The 25 Days of Christmas

The 25 Days of Christmas

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Days 24 and 25. Scrooge (1951) and Mickey's Christmas Carol


The 1951 Scrooge starring Alaister Sim is often considered the definitive film version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Its rendering of Victorian winter is the coldest and the cruelest and is, especially in some of its early moments, the scariest. At age three, this is also one of the first movies I ever saw, one night when TV viewing selection was left in the hands of a babysitter who should have known better. Revisiting it all these years later, key images were uprooted in my psyche--a door-knocker taking on the apparition of Jacob Marley's face, spectres of the homeless dead, Sim's frightened and elated hysterics.

But if this is the least forgiving Scrooge, it goes in hand that its journey to light is also the most rewarding. Sim plays the title role first as a man valuing the sound of his own witticisms over the destitute lives those words reprimand, and then, as he's guided on a tour of his life by three spirits, as a wreck of fear and remorse. The dialogue is often caustic and funny. Scrooge doesn't act this way without precedence. Like the Michael Myers of the Rob Zombie Halloween movies, he had a hard life, enduring both the untimely death of his sister, and his father's condemnation for his mother not surviving his birth. As always, we have the choice of whether to allow hardships to define us (what the film phrases as being "changed by the harshness of the world") and then, in what manner. 

Ebenezer Scrooge, like a lot of mean people, has accumulated great intelligence, but not wisdom. His intellect is flaunted at the expense of others, an icy vanity. 

Scrooge McDuck fills the role in Mickey's Christmas Carol. Where Sim plays the part bug-eyed, and baring crooked teeth, as though even his aggression is confused, the team at Disney paint Scrooge as a shrewd miser, the corporate unapproachable and unreasonable money-man stationed behind a desk in Coen Brothers films. It's a beautifully animated piece, as it should be. Debuting before the 1983 re-release of The Rescuers, Mickey's Christmas Carol was an event in itself: the first theatrical Mickey Mouse cartoon in over 30 years. 

As this is a family engagement, it's Dickens-light, and that approach tends to disservice this material. The familiar and largely anthropomorphic cast gives a strange flavour to a moment when The Ghost of Christmas Present salivates over a roasted pig. What, Donald Duck has hierarchical precedence because he wears a hat?!

There's a real spirit at work, though, helped largely by the yuletide glow of the theme song, "Oh, What a Merry Christmas Day!" If there's an image from this short that has stuck with me through the years, it's of Mickey's Bob Cratchit cutting a single pea with a knife and fork and dividing it among his family members. It's as exemplary a comic-tragic portrait of destitution as Chaplin eating his own boots in The Gold Rush. Mickey's Christmas Carol is a soft Scrooge tale, but it's also a dark Disney cartoon, and that's an interesting alchemy. 

I began this series as an alternative to 31 Days of Halloween blogs, wherein a different horror movie is watched and written about over every day in October. Christmas movies are more specific, and I approached this as a challenging way to find some understanding of what these films represent and mean to me personally. It's possible to see this voyage as a Scrooge story in its own right. I love Christmas, but having to write about the holy spirit for twenty-five days in a row does something to a man. I've always approached movie writing as a way to write about humanity as well as aesthetics, but even this was a challenge. I hope everyone has enjoyed it. Now save yourselves! 


Monday, December 23, 2013

Day 23. He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special


Christmas comes to Eternia in He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special, which is a planet that, as far as I know based on the limited information about religious leanings over there, isn't overflowing with Christians, but most people who celebrate the holiday here on Earth aren't Christian either, so we should allow Eternia to partake in the seasonal values, given their constant hardships from terrorist attacks by arch-enemy Skeletor who manages to have a skull for a head and a weightlifter's body. 

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an animated children's adventure-fantasy TV-series in the mid-80s. It's about this prince named Adam, who isn't the type of stuck-up royalty that sends commoners to war. Prince Adam becomes the mighty He-Man when he stands in front of Castle Greyskull with the Sword of Power and shouts "I have the power!" Nobody knows Prince Adam and He-Man are the same person because their clothes are different and He-Man has a sword. Also, He-Man doesn't have the same unfounded reputation on Eternia of being a spoiled sissy. As He-Man, Adam fights Skeletor and other monstrous evils against Dr. Seussian backdrops. The men are buff. The women are curvaceous. It was basically Heavy Metal for kids too young for shrooms.

The Christmas special aired at the end of 1985, when Masters of the Universe had just completed its run. Its sister show, She-Ra: Princess of Power was still airing new episodes. She-Ra was introduced into the He-Man universe in the theatrical release The Secret of the Sword, and the Christmas special gave them another chance to crossover audiences and fight evil together. 

(It wasn't just a demographic gender divide that separated the two series. He-Man's theme music is classic rock, while She-Ra's is faster and appealed to children who grew up to like punk and ska.) 

There are a couple reasons why this special is noteworthy. One is that there's a sparsity of Christmas-related films set in space. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians didn't have the budget to let viewers look at the stars, and The Star Wars Holiday Special is just hard to look at. There's also the Canadian animated special A Cosmic Christmas from 1977, but basically it ends here. If this collision of genres isn't exactly successful in practice, it's still intriguing in theory. 


The other reason is that the moments where Skeletor becomes infected with Christmas spirit have goofy charm. It's unfortunate it takes too long to get there, and the story goes through too many loops to say so little. 

Having never heard of Christmas, He-Man and his friend Man-At-Arms are busy building the Sky Spy satellite so they can spy on Skeletor inside his home from space. Even though this special is twenty-eight years old, it's still topical. Incompetent-wizard-creature Orko enters the Sky Spy and misapplies a landing spell, crashing it on Earth where he meets the human children (and potential future pop stars) Miguel and Alisha. 

There's a nice attention to how kids can be jerks by acting astonished when a peer is ignorant to something they would have no way of knowing. The kids mock poor Orko for asking about Christmas, with which everybody is familiar. Later they teach him "Jingle Bells," though it strikes me that the snippet heard from this rendition is incorrect, consisting of the title sung three times in succession, which should never happen. 

Nevertheless, even Skeletor warms up to these saccharine Earth children with their visions of sugarplums. Holding them captive, during a trek across a field of snow, Skeletor assures that the kids have winter coats, carrying their pre-WaffleBot robo-dog Relay in his arms. His feelings overtake him. These emotions are new and strange, and Skeletor, an untouchable master of his art, is for once uncertain and full of love. 

In the most startling exchange in '80s TV/action figure commercial animation, Skeletor asks the big questions.
"Tell me more about this Christmas?"
"Well, it's a wonderful time of the year. Everyone has lots of fun."
"You mean they get in fights!?"
"No! No! They have fun."
"Fights are fun. I like fights!" 
"And you give each other presents."
"And when you open them they explode, right!?"

Skeletor begins to doubt his very existence in the face of Christmas merriment. 
"I am not nice!" he insists, but it's a weak, desperate attempt to convince himself. He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special is a very odd take on the Ebenezer Scrooge arc, as Skeletor's change is almost out of his control entirely, allowing The Mystical Forces of Christmas Spirit to do their bidding. Once Skeletor's finally gathered with the heroes, having faith, being merry, She-Ra assures him that Christmas comes but once a year. Everybody laughs because it means he'll be trying to kill them again soon.


He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special and The Meaning of Christmas

The Masters of the Universe always ends with He-Man telling viewers the moral of the story. This often consisted of things like "don't accept gifts from strangers," and "don't find shortcuts to becoming a millionaire." This time He-Man tells Orko that the spirit of Christmas is within us all, even those who don't celebrate. Orko jokes that he likes presents, and He-Man rolls his eyes. But there were Masters of the Universe toys to be sold. It wasn't really a laughing matter. 

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Days 21 and 22. A John Hughes X-Mas: Home Alone 2 and Miracle on 34th Street (1994)


John Hughes never directed a Christmas movie, though he wrote at least four of them. Things get confusing when he started using a pseudonym, and though I planned to cover Home Alone 3 for this blog, there's too much conflict about whether it should even be considered a Christmas movie. Its genre classification is the most frequent topic of debate on CNN, after gun control and the Duck Dynasty guy.  


Of the Hughes Christmas films that I'm sure of, the original Home Alone has held up as funnier and more interesting than Christmas Vacation. Both movies take their characters' class privilege for granted, but where Christmas Vacation means nothing when you're not currently a parent or child of a household, or when your defining emotional arcs don't involve expectation of a Christmas bonus big enough to install a swimming pool, Home Alone carries its extravagancies with charm. Eight-year old Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) must protect his family's mansion and fortune from a duo of dimwitted down-on-their-luck crooks (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), thereby saving Christmas. It's class warfare made literal. Home Alone is "clean entertainment" that's actually a little troubling, making it of some substance.

Hughes wouldn't again operate on the level of his past abilities following Home Alone's enormous success. 1992's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and '94's remake of Miracle on 34th Street at least show a few remaining glimmers from one of the most heartfelt comic voices of the eighties, transplanting his usual Chicago suburbs for the December bustle of Manhattan. 


It's persistently repeated that Hughes penned the script for Ferris Bueller's Day Off in one weekend. If that's to be believed, Home Alone 2 should have been completed by noon on a Saturday. It repeats all the beats that made the original a sadistic festive mega-smash, only this time it's more outlandish and loses any connection to Earth. Now when Kevin's mother (Catherine O'Hara) realizes she's lost her son, she not only stares into the camera and yells "Kevin!," she also faints by falling backward. Instead of causing a mess of his family's pizza dinner, Kevin's church choir solo is sabotaged by his brother, for which the audience unbelievably revels in his embarrassment, provoking Kevin to retaliate, for which his family unbelievably blames him entirely. The redundancy nullifies the first film. Neither Kevin nor his family have retained the life-altering lessons they'd learned last time, so why should viewers believe they'll retain them now?

Becoming lost in New York (there are specifics that involve getting on the wrong plane, which aren't meant to be remembered), Kevin enjoys hotel life, hilariously never giving his struggling bellhop an appropriate tip, and tries to thwart the same bandits from the first movie another time. 

It's of interest that when the crooks are led through their house of torment, Home Alone 2 is more grotesquely violent than outlier holiday standard Die Hard. Hughes and director Chris Columbus don't merely showcase violence as Bruce Willis does with his machine gun, their focus is the resulting pain. 

Of course, kids watching this extreme slapstick mostly didn't go home and jerry-rig a contraption to break their sibling's neck. Columbus even underlines the film's cartoon intentions by merging a TV image of the animated Grinch's malicious grin with that of Tim Curry's sinister concierge. Kevin then humiliates him by playing back sounds of a gangster movie that seemingly accuses him of having a gay tryst. It's now a dated joke, but also wasn't funny to any kids in even-more-homo-intolerant 1992 for any reason other than that they lived in a time when they were told it was supposed to be. 

By far the most ill-conceived scene in Home Alone 2 involves Kevin lecturing a homeless pigeon lady (Brenda Fricker) in Central Park. The first movie used a similar reversal in his meeting with an old man isolated from his son, making Kevin the adult and the senior the child. It was cute once. Now it turns Kevin into a patronizing boy-robot. Hughes' movies often take upper-class living as the American standard, but in scripts like Some Kind of Wonderful, he treated the rich-poor divide with empathy, where emotion remained universal despite the streets and homes separating us. Making Kevin McCallister a homeless woman's rich child-saviour involves giving her the guidance to just open her heart to love. It's gross, but without malice. Hughes and Columbus really don't appear to know better. 


A nicer, smaller moment occurs as Kevin, lonesome and missing his family yet again, returns a hand wave gesture to a boy sitting in a hospital window. It's easy to be cynical about its inclusion because, until a voice-over quickly reminds us that it's a plot point, it's presented without cynicism. Their shared motion, of commiseration and still undefeated spirit, is touching. It's the only moment where Kevin is permitted to be an actual human being. 

Nothing in Home Alone 2 is fresh and new. The same actors return, this time with money in their eyes. But the filmmakers know this family Christmas formula well, and too briefly, its spirit can be felt.

This feeling lasts much longer in Miracle on 34th Street, though there are times when it could pull back a bit. An early example of a remake of a classic, before that became most movies, it works because Hughes isn't simply exercising a photocopier. He's thoroughly convincing that he believes in Santa Claus, and at the movie's best, that's infectious. 

Young Susan Walker (Mara Wilson) faces a crisis of faith, brought on by her mother's insistence that truth is always more important than fantasy. When Susan reluctantly visits Santa at a Coles department store, she changes her mind, and must now convince a skeptical world. Kevin in Home Alone was always devout. Susan has an epiphany.

Bathed in the mid-90s rich orange glow characteristic of Party of Five and Jerry Maguire, Hughes and director Les Mayfield make Miracle on 34th Street an uncommon kids movie led by emotion over action. It overstays its welcome. Bruce Broughton's score is relentless and sugary, and the court sequences lose focus through hammy villains unable to mesh with anything else on screen. Richard Attenborough's Santa Claus is one of the best, though. Miracle on 34th Street is more stately than zany Home Alone 2, but Hughes scholars should take note. This feels like one he was truly happy to make.  


Friday, December 20, 2013

Day 20. White Christmas


There are sometimes limits. Most kids, within the roughly 45% of the world's population who celebrate it, like Christmas. It's just the video box cover art for 1954's White Christmas was always too much. Amidst the familiar titles (Scrooged, National Lampoon's, et al.) was this image of white men and women smiling in Santa robes in what appeared to be an entire film version of a yellowing Sears Wishbook Catalogue.  It was not unlike those horror titles kids put back on store shelves after looking at the screenshots on the back, thinking "If I watched this, I would probably die." Christmas is great, but who wanted to lay on the syrup this thick?

It turns out there are about five minutes of Christmas-related material in this movie, with the performance of the title song taking up the final three.


White Christmas begins in an unspecified part of Europe where inhabitants speak in an unspecified accent, and American WWII troops are celebrating the holiday by watching a song-and-dance number by Bob (Bing Crosby) and Phil (Danny Kaye). Following a stint on Broadway, they take their show on the road, so to speak, traveling to a Vermont hotel owned by their beloved, recently discharged General Waverly (Dean Jagger). The movie is populated by the songs of Irving Berlin, most of which are older numbers, so it wouldn't be wrong to say White Christmas is the progenitor of Rock of Ages and Mamma Mia!

The whole thing plays out in an "established comedy bits interspersed with musical numbers" revue style that lasted from Marx Brothers films through to Saturday Night Live. It's visually colourful. The opening Paramount logo boasts that it's shot in VistaVision, and in the pre-Wikipedia age one must have just had to assume that meant something. It's also so tame, it never reaches true spontaneity or joy. 

Traveling with the singing sister duo of Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy (Vera-Ellen), there's pressure on the four to pair up and get hitched. Because this is a Christmas movie of toasty fireplaces, dances and serenades, rather than Santa Clauses and spiritual reckoning, the comedy revolves around the nervousness and misunderstandings of courtship. But it lacks sex appeal, even of the 1950s variety. The funniest bit occurs as Judy tries to force an engagement with Phil, which will inspire Betty to marry Bob. In this universe, if you're a girl who wants to marry a guy, simply find someone and tell him he's now your fiance.


Hetero-marriage in White Christmas is the most important thing in life besides militarism. Together they form the true meaning of Christmas. It's of note that Bob and Phil are trying to put on a show to save their army friend's hotel business, which is very kind, but is that the best this movie could come up with? It's the holiday. Cure an illness. Feed the poor. The damn Blues Brothers made it a mission to save an orphanage.

Several musical numbers, such as a minstrel routine, cognizant enough to avoid blackface, have a cinematic grandeur of prime colours and choreography under the eye of Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood). Others, such as the original number "What Can You Do With a General?" showcase Bing Crosby singing a dead tune while standing still against a wall.

There's an audience who grew up with this film, or still shares many of its values, and that's fine. In its own heart, it's a harmless romp. It's just when there's a cheerful number about how the army is more pleasant than civilian life because there are free meals and provided uniforms that I can only pat this thing on the head and wish it luck.


White Christmas and The Meaning of Christmas

Berlin's "White Christmas" is the best selling single of all-time, beating even Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" and T-Baby's "It's So Cold in the D". But it was actually written for an earlier Bing Crosby Christmas film, 1942's Holiday Inn. That makes some sense. White Christmas, the movie, is after all about latching on to traditions, observing the season by connecting to the good old things in life. Now get a husband and go to war!

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Day 19. The Ref

It opens with a choral version of "The Holly and the Ivy" over an image of a festively lit suburb. The song is then overlaid with hip-hop beats. There's suddenly no mistaking it: this is Christmas with attitude!



The Ref has been the most requested title for this blog. I saw it once upon its VHS release (rented from Super Video in Rockingham Ridge, and I mention that here only so there's now an Internet record of the place existing), but couldn't remember any details beyond the cover art and that I enjoyed it. Looking at it now, two things are apparent. 1) Humour has changed significantly since 1994. 2) This is still a well-constructed Christmas comedy.

On its most obvious level, The Ref exists as a showcase for Denis Leary, whose No Cure For Cancer standup act was a popular hit, but who had been upstaged by the soundtrack to his own movie Judgment Night a few months earlier. Strolling into a vanilla Connecticut town with his era-appropriate outgrown Chris Cornell-goatee, Leary plays a jewelry thief named Gus, buying time awaiting his partner in a neighbourhood home. That home is inhabited by couple Lloyd and Caroline Chasseur (Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis), whose endless marital bickering gives Leary the chance to showcase his stylings by ranting at them.

The impedes for these Hollywood writers and executives to make cynical Christmas movies about how marriages implode and relatives are always at each others throats is easy to do from up on their mountain of prostitution, blow and almond milk. But what's special about The Ref is that it has it both ways, posing as the subversive movie before getting infected with some of that sentimental yuletide spirit, while making the transition feel legit. It helps that it's uniformly populated with good actors playing interesting characters. 

Much of the comedy is locked in its era. Take, for example, this exchange:

"Who would catch a criminal and then let him go free?"
"Republicans."

In 1994, that joke was a highlight, but comedy has since mutated, with more audiences preferring random absurdity or clockwork construction. Today, it's still okay, but registers mainly as an effort to be clever.

The Ref improves, getting looser and funnier, as its cast of characters expands. The Chasseurs' relatives join them for Christmas Eve, with Gus having to pose as the marriage counsellor. Director Ted Demme (Who's the Man?) does a nice job balancing a multitude of feuding personalities, becoming less dependent on the binary of Lloyd and Caroline arguing, followed by Gus shouting his material at them. It's a dialogue-heavy script, locating scathing and ultimately empathetic comedy in a group of adults who feel they should have found happiness by now, but have not.

The Ref and The Meaning of Christmas

In a lot of Christmas movies, people receive unwanted fruitcakes. Jack Lemmon complains about all those he's received in The Apartment. Denis Leary can't stand the taste of one in The Ref. It's clear to me that there will be no peace on Earth and goodwill toward humans, until we decide on a better desert for gift-giving. 

Also, stop complaining so much about your family and fruitcakes. 



Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Day 18. The Apartment

The Apartment (1960) is a light dramatic comedy about killing yourself. Metaphorically, for the most part. Because Christmas is placed so close to New Year's, hope of new life necessitates destroying the one that isn't even happy at the most wonderful time of the year.

For C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) ascending the corporate ladder means giving up his New York apartment to his bosses multiple times per week, so they can have alone time with women who aren't their wives. He works at an insurance firm called Consolidated Life, the name being a joke on how his social life is suffocated by his job. C.C.'s contributions do get him promoted, but the demands to use his place don't stop, and when he protests, the guilt and speeches of ingratitude happen. He concedes. It is, after all, an honour just being exploited.

Billy Wilder's Oscar winner is a proto-hipster movie, incorporating pop references to TV's The Untouchables, as well as Grand Hotel and The Music Man. When C.C. falls for his building's elevator operator Fran (Shirley MacLaine), she's a needed change, a fun, self-described "broken" escape. The Apartment is the Silver Linings Playbook of its era, and though it means less to me, not risking dislodging Lemmon's leading man as the force of stability, it deals on its own terms with reawakening through sexual attraction. 

The central moment occurs at the firm's Christmas Eve party, as C.C., drunk and newly promoted, boasts to Fran to look at all his shit. Unimpressed by his display of capitalist bravado, even when he models his fifteen-dollar bowler hat, she eyes him with a disappointment that says he initially seemed more interesting. C.C. realizes that he's stuck, and as The Smiths song goes, "In the days when you were hopelessly poor, I just liked you more." 

C.C. goes to a bar, depressed, and picks up a single lady. Fran, meanwhile, late night December 24th, heads to C.C.'s empty apartment where she ODs on sleeping pills. Both seek a rebirth. Fran wants to stop being a social plaything for C.C.'s deceitful boss (Fred MacMurray). C.C. wants the social freedom to live.

The Apartment concludes on New Year's Eve, bringing with it the uncertain potential for new life. 

The Apartment and The Meaning of Christmas

A lot of these Christmas movies view the holiday through a lens of despair. The Apartment isn't depressing in tone, but melancholy invades its subjects. If you're not celebrating, it's the time to figure out why. #ChristmasMovieScholarship101



Tomorrow: The Ref

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Day 17. The Santa Clause

Frustration set it about thirty minutes into The Santa Clause, by which point Tim Allen had flown on a sleigh and been down two chimneys, yet still wouldn't believe in Santa Claus. He professes that skepticism at Santa's workshop. To an elf. 


Back in 1994, Tim Allen was one of the biggest stars in the world. TV's Home Improvement was a consistent ratings champion, and The Santa Clause became a huge box office success. I never saw it upon release. I was fifteen, and my mind was on Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, and Ed Wood. Mainstream movie comedy was not at a highpoint for most of that decade, at least until Austin Powers started to introduce different elements. If there's any delight in moments of The Santa Clause where Tim Allen reassures his son he feels safe flying through the air by saying, "I lived through the '60s," or when he describes the feeling of delivering presents to a house with, "It felt like America's Most Wanted," it's not that they're funny. It's that in 1994, this was considered funny.

Allen plays Scott Calvin, a divorced father who works at a toy company. He gets along with his son Charlie (Eric Lloyd), but is consumed by work. When Santa Claus falls off of his roof and becomes injured, he's forced into assuming the role. It's never clear why Calvin is the chosen one, but he begins to physically transform into old Saint Nick, greying, growing a beard, and getting visibly fatter, all over night. It's the children's Christmas movie variation of  Cronenberg's The Fly.

That's fine in concept, but The Santa Clause is not well thought-out at a script level. It means nothing, existing cynically as a glitzy moneymaker that can star Tim Allen. Once Calvin takes the reigns as Santa Claus, he no longer has an arc. It's not as though he was a Christmas-hating Grinch before that point, and though it brings him closer to his son, he was only previously distanced from him as a legal custodian. This does allow Judge Reinhold, as the kid's stepfather to spend all of his scenes being a douche and telling Calvin, "You're taking this Santa thing a little far."

Most Christmas movies equate belief in Santa with belief in God, which is exclusionary. But really, promoting the belief in Santa as a representation of only Santa is meaningless. If Santa Claus is just a representation of magic and hope, then please, screenwriters Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick, establish a world without magic from the beginning.  


I struggle with the philosophy of Santa Claus in Christmas movies. For anyone over a certain age, there are more important values to hold onto at Christmas. And yet, this is a film meant for little kids where the default thinking of every grown character is that Santa Claus does not exist. It never occurred to me as a child that adults don't believe, and I don't think I'd have wanted to see a movie where this is repeatedly stated. It's true that the grown ups in Miracle on 34th Street don't believe either, but as a child, I was able to process that movie as taking place within a Kafkaesque dystopia. The Santa Clause is too shiny to use that excuse. 

The Santa Clause is not painful. It's not corrupt (as in Allen's later, still unbelievable Christmas With the Kranks). It's just without matter. 



The Santa Clause and The Meaning of Christmas

Santa Claus is real, and you should never stop believing in him. Otherwise, you'll have to figure out some other way to bond with your kids, and things got confusing after Pokemon