (1935)

Review Essay

Welcome to the first of these A Christmas Carol adaptation reviews, which will appear on the blog each Sunday.  I’m sure any of us who love Christmas movies have a favorite Carol, and part of what inspired me to start this project in the first place was my own affection for a couple of particularly wonderful Christmas Carol adaptations.  As you’ll see below, the categories and scoring system will work somewhat differently than the regular reviews, which I hope you’ll enjoy as a little variation.  I’ll note, too, that this story is so universally well known, and the details I want to talk about stretch so fully through the film, that these Christmas Carol film reviews will be MUCH higher on spoilers.  To me, talking about Scrooge’s redemption arc is about as much of a “spoiler” as telling someone the Titanic is going to hit an iceberg and sink (apologies if that just ruined James Cameron’s film for you), but I wanted you to be forewarned about that approach.  Okay, on with the show.

For my first Christmas Carol on the blog, I just had to go with the oldest feature film version of the story that has sound (I’ll probably take on a silent film version someday, if this blog persists beyond this first quixotic holiday season).  There’s more than one version of the 1935 Scrooge, though, so to be clear, I watched the movie in its original full length version, in black and white: there’s a shorter, colorized version of this film that was created a few years later for American school children, and that’s the one you’ll more frequently see on streaming services.  Whichever one you watch (I’ve seen both versions), the surviving print of this film is in bad shape, with lots of cracks and pops, and a wobbly and sometimes fuzzy or murky image.  Someday we need a nice, clean version (which I know we now have the digital tools to create), but goodness knows when one will be produced — the free market has no shortage, after all, of Christmas Carol movies!

A poster for the 1935 film, Scrooge, the title of the film is written in large red letters. Just below it, Ebenezer Scrooge glares off to his left under long white eyebrows. Beneath Scrooge we see Fred and Clara, and beside and above him (and the title) is Bob Cratchit, carrying Tiny Tim on his back.

There’s a definite attempt at realism in this version of the story — the band playing in the street outside Scrooge & Marley is just as out of tune as one would have been in real life, I’m sure, and inside the office itself we see that Scrooge’s desk and work look very little different from Bob Cratchit’s, as might well have been the case for someone as dedicated to miserhood as Ebenezer was.  The portrayal of Scrooge by Seymour Hicks is much more infirm and physically shaky: he seems both closer to the grave and more frail (and less intimidating) than in a lot of other approaches I’ve seen.  But being less imposing doesn’t make him less malicious: to the contrary, this adaptation is a lot more personal in his jabs at Bob, asking him about his family before reminding him of how painful it would be to lose his salary.

We see a little more of a montage after the end of the workday than sometimes appears in a Carol — scenes evoking lots of Christmas energy and spirit, including the Lord Mayor’s Christmas toast to the Queen which I think I’ve never seen in another Carol.  Also this version does show us Scrooge eating dinner in a tavern (alone, and dining on a pretty meager feast), which further extends the passage of time before the supernatural invades the plot.  I’d say the integration of the supernatural here is, in fact, a bit shaky — Scrooge doesn’t react aloud to the Marley doorknob effect, so that any viewer unfamiliar with the story (there have to be a few of them left in the world, don’t there?) wouldn’t really know what’s up.  He’s silent, too, in searching the house, which nevertheless he does do on camera, and slowly — arguably suspense is building for the audience, but to me this dragged a bit.  A really fun choice, though, is made in depicting Marley as invisible — Scrooge can see him, but we can’t.  So we see Scrooge’s horrified response to a ghost we only hear, and we watch as the camera pans slowly as though following Marley around the room — it’s eerie, and probably a lot more effective at spooking us than whatever practical “ghost” effect they might have tried would be.

Less successful, to me, are the depiction of the three spirits: Christmas Past is neither diminutive nor someone who pulls him to the window, and Christmas Present is neither large nor quite jovial enough, for my taste.  (Yet to Come is harder to screw up, and this film’s shadowy depiction was fine, I thought.)  It was odd to see a Carol that doesn’t show any of Scrooge as a younger man, but Christmas Past jumps only to him as a middle-aged moneylender, foreclosing on some poor people and enraging his fiancee (Scrooge’s childhood isn’t in EVERY adaptation, but is there another one that, like this film, also skips Fezziwig’s party?).  Unfortunately, as I’ll observe at more length below, this takes away a little of the film’s power.  

The Christmas Present section is more successful, to me — the Cratchit family antics are joyful and ring true, and I think there’s something novel and plausible here about Bob’s comments to his wife about Tiny Tim (which suggest to me a man who’s just unnerved enough by some of his little son’s words that he worries about him). Let’s face it, Tiny Tim’s a soul so old that any parent might find him a challenge, which this adaptation leans into, making his “God bless us, every one” into less an exuberant cheer and more a wistful hope.  The adaptation does manage a nice if brief version of the montage through a lot of nameless folks keeping Christmas in their way, before installing us at Fred’s.  The scene just does carry off the explanation of why Fred doesn’t resent Scrooge, but I’m afraid it doesn’t linger long enough to convey the real fun of that gathering, to me.

The Yet to Come sequence, as I mentioned earlier, does a fine job with the shadowy Ghost, but much of the rest of it feels a little off to me.  The ragpicker scene is weirdly staged, seemingly due to the director’s conviction that it would be a lot more unsettling (and less dull) than I found it, and we get a glimpse of an unidentified dead body (Scrooge’s, surely) that doesn’t pay off.  The Cratchit family scene is as affecting as always, but the graveyard scene that follows is tonally very weird: the music sounds like an action sequence as opposed to a heartbreaking revelation, and Scrooge’s wrestling with the spirit feels both forced and aimless.  Also a bit rote is Scrooge’s joy at the finale, though it’s fun to see Hicks transform his Scrooge into someone with a bit more energy.  I’d wish for a Christmas Day a little lighter on “business” — there’s too much to-do with how exactly to order and deliver a turkey — and heavier on the emotional journey he’s made, but his connection with Fred and Clara gets there, in the end.  And I do love any Carol that leaves in a little of Scrooge having fun at Bob’s expense, so I was pleased to see it here, and Hicks does a fine job as the reformed Scrooge “playing” at being cantankerous.  Scrooge joining the Cratchits at church is, I think, another singular element in this adaptation, and it’s where it concludes.

I Know That Face: There’s not a lot of connections to be made here (that I can find), but I think it’s really remarkable that Seymour Hicks, who of course plays the title character here, had somehow also played Ebenezer Scrooge over two decades earlier, in the 1913 short film entitled Scrooge.  If I ever do watch a silent film version of A Christmas Carol, maybe that’s the one I should pick.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: This section, which celebrates the inclusion of elements from the novella that are often cut out, could be long for any traditional adaptation like this one, but I’ll just note a couple of highlights.  I always like Martha Cratchit hiding playfully from her dad, and I think this adaptation pulls off the fun in that scene (and all it implies about Cratchit family fun) really well.  And I think the montages were unusually and marvelously inclusive of the story’s smaller details — I’m thinking especially of the Lord Mayor (who, again, is in a single sentence early in the story) toasting Queen Victoria and then, much later, Christmas Present taking Scrooge to a Christmas celebration at a lighthouse (which comprises a slightly longer and lovely scene in the book). 

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: This section, which denounces foolish exclusions from the original written version of the story, could be equally long here.  I’ll just note in particular that the loss of both Scrooge’s boyhood and Fezziwig messes up the story pretty fiercely — Dickens does a fine job in just a couple of scenes to establish that Scrooge is a man profoundly affected by the trauma of his lonely upbringing (and probably a harsh, if not abusive, father), and that he nevertheless once had the capacity to at least enjoy Christmas generosity when it was doled out by someone as relentlessly merry as his master, Fezziwig.  The idea that within this withered old miser there’s both a child who can be healed and a reveler ready to dance a jig is hard enough to sustain WITH those two scenes, and it’s basically impossible to envision without having either one.

Christmas Carol Vibes (8.5/10): Any attempt at a “straight” adaptation is going to score pretty high, and I’ll admit, especially when I consider the practical limitations of both sound recording and visual effects in this mid-1930s, I think this really captures the vibe of the book well for big portions of its running time.  Sure, I am frustrated with choices in the Christmas Past section (and I think a couple choices in Yet to Come are just weird), but when I think of all the ways this story’s been scrambled and reconfigured and borrowed from, I think this is a solid entry in the long list of Christmas Carol adaptations.  That list’s long enough, though, that there’s plenty to be mentioned above this one in terms of connection with the story, too.

Actual Quality (7.5/10): I mean, I’m still trying to cut this film some slack for its era, but I can’t deny — the quality of the print exacerbates the problems with the film’s already murky and sometimes aimless visual language.  I’ll talk about the actors below, but I’ll just say that in general there’s good but not great work being done here; the screenplay has some strange omissions (and welcome additions, to be sure), and the direction is really mannered and sometimes much too stiff.  It hangs together as a film due to the power of this story, which is so good it’s almost impossible to make something bad out of it, but the seams show throughout.

Scrooge?

Every Carol adaptation depends a lot on its version of Scrooge, so what of this one?  Well, Seymour Hicks plays the bitter, warped old man better than the reformed saint, who feels more deranged than human — I fear that Hicks, who by this time had been playing the role on stage for more than thirty years, had just aged to the point that it was tough to have the full range the part really demands.  But it’s not a bad performance by any stretch, and you can see the seeds of later performers here without question: some of Hicks’s physical gestures and line readings are very clearly either being borrowed or being given an homage by later actors, and that’s praise of a meaningful kind.

Supporting Cast?

The movie is brief enough and lingers enough in weird moments that only a couple of actors in the cast really get the chance to leave an impression.  Robert Cochran’s Fred is pretty successful as a guy you can believe would honestly both invite his awful uncle to dinner and laugh about it when the old goat doesn’t turn up.  Donald Calthrop as Bob Cratchit is a little more limited, but there’s a sweetness and a piety to him here that works within this particular adaptation — he’s less timid than some other Cratchit performances, too, so he’s not an outlier in that sense.  I do think it’s a bit of a mark against the rest of the cast that they just don’t linger — I really ought to have strong feelings about either Christmas Past or Present, and to have something to say about Tiny Tim, or Mrs. Cratchit, or Marley, all of which are often really memorable turns in other films.  I do blame some of this on the screenplay, but only some of it.

Recommended Frequency?

The 1935 film Scrooge is absolutely worth a one time watch, especially if you love A Christmas Carol — it’s laying some groundwork that I do think you’ll see in a lot of later versions, especially with the character of Scrooge himself.  But it’s hard to find a good quality version of the film, and even at its full length it feels a bit choppy and hasty — I’d be very surprised if it was anyone’s favorite version of the story.  I am willing to think, though, that a couple of its scenes just might be the best versions of those particular moments from the story: if you’re a big enough fan of the tale, this one would be an important element in getting a “completionist” perspective on it.

Finding the original black and white version of this film streaming is a little challenging.  Tubi has the shorter, colorized version, as do both Pluto and Plex.  (If you don’t know those three free services, by the way, they’re a great source of more obscure and older films — yes, with ad breaks, but they’ve got to pay bills somehow, and you can spend the ad breaks re-reading my review in delighted awe.  Okay, or you can just use that time to go down rabbit holes in IMDB; that’s what I’d do, honestly.)  Even Amazon Prime has the shortened, colorized version.  The only place I found the black and white original cut of the film was on YouTube — for those of you who are fastidious about copyright protection, you can be comforted that, to the best of my knowledge, the movie has fallen into the public domain.  You can buy the black and white original on DVD, too, from Amazon, and my hope is that some libraries carry the DVD, but Worldcat is down right now, so I can’t post a link to give you more information about that (I’ll update this whenever I next get the chance).

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020)

Review Essay

I’ll acknowledge at the outset that most Christmas films that latch onto our hearts (to any degree) are films we encountered via childhood — our own, the childhood of those around us, or the child that lingers within as we age.  I say that just because I’m about to be a little gentler to this movie than I suspect it may deserve, but that’s because it’s a film I have only ever seen in the company of my delightful kid, for whom it is a “Christmas classic” at this point because she’s seen it annually for about as long as she can remember.  Also, that first year that she and I watched it together, it was the pandemic year — we’d been largely confined to our house for months and months, and the holidays ahead of us were about to be conducted really entirely on Zoom.  So the exuberance and the physicality of this film landed a little more soundly, for me, because I was feeling that vulnerability and sadness that the pandemic brought with it — I was ready to feel like a kid alongside her.

Exuberance and physicality are really the hallmarks of Jingle Jangle, a Netflix film that attempts that trickiest of endeavors — creating a new fairy tale, something that feels like you’ve heard it all your life even though you never have before.  The two undeniably powerful things about the movie are its costumes and its production design: every single moment you’re watching, the screen is popping with vibrance and detail and a charisma that can’t be denied.  Even if you don’t love the movie you’re watching, I find it really hard to believe you wouldn’t want to walk down that street, or into that toy shop.  It’s a world worth seeing, then, and one that’s both tapping into an old school Victorian Christmas spirit and turning it upside down with the diversity of its humanity, and with the not-very-Victorian energy of modern pop and hip hop music and dance.

Movie poster for Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. Journey, the film's child star, is a young Black girl in the foreground, smiling in a red coat and standing with arms wide and looking upward. Behind her left shoulder is a floating gold robot with large eyes. In the background,the crowded shelves of an eccentric toy store are visible.

I know, I know, it’s the third paragraph and I haven’t touched the plot yet — well, folks, the plot’s the piece of the movie I have the hardest time defending.  I mentioned the “new fairy tale” idea earlier, and I think that’s the best way to understand the movie — so much of it really wouldn’t make sense in a realistic world where there’s any consistency at all, but the logic of fairyland is famously a little less reliable.  Here’s the premise: Jeronicus Jangle, a brilliant toy inventor, has a wife and child and a great life, until one day, after achieving his greatest invention yet, his assistant (Gustafson) who feels overlooked and neglected steals both the invention and Jeronicus’s book of inventions and creates a brand new toy empire.  Jeronicus is ruined, and soon loses everything — his store’s a shambles, his wife dies, he alienates his brilliant inventor daughter.  But then HER daughter, a girl named Journey who is an inventor herself, decides to go visit her grandfather for Christmas basically unannounced.  Will the chipper enthusiasm and open-hearted love of a little girl warm the bitter old man’s heart?  Will Gustafson’s theft of Jangle’s inventions finally come back to haunt him?  Will there be a singing widowed postal worker who serenades Jeronicus on the daily with her three backup singers chiming in like Gladys Knight and the Pips?  Uh….yeah, yes is the answer to all three of those questions.  Jingle Jangle is kind of a wild ride sometimes.

So, basically everything about the plot really is cuckoo bananas — there’s just no reasonable way Gustafson could have gotten away with his theft when Jeronicus could simply have reported it, nor is there any real explanation other than “it happened” for how Jeronicus suddenly was unable to remember or recreate literally any of the inventions he’d come up with previously, let alone create anything new.  And sure, I could excuse those elements as “magical” except this is ALSO a script that later treats the theft of inventions as something the local constabulary treats really seriously with the administration of swift justice.  That same script wants me to believe that Jeronicus was unable to make any good inventions at all after Gustafson’s betrayal….except for the single exception of an adorable flying, talking robot that puts basically all his other ideas to shame.  Again, I guess, magic?  I don’t know — there’s also a massive logical flaw in the frame tale that surrounds this fairy story, but I really don’t want you to think about the plot that much, it’s not what the movie’s for.

The movie’s for so many other things — the aforementioned brilliant costumes, props, and sets.  Some really excellent acting performances show up on screen: I mean, sure, this isn’t the best work ever by either Forest Whitaker or Keegan-Michael Key but the two of them are fun to watch even when they’re working with a pretty basic script.  The music, with John Legend doing some co-writing and Usher showing up for the end credits, is definitely an asset, also.  And there’s just no denying that, in a genre that tends to skew lily white, there’s something truly fantastic about seeing a full cast of Black performers — major roles, minor ones, extras — in outlandishly lovely Victorian costume on snowy cobbled streets, showing off their skills as dancers and singers and overall performers.  White kids have gotten to grow up watching Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen in White Christmas, after all, or the showy musical performances in the 1970 adaptation of Scrooge, and it makes me glad that other kids can grow up seeing folks who look like themselves and their families, spreading some holiday cheer.  Heck, I’m glad my White kid is getting that opportunity – that Christmas joy for her will be a more multicultural and multiracial experience than the world my generation grew up with.  I wouldn’t just give a pass to any film that came along with a diverse cast, to be sure, but there’s more than enough good things going on here for me to be willing not to think too hard about how exactly the story unfolds.

I Know That Face: Hugh Bonneville, one of the few non-Black performers in the main cast, appears as Mr. Delacroix here (sort of investor in / landlord for Jeronicus, it seems?), and also appears as the narrator in Silent Night: A Song for the World, a kind of docudrama re-enacting the writing of the Christmas hymn.  Lisa Davina Phillip, who for me steals every scene she’s in as the postwoman Ms. Johnston, also appears as Auntie Valerie in Boxing Day, a romantic comedy in which a British writer brings his American fiancee home to the UK for Christmas to meet his eccentric family (stay tuned for more on that one).  And Anika Noni Rose, who here plays the adult daughter of Jeronicus, appeared as a choir member back in 2004 in Surviving Christmas, the film in which an unpleasant billionaire hires a family to spend the holiday with him. Hoo boy, it’s hard not to make some political commentary about that one, but it’s only day two of the blog, maybe I can let some pitches go by, eh?

That Takes Me Back: A child’s reference to “The Jangleater 2000” took me back to when calling something a “2000” sounded futuristic and cool — what do kids say these days?  3000, maybe, since Buddy gets to be the Buddy 3000?  Also, this movie takes place at a time when rich and powerful people could still be held accountable by the legal system….oh, sorry, is that too dark for you? Guess James couldn’t hold it back after all: look, folks, it’s 2024, I can’t pretend not to be paying attention to the world, even if the goal here is more escapism than activism.

I Understood That Reference:  In the film’s prologue, before she spins her (highly unlikely) story, Grandma’s asked by one of her unnamed grandchildren if she’ll read them The Night Before Christmas, though she deflects the request since “it’s time for a new story”.  (Okay, Grandma, I’m picking up the subtext of race in that remark, and you’re right — that’s what I like about this movie, that instead of retreading the old Christmas tales, it’s presenting something different.)

Holiday Vibes (7.5/10): While the story is less about Christmas and more about the fantastical adventures of Journey, this has so many of the 19th Century trappings that, between A Christmas Carol and Currier & Ives lithographs, we associate with nostalgic holiday celebrations and wintry scenes of yore — mechanical toys and rich Victorian costuming and horses clopping along on cobblestones, etc.  This will press plenty of festive buttons, if you’re coming to it looking for those feelings.

Actual Quality (7.5/10): Again, the plot is bonkers: we cannot think about it at all.  But plot’s not the only thing a movie is made of.  If I just focus on the settings and costumes, the music and the acting, the overall feel of this movie?  I’m having a very fun time with it — and if I’m watching it alongside my 5th grader, add at least a full point to this rating, you know?  I know the film’s got plenty of issues, but I’m so darn glad it exists.

Party Mood-Setter? This is a perfect role for this movie to play, since at the low level of attention of “it’s on while we’re wrapping presents” or what have you, all the movie’s best stuff is still going to shine through aggressively, and the weaknesses of its overall structure are going to be less visible.  I’d highly recommend giving it a try in that setting.

Plucked Heart Strings? I think for a child audience, it might land the punches it wants to throw.  As an adult viewer, the plot ends up being silly enough that I can’t really take the problems of Jeronicus (or anybody else) seriously enough to feel actually tearful, but I certainly care about the characters, and that’s a testament to the things that are working here.

Recommended Frequency: This is an annual movie for me, in part because it’s one of my daughter’s top 5 holiday movies of all time (I asked her for a ranking).  I think it easily offers enough in the way of charm and color and energy to be worth it every year, and with each passing year, I get more accustomed to its weird plot, so that the ways in which it doesn’t work are less noticeable or problematic for me now. Again, I think you should give it a whirl, and I think it’s fine if it’s just something you’ve put on in the background while you construct a Yule log out of gingerbread or make homemade eggnog or whatever fun holiday practices you engage in.

This time around, there’s only one place I can steer you: if you want to watch Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, as a Netflix movie, it is unavailable on any streaming service or rental/purchase service other than Netflix itself.