Monthly Archives: November 2014

Road to Christmas

Julia Wise is the Martha Stewart of the Hallmark Christmas universe. This year her producer, Maggie (Jessy Schram), is planning a live Christmas Special, but Julia and the network are worried that it won’t be the ratings draw they want and need. So Julia brings in her son, Danny (Chad Michael Murray), to co-produce. He’s stepping on all ten of Maggie’s toes, but she’s professional and intends to grin and bear it. Whatever it takes!

His first suggestion to improve the live Christmas Special is to pre-tape some MV5BODAxMWNjMDMtZGE3NC00ZWYwLTg3NjgtM2ExYmNmOTc5OTM4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQyOTc3NDU@._V1_ segments. Catch that? Live TV. Pre-taped. Does not compute, right? So yeah, toe stepping accomplished, now they’re butting heads too. But as a compromise, they decide to cross the country filming Christmas oddities, like snowman relay races (you’ll have to watch to find out), and Maggie’s secret goal is also to assemble the Wise Men (ie, Danny’s brothers, who resent the Special and their mom’s Hollywood version of Christmas) for extra holiday cheer. But, you know, for the record – two can play that game.

Anyway, you’re never going to believe what’s about to brew between these two attractive competitors. And by “never believe” I mean that you’ll of course see it coming from the opening credits because Hallmark follows a strict formula from which is never deviates. Homogeneity is their brand. People who watch Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas want a white man to hold a white woman under the mistletoe after a brief and tumultuous courtship while the set decorators slap greenery on anything that isn’t moving. I bet the rest of us can find something more interesting to talk about.

What odd holiday traditions does your family observe? Maggie’s does a white elephant gift exchange that involves an actual white elephant. Growing up, we left Santa Doritos and daiquiris rather than milk and cookies because my Mom insisted that’s what he’d prefer, and she was right, because they were always gone. Growing up, my Mom’s family would do a Réveillon; her family would attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve, then return home to a big meal and gifts from Santa. Christmas day was spent going visiting, collecting people as they went, the soberest doing the driving, until the last house of the night had 30 guests all at once. Today we do a modified version, with the believers bundling off to church on the 24th while the rest of us stay behind to warm up the finger food and mix the drinks we’ll pass around once everyone gets back. No gifts though. Those are left for The Big Reveal on Christmas morning, when Santa has left a sea of unwrapped gifts – mine on the love seat, Jessie’s on the chair, with Jana and Tessa splitting the couch. It’s weird, but it’s tradition. What’s yours?

Shrek the Halls

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Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, and all the friends we’re accustomed to finding down in the swamp gather round the ogre’s hearth for a heartwarming Christmas celebration.

Okay, not quite. First off, Shrek is no fan of Christmas. Generally speaking, ogres aren’t, apparently. So this first Christmas with Fiona and the triplets is also Shrek’s first Christmas period. It has caught him unawares. But Shrek is nothing if not a good dad and devoted husband, so he sets about creating the perfect holiday for his little family. Look closely and you may notice his decor consists of eyeballs shrek and his roast goose is not, in fact, a goose, or fowl of any kind. He’s an ogre and he’s doing his best.

Of course, Shrek gets more than he bargained for when his whole extended family shows up uninvited – Donkey, Puss In Boots, the blind mice, the three little pigs, the whole gang’s assembled, and in true Shrek fashion, the first they do is throw a dance party, because no Shrek movie is complete without a montage or two set to high-energy, kid-friendly music.

Shrek The Halls is a short, 30 minute holiday special that you can find on Netflix. It’s got nothing new to add to the Shrek cannon, it’s just a happy holiday happening, and it can be happening right now, in your bedroom, in your living room, anywhere you need some holiday cheer that’s fun for the whole family.

A Shoe Addict’s Christmas

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Noelle loves Christmas almost as much as she loves shoes. Although her official title is HR, she’s decorating and over-decorating the department store where she works in true holiday spirit – even though the store’s owner is not so big on the holidays.

Now, take some deep breaths because this next part is a bit nuts: Noelle (Candace Cameron Bure) gets locked in the store overnight, because they shut down early due to MV5BMTBkYTUyNGQtOWFjZC00YmM2LWJlMWMtMjRjOWMxMjg4ODUzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODA4MzkyNjM@._V1_ snow, and she doesn’t have a key. So she just gets left there! That’s clearly cooked up by some Hollywood psycho, because anyone who lives in a city who routinely gets snow knows that shit don’t get shut down for nuthin. But anyway, this suspension of disbelief is necessary, because how else will Noelle be visited by her guardian angel, Charlie (Jean Smart, WHOM I LOVE) who is here to reignite her passions. Through a pair of time-traveling shoes, she shows her a past Christmas when she should have made a different (better, smarter) choice, and an alternate Christmas from the universe where that good choice was made. But forget about career, happiness, success – she’s about to meet the man she marries in that alternate universe when she gets rescued and the vision dissipates. Darn!

Now, to be sure, even the title of this movie eats at my feminist sensibilities. But I’m doing some deep breathing to see beyond it. Ha. That’ll be a Christmas miracle.

Anyway, Noelle is back home in her normal, usual life, but Charlie has stuck around, and is encouraging her to see what’s possible – notably, by hanging out as much as possible with the hunky fireman who just moved in next door, Jake (Luke Macfarlane). Luckily, they’ve been paired to throw a charity ball. Christmas is just two weeks away, and these types of events are usually planned over a period of months if not a full year, but in the meantime, we’re going to enjoy watching these two lock reindeer antlers over the stupid, made-up things they argue over. Hollywood has such a fucked up notion of courtship. Charlie keeps throwing them together and Noelle keeps not playing along, but luckily she is easily fooled by a new pair of shoes, and the damn shoes keep sucking her into other possible lives. And somehow god gets pulled into this. Do not ask me how.

Anyway, the movie is light, flirty, and stacked full of actors who pronounce familiar “fermiliar.” Rhymes with “phertographer.” Except not really. Is this a weird American thing? Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I won’t be wearing any shoes this Christmas. Flip flops, maybe, but otherwise it’ll just be my toes in the sand or the waves.

Christmas In Love

Christmas Incorporated

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Riley has $89 left to her name. She’s in desperate need of a job, so even though she’s over-qualified, she accepts a job acting as assistant to William Young, the young heir of a toy company. Within hours, she’s off to the airport to fly to the small town where a foundering factory is located. Young and his board of directors are thinking of shutting it down, but the whole town has gathered in order that it be saved.

Things are made extra awkward by the fact that William is a bit of a Christmas grouch. The town’s got its holiday cheer turned up to 11 for him, which is the exact opposite of how to win him over. Even knowing this, Riley’s answer to the town’s MV5BNDczYTI1YTItNDBhNy00YThlLWI3YmMtNzhhZjU5MzFiZmRlL2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMzM0ODg1MzA@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1502,1000_AL_ woes is to immerse William, against his will, in the town’s events, to make him fit in with the locals. Their shenanigans are of course observed by the local press, and the board isn’t happy with the image he’s portraying. Business is hard! It’s even harder when you’ve been keeping secrets, which Riley (Shenae Grimes-Beech) has. She’s not the person William Young thinks he hired. Don’t worry, that secret won’t squeak out until after he falls in love with her, so the betrayal will be doubled, nay squared, but drama is what we’re after. Where’s the fun in a love story that’s not fertilized generously by conflict?

So let’s brainstorm. There’s a sweet, smart assistant who may have misled some people about her true identity. There’s a handsome rich guy who hates Christmas but likes the girl who loves Christmas. And there’s a town who thrives on Christmas – at least until their toy factory disappears. Can Hallmark successfully juggle all these balls? Have no fear, they plug conveniently into the Hallmark formula and out tumbles the usual equation: Christmas is saved, love blossoms, happily ever after, blah blah blah.

Little Miss Sunshine

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This is my jam. A movie I can watch again and again and it never gets old. It’s well-constructed and absorbing and there’s always some small detail to catch and enjoy.

The Hoovers are having a hard time. Sheryl brings her suicidal brother Frank to her home where he’s scarcely the most damaged. Frank (Steve Carell) has just been rejected by his lover and is suffering from acute profession angst as he watches his rival in Proustian studies get recognized while his own work languishes. Sheryl (Toni Collette) takes him in but barely has a thought to spare for him, poor guy, no matter how fresh the bandages on his wrists are. Her husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) has a self-help technique for attaining success that nobody wants. He’s a loser, and his starry-eyed MV5BNTUyNzk4NjA0Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTYzNDA2MjI@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1526,1000_AL_ confidence is waning by the minute. Their teenage son Dwayne (Paul Dano) has taken a vow of silence. He can’t wait to leave his family behind to pursue his dream of becoming a pilot. Dwayne’s grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) has just been kicked out of his retirement residence for selling (and taking) drugs. The family’s a mess, and Sheryl’s beginning to feel emotionally bankrupt, so it’s under these circumstances that the family rallies around its youngest member, Olive (Abigail Breslin). Olive may be an unlikely candidate for the beauty pageant circuit but she’s an enthusiastic one. On a whim, the family decides to leave their troubles behind and hit the road from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, California, in pursuit of little Olive’s dream of pageant glory.

Little Miss Sunshine is about dreams, and I guess, their inverse – illusions. This family of fuck ups needs so badly for one goddamned thing to go right. But for some of us, happiness, or contentment, needs to be found in small moments of unity. Triumph found in trying. Not everyone is a winner at life, and that’s what makes this film so funny, and so heart breaking. It’s what makes it feel real despite some increasingly absurd twists of fate.

Family dynamics are made clear to us during a long scene around a bucket of KFC. My goodness. Toni Collette has long been a favourite of mine but she’s determined with each performance to win me over again, astonishing me with her willingness to let ego go and embrace the honest dregs of each character. Steve Carell was an unknown when they cast him, and producers worried that he wasn’t famous enough to help their little movie along. But in the short time between filming and the movie’s release, Carell burst onto the scene in a star-making turn in the 40 Year Old Virgin, and then introduced himself to all of America as everyone’s favourite boss on The Office. He is quiet and introspective in Little Miss Sunshine, but his underplayed pain and ennui have a presence that take up space in the family’s forever breaking down VW bus. Little Abigail Breslin did not make her acting debut in Little Miss Sunshine (she was in 2002’s Signs) but she did become the first person born in the 90s to get a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod for her role; she was 10 at the time. She lost but Alan Arkin won in his category. His snatching of the Oscar from Mark Wahlberg was the only one of 5 categories that The Departed lost that night.

This family’s dysfunction is perhaps a little more urgent and layered than most, but almost everyone can see a slice of their own family somewhere in this script. We laugh, we cry, we have a good time, and we leave better people because we’ve witnessed someone’s pain and empathized.

The Virgin Suicides

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Mid-1970s Detroit: 5 beautiful, blonde sisters are all but cloistered in their home, kept safe and sheltered by their strict, religious parents. A group of neighbourhood boys become obsessed with these rarely-seen girls, and their intensity and curiosity is only heightened when the youngest sister, just 13, commits suicide.

One of those boys, now grown up and middle aged, recounts the story for us – is he a reliable narrator? He can only piece together the story with the rare glimpses they got from the outside. Even among his friends, he admits, they still argue about what exactly happened. But it says something that they still talk about it in such detail all these years later. It’s a morbid fascination that comes to include us.

Writer-director Sofia Coppola (based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel) loves to hide what her leading ladies are thinking, but they never remain as mysterious as in The Virgin Suicides, where the sisters are unknowable not by choice, but by the restrictive actions of their parents. In fact, they are desperate to communicate with the world, and in the 1970s, given all the barriers around them, this was in games of telephone, hand-written notes, even a lamp flicked on and off – morse code, perhaps.

The movie is ostensibly about the sisters (the next-youngest, Lux, played by Kirsten Dunst, especially), but the story really belongs to and is told by the people – the boys and the men – on the outside, trying and failing to make sense of it all. This sense of the outside looking in is often visually represented through Coppola’s shots of the house outside. We peek in through the windows, through cracks of the front door. When a little girl is taken away by ambulance, all the neighbours gather on their front lawns to watch. The cinematic voyeurism only magnifies what the characters do on screen. Short scenes in living rooms and beauty salons assure us that gossip is as rampant among adults as the teenagers who can’t stop watching, even through a telescope, if that’s what it takes. And when one boy, on the cusp of manhood really (Josh Hartnett), finally achieves the impossible and sleeps with the unattainable Lux, she wakes up the next morning to find him gone. He’s left her because once he’s pierced the soapy bubble of her elusiveness and mystique, he finds that she is, in fact, an ordinary girl, and is no longer interested. The sisters’ mythos has largely been constructed by others and is ironically fueled by the strictness of their parents.

This is a tragic story, one that manages not to have heroes or villains, simply victims and witnesses. The boys, in their youth and inexperience, are never held accountable, nor even judged. And the girls remain aloof, forever lost, reduced to a mere absence, a wistful grief.

Beethoven’s Christmas Adventure

Nowhere Boy

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Nowhere Boy is about John Lennon’s early years – adolescence toward young manhood, which as we know is not a normal coming of age tale since the nowhere boy was well on his way to becoming the most famous man in the world.

The film shows the influence of two women on John’s life: his mean Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) who raised him, and his absent mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), who re-enters his life at a crucial bit, extracting pain but also possibly inspiring artistry.

MV5BOTI2MDM0Mzg5M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDI0OTQ0Mw@@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1505,1000_AL_ Lennon (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) knew Mimi wasn’t his mother, but did not learn his mother’s identity until his uncle died and she showed up to the funeral. He was shocked to learn that all this time, she’s lived in the neighbourhood, must have been watching as he grew up. Julia is the younger, prettier, more outgoing, easier to love sister of Mimi’s. John and Julia’s relationship feels a little like a romance as they get to know each other in a little bubble.

But remember, during this time he’s also meeting George, and Paul. The world Beatles is never uttered, though, because this isn’t about the birth of the band. It’s about one ordinary teenager’s life, and the family secrets and tragedies that ushered him into adulthood.

It constricts the heart a little to know that the man who sang All You Need Is Love didn’t always get it. And if he had, we might not have him, or his beautiful lyrics, or his search for truth and meaning.

Sam Taylor-Johnson directed this film, with input from Paul McCartney and Lennon’s half sister, Julia Baird. It is her feature length debut. Her style is unpretentious, and she knows where her focus should be: on John. On the many Johns. The lesser-known Johns. It’s satisfying, as a biopic, because of its narrow scope. We all know who John became; this film tells us how he became. It’s fresh, and that’s very hard to do when we’re talking about one of the most recognizable human beings on the planet. It leaves behind the expected trappings and delivers only gleeful hints of what might be on the horizon. It’s thrilling to watch because of where it does not go.

Casting was obviously going to be a huge part of the film’s success or failure. Taylor-Johnson admits she was most nervous about finding the right Paul, as he’s still alive to see it. Instead of look-alikes, she went with a sweet-faced actor known to us as the drummer kid from Love Actually, Thomas Brodie-Sangster. But John, of course, makes the movie thrum, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson was its beating heart. With no overt mimicry, he embodies John’s spirit. It’s beautiful to watch.

Christmas Wedding Planner

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Kelsey is planning her first real wedding, her cousin Emily’s Christmas Eve wedding, and Kelsey (Jocelyn Hudon) is big-time overwhelmed. She meets Connor (Stephen Huszar) very early on in the movie, when her overwhelmedness is communicated in the opening scene when she bodily runs into not one but two different people in a coffee shop and allows the gentleman to precede her in ordering only to have him nab the last blueberry scone. And that was a very important blueberry scone, meant to appease her fierce aunt Olivia (Kelly Rutherford, it’s come to this), mother of Emily (Rebecca Dalton), and able to make or break Kelsey as a wedding planner.

Cut to the engagement party where Kelsey finds out that Connor is Emily’s ex, and he may be in town to ruin the wedding! Somehow, though Emily is a cousin but more like a sister, Kelsey has never met nor heard of Connor. And he’s also a private investigator “looking into” Emily’s fiancé Todd.

Christmas Wedding Planner blends the best (or the worst, depending on your point of view) tropes in both romance and holiday genres: dress shopping, cookie baking, sleigh bells instead of a real score, charitable deeds, cake tasting, and lots of misunderstandings. This one even has a boy-bander as the PI’s bartending conscience. It’s a weird addition that hardly stands out in a movie that’s not trying to make sense.

Like all of these movies, the acting is either wooden, or over the top, though I dare say our leading lady (Hudon) is not only exceedingly cute, but sort of a good actress too.

Your brain won’t like this film. Your brain will be embarrassed for you, and maybe for your cats as well. If you insist on watching this, turn off your brain. I don’t classify this as a Christmas movie, but as a wrapping presents movie – it’ll vaguely put you in the spirit but you won’t need to give it your full attention. Not even half a brain. Remember: you turned that shit off. Hallmark means enjoying the cheese while sipping some wine.