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Christmas & New Year's

Scrooged Review

December 14, 2016 by JD Hansel

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert got into a big argument on their TV show back in the 1980s because of the film Back to the Future: Part II.  Ebert thought it was a perfectly enjoyable screwball comedy, but Siskel found it lacking in a certain quality that the first film in the series had.  “The first film had a heart to it, and I don’t think there’s any reason why a screwball comedy couldn’t take time out to have heart.  . . . I really found it kind of unpleasant to watch in a way.”  Ebert conceded that the first film moved the audience emotionally, and the second film didn’t do that, but I don’t understand what either of them were talking about here.  There’s nothing heartwarming about the story of a boy who doesn’t like his parents, and then inadvertently changes them into likable people and ends up richer.  I think people are desperate to see heart in a movie any chance they get, even if it doesn’t belong there, and when they can’t see it, they feel like the movie is missing something fundamental.  Frankly, this is nonsense.

Heart is a very delicate thing – it can easily turn to sap if the filmmaker isn’t careful, but it amazes me how many people will take heart even when it is sappy crap.  I’ll never understand how anyone can watch the climax of the movie Elf without vomiting rainbows and pooping out snowflakes – it’s just disgusting – but this is the only way most people want to feel when they watch a Christmas movie.  This is the only way I can make sense of Ebert’s very harsh review of 1988’s Scrooged, which he thought was so horribly lacking in the heart of the original story that it seemed to him like the filmmakers must not have read it, especially because of Murray’s particularly harsh performance in the film.  I, in turn, wonder if Ebert has ever read the story, because this film captures exactly what the story needs to be in order to be applicable to the modern era.

The original story by Dickens is not exactly a light, fun, and heartwarming story – at least not until the end.  Scrooge is a thoroughly horrible person, and it is very important to the story that he starts off without a shred of human decency.  He doesn’t care if the poor and hungry die, arguing it would “decrease the surplus population.”  While it may be tempting for some to feel that Murray should have been more like his funny characters in Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, this would completely undercut the story’s message.  We want to be those characters in those films, but it is crucial that Murray’s character in this film is not very likable in this film – even a Tony Stark type would be too charming for the story to function.  Also, a writer that wants to be purely heartfelt and whimsical would use Faeries of Christmas Past, not ghosts, but this story is designed to be so eerie and dark that the light of Christmas morning is like a breath of fresh air for the reader.  Much like with Our Town, the story makes its case well because it forecasts death and doom, and it uses its darkness in order to keep the positive message from being so cheery as to seem unrealistic and so sweet as to seem disgusting, while also motivating the audience to live better lives.

It’s also important that the film take the heartless approach that it does to most of the film because it’s not a straight adaptation of the story: it’s a modern-day comedy, and that has different requirements than a traditional adaptation or a drama would.  Comedy, unlike what many people suppose, is not a particularly cheery genre by nature – it’s actually, in its purest form, quite brutal.  Comedy assaults the ego, making a mockery of humankind and all of its accomplishments, revealing absurdity in the things we hold most sacred, including Christmas.  This movie understands that, so it makes Murray a total jerk, the man he fires a drunken psycho, and the Ghost of Christmas Present a cartoony, merciless sadist, creating the sense that the film must have been directed by Yakko Warner or Daffy Duck.  It also modernizes the story with a  Nora Ephron approach before the films of Ephron’s era of romantic comedy even came out: it addresses the old story it’s retelling pretty directly, displays skepticism towards its relevance or believably in the post-Vietnam era, dismisses it as pure fiction, and then ultimately decides to go along with it anyway.  The films of the late ’80s and 1990s that revisited old stories and genres had a different audience that was not as willing to believe in stories with pure and concentrated heart, so the smart ones knew to tell the audiences that they knew the story was a silly fairy tale, and this allowed the audience to humor it anyway.  This film uses its dark humor wisely to give the audience the licence to believe in an otherwise unbelievable story, which is exactly what it needed to do.

It’s interesting to compare Scrooged to other modern Christmas classics, such as Elf, which have a lot more heart to them.  With Elf, not everything is sweet: his father is a jerk at the start, and the people of New York are initially reticent about embracing Christmas cheer, but these scenes with real-world problems and minor profanity are used to make the unrealistically jolly world where people say “cotton-headed ninny-muggins” seem entirely absurd.  The film then makes an awkward turn-around towards the end and insists that the world of jolliness must entirely trump the world of the normal people, as though the jolliness is inexplicably no longer absurd, but an important part of the human experience.  This is easily accepted by the people of New York without believable justification, and everything feels excruciatingly forced.  In Scrooged, on the other hand, nobody ever has to believe in the ghosts Murray encountered, and the characters only go along with Murray’s musical number because he’s crazy enough to fire them if they don’t and the TV crew is being held at gunpoint by a lunatic.  One film makes the case that faithful belief, even in something everyone in real life knows is obviously a lie, is intrinsically good, the other makes the case that we sometimes have to embrace a little bit of craziness because we’re a desperate, crazy species in a depraved, crazy world, which is clearly more honest and ethical.

In short, even though I have my issues with it, this is already one of my favorite Christmas movies.  It’s over-the-top, delightfully dark, and incredibly clever, even if it could use a few more laughs than it has.  It’s another one of those movies that feels like an ’80s movie should: it’s too dark for it to be made as a kid’s film today, but too childlike to be a movie for adults today, so it’s right in the sweet spot.  Its costumes, sets, and special effects are just right, and it even has a little bit of a Tim Burton feel to it, which is probably largely due to Danny Elfman’s perfectly fitting score.  I will say that I thought some of it could have been a little bit more original.  (For example, I got the impression that the Ghosts of Christmas Past wouldn’t be literal ghosts, but real people whom Murray’s character interprets to be the ghosts, but they went the boring literal way, which I guess worked out fine because of their unique casting choices for the first two ghosts.)  If you’re looking for Rankin-Bass levels of good holiday cheer, you and Roger Ebert can go look elsewhere, but this is the film I’m looking forward to watching at Christmastime for years to come.

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 1980s Movie Reviews, 1988, Anarchic Comedy, Christmas & New Year's, Comedy Classics, Dark Comedy, Fantasy, Four Stars, PG-13, Richard Donner

Home Alone Review

December 27, 2015 by JD Hansel

Let’s just pretend, hypothetically speaking, that everyone reading this has seen at least some amount of Home Alone during this holiday season.  Now let’s stop pretending.  It’s as much a reality as the fact that the Sun is bright.  This has always intrigued me, but it was not until days ago that I actually got to watch this film in full.  Now I think I understand what makes it such a holiday classic.

This is one of the those rare films that reverts me to a stage in my childhood when I was trying to figure out who I wanted to be, and basically, I wanted to be someone like Kevin McCallister.  I wanted to be Bugs Bunny too, and Spider-Man, and sometimes even Lizzie McGuire’s brother Matt, but the important thing was never the species, the age, or the powers.  It was always the competence.  I loved the idea of a character who could always come up with brilliant ideas and creative solutions to problems, and because of this, he approached every situation with a delightful sense of humor and a touch of nonchalance.  This movie shows Kevin McCallister taking initiative, fending for himself, conquering his fears, protecting that for which he is responsible, cleverly taking advantage of everything at his disposal to use for creative purposes, and even knowing when to call authorities.  There’s much to like about this kid, and I think everybody wants to be him.

I think there are other reasons why this is considered a classic, and much of this is due to the brilliant writing by John Hughes and charming directing by Chris Columbus.  While it would be easy to make a film that only focuses on the values of caring about family, this movie takes advantage of everything that can be done with a story of this nature.  It makes the family seem really difficult to live with, and it makes the struggle for the mother to get back home seem really difficult, and it makes Kevin thwarting the bandits with household objects seem really clever, while also packing on a bunch of great messages for a Christmas film.  Everything about it feels right for a children’s Christmas movie, and I approve of its status as a classic.  It may not be Muppet Christmas Carol or Gremlins, but I always knew I could count on Hughes and Columbus to blow Elf out of the water.

87 Home Alone

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 1990, 1990s Movie Reviews, Christmas & New Year's, Family, Four Stars, John Hughes, PG

Babes in Toyland Review

December 20, 2015 by JD Hansel

I recall the time when I took some tests to be assessed for my IQ, intelligence, and/or learning disabilities a few years back.  The expert who assessed me found the results quite curious, and noted the following: “a Full Scale IQ Score is not an accurate assessment of his ability.  He is a student whose scores on these measures of ability range from the 5th to the 99.9th percentile.  A Full Scale IQ Score represents an average of these numbers and as such, will underestimate his strengths and overestimate his weaknesses.”  The same can be said of many people and many things, as nothing is black and white.  This is why I argue that the classic Walt Disney embarrassment Babes in Toyland, based on the fatally frown-inducing operetta of the same name, cannot be given an accurate star rating.

Babes in Toyland is such a remarkable piece of work, which I suppose is best understood in context.  As I understand it, Disney planned to make a Wizard of Oz movie ever since the days when he was working on Snow White, but ironically, the success of Snow White prompted MGM to buy the rights to The Wizard of Oz in an attempt to make a better family film than Disney’s.  (Spoiler alert – they succeeded.)  Years later, Disney decided to try again to get the rights to make an Oz film, but he wanted to do a test-drive first to see if his creative team – and his usual cast – could pull off such a feat.  His test was Babes in Toyland, which was an old operetta made by the people who’d created a successful Wizard of Oz operetta, and Babes was just a cash-in on that.  So, Disney’s Babes in Toyland is a Wizard of Oz test drive based on a Wizard of Oz rip off, which happens to star Ray Bolger of Wizard of Oz fame.  Some of my facts might be a little off, so feel free to correct me since I’m no historian, but this is about the gist of it.

Because I love MGM’s Wizard of Oz, I naturally really like many elements of this film.  The overall spirit, mood, and atmosphere are just delightful.  It’s just as wondrous and theatrical as I would want any live-action family fantasy film to be.  Many, many, many of the visuals are fantastic because the lighting is so perfect, and the costumes so colorful.  The cast is clearly talented too, and they use every exaggerated prop or over-the-top costume piece to its fullest potential to create an atmosphere of complete other-worldliness.  Because of this, just watching clips from the movie would make it seem like perfection, at least for someone with my tastes in film.

Here comes the however.  However . . . the problems with this beast seem unending.  The puppets are often hideous and/or poorly performed, the plot doesn’t make any sense, the characters are all idiots, the focus of the story keeps changing, the songs are mediocre, and nearly every scene goes on far too long.  That sums up a lot of it, but a closer look will reveal other issues.  It seems to be rather sexist, mildly racist, and possibly advocating child slavery.  It’s not that Disney can be blamed for all of these problems – I can say from experience that the stage show is just as painful if it’s not performed with astonishing excellence from all cast members – but what people forgive on a stage they’d decry on a screen.

Unfortunately, while it’s a film worth studying as visual art, and although it may make for a good laugh if you riff it with an MST3K-loving friend, this cinematic disaster is far from being the kind of holiday classic one would hope Mr. Disney would have produced.

85 Babes in Toyland

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 1960s Movie Reviews, 1961, Christmas & New Year's, Disney, Fantasy, Fantasy Worlds & High Fantasy, G, Musical, Two Stars

A Christmas Story Review

December 27, 2014 by JD Hansel

I meant to have this up by Christmas day, but unfortunately I got very sick, and wasn’t up for writing anything.  Also, I would have a spoiler warning, but it seems there is no need since everyone has seen this movie before.  As many have noted before me, everyone has livedthis movie before.  It effectively captures the experience of being a child during Christmas time, while also adding elements that are plausible or desirable, which fit in perfectly.  This is one of those great movies that should not work, and yet it does.  The plot is loosely connected, the protagonist’s goal is unimportant, the pacing is odd, and there are interruptions (daydreams) periodically – and it still works well.

There are flaws, however.  I am always bothered when family films, particularly those clearly inviting children to watch them, contain elements that may not be appropriate for children, and this movie does have that.  A lot of the jokes are rather weak, which would be bearable if the jokes kept coming constantly, but the film is actually pretty slow.  It is difficult for me to stay focused on the film since it has a pace that is bordering on too slow for me and my ADD.  The unconventional structure also makes it hard to stay into, but that can only be prevented to some degree since the nature of the story is purely a child’s Christmas experience.  I also have issues with the film purely because I can’t totally relate.  I didn’t want a gun as a kid, nor did I get bullied, or get bad grades, or lie much really.

Still, I understand why this is a Christmas classic.  It’s just not one of my favorite Christmas classics.

34 A Christmas Story

Filed Under: Film Criticism, Tumblr Movie Reviews Tagged With: 1980s Movie Reviews, 1983, Christmas & New Year's, Essential Classics, Family, PG, Roger Ebert's "Great Movies", Roger Ebert's Favorites, Three and a Half Stars

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