Monthly Archives: December 2014

White Christmas

This movie is almost exactly like a great number of other musicals from the same era: a successful song-and-dance duo meet and fall in love with a sister act. But this wasn’t just another musical, this was Bing Crosby in White Christmas, and it became the highest grossing film of 1954, even though it’s “just” a Christmas movie.

The film also puts Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby on the screen together, which is a delight. Too bad you can’t hear them together anywhere but in the movie: Clooney’s record company wouldn’t let her on the soundtrack for a competing company, so Peggy Lee replaces her there. She released her own version of the songs, some with her actual sister playing the sister part. Danny Kaye and Vera Ellen round out the cast, though Vera Ellen mysteriously does very little of her own singing. But who cares? You came for Bing Crosby anyway!

As usual, no expense is spared with set and costume. Or, for the numbers anyway – you’ll never see a sorrier excuse for a brick wall during the war bit at the beginning. I loved the tiny little pointe shoes on the tiny little ballerinas. I also loved Crosby’s unsuppressed (and unscripted) laughter during his and Kaye’s “drag” scene.

What I really enjoy about this movie though is the war aspect. We see Crosby doing a Christmas Eve show as a captain in the army. His fan and supporter (Kaye) saves his life, and when the war is over, the two team up and become quite famous performing their act all over the country. But the war is never really far from our consciousness. The plot is propelled by “favours” for old army buddies (well, that, and Kaye deciding that his buddy Bing really needs to get ~~laid~~ married). And when they find their general down on his luck, they rally around him in a touching tribute. This speaks to me because it’s clear that the war theme was still resonating with audiences in 1954.

We’ve of course forgotten the true meaning of White Christmas, the song, but it was beloved and popularized by the boys in the Pacific over a decade earlier, in 1942. Irving Berlin, the composer, realized that the soldiers were truly the ones dreaming of a white Christmas, and so he built this show (and then the movie) around the song. And while the movie has great big production numbers, this song is given a very simple treatment, just Bing accompanied by a wind-up music box, in front of the soldiers who loved it most, on a lonely Christmas Eve.

It’s interesting that during the movie, the characters make reference (through song lyrics) to USO performers going overseas to entertain the troops on Christmas. They sing “Jolsen, Hope and Benny all for free” but the original lyric was “Crosby, Hope and Benny” – obviously a change was necessary to maintain the integrity of the fourth wall – but it’s important to remember that this cause had long been dear to Crosby’s heart.

It’s incredibly touching to me at the end to see all those men in their uniforms saluting their general and all that he stands for. It’s a great representation of the camaraderie and the unconditional support that was birthed in those trenches (while ignoring the horrors of war, true, but this is a Christmas movie after all).

Vote for your favourite all-time Christmas movie in our poll!

6 Big Reasons to See Big Hero 6

6 Replies

I am a little late to the party seeing Big Hero 6 so I will not review it the way that I normally would but will instead try to sum up in 6 reasons why, if you haven’t seen it yet, in the words of Hiro Hamada “I fail to see how you fail to see that it’s awesome”.

1. It was announced last week that Big Hero 6 has been nominated for a Best Animated Feature Film at the Golden Globes!!! Hmmm.. That sounded more exciting in my head. Okay, even I don’t really care about the Globes but, come January, I’m sure it’ll also become a must-see for any educated Oscar pool. Besides, you don’t want to be the only one in the room not to get it when Tina and Amy make a hilarious Baymax joke, do you?

2. If you don’t usually like Disney movies, don’t worry. This one’s also from a pretty deep and obscure corner of the Marvel universe. Apart from one robot, all the characters here are human . Just like any superhero movie, Hiro starts out as a bit of an outsider with a tragic past and must use what makes him unique (in this case, his intellect) to save the city. His pet robot Baymax also makes the transformation from cuddly to badass. There’s even a Stan Lee cameo.

3. If you’re tired of superhero movies, don’t worry. This is still a Disney film at heart with all the creativity, visual genius, and great characters you’ve come to expect from Disney’s best movies. Baymax really is an awesome creation and, although all the rockets and armour that Hiro adds later feel straight out of Iron Man, the health care provider that he is deep down is all Disney.

4. Hiro is backed up by a great supporting cast of four nerds-turned-heroes. Some Disney sidekicks are really there for the kids and can be distracting or even annoying. Wasabi, GoGo, Fred, and Honey Lemon offer necessary comic relief and support for Hiro, who is much younger than the rest.

5. A teenage boy who’s a bit of a loner bonds with and fights aongside a robot to save the world and it’s not directed by Michael Bay. So, there’s that.

6. Ever since Sean saw saw Big Hero 6, I could barely understand what he was talking about half the time. Now I can. he loved it too and you can check out his review.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

3 Replies

Matt and Christina Drayton (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn)’s daughter has come home from university with some exciting news: She’s met a guy! She’s only known him for 10 days but she thinks she’s in love and would like to get married. They’ve never seen her so happy so, even though this is pretty sudden, this is great news. What’s his name? Dr. John Prentice. Oooohh, a doctor? What’s he like? Well, Mom and Dad, There’s just one little thing. It’s not a big deal but you might want to sit down. He’s, well, he’s black.

You probably still could pull enough drama out of this concept to make a movie today but, in 1967, no one else had really tried to make a movie about inter-racial marraiges in a positive light. Hell, it was even still illegal in 14 states when they started filming. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was a huge success, disproving the conventional wisdom of major studios at the time that films with black actors and black themes would not be interesting to mainstream audiences. It was also nominated for 10 Oscars. But how does it hold up today?

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner has been the subject of some controversey in recent years. Both Herman Koch’s novel The Dinner (read it if you get the chance) and Lee Daniels’ The Butler feature impassioned dinner table debates over the film’s message. Dr. Prentice is played by the great Sidney Poitier as polite, well-spoken, and successful. Of course her parents learn to love him, modern haters claim. Prentice is as non-threatening as can be, with some criticizing the character as too “assimilated” or even “too white”.

I will not address these criticisms except to suggest that they may miss the point. This was a pretty forward-thinking movie for 1967 but it was still 1967 and it was made with a white audience in mind and it’s what’s going on with Tracy and Hepburn’s characters that make things interesting. A less interesting movie would have potrayed them as a couple of overt bigots, leaving it up to Poitier’s character to shatter their prejudices. Instead, Matt and Christina are San Fransisco intellectuals ( he runs a newspaper, she runs an art gallery) and self-appointed liberals. Matt’s daughter describes him as a “life-long liberal who has spent his entire life fighting discrimination”. But what happens when a black man asks him for his daughter’s hand in marraige? One friend of the family watches the whole drama with amusement, “watching a broken-down phony liberal come face-to-face with his principles”.

The haters aren’t wrong. It is dated. The music is corny, the backyard scenes are so obviously filmed on a set that it’s almost hilarious, and a couple of scenes are just plain silly. But the dilemma that Matt and Christina face still rings true. Spencer Tracy is especially compelling as he lashes out at everyone, angry mostly at himself as he comes to realize that maybe he wasn’t as enlightened as he thought, now that he himself has to make the changes that he keeps insisting America must make. Maybe because Poitier has such screen-presence, it can be easy to put the focus on Dr. Prentice but the film’s main struggle is really between the Drayton’s and their own values. Watching this unfold is what makes Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner a Hollywood classic, one that I make a point of revisiting every couple of years and that will endure long after we’ve all forgotten about Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

Snow Piercer

1 Reply

An experiment to save the world actually destroys it, sending the world into a deep freeze. The few survivors board a train that constantly whizzes around the globe, smashing through ice and snow, in perpetual motion. The train is strictly divided according to class, with the very rich poshly appointed in the front and the poor kept in dismal conditions in the back until cryptic messages filter through to them, inciting them to rebellion.

Curtis (bushy bearded Chris Evans) is the reluctant leader of the great unwashed in a brutal, gruesome battle toward the front, and the train’s inventor\conductor, Wilford. Wilford sends his minions to do his dirty work, including a nightmarish Tilda Swinton.

I heard about this movie from several sources in late spring of 2014 and looked forward to finding it in theatres, though I never did. Why did such a fascinating movie disappear? It’s because of a little dick named Harvey Weinstein. The Weinstein Company owned the rights but didn’t believe that North American audiences were smart enough to “get” the movie, insisting on a 20-minute slaughter of the film, as well as the addition of opening and closing monologues. To punish director Bong Joon-ho for sticking up for his movie, Weinstein buried the movie. But guess what? We found it, lots of us did, and you can too.

This movie works on many levels – as an allegory, as social commentary, as an action flick, as an intense, thrilling drama. I love how the progress of the underclass from the back of the train to the front is literally transformative, from the darkest quarters, to bright, lush, and sumptuous toward the front, with devastating frosty beauty outside the windows. This film is visionary, but it declares a certain urgency in setting year 0 at 2014. The editing is tight, it keeps the motion pressing forward, keeps the pace brisk and exhilarating (and sometimes terrifying). This is a real trick of cinematography, to use the train’s inherent claustrophobia as an asset, and to use the momentum as a character and not byproduct of the plot. The scenes are literally compartmentalized but they fit together to make a really nice, fluid picture that you’ll enjoy watching, enjoy rewatching, and really enjoy discussing.

The Martian

5 Replies

In Andy Weir’s sci-fi novel The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney gets accidentally left behind on Mars. You can read my review of the book at Quickie Book Reviews (yes, she reads too!). Weir self-published his book on Amazon and it did so well that a real publisher acquired the rights, and that release did so well that some studio bought the rights to make it into a stupid space movie starring Matt Damon.

Which is all well and good. The book itself is pretty heavy on sciency stuff but I think the overall themes of isolation, preservation, and space panic will translate pretty well on film. And Matt Damon’s got some serious experience being left alone on a planet (although as I recall, that one didn’t go so well). Then yesterday I heard Jessica Chastain was added to the cast, and I instantly worried that this was beginning to feel too much like an Interstellar sequel. Also rumoured to be starring: Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Michael Pena, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, and Donald Glover. Add director Ridley Scott into the mix and what could go wrong? It’s a super starry mix, all reportedly working for less than their normal fees just to “get this thing made.”

So what do you think? Interested in seeing this one? It’s slated for release November 2015.

Update June 2015: The trailer’s just been released, and people are psyched!

Mr Peabody & Sherman

Leave a reply

The Assholes are too young to feel nostalgic about this movie. I can’t comment on how it stands up to the original stuff, I can only say how I felt about it as a stand-alone movie starring characters that I first heard about in 2014.

I take it that the source material, 4-minute shorts contained as a side piece to the Rocky & Bullwinkle show, was one of the first “ironic” cartoons made for kids. But in 2014, snarkiness is now a fait accompli if an animated movie is going to be have much success at the box office, and by that standard, Mr. Peabody and Sherman is actually quite innocent.

Mr. Peabody (voiced by Ty Burrell) is exceptional. He’s a genius, and an Olympian, a Nobel-Prize recipient, and Harvard know-it-all (he was valeDOGtorian, in fact). Finally he’s found himself an actual challenge: raising his adopted (human) son, Sherman, who mysteriously calls his father Mr. Peabody. We are treated to a little montage of their lives together thus far (set sweetly to John Lennon’s Beautiful Boy). And then launched into plot: Sherman is 7 now, and attending school where he is bullied. He gets into a fight with the bully and bites her. Mr. Peabody is very surprised at this behaviour and learns that the intolerable thing that the bully has accused Sherman of being is – a dog. That little moment is a delight in animation. We can read the hurt on both their faces – the father and his pain at being the thing that his son cannot stand, and the son and his shame for wanting so badly to not be like his father. If only the movie could provide us with more such moments.

Alas, it’s time for the action. And in case you didn’t guess, Mr. Peabody, genius inventor, has a secret time machine that allows him to teach his son about history and the world first-hand. But when left alone with the bully, who just happens to be a cute blonde, nerdy little Sherman tries to win her affection by spilling the secret, and like that, they’re off to Ancient Egypt where complications await them.

It’s basically a sweet film, great for kids, and it’s hard to argue against a talking dog. It’s just that this dog has no bark, and no bite. He’s all bowties and cuddles. Pop this one into the DVD player for the kids, and go have a martini all to yourself.

Scrooged

Leave a reply

If you’ve seen Scrooged then you might know, and if you’ve never seen it you still may have guessed, it’s not a great movie. It’s not bad, but there are better Christmas movies out there. In fact, there are better Dickens-inspired Christmas movies out there. But do you know what this movie has and others do not? Bill Fucking Murray.

The man’s a legend, so any movie he deigns to appear in has immediate cool factor. And in Scrooged, you get 4 Murrays for the price of 1: three of his brothers appear in this movie with him, one playing his brother, and another playing his dad! (The third plays “party guest” – you can’t win em all).

Murray plays the would-be-Jacob-Marley character, and there’s no one better suited to play such a depraved, misanthropic, crotchety role. That’s him at his best. So why then did director Richard Donner muddy it up with gimmicks, forced laughs, and production values that nobody asked for? It feels like Donner didn’t trust his leading man, but this movie would have been a heck of a lot funnier if Murray had been allowed off his leash.

In the holiday mood? Feeling Christmassy? Read Jay’s review of Love Actually here, and be sure to cast your vote for all-time favourite Christmas movie. Expect more Christmas reviews in the days and weeks to come.

The Madness of King George

Leave a reply

I’m actually kind of partial to the films of 1994 because it was the 1995 Oscar ceremony, honouring the best of ’94, that got me hooked on all things Oscar. In honour of my upcoming 20th annual Oscar party, I decided to check this movie out- one of the few that I still hadn’t seen from that year.

In The Madness of King George, Nigel Hawthorne plays King George II during his struggle with mental illness (never so-called in the film for obvious reasons) in the late 1780’s. The pretty much always awesome Helen Mirren plays his wife Queen Charlotte who has no idea what to do with him. “It was something he ate!” she yells at no one in particular while the King derails a concert by storming the stage swatting away anyone trying to assist him.

The Madness of King George is quite well-done until the photo finish ending where the king races to Parliament to prove that he’s sane again before his son the Prince of Wales, played as a complete dickwad by Rupert Everett, can be declared Regent. I still have mixed feelings about this movie though, mostly about Dr. Willis, played by Ian Holm (old Bilbo Baggins). On the one hand, his theorizing about power’s connection to madness is interesting. All mad men think of themselves as kings, he muses. What fantasy then does a mad king take refuge in? It’s the feedback we get from others, including the insults and constructive criticism that shapes us so how can you keep a grip on reality when everyone around you looks to you as royalty? It’s a good question worth thinking about. Although, with medical hindsight being 20/20, they seem pretty sure now that the king’s madness was due to a rare blood disorder, not believing his own hype.

Dr. Willis’ answer to this is behavioural modification, basically meaning that the patient will be put in restraints every time he misbehaves (e.g. talking crazy, not eating, swearing etc.). Ok, I know that this is 1788 but, working in mental health myself, I was a little disturbed to see this practice potrayed as almost heroic rather than (again, hindsight 20/20) primitive. Compared to the king’s other doctors, of course, Willis was quite forward-thinking. One doctor is hilariously outraged at the impropriety of conducting a physical examination of the king while another just can’t get enough royal crap to examine.

It was hell to be declared mad in 1788. You can see it on the king’s face every now and then, when he becomes temporarily lucid enough to wonder what is happening to him. I would have rather the film focus on this more, instead of finding a doctor to declare as hero just because he is a little less incompetent or inhumane than the rest.

Mixed Nuts

Leave a reply

A small group of dedicated counsellors are working a crisis line on Christmas, even though they’re about to get evicted. It features an all-star cast: Steve Martin, Rita Wilson, Madeline Kahn, Adam Sandler, Liev Schreiber, Anthony LaPaglia, Juliette Lewis, Rob Reiner, Joely Fisher, and Garry Shandling. Victor Garber lends a voice, tiny Haley Joel Osment can be spotted, and Jon Stewart and Parker Posey play yuppie rollerbladers who are comparatively not worthy of top-billing.

I watch this movie without fail, every year. Admittedly, this is in part because for the past 7 I have found myself working at a crisis line on Christmas.

Now, the thing that you must understand about this movie is that it is bad. Quite bad. But lovable.

Rita Wilson is a goofball who probably shouldn’t be in movies. She’s way too earnest and tries too hard. She seems to mistake acting for clowning and all her lines are shouted, all her gestures hammy and over the top. But writer\director Nora Ephron had just finished making Sleepless in Seattle with Tom Hanks, and may she owed him one (Wilson is his wife).

But just so that Wilson doesn’t feel left out, the others join in on the sub-par acting. Steve Martin resorts to slap-stick. Adam Sandler does a bit with a ukelele that feels like an SNL sketch just wandered randomly onto the set. Juliette Lewis, never the last to board the crazy train, goes balls-deep in the fruitloop department. She delivers her lines as if she’s reading a book to a group of small, not very brightl children. Maybe they’re all just trying to get noticed? Too many cooks in the kitchen? Tooo many clowns at the circus?

This movie is SO bad that it actually uses a recording of the Jingle Cats doing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Fruitcakes are abundant, both literally and figuratively. Liev Schreiber wears a dress and does a fierce tango in his feature film debut – oh what a career that man could have had! And by the way, who taught Juliette Lewis how to empty a gun?

But to me, all the bad pieces add up to a silly, fun movie, exactly the kind of thing I need in between depressive, suicidal callers when I’m at work early on Christmas morning. Madeline Kahn is perfection, and Rob Reiner, as the straight man, is pretty fun too. And despite the many problems, Nora Ephron is still Nora Ephron, and this movie is full of quotable lines. Is this required Christmas viewing? Certainly not. But if you’ve got a dearth of Christmas cheer, or hours to fill at work over the holidays, then give it a try. You may even find it becoming a Christmas staple.

Don’t forget to vote for your favourite Christmas movie!

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

4 Replies

For a blow-by-blow account, read Jay’s live blogging of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

“I’ve gone and done something again. Wish I could remember what”.

Marv (Mickey Rourke) has gone and done it again. It’s bad to forget your medicine when you’ve got a condition. This opening, based on Frank Miller’s short story Just Another Saturday Night, does not bode well for the rest of this sequel that I’d been anxiously awaiting for nearly 10 years. The first scene of Sin City, where Josh Hartnett plays a contract killer who completes a contract that a woman apparently put out on her herself, was not like anything I had ever seen. Sin City 2’s opening felt so much like a movie that I’d already seen before that, when watching it with Luc, it took me five minutes to convince him that we weren’t accidentally rewatching the first one. This had better get better fast.

“Poker. Savage power in gentlemen’s hands”.

If you’ve read my other reviews, you might have noticed that I have a bit of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt bias that I might as well come clean about. With that kept in mind, this next segment of the film, an original story by Frank Miller written for the movie, is the strongest by far. JGL plays a gambler who wins more than he should have against the beastly no good Senator Roark. He’s cocky but with more than his share of demons and if there’s one thing JGL knows, it’s cocky with more than his share of demons. Plus, movies like Brick and Looper have prepared him for lines like “Sin City’s where you go in with your eyes open. Or you don’t come out at all”. It isn’t just him that makes this the best of the four stories though. Everyone involved seems to be having more fun, especially Powers Boothe as Roark, who seems to get hard with every ruthless word.

“It’s another hot night, dry and windless. The kind that makes people do sweaty, secret things”.

This is really the main segment of the film, a nearly panel-for-panel adaptation of one of Miller’s more popular graphic novels, A Dame to Kill for. Eva Green plays Ava Lord, a damsel to kill for who seduces men into doing horrible things, including our old pal Dwight (this time played by Josh Brolin). The almost constantly naked Green is even more wicked than in Miller’s 300: Rise of an Empire earlier this year. She seems to relish playing her, even if she never seems sure what to do with her accent. Everyone else is phoning it in though. Brolin growls through all his lines like he’s trying to out-Marv Marv. Rourke, as Marv (over-used in the sequel) sounds like he showed up to the ten-year Sin City reunion only to find that it wasn’t nearly as much fun as he remembered. And Ray Liotta, in a short cameo, uses the campy dialogue as an excuse to go full Liotta. This story might have been a better fit for the first film, when the novelty was still there.

“I don’t use the stripper logic anymore”.

We end with another original story, this time focusing on Jessica Alba’s character. It gets off to a pretty good start. Nancy starts to fall apart after the death of Bruce Willis’ character in the first movie and Alba plays it better than I would have expected. The segment itself starts to fall apart very quickly though with more skull-crushing from Marv and a crossbow-wiedling Nancy. It ends with the death of a character that may kill the possibility of a third Sin City, which I would have been disappointed by 9 years ago. After watching this sequel though, it’s probably for the best.