The Muppet Christmas Carol (Revisit 2023) Rockin' Around the Paramount

 

No apologies, no excuses, no doubt, The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best version of the Charles Dickens story and as a result, the best Christmas movie out there. Years ago on the LAMB, we had a voting bracket that established this film as supreme over all other holiday movies, including "Die Hard". The reasons are very straightforward, Michael Caine and the Muppets.

Michael Caine is not a singer by nature, but then neither was Rex Harrison. Both of those actors can do a walk through of the songs in their respective films, and talk their way through a song with enough rhythm and inflection to fool us into thinking they sing. Harrison was acting against Audrey Hepburn who's voice ended up being dubbed. Caine is singing opposite Kermit the Frog, Gonzo the Great and a dozen other Muppet characters, so he has to work especially hard.

Because Caine plays it straight, the film works dramatically, even though there is Muppet Mayhem everywhere. The story is one of redemption, and Scrooge's encounters with the Muppet ghosts are really effective. The Ghost of Christmas Present is especially moving as he relates the situation of the Cratchetts to Scrooge, who suddenly seems to be awakening to his own indifference. The look on Caine's face when he sees his nephew revealing that the unwanted creature of the guessing game they are playing is Ebenezer Scrooge. 

Getting a chance to see this heartwarming film on the big screen again is great, that it was at my new favorite spot in my new hometown was even better. The Paramount was packed to the rafters for the show. There were some pre-show activities that we skipped because we were meeting a friend for dinner, but the atmosphere was exactly the tone you want for a holiday outing. 

If there is a third component to the success of the film, it would be the songs by composer Paul Williams. The melodious transition songs are fine but the highlight is the opening number that introduces Scrooge and gives an active part to most of the Muppets in the film.  The wordplay is delightful and sets the tone for the film. 

I was shocked to hear on the Podcast the other day, that my frequent guest, occasional substitute host, and friend, Howard, has not seen this version of A Christmas Carol. If you , like Howard, have not yet found this movie, I strongly encourage you to make an effort to watch, maybe even on Christmas Eve. The Muppet Christmas Carol can put both the Grinch and Scrooge, and maybe even Krampus, in a real Christmas spirit. The fact that this was the first Muppet Project after the death of Jim Henson, makes its quality a sweet comment of the genius of the man who created the performers in this film. God Bless us, everyone. Especially you Jim Henson.

Love Actually (Revisit 2023)

 

This film came out twenty years ago, and that was seven years before I started this blog. That means that this is the first time I have had an opportunity to include it for the main purpose of this site, which is theatrical presentation of movies. Sure, I occasionally have a special post or retrospective, but my real goal is to document my own experiences in a theater and this is the first time I have seen "Love Actually" in a theater since it's original release. 

In the twenty years that have elapsed between then and now, this movie has had a rollercoaster of a ride in the circles I travel in on-line. First it was promoted by fans as a new Christmas Classic, to be repeated annually as part of your holiday. Then there was a backlash, criticisms that it is just a rom-com, treacly at times and unworthy of much respect. Then there was a ten minute charity short in 2017, and the film's love quotient went up again. If you look at a site like Rotten Tomatoes, you will see very divergent views of the film.  Let me say right now, I actually love this film. I bathe in the warmth of the relationships , in spite of some of the contrivances. I enjoy the thought that Great Britain is a nation that is clean, quirky and tolerant of eccentricities. There are moments in the film that make me laugh out loud, and there are sentiments that bring a tear to my eye. I suppose that the film is a sort of Rorschach test for film watchers, it is capable of separating the cynics from the sentimentalist with ease.  

The opening segment of the movie sets up the optimistic tone of the stories. The scenes of actually people greeting loved ones at the airport, and the narration by Hugh Grant, lays out a thick layer of sentiment that will cover the next two hours in various ways. The fact that the stories are mostly interconnected, gives us a little bonus puzzle to work on as we suck up the warm fuzzies. There is a musical segment at a wedding and there is one at a funeral, and they both work. Brothers and sisters connect and divide in just about every storyline, and the struggle of a step father to help his child, while simultaneously grieving for his lost wife, may seem like it is laying it on a bit thick, the winsome performance of the child and the honesty of Liam Neeson, sell it for me.

It is not automatically a picture worthy of love, simply because Bill Nighy and Billy Bob Thornton are in it, but I will say that it pushes me a long way into accepting the film with that casting. Nighy's Billy Mack made the audience laugh every time he was in a scene. Billy Bob channels both the lecherous Bill Clinton and the demanding George Bush into one character. His time in the movie is brief but impactful. Although Hugh Grant belittles many of his films and disliked doing the dancing scene in this movie, he still has the charisma and comic chops to pull off what might otherwise be a impossible version of a high ranking political figure. 

To me, the romantic highlight of the film is the last section of Colin Firth's story, as he travels back to France, to locate the Portuguese woman he has fallen in love with, and speaks in broken vocabulary to her and the assembled crowd at the restaurant she works at. The hope for love, in the unlikely circumstances is one of the things that all of us are motivated by at times. The sweetness of the characters, in spite of what might be seen as incorrect these days, overcomes my bullshit detector and just makes me want to feel the way so many of the characters in this movie do at the end of the day. 

White Christmas (Revisit 2023)

 

When I was younger, I thought of the movie "White Christmas" as a clunky Hollywood story, trying to manufacture a Christmas Movie. It was ok but never a favorite. As I have gotten older, I tend to appreciate some of the finer aspects of the film and I have come to a completely different conclusion, "White Christmas" is a delight and deserves repeated visits, although maybe every other year rather than annually. 

Six years ago, I attended a sing along presentation of the film at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. When shared with a couple thousand other fans of the film, it is so easy to overlook some of the clunky elements and instead, revel in the joy that so many sequence evoke. The story will take care of itself, the drama is not really what we come to a movie like this for anyway. We are here for the glorious dancing and singing parts, and the performers that make you long for the golden age of Hollywood.

I have always been a fan of Danny Kaye. Every time I see Bing Crosby in a movie, I also appreciate why he was the biggest star in the world at one point. These two guys are unparalleled entertainers, who knew where their lane was and filled that groove with the things we craved.

Bing smoothly croons all of his songs with such a lightness of effort that it might make you wonder if he is not just an AI creation. Of course it doesn't hurt when the songwriter was the amazing and prolific Irving Berlin. Danny Kaye does a beautiful job matching him in the duets and brings a comic liveliness  to the proceedings.

I especially liked the number "The Best Things Happen When You're Dancing". Kaye and the terrific Vera Ellen, glide across a dance set that includes a water feature and fences which allow them to twirl, leap and gracefully fall into one another's arms. The director of the film was Michael Curtiz, who directed two of my favorite films, "Casablanca" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood". He worked with the choreographer to stage some beautiful moments in this sequence and he clearly knew how to make the rest of the film come together as well. The film was the highest grossing film of it's year and for a decade, the highest grossing musical ever. 

With so many segments that are backstage musical moments, the movie does feel a little long, and some of those segments are completely unrelated to the story. That does not matter however, because you want to enjoy them anyway. So Danny Kaye, making fun of modern choreography, and a Vera Ellen dancing segment, or Rosemary Clooney doing a torch song solo in a nightclub, all make the movie luxurious in production, if not efficient in storytelling. 

I'll just say that I swam in the warm waters of nostalgia, smiling for two hours, and glad that there was nothing more pressing in the film than being entertained. The production is spectacular, the look of the film is beautifully colored, and the final rendition of the title song should give you the  " hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny f##king Kaye."

Dream Scenario

 

Nicolas Cage is not only a fine actor, and an interesting character, but he has also become a somewhat cultural icon in the cinema world. His quirky performances intrigue audiences, and the shift in his career to quick, often violent direct to video fare has sometimes diminished his star but not the iconic status. If anything, those plethora of forgettable action films have created an even bigger footprint for social impact by painting his career with a slightly damaged tint. With that in mind it is perhaps essential that he is the star of the new film "Dream Scenario". In some ways it reflects the trajectory of his own story. 

The central character of Paul Matthews is a perfectly nice guy, but a bit of a shlub.  He is enthusiastic when teaching his classes, but like many college professors, his enthusiasm is not enough to encourage his students. At home, he seems to have a playful relationship with his somewhat emasculating wife, but it is never as warm as a deep relationship needs to be. His teen daughters regard him with the parental distain that most teens have, although there is love and not anger there. He is an everyman without any special or exceptional gift. That is until he starts appearing in other people's dreams. At first he is merely a passive observer, much as he is in life. Yet the phenomena of his presence in so many other people's dreams, makes his everyday status disappear in a flurry of social media activity. 

At this point, the film seems to become a vehicle for criticism of our obsessions with fame. Does going "viral" have any worth? Will it give a person the power to expand their horizons? That is the existential question of the film. Paul has to confront the shortcomings in his life in some fairly brutal ways. The screenplay is not just focused on Paul, although he is the catalyst for events, it also questions our gullibility as to what this sort of fame might mean. There is a sequence, which is painful to watch, where an internet start up, struggles to spin Paul's fame into gold. The monetization of our lives is critiqued by a pitch for a soda product. 

Cage brings an overwhelming sense of being overwhelmed to the film. He is oblivious at first to the dangers the scenario entails, and when real life intrudes on the viral mania, it becomes humiliating and provokes a change in the nature of his existence in other peoples dreams. That shift produces the inevitable canceling of Paul, thus offering a further negative judgment of our social media dominated society. Cage conveys futility in a way that reminds me of that scene in Fargo, where William H. Macy is scraping off the window of his car after being frustrated by his father-in-law. Arms flapping in fury and incapable of expressing it in words. 

The film is comedic at first but it makes some dark turns that will leave you a little down at the end. Not that a film needs to be upbeat, but this one is being sold as a light comedy, and that is not what it is. This film reminded me a bit of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" with Ben Stiller from a few years ago. There are some insightful moments that are amusing, but it goes deep and that can be a bit of a downer after the comic moments. 

Silent Night

 

I admire director John Woo and as I have confessed in the past, revenge films are my guilty pleasure. So it gives me no joy to report that the new film "Silent Night", mostly failed to satisfy me. The disappointment is not a reflection of the action scenes, which are effectively staged. Nor is the let down based on the shortage of blood and revenge deserving victims, there was plenty of both. I think the problem that I had is that the conceit was just not necessary and it limits the emotional engagement that I felt throughout the film. The conscious choice that the script and the director make, keeps drawing attention to the film making and thus distances me from the emotional catharsis I am seeking.

If you are unaware, this is a mostly dialogue free film. Except for a couple of whispered words and disembodied voices on radios and intercoms, there is no speaking. That may seem like an advantage when your lead is Joel Kinnaman, an actor who for me at least has been charm free for the last dozen years. His visual range in this movie is so narrow, that I am confused as to why I am mostly unaffected by it. He gets to play anguish and anger. Not to give anything away, but Brian Godlock, Kinnamen's character, suffers a tragic loss that drives him into an angry depression that his equally devastated wife cannot endure. His emergence from a zombie like state only occurs when he commits to a plan that he sets a date of December 24th to complete. That date is the anniversary of the tragedy, and his goal is laid out in three words on a calendar, "Kill Them All". For me, that was the emotional high point of the movie. He finally states what we all are there for, so you would think that the build up and execution of that plan would be satisfying, but it was not.

Everything Brian does to get ready is a cliché, which is fine but could use something to distinguish those moments. There is nothing that elevates these scenes above the obvious. Brian goes into physical training and all the pull up, sit up, weight lifting moments are repeats of beats that we have seen in a bunch of Rocky films and other movies in this genre. The fidelity to the trope, along with the absence of any personality other than a grim determination, left me cold. The same is true with the sequences where Brian acquires a car and a cache of weapons, that would make a prepper blush, they just lay there and do nothing. I think maybe the character has to make some sardonic comment or grim forecast, for these sequences to have the emotional punch that you get from most revenge films. 

There is a hint that the police detective, who is investigating the crime that started this whole chain reaction, is secretly in league with Brian. They appear to have crossed paths and Brian gets some information from subterfuge, but that is as far as it goes until the climax. How Brian manages to stakeout and detail the work of the gang he is after is not really explained. The struggle for answers should be a part of the revenge plot but it is mostly skimped over. The interrogation of one of the gang members includes a fight sequence that should be informing us that this task will not be easy. Of course when the action starts, it is as if John Wick is simply occupying a different environment. 

Look, I still enjoyed the movie. The car scenes were intense, the hand to hand combat was brutal, and th gunplay is full of the John Woo touches that we have come to expect. It just did not hook me the way other films of this ilk have done in the past. Instead of a masterpiece from a master, I feel like I got an experiment that was interesting but not very involving. 

Arthur Christmas (Revisit)

 

Like a lot of people, when the Christmas season rolls around, we have a long list of holiday themed movies that we want to visit with. This year is the 40th Anniversary of "A Christmas Story", a film I saw in theaters when it opened, and I predicted that it would become a holiday perennial. I made the same prediction about this movie twelve years ago. I don't know how it is at your house, but I can say for sure that we have not missed seeing "Arthur Christmas" in the last decade. This year we got to experience it again on the big screen.  

This Aardman Studios film feels like a computed animated version of one of their stop motion movies. It has an off kilter sensibility, endearing characters, and a plot that is not at all unfamiliar but still comes with a great number of surprises. Very few other holiday efforts in the last few years have managed to pull off the level of excellence in story, humor and heart that "Arthur Christmas" has managed. I want to give a shout out to the voice cast at this point. When I wrote about this on the original post, I simply said it was a cast populate with English actors, the kind of voices and accents that we Americans find charming. So I was charmed by James McAvoy, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Andy Serkis and many more. 

Ultimately, this is a family movie because it is about a family. It just so happens that the family it focuses on is the Claus family. The current Santa is reluctant to retire, although he is beginning to resemble Joe Biden as a leader of his people, you know, forgetful, passing work off to the underlings, slightly bumbling. Steve, the heir apparent is competent at the technical parts of the job, but he seems out of his depths when it comes to the children and the spirit of the holiday. Arthur is the eager beaver, bull in the china closet. He enthusiastically embraces Christmas, but he is just as likely as not to break something on his way to trying to do the right thing. Grand Santa, resents having to have retired and wants to show off that the old ways were better than the new. So there is plenty of family drama here, but it is leavened with the droll antics of the elves who populate the North Poll and allow the Santas to accomplish their jobs.

The goal of any good Christmas movie is to warm your heart and put you in the spirit of the season. "Arthur Christmas" does that with a fun story and some brilliant comic moments, while still having a solid dramatic core. When a game piece from a board game can provoke a tear in your eye, you know that you have been in good hands. 

Napoleon

 

This is a late post, I left for an extended trip right after this and I am only now circling back to write about the film. Ridley Scott has usually been a reliable indicator for me that I should be seeing a film, but there have been some that just did not interest me to begin with (Exodus Gods and Kings and The Counselor come to mind as films I deliberately skipped). I am a bit of a history buff so the subject was strong enough to pull me in alone but with Scott navigating and Phoenix starring, I was relatively confident I'd be OK. 

As a longtime movie goer, I know not to get my history from a Hollywood production. Nevertheless, I suspect that a biopic is likely to have some major points about the subjects life correct and I have to admit that my knowledge of Napoleon extended only so far as his reign as Emperor and his final downfall and exile. The sketch of his rise to power in the revolutionary era was interesting, and I assume it was not too fictionalized, since it did not seem to effect any of the personal story plotlines we did get.

The relationship with Josephine was certainly dramatized, but the key events of their life together, the circumstances in which she was living, his position at the time, their wedding and the reasons for the end of that union were all presented in a matter of fact manner. Where I can certainly see the divergence for dramatic purpose is in the sexual encounters between them and the status and power games they played with one another. Whether she was his one true love is a issue of drama rather tahn history, so I was willing to enjoy the story as it was set out.

The order of the battle sequences and the politics involved seem to be accurate, although the battles themselves have almost certainly been enhanced for cinematic purposes. The clever strategy used in taking the fort at Toulon is depicted as a well shot cinematic battle, not necessarily the way things really took place. The Battle at Austerlitz is similarly enhanced I'm sure to make it a visual spectacle for the big screen. The tumultuous retreat and the artillery use to break the ice under the feet of the withdrawing forces, is beautifully and horrifyingly rendered for the film.

Napoleon was certainly a lot more complex than the military leader presented in this film. Joaquin Phoenix seems physically right for the role, but his understated voice and occasional mumbling do not seem to engender those qualities that made Napoleon a favorite of the French citizenry.  Vanessa Kirby is an alluring Josephine, and a good match for Phoenix, although the portrayal of her as a wanton woman, unsatisfied with her physical relationship with the Emperor seems a little overdone. I have heard criticism of the film from some sources but I found it a reasonable presentation of an important historical figure. It may not have the fidelity to the truth that some other biopics have, but I found it very watchable. Some people might be bored, but I thought the film brought the characters to life enough for me to relate to them a bit.