Moviephile

I believe I already mentioned the fact that my in-laws bought me a trip to see Cinematic Titanic Live for my birthday earlier this month. It was delightful. For my full review of that show (typos and all) visit the official MST3k fan site.

The movie featured at that performance was Santa Claus Conquers the Martians - a movie that was previously performed by MST3k; a “somewhat controversial” choice on their part.  I still don’t know why Cinematic Titanic decided to choose a movie that the exact same people (minus J. Elvis) had already made fun of once… Can it possibly have been some kind of complex, well-thought out move to simultaneously connect to their old fans while distancing themselves from their old work? Or was it just that they were able to get this movie really, really cheap? (Hmmm….)

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is a poorly made Sci-Fi/Christmas film. The plot is this: the children of Mars have forgotten how to have fun, so a handful of Martians go down to Earth and kidnap Santa with the idea that Santa’s Christmas magic and toys will bring joy back to Martian kids. The best thing I can say about this movie is that it has a kicky little theme song (”Hooray for Santy Claus!”)

Anyway, as I said, I received a trip to the live show for my birthday, and it was lovely. However, fortuitously, I also received the DVD of their riff on said movie. I took it home and watched it with my parents on St. Stephen’s Day. Hense, two viewings of the Cinematic Titanic version of the film.

However, I also have a DVD of the original MST3k riff, and it seemed a shame to pass it over for the sake of its Cinematic Titanic progeny… so when Mr. Hall and I visited his parents, we watched the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. That makes three viewings.

Then when we got home from our vacation yesterday we discovered we had a Christmas present from a friend, Miss Landis. We opened it up - and found that she (knowing how we enjoy watching bad movies) has given us the un-MST3k’d, un-Cinmatic Titanic’d, RAW version of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

I’ve never actually seen this movie without a humorous commentary running over it - so I daresay this spells one more (a FOURTH!) viewing of the film before the end of the holiday season.

Okay. I’m not a huge fan of musicals, or a huge fan of Sondheim. I don’t have anything in particular AGAINST them, I just tend to prefer non-musicals or non-Sondheim.

But I like Tim Burton (well, olden days Tim Burton, anyway) so I decided I would give Sweeney Todd a try. It was released, what, last Christmas? So I figured it was seasonably appropriate to finally watch it.

I had a couple problems with this movie right off the bat. For one thing… why did he cast a bunch of non-singers as the leads in this movie? I have nothing against Johnny Depp (except perhaps that I think his best performances were when he was receiving the least amount of praise, i.e. pre-Capt. Jack) and especially not against Alan Rickman (who I’ve always felt is very attractive in a Mr. Spock kind of way)… but, honestly. Sondheim tunes are always extremely complex (if that’s the word I want…) and I’m just not entirely sure it was the most melodious possible choice to cast a bunch of guys who can only kind of hit the right notes.

For another thing, I have a problem with the fact that all Tim Burton movies now feature his semi-wife/main squeeze Helena Bonham Carter. I mean, really. Granted it’s his call who he’s going to cast (and I can’t say she’s been terribly mis-cast in any of his films, although I didn’t really buy her in Big Fish … but I disliked the majority of the casting in Big Fish and Big Fish itself, so that’s no shocker) - but, come on. Really.

I had issues with the story - which I suppose I can’t blame Tim Burton for since he didn’t come up with it. Like was that era of London’s history really so permissive that nobody questioned a woman being openly raped at a party? That you could just randomly beat up and terrorize law-abiding citizens without arousing any annoyance on anyone’s part and only making one enemy? (I also take issue that it was a very eighties-type of “No Happy Endings!!” story.)

But in the end, the thing that ruined this movie the most for me is that it has essentially twenty minutes worth of actual story and character development that are stretched out over two hours with a bunch of semi-songs. (I call them semi-songs because I’m really not a fan of whatever you would call Sondheim’s style… avant garde, maybe? You know. Where it doesn’t rhyme, has no form, and you couldn’t hum it back to yourself if you tried.) Again, this is nothing I can blame Tim Burton for - except perhaps the fact that he chose to make it into a movie rather than leave it as the somewhat pretentious piece of musical theater that it is.

In the end… although it had some nice visual moments, I found Sweeney Todd depressing, vapid and unmelodious.  And that’s my last word on the matter.

Now, don’t get me wrong when you see the title of this post: I love the movie A Christmas Story. It delights me on many different levels. However, I am completely perplexed as to why my generation (think people in their 20’s and 30’s, i.e. small tots when the movie was originally released) have embraced it so.

How do I know they have embraced it? Well, apart from the observation of my own eyes, this headline met my notice this morning:
‘Christmas Story’ fans celebrate film’s 25th year
Well? It turns out they’re holding a convention around the movie - 4000 people are booked to attend. Four-thousand people? I’ve seen elections that didn’t get as good a turn-out.

In case you haven’t seen A Christmas Story, it’s a Christmas story (yeah, yeah) based on the short, humorous essays of author Jean Shepherd. Jean Shepherd actually narrates the film, discussing the incidents therein. It’s all about “Little Ralphie” and his desire for the Christmas present of a “Red Ryder BB-gun” - and the various other Christmas adventures he encounters. It takes place in the 1940’s. It’s obviously a rather low-budget film, but features excellent performances.

Okay, this is what perplexes me. Why did my generation (people born in the mid seventies to mid eighties) embrace this movie about a childhood so utterly removed from our own? 1940’s? That’s like my grandparents’ era. My generation barely even likes to watch movies made before 2001. So why have we whole-heartedly embraced this movie about a Christmastime that is so utterly foreign to anything we might have experienced?

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s simply the fact that it is so foreign… Kind of a “The Christmas That Never Was” kind of thing. Or maybe it’s our idealized version of what Christmas should be. Or maybe it’s simply the fact that there has been a near-complete dearth of good Christmas movies during the past twenty-to-thirty years. (Disagree? Think about it - the only “good” Christmas movies I can name that came out during that time are this, Ernest Saves Christmas and Elf . That’s barely one a decade! Not even to mention the fact that some people would debate whether those two can be classified as “good”!)

I don’t know. I still don’t know.

I know this is a bad note to end on… but I just don’t know why this movie has been so embraced by my generation. Any thoughts? Watch it and let me know.

Time to haul out your long red robes and glowing orbs: it’s Life Day, kiddies, better known as the anniversary of the first (and only) broadcast of the little known Star Wars Holiday Special. Today has special significance, though, because not only is this the anniversary - today is the 30th anniversary.

In case you don’t know what this is: the Star Wars Holiday Special was released during the holiday season following the release of the first (the REAL first) Star Wars movie. It was apparently written by a handful of people who had never seen Star Wars and simply heard that it was “some kids’ movie about robots and crap”… and they went on from there, styling a semi-sci-fi themed variety special, featuring popular comedians and singers of the day - including Art Carney, Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman, and so on.  It has something of a plot: Han Solo is trying to get Chewbacca back to Chewie’s home planet for “Life Day” (Wookie Chirstmas, apparently). Surprisingly, the original cast of Star Wars also appears in this during the “plotted” segments - including an overly eye-makeup’d Mark Hammil, an obviously stoned Carrie Fisher, and a very angry looking Harrison Ford.

(Yes, this really exists. When I first heard about it six years ago, I didn’t believe the person who was telling me about it. I thought it was made up. I thought, “How could they possibly have made something like that? That’s ridiculous!” What a poor, sad, innocent fool I was.)

You know, I’ve seen some bad movies in my time. I’ve seen some real bad movies. But this is possibly the worst thing I’ve ever seen. The first time I watched it I immediately made up my mind that it was going on my list of films NEVER TO EVER WATCH AGAIN. Ever. (Along with The Man With Two Brains, Modern Problems and Nothing But Trouble.)

However, I have watched it again - probably six or seven times, maybe more - partly because of its truly extraordinary badness, but also because it makes you feel like part of a select club when you watch it. There is no such thing as an “official copy” of this film. It is so bad that George Lucas had the master copy destroyed; it only exists in bootleg form from copies taped off TV when it was broadcast. Mr. Lucas has been quoted as saying, “If I had the time, and a hammer, I would track down every bootleg copy and smash it.”

And if you’ve seen Episode One, you know it takes a lot to embarrass George Lucas.

Sadly for Mr. Lucas, it would be nigh-on impossible to track down every copy now. Happily for us true-believers, you can usually find one on Ebay, and can watch most of the special in 10-minute chunks on YouTube. (And, for you fans of MST3k, you can download a commentary for this film by Rifftrax. It is absolutely hilarious, although due to the fact that all the bootlegs are somewhat different, it’s somewhat difficult to keep it sync’d up to the film. Totally worth it, though. We watched it last Christmas and laughed ourselves silly.)

So, in honor of Life Day, track yourself down a copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special. Become a part of this exclusive club. However, I’m warning you… at times your mouth is going to be hanging open in pure horror - and I am so not kidding about that.

As a holiday, I love Thanksgiving: what’s better than a day entirely focused on counting your blessings and food? However, the day has its problems: one of which is that there just aren’t enough Thanksgiving movies.

How many can you think of off-hand? Okay. Let me count. 1… maybe 2, wait, no…. uh….

I can think of ONE Thanksgiving movie.

There are movies that feature Thanksgiving that I am not counting. Holiday Inn features Thanksgiving prominently at one point - but it also features lots of holidays prominently. It’s Holiday Inn, for pete’s sake. Miracle on 34th Street begins on Thanksgiving - but the focus of the film is Christmas.

There’s A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but I’m not counting that as a movie because it was made for TV and it’s only 25 minutes long. Mr. Hall likes to watch Nightmare Before Christmas at Thanksgiving, because it (for him) marks the transition from Halloween Time to Christmas Time - but it must be said, it is not about Thanksgiving.

Which brings us back to the ONE Thanksgiving movie: Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

I’ll discuss this movie later at some point when I can do it justice - possibly around Thanksgiving (it would make sense). But seriously! This is the only movie I can think of that is focused on Thanksgiving! You’d think that as a national “we don’t have to go to work” holiday it would at least out-strip Groundhog Day for movies (I mean, if you get right down to it, Groundhog Day is about as important as “Talk Like A Pirate Day” to your average citizen), but as far as I can see… it doesn’t.

If you know of another Thanksgiving movie - let me know. Because this is just ridiculous.

Note: This post is actually from a 12.29.07 blog on another site. However, I am contemplating shutting down that other site (and I rather liked this blog) - hence, my moving it here. Enjoy my thoughts on a couple Christmas movies from post-Christmastime last year.

Well, like I said, I watched more Christmas movies and listened to Christmas music. In fact, since today was the first day of a four-day weekend for me (woot for two four-day weekends in two weeks), I decided I’d just waste the morning and watch another one.

I toyed with the notion of putting on one of our staples, since for some reason we never got around to watching the films that probably amount to my favorite Christmas movies - White Christmas, Holiday Inn and A Christmas Carol (1956). Our viewing time was limited thanks to the fact that John works most nights now, and I’m not going to watch our staples without him.

… However, since I won’t watch staples without him, I was left with few viewing options today. So I broke out the old cable remote and checked to see if the Reginald Owen version of A Christmas Carol was still on our “On Demand” channel on Comcast. (”On Demand”, in case your cable system doesn’t have it, works rather like pay-per-view. There is a list of movies, and you can pick whichever one you want and watch it whenever you want - but unlike pay-per-view it’s free.)

It wasn’t. Apparently the Reginald Owen version was removed from “On Demand” on the 26th. …. But there were several other Christmas movies still up! I flipped down the list and found a film called The Boy Who Saved Christmas. Promising title, right? Sounds heartwarming and whatnot. So I clicked on that.

I got about five minutes into it before I shut it off. Now, I’m all for bad movies. There are plenty of bad movies that I enjoy watching, and plenty that I didn’t enjoy that I still sat through just so that I could say I watched them. But this is one of those movies that is so badly acted, badly storied, badly dialogged that you just can’t handle looking at it - and speaking of that, it was bad looking, too. The scenery was ugly, the makeup was ugly, the costumes were ugly and - honestly - the actors weren’t too hot, either. That was probably the thing that turned me off the most, as I could have dealt with a bad story and bad dialog and bad cinematography if the actors had just been reasonably pleasant to look at. Even Santa looked gross. What was with that mustache? (I just went and tried to find a picture of him so that you could see how crappy the Santa costume is in that movie, but, perhaps not surprisingly, no one on Yahoo seems to have one.)

So, that’s that. I went back to the menu and flipped down it again, and to my surprise I actually found a movie that I had put on my Netflix list this year (but didn’t get, due to Xmas movies getting bumped down on my list by all the other people requesting them.) I’m speaking of the film Christmas in Connecticut .

I had never heard of this movie before, but Netflix recommended it to me when I was telling it what Christmas movies I enjoyed, so I added it to the list. Apparently it was the heartwarming tale of a GI hero (during WWII) who was sent to spend Christmas (in Connecticut) with a housewife named Elizabeth Lane who is the best-selling author of this column about food and housewifery. Turns out, that’s all a ruse and she’s just an ordinary working girl who fakes all the stuff for her articles, and then they fall in love and it’s Christmas and awwwww.

…. Or at least, so I thought. The first fifteen minutes or so of the movie deals exclusively with the GI, who fakes being in love with this nurse so that she’ll bring him decent food. He tries to back out on the deal claiming he doesn’t know how to deal with a family, so she writes the publisher of the Elizabeth Lane articles and asks him to send the GI to Elizabeth Lane’s place for Christmas so that he can experience a real family Christmas.

Following that so far? It’s kind of a muddled plot, and I wasn’t feeling very Christmassy about it at this point. Cut to, the publisher, who isn’t getting to spend Christmas with his family. Cut to Elizabeth Lane, who lives in a stinky apartment in New York and is poor and has no family, but she’s got this architect beau who she doesn’t really like but he wants to marry her anyway and she has this Uncle who is a really good cook and owns a restaurant and she actually just steals all her good food ideas for her articles from him… Eh… Then the Publisher gets the letter from the nurse (remember her?) and calls up Elizabeth Lane and tells her she’s hosting this GI. She goes to her architect beau and agrees to marry him because she’s going to be exposed and won’t have a job - but then her agent suggests that they just pull another ruse and invite the GI out to the beau’s place, because it’s in Connecticut, right where she claimed to live in her articles. And OH, she has to take her funny foreign uncle with her, because he’s the one who cooks, and OH, they have to pretend to have a baby, and OH, there’s a lot of hoo-haa with trying to get the judge down there to marry them but they can’t let the guests (the Gi and the Publisher, who decided since his family wasn’t going to be in town that he’d spend Christmas with Mrs. Lane too) see, and the Irish cook doesn’t approve….

Doh. It was a muddled mess of a film and honestly had very little to actually do with Christmas. It might well as have been called Thanksgiving in Connecticut or 4th of July in Connecticut for all the holiday actually had to bear on the story. Granted, those movies I mentioned earlier that I do like watching (Holiday Inn and White Christmas) don’t have a whole lot to do with Christmas themselves… But at least  White Christmas begins AND ends with Christmas numbers. And Holiday Inn revolves around Holidays, one of which (importantly) is Christmas.

The entire Christmas content of this movie consisted of the hero singing half a Christmas carol while whatserface pretends to decorate the tree. Then he sang a totally non-Christmas song while she finished, which rather canceled it out.

Still, I won’t say it was wholly unpleasant to watch. Granted, it didn’t have much to do with Christmas, the plot was a muddled mess and I found some aspects of the story wholly repellent (her agreeing to marry a man that she doesn’t love just because she has nothing better to do - the hero falling in love with her while he thinks that she’s a married woman, not even to mention bamboozling that poor nurse)… At least the scenery was pleasant, and the actors were decent performers (and pleasant to look at). And I can’t deny that I laughed a couple times, and that the story worked out okay in the end (despite being a muddled mess). So, I won’t say it was a wasted morning - but neither will I advise you to run out and add this to your list of “Must-Watch Christmas movies”. It was good enough for the first morning of a four-day weekend. Honestly, the version of the movie I had in my head after reading the synopsis was much better than it turned out to be. Maybe I’ll write that version myself. — Mrs. Hall.