From December 1st until the 25th, I will watch and blog about twenty-five feature Christmas movies that I have NEVER SEEN BEFORE, or that I at least haven't seen in a very long time. On this emotional journey, I hope to learn the true meaning of Christmas.
Maturation is characterized by a voyage into the night in Mon oncle Antoine (1971), a trip that occurs on Christmas Eve. In a 1940s Quebec mining town, winter is still the season promising holiday cheer, while in reality it just makes outdoor labour harder and everything darker and colder. The Asbestos Strike and Quiet Revolution will change the welfare and secularization of Quebec over the next two decades, but for now, the French working class observe the laws of tradition, and aren't necessarily happy about it.
Fifteen year-old Benoit (Jacques Gagnon) walks through life with a curious smile when his face is in resting position, annoying those around him. The movie is told, for the most part, through his eyes, and becomes a variation of the narrative trope of a kid "coming of age." I don't think very many people can identify a single moment where they "came of age" in life, but it works all the time in fiction, so I won't argue.
It also lends itself to the contrasts that make Mon oncle Antoine interesting. Claude Jutra's film is repeatedly voted the best in Canadian history in critics' polls, and that likely results from its impressionistic moments rather than its overall engagement. The movie opens on overhead images of the town against white hillsides, with music that sounds like a children's song re-arranged by Ennio Morricone. It's idyllic, briefly, until factories and smoke overtake everything.
This makes way for a first half with a near documentary-like aversion to obvious dramatic manipulation. In the days leading to Christmas, Benoit helps his adoptive uncle Antoine (Jean Duceppe) rebrand his general store for the holidays. Benoit flirts with his teenage female co-worker in moments that are amusing because neither kid has yet absorbed basic appropriateness. But Benoit's discovery of sex is more perfunctory and less profound than his encounter with death, and it isn't until the second half where Mon oncle Antoine becomes truly compelling.
Antoine doubles as an undertaker, and upon receiving a call that a different fifteen year-old boy has died, he sets off with Benoit on a night sled trip through snowy wilderness to retrieve the corpse. As the two of them eat dinner at the dead boy's mother's house, Benoit sits disturbed. He keeps looking to the dark opening of the kid's bedroom, beyond which that boy lays dead, cutoff from life at the very same age Benoit is now. The sequence works spectacularly as a short film in its own right.
Forced maturation through melancholy is a staple in Canadian film. Childhood interrupted by a realization of death is also vividly illustrated in French Canadian director Andre Melancon's 1984 beloved kids' adventure movie La guerre des tuques (The Dog Who Stopped the War). Mon oncle Antoine helped define this regional legacy, and whether we're happy with this formula or not, this is where the props go.
Mon oncle Antoine and The Meaning of Christmas
Christmas is viewed here as a time of death and birth. Benoit's old self dies, leading to an uncertain awakening.
The delivery of Tyler Perry's Madea movies has always been a little off balance. The new one begins with a comic moment of Perry's outspoken Great Aunt drag matriarch persona Madea telling a woman at a shop that she's too old and fat to be purchasing lingerie. An hour later, Madea is delivering a message that people should always treat each other with kindness. She's very politically savvy.
A Madea Christmas is full of this two-faced approach, and there's never been much option but to get used to it. This is a series where comedy that "doesn't mean it" co-exists with melodrama so earnest it's almost patronizing. Perry has been at this game for a long time, and though A Madea Christmas has received his harshest reviews yet, it's worth noting that the earlier ones were mostly reviewed disingenuously by critics who didn't feel right analyzing religious-heavy "black movies" with anything but a nod of acceptance. At this point, they're fed up with Madea. Which isn't fair because as Perry's movies go, this one's among the most entertaining.
The usual problems are here. Perry's direction is still tied to his stage play origins, over-reliant on stationary televisual head-shots, while the image itself always appears about to slip out of focus. There's little rhythmic momentum in the length and organization of scenes. And resolve mostly happens through Madea delivering speeches on humanity, at least in cases when there's no church choir in town. But the Madea movies play to emotional realization even when those truths are intellectually obvious. The streamlining of the comedy feels organic here, when even the extremely silly Madea Goes to Jail could get bogged down in heavy-handed soap opera.
For the holidays, Madea travels with her co-worker friend Eileen (Anna Maria Horsford) to a farm in rural Alabama. That's where Eileen's schoolteacher daughter Lacey (Tika Sumptor) lives, and is secretly married to caucasian farmer Conner (Eric Lively). Kathy Najimy and Larry the Cable Guy show up as Conner's parents, and bond with Madea over their shared down-home big-hearted political incorrectness. The movie becomes an argument of acceptance for interracial marriage, culminating in a gender and race-reversal of the burning car rescue scene from Crash.
Earlier, Madea (working as a substitute teacher) deals with a prepubescent bully by hanging her to a cross with Christmas lights.
A Madea Christmas has social liberalism in its heart. You're just required to bow to tradition to get there.
Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas and The Meaning of Christmas
This is one of those Christmas movies that could just as easily have been set in July. It's the time of year to open one's heart to people, and learn big lessons, but let's not pretend that's a different strategy than in all of Perry's other movies. This time he uses animated snowflake and tree ornament scene transitions to keep the festive spirit going.
It's also about the power of acceptance and of family, and about organizing a Christmas jamboree. Really, you can learn about those things at any time of year, and can end your movie on a spelling bee if need be. It just so happens that this movie works better than most of Perry's, and that feels like Christmas.
Tokyo Godfathers (2003) is basically Three Men and a Baby, except it's an animated movie from Japan. And the three men are homeless. Also, they're not all men.
Look, I'm just trying to find a contemporary point of comparison.
It's probably a lot closer to John Ford's 1948 3 Godfathers, but all of this ignores that, as far as I'm aware, Tokyo Godfathers is the only animated Christmas motion picture about homelessness. Except Hobo With a Shotgun. Which wasn't animated or set at Christmas.
On Christmas Eve, alcoholic "old man" Gin (he's forty-something), transvestite Hana, and teenage girl Miyuki find an abandoned baby while scavenging through the trash. The three have formed a dysfunctional family of sorts on the city streets, and the baby dredges up feelings in them all, of their own abandonment, or of the wrong turns made, that led them here.
Tokyo Godfathers becomes an allegorical quest of sorts, where the Three Wise Men bear the gift of baby Jesus himself as a good luck omen on the trek to finding its parents. The movie is most successful in capturing nighttime Tokyo distinctively from its usual portrayal as a multi-million dollar electrical bill neon metropolis. This trio live in dimly lit back alleys behind brown and concrete slabs. It's another Christmas movie where festive cheer seems always just out of the characters' reach, and they find, in themselves, in each other, and the infant, a reason to continue.
The movie seems so good as a concept that it's frustrating how it never fully coheres. The tone is frequently loud and screechy, when it demands to be somber and poignant. The comedy is broad and easy, when it could be dry and truthful. Directors Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress) and Shogo Furuya work in some nice moments throughout, particularly in dealing with the pain and confrontation of the trio's past, but it's lazy how the story's progression is forced through a series of Christmas miracles.
Tokyo Godfathers and The Meaning of Christmas
The major holiday standard in this film is Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," which is used in Die Hard. Tokyo Godfathers occasionally becomes an action movie, because it suffers an identity crisis. In its heart, it's about family. Everyone needs one, at least of some type.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is often thought of as a Christmas movie, though it's pretty evenly divided over the course of a year. Snowmen, carols, and decorated trees are just the elements most likely to linger. The film's final quarter did after all introduce the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." To many who haven't seen Meet Me in St. Louis (and I only saw it for the first time), the tune's origin may not be known, so give due respect. It isn't like "Hot Chocolate" from The Polar Express is being sung door-to-door by church groups or covered on Bob Dylan albums.
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is sung by a heart-troubled Esther Smith (Judy Garland) to her distressed, somewhat demonic younger sister "Tootie" (Margaret O'Brien) on Christmas Eve, as the two sit on a bedroom windowsill of the house in the city they're unhappy to leave. The moment of one sister attempting to force optimism upon the other, through sentiment she's unsure she feels herself, expresses the classic movie musical's approach to the holiday better than any other. Christmas is a beginning and an end, a time of magic and rebirth, where all becomes possible even when it feels awful. It's of note that the initially penned lyric was, "Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas / It may be your last." It was Garland, whose house once landed upon and crushed The Wicked Witch of the East, who would not approve such morbid words.
Meet Me in St. Louis functions as a Christmas movie, because it places it where it belongs, as the spiritual endpoint of a calendar year. Director Vincente Minnelli's moves Sally Benson's written memoir through the seasons of 1903, in painterly Technicolor and with a vibrant humour toward traditions of family, mischief and courtship.
This is an era where the most important thing a young person can do is to prove themselves a "grown up," which in Esther's case is repeatedly thwarted by unrepressed and still pleasurable immaturity.The pressure of these social dynamics (if you're not married by the time you're twenty, you may as well kill yourself) is handled with both scorn and comic affection.
Meet Me in St. Louis and The Meaning of Christmas
It would be easy to read Meet Me in St. Louis' final message as an affirmation of the status quo: do not seek change, because everything in your backyard is good enough. On the other hand, we probably should quit ignoring the good stuff in our backyards once in a while.
Christmas isn't the only festive tradition covered in Meet Me in St. Louis. Both John Carpenter and Clive Barker have cited this film's Halloween sequence as a major influence on their work.
By 1992, the Muppet Empire was going through a state of recession. Creator Jim Henson had died two years earlier, and I, of the X/Y-cusp Nintendo Generation, having grown up on TV and library screenings of the initial immortal Muppet trilogy (The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan), did not feel the need to return to those characters as a pre-teen. It wouldn't be until the '00s that people my age would become hopelessly obsessed with childhood nostalgia, making 2011's The Muppets a must-see event.
The Muppet Christmas Carol, which barely dented the '92 holiday family film market next to Home Alone 2 and Disney's other big release Aladdin, has acquired a fan base over the years. Though it's another adaptation of Charles Dickens' yuletide standard, it does at least one interesting thing. The movie adds an imaginative boundary for the audience, who is used to pretending actors they know are in fact different characters on screen. In The Muppet Christmas Carol, voice actors play Muppets who are playing characters from Dickens. That's Steve Whitmire as Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit. That's Frank Oz as Miss Piggy as Emily Cratchit. For the most part, these characters are permitted to keep most of their defining Muppetness.
Michael Caine as himself plays Ebenezer Scrooge. He's the heartless, greedy one-percenter amongst the Victorian poor, and can't stand their presence or Christmas cheer. Maybe if they didn't all sing a song with the lyric "There goes Mr. Humbug" whenever he walks past things would be different.
This is a sweet film, with a good spirit and a wisely conceived performance by Caine, who plays the part completely straight, the comic hijinks surrounding him only exacerbating his seriousness. The Muppets are reduced to supporting players in their own movie, and there was probably no way to escape that. Gonzo the Great and Rizzo the Rat get the bulk of the troupe's screen time, narrating the events in the roles of Charles Dickens and… his rat.
I suspect children will really take to the film, but it must be said, it isn't stellar as either a Muppet movie or a Christmas Carol adaptation. The zaniness of the Muppets is tempered and so are Dickens' cold scares. The Muppet Christmas Carol finds a happy middle-ground for families. It's nice throughout, but refuses to veer far enough into the heartwarming and the heartbreaking.
The Muppet Christmas Carol and The Meaning of Christmas
As the Paul Williams penned end-credits song informs us, "Wherever you find love, it feels like Christmas!" Scrooge is a non-believer, but his revelation is of the heart rather than of religious doctrine. Which is how it should be. We don't need the Muppets to become VeggieTales.
I laughed out loud during Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)
more than once, and I'm quite certain that was a desired response. Following the dreary initial film, this sequel is every bit as soul-sick, but it's self-aware. It knows how to flaunt its illness with pride.
This movie is remarkable in one way that won't possibly escape anyone who sees it. Almost its entire first half is recycled footage from the previous movie. Remember when the recap in Friday the 13th Part 2 lasted for ten minutes? Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2's lasts for forty!
Billy, the killer from the first film, had an infant brother in the back of his car when his parents were hijacked and slashed by a robber dressed as old St. Nick. Now that brother, Ricky (Eric Freeman, in what would still be regarded as the performance of his lifetime if he hadn't disappeared completely) is grown and manic. He recounts to a psychiatrist all of the events that transpired in part one--events that he could not possibly have known, and from the same camera angles, too.
This "highlight" reel supplants any need to see the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, and put me in mind of an idea I had when Jack Reacher opened. It would be maddening to audiences if the characters in that Tom Cruise film went to a cinema playing Top Gun, and the entirety of that movie played out, extending Jack Reacher's running time to four hours. The makers of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 were ahead of me, because in the last half of the film, Ricky goes on a movie date to see the first Silent Night, Deadly Night.
I don't understand this at all.
And that's okay. Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 should inspire as an example of making the most of a bad situation. The filmmakers were asked to re-edit the first film and pass it off as a sequel. I'm unsure how that could be expected to fool anyone, but to their credit director Lee Harry and his co-writer Joseph H. Earle have crafted a brand new, and thoroughly deranged last half.
The film's "Garbage Day" scene became an Internet meme several years back due to Freeman's mega-acting, and the madness doesn't begin and end there. Campiness is not my preferred aesthetic (always play your jokes as drama), but it does a lot to palate the spiritual ugliness on display. Unlike his brother Billy, Ricky isn't simply set off by "Christmas triggers." He starts as a vigilante, avenging an attempted rape, and impaling a mobster with an umbrella, before he moves to firing at neighbours who step on their porches to investigate why he's firing at other neighbours. Freeman laughs maniacally after every kill. According to IMDb, he raises and lowers his eyebrows a total of 130 times in this film. It's a performance designed to keep Nicolas Cage, in his more adventurous phases, up at night, questioning the disappeared enigma known as Eric Freeman.
Even though the next sequel is directed by arthouse auteur Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop), I've had my fill of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series now. There are other Christmas movies to cover--movies that are classics, animations, come from foreign lands, or involve Muppets. When you can't leave a series on a high note, leave on a very bizarre one.
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 and The Meaning of Christmas
It has absolutely no idea. Why would you ask? Tomorrow: The Muppet Christmas Carol
In my Rare Exports write-up, I'd mentioned that it's a common bad idea in Christmas horror movies to make Santa Claus the killer. In discussing 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night (probably the most recognized title from the Killer Santa file) that deserves some clarification. Primarily, I feel the concept is opportunistic and cheap.
It's easy to subvert a totem of innocence. Carrying Christmas into the slasher movie calendar sweepstakes of Friday the 13th and Halloween seemed the obvious next move. The difference is that turning Santa Claus evil demands meaning but is by default disingenuous. At worst, its entailment of childhood corruption is played as a cheeky joke. Yet without a basis of credible traumatic experience (as when Ice Cube corrupts nursery rhymes to express stolen innocence in his "Gangsta's Fairytale" raps), it comes across as a gag played at kids' expense. Who was ever scared of Santa Claus?
Everything in Silent Night, Deadly Night falls predictably in line. It doesn't much think or care about its meaning, only passing as entertainment for the undemanding.
Upon visiting him in an institute, young Billy's grandfather breaks from a catatonic state to warn that Santa Claus will punish the naughty. Driving back home with his parents, Billy observes, wide-eyed and frightened, as the car is stopped by a thief dressed in Santa gear who murders his father, and strips and murders his mother. By the age of 18, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) reaches some level of stability, even finding work at a department store under the employ of Anthony Michael Hall's dad in Weird Science (Britt Leach). It's when he's asked to play store Santa that his Christmas trigger goes off, and people will be killed.
Partially artistically salvaged in its edit and score, which bring some personalized idiosyncrasy to dead body and teamwork montages, the bulk of Silent Night, Deadly Night is creatively drained. Billy isn't a tragic outsider (like Jason Voorhees, Frankenstein's monster and others) because he's an inevitability of fate rather than an ugly product of the status quo. Fatalism and nihilism are the only messages here. Billy isn't allowed even the option to cope with his trauma. His tragedy must make him a remorseless killer, because apparently the world order (unlike the best teen slashers) does not believe in youth survival and empowerment. In Silent Night, Deadly Night, it isn't just the usual protocol where sex is punished. All joy is punished. Director Charles E. Sellier must have felt some remorse for this, as he quickly abandoned the slasher genre for a lucrative career producing Bible films.
Which is fine because Silent Night, Deadly Night has only the most cynical understanding of slasher movies anyway. Sorry folks. This one just seems hateful.
Silent Night, Deadly Night and the Meaning of Christmas
Christmas sucks because it will cause those traumatized by the holiday to kill you.
