The Screengrab : a christmas carol

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "White Christmas"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

After the horrors of Silent Night Deadly Night, it was a relief that the next movie that showed up in the pile of holiday DVDs I drunkenly knocked over while prepping for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon was a good old-fashioned heartwarming musical. Of course, a lot of people really, really hate musicals, and would rather watch jolly old St. Nick ventilating craniums with a wood axe on endless loop than hear some cheeseball from the Golden Age of Hollywood belt out a single rousing number, so for some of our readers, this might be a significant turn for the worse. However, I will tell you now that those readers are wrong. White Christmas is a wonderful movie, and despite not having any killing in it (well, except for the World War II stuff, I guess), it is superior in every way to our previous movie.

White Christmas is what was once known in the biz as a "jukebox musical". This is where, rather than writing new songs for a production, a bunch of already-existing hit songs are thrown together, a half-assed 'plot' is woven to tie them loosely together, and they are unleashed on an audience who, it is reasoned, will make the jukebox musical a huge success, because you already know that they like these songs. Contemporary audiences tend to think of the jukebox musical as a relatively recent invention, the result of postmodern game-playing like Moulin Rouge and Broadway cash-ins like Mamma Mia!, but in fact, they've been around for centuries -- in the past, when popular songs were generally renowned for who composed them rather than who wrote them, the jukebox musical was ubiquitous.

There was no better acid test for the notion that jukebox musicals were more likely to meet with success thanks to the audience already being familiar with, and well-disposed to, the songs featured in them than White Christmas. Every song in the movie was by the incredibly successful and well-liked Irving Berlin, and the title track is one of the most popular songs in the history of the English language. (There's an old joke on The Simpsons where Mr. Burns laments that he once lost the chance to buy Picasso's "Guernica" for a song. "Luckily," he says, "that song was 'White Christmas', and by hanging on to it, I made billions.") It had been a massive hit all throughout the Second World War, and White Christmas used it as its can't-miss finale.

Paramount wasn't done stacking the deck, though. Besides hiring Bing Crosby, whose recording of "White Christmas" was the best-selling song of the 1940s (and subsequently became the best-selling single of all time), to play the lead, they crammed the cast with appealing superstars: Danny Kaye plays Crosby's war buddy and singing partner, and the two work with -- and fall for -- a dancing duet played by the gorgeous Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney at the peak of her singing skills. Directing chores were handed to the beloved and prolific Michael Curtiz, the script -- flimsy as it was -- was written by comedic pro Norman Panama, and the filming was done in VistaVision, Paramount's version of CinemaScope, and rich Technicolor that makes it one of the most gorgeous movies of its day. All this scheming paid off in spades, as White Christmas was far and away the top-grossing movie of 1954.

As for the plot...well, don't ask. It's as paltry as the plot of any other musical: Bing and Danny, war buddies under the command of a hideously toupeed Dean Jagger, visit a failing country inn their old CO operates in peacetime. Hoping to help him out, the two decide to put on a show, with the aid of the lovely and talented Mmes. Ellen and Clooney and an all-star assortment of background players, including a scene-stealing Barrie Chase in her first movie role. It's not really any more complicated than that, but with killer songs like "It's Cold Outside", "Heat Wave", "Blue Skies", and the song that its author called "the best song that anybody's ever written", who cares how slender the story is? If you can't be happy with some incredible songs sung by some purely brilliant entertainers, you should watch A Christmas Carol again and figure out which character is you.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A wild ten Lords a-leaping, one of which is the indefatigable Danny Kaye, brought in to replace first Fred Astaire and then Donald O'Connor. Rarely has a third choice been so inspired -- and inspiring. This is a great one to watch while you're not really paying attention, like when you're cooking or eating dinner or opening presents: it allows you to ignore the hokey plot and just let the tremendous music wash over you.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Muppet Christmas Carol

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Silent Night Deadly Night"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:15:00 GMT

How on Earth (good will towards men) did we get from good-hearted classics like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life to this schlocky mid-'80s slasher film from the dregs of the human spirit? Once again, I blame my heroic holiday intake of Christmas cocktails. As it happens, I was getting a little burned out on decency and kindness by the time I reached this point in the marathon, so I was more than happy to see a guy dressed up as Santa Claus take an axe to a bunch of innocent bystanders, but that's just how I roll. Don't show this to any children you may happen to have lying around the house; I saw it for the first time when I was 15, and look how I turned out. Revolution Number Nine in the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: the controversial cult classic Silent Night Deadly Night.

The movie, starring an astonishing array of actors you have never heard of before or since its release, generated a massive amount of controversy on its release. Its premise is simple enough: a traumatized young boy, whose childhood is marred by a bunch of unlikely coincidences involving Santa Claus, grows up to be a mad killer who takes the St. Nicholasian imperative to reward the good and deny the bad rather beyond its normal purview. Taken as high camp, it's actually not that bad, though hampered by some grade-Z acting and direction that it would be a compliment to call perfunctory. The script, based on a Paul Caimi novel called Slayride (!), is lively enough and clearly doesn't take its moments of high drama very seriously, but the movie caused a sort of national paroxysm of moral panic.

It's hard to say why, exactly. Sure, it's violent and exploitative -- but no more so, and indeed a bit less so, than plenty of other slasher films that were released around the same time. And yeah, the killer (played by Robert Brian Wilson, who, like many in the cast, never appeared in another movie again) dresses up like Santa Claus, but weren't we sufficiently jaded by 1984? In fact, it wasn't even a particularly novel concept: 1974's Black Christmas and 1980's Christmas Evil had covered the same territory. Still, the nation's critics and parents went collectively apeshit over Silent Night Deadly Night: the PTA attempted to have the movie pulled from theaters; the Moral Majority singled it out for vehement condemnation; Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert read its production credits on the air, uttering "shame, shame!" after each name; and Leonard Maltin speculated that the next step would be a child-molesting Easter Bunny, an appealing notion that has yet to be picked up by Todd Solondz.

The tidal wave of outrage that greeted Silent Night Deadly Night was way out of proportion to both its cultural presence and its content. It made very little money in a limited release (although it later picked up a cult following based mostly on its infamy), it was a minor studio release with no big-name stars attached, and its violence and nastiness quotient was well below what you'd see in a typical installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. And it's not like the deranged killer was dressed up like Jesus -- although part of his backstory, involving being abused by the Mother Superior of the Catholic orphanage to which he was sent after the death of his parents, was read by a number of critical as anti-religious bigotry. Combined with the detournement of Santa Claus (who was suddenly recast as a religious symbol instead of a commercial one), it struck a lot of religious right types as an all-out attack on the birthday of our Savior.

Curiously enough, though, director Charles E. Sellier Jr. has always denied that this was the case. The Catholic orphanage scenes, he insists, were always just a gimmick to get the plot rolling along, and had no anti-clerical intent; and, as if to atone for his sins in making Silent Night Deadly Night, he spent the rest of his career writing and producing direct-to-video religious fodder like The Case for Christ's Ressurection, In Search of the Historical Jesus, and The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark. Still, despite a flood of truly abysmal sequels, his creation remains a curiously watchable little aberration, and has given us one of the all-time great movie taglines in "He's dreaming of a red Christmas". The movie is set to be remade next year by Alexandre Aja, who no doubt will ruin its ragged charm by taken it completely seriously.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An odiferous, fat, and clucking three French hens. Honestly, this isn't a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it can be enjoyably hooty if you're well in your cups on Christmas Day and looking for a break from the non-stop good feelings. Cram it into your DVD player, banish the kids to go play with their new toys, and warn them afterwards what can happen to little boys and girls who are naughty.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Muppet Christmas Carol"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Alert readers may recall that, while I'm posting the reviews of the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon movies in dribs and drabs over the days leading up to Christmas, I actually watched them all in sequence over the space of two days in a bleary haze of rum-soaked egg nog and seasonal affective disorder. I had a highly formalized plan for which movie to watch in which particular order, but I drunkenly knocked over my stack of DVDs after the fifth movie, and then I just watched them in the order in which they fell on the living room floor. I was hoping that it would be late in the day by the time I had to get around to watching some variation of A Christmas Carol -- I find the irascible-old-bastard Scrooge largely preferable to the lover-of-all-humanity Scrooge -- but here's where it turned up, so you're going to have to read about it.

My own misanthropy aside, it's not surprising that Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas has become one of the most beloved holiday stories of all time. It's got a little bit of something for everyone: a sincere, adorable crippled boy, for treacle fans; a handful of truly memorable characters; abundant humor, some of it rather more mordant than one might expect; a creepy ghost story; and, best of all, a central plot that appeals to lovers of Christmas everywhere: a cranky old jerk who hates Christmas has, after a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, a legendary change of heart and embraces the holiday in full, becoming the very embodiment of the spirit of giving and showering those poor souls he previously spurned with largesse.

Dickens write A Christmas Carol for the same reason he wrote a lot of his most famous work: for a paycheck. But it ended up having a much more vast impact on our entire culture than its author possibly imagined. One of the most widely-read stories of the English canon, its familiar story and infinitely flexible formal structure have led it to become one of the most widely-adapted stories as well. The number of stage plays, movies and very-special-episode television series based on the story are probably uncountable; as long as there is economic injustice, as long as there are lazy scriptwriters in love with the flashback gimmick; as long as there are cranky old jerks who, justfiably or not, aren't as into the holidays as the rest of us, there will continue to be new movie and TV versions of A Christmas Carol.

Just to mix things up a bit, I chose as my preferred adaptation this time around the 1992 felt-puppet version of Dickens' classic. Made just after Muppet maven Jim Henson died, it didn't do that well on its initial release, but gained something of a cult following on home video. There's plenty of inside jokes and a clever framing device of the story being narrated by Dickens himself (played by the Great Gonzo) and a comic foil in the form of Rizzo the Rat; the story is surprisingly faithful to the original; the casting of balcony naysayers Statler and Waldorf as Jacob Marley and -- ho, ho -- his brother Robert is inspired and leads to the movie's best musical number; and best of all, Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge proves that, just as he can turn in a great performance in a bad movie, he can be intensely human and affecting while acting opposite a stuffed bag of felt.

You'd be forgiven, naturally, if you chose a different movie version of A Christmas Carol as your favorite; there's enough good ones to make a 12 days of Christmas marathon of nothing but this particular story. The 'canonical' version is probably the 1951 British adaptation Scrooge, carried on the strength of an unforgettable lead performance by the wonderful Alastair Sim, but there's also the 1970 Albert Finney version, a 1935 adptation starring Leo G. Carroll, the George C. Scott-as-Scrooge TV movie from 1984, a 1999 television adaptation with slices of thick British ham from Patrick Stewart, Joel Grey and Richard E. Grant, Henry Winkler's An American Christmas Carol, Bill Murray's post-ironic 1988 adaptation Scrooged, and animated versions starring Mr. Magoo, the Flintstones, and a bunch of talking dogs that all have their fans.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An enjoyable 9 Muppet ladies dancing. This isn't the best Muppet movie, but it isn't the worst, and its relentless charm is hard to resist. Henson's son Brian and Steve Whitmore do a solid if uninspired job of carrying on the Muppet tradition, and there's the usual blend of kid-friendly shenanigans and clever jokes and references for the grown-ups. Caine's performance as Scrooge, though, is what really steals the show.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Star Wars Holiday Special

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "It's a Wonderful Life"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Eight films into our little holiday movie marathon, we finally arrive at the one that most of our readers who haven't spent the last sixty years in the Witness Protection Program in a cave on Mars have probably already seen a dozen times or so: Frank Capra's legendary 1946 Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life. While there's been dozens and dozens of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, there's only one It's a Wonderful Life: despite decades of references, parodys, homages and metacommentaries, the big-screen adaptation of the Phillip Van Doren short story "The Greatest Gift" remains one of a kind. Thanks to an inexplicable chain of events that led to its falling into the public domain for a number of years, it was shown on pretty much every television station at Christmas for decades; finding someone in the U.S. who hasn't seen it is next to impossible.

The challenge when discussing It's a Wonderful Life, then, isn't to explain its plot or detail the great things about it: these are things most people know intimately from repeated first-hand experience. The challege is to think of something new to say about a movie that almost everyone of a certain age has seen, probably more than once. Frank Capra's surehanded direction, the solid script (primarily by Capra and Frances Goodrich), and iconic performances by screen legend Jimmy Stewart (whose interpretation of George Bailey is more responsible than anything for the cultural shorthand we now have for him), future television star Donna Reed, and Hollywood patriarch Lionel Barrymore are the building blocks for a film that defines the word "Capraesque", but what makes it resonate so? It it simple repetition that makes this the Christmas classic above all others?

Entire books have been written about It's a Wonderful Life, and we'll be breaking no new ground in discussing the film in our limited space. But one thing worth mentioning is that how terrifically effective the entire cast is: at a time when the star system was in full swing, Capra and his collaborators (which included script doctors in the uncredited form of Clifford Odets and Dalton Trumbo) populated Bedford Falls with an entire star system of great actors and actresses, many of them character types who gave the performances of their careers in the film. The entire cast seems to take their acting cues from the oversized yet surprisingly natural performance of Jimmy Stewart, who had to be talked into playing the role -- his first since returning from a traumatic tour of duty in WWII.

One thing that's finally getting a due amount of attention after years of being glossed over in critical overviews, at a time when "Capraesque" was misguided jargon for simple-minded patriotic feel-good movies, is how deeply dark and sometimes subversive It's a Wonderful Life can be. Mixed in with all the appropriately heartwarming stuff about family, neighborliness and the power of choosing life is some undeniably cynical, nasty commentary on life as we live it. Capra lets his social-realist background bubble surpringly to the fore considering this is a movie with a bumbling trainee angel named Clarence in it, and for a movie most parents feel totally at ease showing to their children, there are many dark hints of suicide, prostitution, economic ruin, and anti-capitalism so pronounced that the FBI was said to consider the entire film merely an elevated form of Red propaganda designed to soften up our citizens to commie anti-banker rhetoric.

J. Edgar Hoover's boys weren't exactly off by a mile. Frank Capra meant for It's a Wonderful Life to be inspirational as well as confrontational, to show an American spirit challenged and often miserable if always ultimately triumphant. This was the only major motion picture to be produced by Capra's Liberty Studio, a venture designed to showcase serious issue-driven films about what it means to be an American; but even if it were the only major motion picture Capra ever made, it would be enough. In a way, it's fortunate that RKO's operators made the foolish mistake of not renewing the film's copyright at a critical time: when It's a Wonderful Life slid into the public domain, it ensured that it would be viewable at least once a year by audiences who might not have otherwise gotten a chance to see it, and fully take in its hidden depths.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An unparallelled 12 drummers drumming out a message of hope and redemption. Simply one of the greatest Christmas stories ever told, as well as one of the finest movies of its era (even if it did get screwed by the Motion Picture Academy. If you have the chance, I'd also recommend a viewing of Hirokazu Koreeda's masterful After Life (Japanese title: Wandafuru Raifu), a brilliant, unforgettable film that isn't a holiday movie but purely and beatifully distills the esence of It's a Wonderful Life -- its primary influence -- in an astonishing way.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nighmare Before Christmas

Yesterday's Hits: The Santa Clause (1994, John Pasquin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Well, it’s the holidays again, and that means that Christmas movies are back in season. But while Christmas movies have long been an annual tradition, in the last few decades the market for new holiday-themed classics has grown by leaps and bounds. Gone are the days when scruffy little movies like A Christmas Story would do decent business in theatres only to become classics on video and cable. Today, Christmas movies are big business, and rare is the big budget holiday movie that doesn’t clean up at the box office. For my next three Yesterday’s Hits columns, I’ll be taking a new look at three of the biggest holiday hits of all time, to get you all in the spirit of the season. This week, I’ll begin with the 1994 blockbuster The Santa Clause.

The Santa Clause came after nearly a decade of Christmas movies that shied away from dealing with Santa Claus. While this might seem odd nowadays, there was a good reason for this at the time- 1985’s Santa Claus: The Movie was a massive flop, scaring the studios into making less fantasy-based holiday movies in the years to come. But by the mid-1990s, Disney decided it was time to bring back the jolly old elf, and The Santa Clause served up St. Nick with a twist on the old tale. After several established movie stars (Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, to name two) turned down the role, Disney turned to the star of the hugely popular sitcom Home Improvement, a former standup comedian named Tim Allen. The combination of Christmas and Allen’s big-screen leading man debut proved as irresistible to audiences as milk and cookies, and The Santa Clause became the biggest hit of fall 1994, spawning two sequels and propelling Allen to movie stardom.

The premise of the film certainly helped. Rather than beginning with its main character born as Santa, The Santa Clause took the novel approach of having its protagonist Scott Calvin (played by Allen) more or less inherit the job. In the film, if something happens to the current Santa, the next person to don the suit takes his place, with all of the side effects that implies. The Santa Clause’s best sequence takes place right after Scott finds himself thrust into the role of Kris Kringle, when we discover through his eyes the perils of the job- snarling dogs, home security systems, gifts that are too big to fit under the tree. And while Scott predictably finds himself turning physically into Santa, gaining 45 pounds in a week and growing a long white beard in a matter of minutes, the sight gags are fairly enjoyable nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn’t as much fun as the Santa material. Scott’s life in the temperate latitudes includes a well-paying job as a toy company executive and an ex-wife Laura (Wendy Crewson), with whom he shares custody of their young son Charlie (Eric Lloyd). Naturally, Charlie is jazzed about his dad being Santa, but of course none of the other adults believe his stories of when they visited the North Pole and went around delivering gifts. Laura’s new husband Neil (Judge Reinhold) just happens to be a psychiatrist, and he quickly concludes that Charlie is having trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and that Scott with his physical changes is feeding his son’s delusions in order to look better in Charlie’s eyes. The resulting plot developments are too contrived to be effective, and they’re exacerbated by Reinhold’s awful performance, in which he comes off less as a competent doctor than someone who’s suffered a recent blow to the head.

Ever since Charles Dickens penned A Christmas Carol more than 160 years ago, there has been a fairly standard trajectory for Christmas stories and, later, Christmas movies- a character, or group of characters, overcome their self-centered ways by discovering the meaning of Christmas. Even Bad Santa’s Willie, the most dissolute of recent Christmas movie protagonists, ended up finding some member of the Christmas spirit through his unlikely mentorship of a (very strange) kid. The Santa Clause was directed by John Pasquin, who had previously worked with Allen when he directed numerous episodes of Home Improvement, and the movie feels and looks like a big-screen sitcom, with some easy laughs and nothing offensive to scare away audiences. Like most Christmas movies, it’s an okay way to take a break from holiday shopping or entertain visiting relatives. But as a movie, it’s really nothing special.

DVD Digest for November 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

You can always tell when it’s the holiday season, because the studios begin to clear out their coffers to release titles both new and classic, no matter whether they’ve already been released on DVD.

DVD of the Week: With thousands of titles (both theirs, MGM’s, and other studios’) in their library, no studio has more classic movies to draw from than Warner Bros. This week brings a goldmine of classic WB titles, but none of these is more appealing than the new box set Warner Bros. and the Homefront. Just in time for Veteran’s Day, the box set contains three of the studio’s best-known flag-waving entertainments, all of which are new to DVD. The most notable of the bunch was the 1943 hit Irving Berlin’s This Is The Army, starring future president Ronald Reagan along with the titular composer. The other films in the set are a pair of star-studded patriotic musicals, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Hollywood Canteen. In addition, Warner Bros. has dug into their massive collection of archival material in order to pair vintage short films, newsreels, trailers and cartoons with each of the films, including the semi-notorious Herr Meets Hare. So while some might claim that the films in the Homefront collection are disposable, the box set is anything but.

Warner will also be releasing two box sets for the holidays, Warner Bros. Holiday Collection Volume 1 and Volume 2. Volume 1 includes previously-released DVDs of Boys Town, A Christmas Carol, and Christmas in Connecticut, plus a bonus DVD of The Singing Nun. Volume 2 contains the new-to-DVD titles All Mine to Give, Holiday Affair, and It Happened on 5th Avenue (each sold separately), plus Blossoms in the Dust, available only in the box set. Paramount will be rereleasing three of their most beloved classics- Roman Holiday, Sabrina, and Sunset Blvd- in special “Centennial Editions” just in time for the studio’s 100th anniversary. Other classics coming to DVD this week include: JFK 3-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Quo Vadis (Warner), and The Director’s Series: Roberto Rossellini (Lionsgate), which includes Escape By Night and Where Is Freedom?.

The highest-profile recent releases coming to DVD this week are Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Universal, also Blu-Ray) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (First Look, also Blu-Ray); the holiday-themed This Christmas (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Christophe Honore’s Love Songs (Genius Productions); the breakdancing doc Planet B-Boy (Arts Alliance America); and two titles who will have almost no audience members in common, Toby Keith in Beer For My Horses (Lionsgate) and the Flaming Lips in Christmas on Mars (WEA).

This week’s big TV on DVD news is the release of the massive The Sopranos: The Complete Series (HBO) box set. In addition, there’s also The Cosby Show: The Complete Series (First Look), as well as Scrubs Season 7 (Disney). And finally, the Blu-Ray only titles for this week are exclusively TV shows: Band of Brothers (Warner), Chuck Season 1 (Warner), Firefly: The Complete Series (Warner), and Supernatural Season 3 (Warner). So that’s cool, I guess.