30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays
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30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays copyright © 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
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Contents
Introduction
Key to Symbols
Bad Santa
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Christmas in the Clouds
A Christmas Story
A Christmas Tale
Comfort and Joy
The Dead
Disney’s A Christmas Carol
Elf
Fanny and Alexander
Gremlins
Hannah and Her Sisters
Home for the Holidays
The Ice Harvest
It’s a Wonderful Life
Joyeux Noel
Little Women
Love Actually
The Muppet Christmas Carol
Nothing Like the Holidays
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
The Polar Express
Prancer
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
The Ref
Scrooge
The Thin Man
This Christmas
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas
What’s Cooking?
Introduction
The notion of movies to “get you through the holidays” sounds rather dour, especially since some of my choices are about people who are having problems getting through the holidays.
Many of these films have one thing in common: The holidays represent the only time of the year when families, especially those with buried issues, get together at all. A typical family film in the genre airs all the dirty laundry and opens all the old wounds.
One curiosity I’ve noticed is that Thanksgiving films are more likely to tilt toward the emotionally fraught, and Christmas films are more likely to be comedies and heart-warmers.
Setting that aside, some of these titles are just plain great films, no matter what. For example, What’s Cooking?; The Thin Man; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; and John Huston’s heartbreaking final film, The Dead.
One of these is just plain bizarre—Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Bad Santa pushes right through the boundaries of good taste.
The real sleeper here is Nothing Like the Holidays, about a Hispanic family in Chicago.
And the gob-smacker is The Polar Express, with Robert Zemeckis showing a virtuoso command of motion-capture animation. Yes, there’s a reason so many characters look like Tom Hanks.
ROGER EBERT
Key to Symbols
A great film
G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17: Ratings of the Motion Picture Association of America
G Indicates that the movie is suitable for general audiences
PG Suitable for general audiences but parental guidance is suggested
PG-13 Recommended for viewers 13 years or above; may contain material inappropriate for younger children
R Recommended for viewers 17 or older
NC-17 Intended for adults only
141 m. Running time
2011 Year of theatrical release
Bad Santa ½
R, 93 m., 2003
Billy Bob Thornton (Willie T. Soke), Tony Cox (Marcus), Bernie Mac (Gin Slagel), Lauren Graham (Sue), John Ritter (Mall Manager), Brett Kelly (The Kid), Cloris Leachman (Grandma). Directed by Terry Zwigoff and produced by Sarah Aubrey, John Cameron, and Bob Weinstein. Screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra.
The kid gives Santa a carved wooden pickle as a Christmas present.
“How come it’s brown?” Santa asks. “Why didn’t you paint it green?”
“It isn’t painted,” the kid says. “That’s blood from when I cut my hand while I was making it for you.”
Santa is a depressed, alcoholic safecracker. The kid is not one of your cute movie kids, but an intense and needy stalker; think of Thomas the Tank Engine as a member of the Addams Family. Oh, and there’s an elf, too, named Marcus. The elf is an angry dwarf who has been working with Santa for eight years, cracking the safe in a different department store every Christmas. The elf is fed up. Santa gets drunk on the job, he’s screwing customers in the Plus Sizes dressing room, and whether the children throw up on Santa or he throws up on them is a toss-up, no pun intended.
Bad Santa is a demented, twisted, unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Santa in a performance that’s defiantly uncouth. His character is named Willie T. Soke; W. C. Fields would have liked that. He’s a foul-mouthed, unkempt, drunken louse at the beginning of the movie, and sticks to that theme all the way through. You expect a happy ending, but the ending is happy in the same sense that a man’s doctors tell him he lost his legs but they were able to save his shoes.
There are certain unwritten parameters governing mainstream American movies, and Bad Santa violates all of them. When was the last time you saw a movie Santa kicking a department store reindeer to pieces? Or using the f-word more than Eddie Griffin? Or finding a girlfriend who makes him wear his little red hat in bed because she has a Santa fetish? And for that matter, when was the last movie where a loser Santa meets a little kid and the kid doesn’t redeem the loser with his sweetness and simplicity, but attaches himself l
ike those leeches on Bogart in The African Queen?
Movie critics have been accused of praising weirdo movies because we are bored by movies that seem the same. There is some justice in that. But I didn’t like this movie merely because it was weird and different. I liked it because it makes no compromises and takes no prisoners. And because it is funny.
The director is Terry Zwigoff. He made the great documentary Crumb, about R. Crumb, the cartoonist who is a devoted misanthrope. (Crumb drew the American Splendor comic books about Harvey Pekar, his equal in misanthropy.) Zwigoff also directed the quirky Ghost World, with its unlikely romantic alliance between a teenage girl (Thora Birch) and a sour, fortyish recluse (Steve Buscemi). This is a director who makes a specialty of bitter antisocial oddballs. That he does it in comedy takes more guts than doing it in tragedy.
Zwigoff worked from an original screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. And what is their track record, you are wondering? They cowrote Cats and Dogs (2001), with its parachuting Ninja cats. Maybe screenwriters who do sweet, PG-rated movies like Cats and Dogs have a script like Bad Santa in the bottom desk drawer, perhaps in a lead-lined box.
When Billy Bob Thornton got the script, he must have read it and decided it would be career suicide. Then he put the script to his head and pulled the trigger. For him to play Hamlet would take nerve; for him to play Willie T. Soke took heroism. Wandering through the final stages of alcoholism, he functions only because of the determination of Marcus, who is played by Tony Cox as a crook who considers stealing to be a job, and straps on his elf ears every morning to go to work. Willie and Marcus always use the same MO: They use the Santa gig to get into the store, stay after closing, and crack the safe. Alas, this year the store’s security chief (Bernie Mac, also pissed off most of the time) is wise to their plan and wants a cut. Because it’s in his interest to keep Bad Santa in the store, he doesn’t report little incidents like the reindeer kicking to the store manager, played by the late John Ritter.
Willie becomes distracted by the arrival in his life of Sue (Lauren Graham), the Santa fetishist, who picks him up at a bar. Then there’s the kid (Brett Kelly), who sits on his lap, tells him he isn’t Santa Claus, and then doggedly insists on treating him as if he is. The kid is desperately lonely because his parents are away for reasons we understand better than he does, and he’s being looked after by his comatose grandmother (Cloris Leachman). I know, I know—I disapproved of the cruel treatment of the comatose babysitter Mrs. Kwan in The Cat in the Hat, and here I am approving of the way they treat the kid’s grandmother. The differences are: (1) This film is funny and that film was not, and (2) that one was intended for family audiences, and this one is not.
Is it ever not. I imagine a few unsuspecting families will wander into it despite the “R” rating, and I picture terrified kids running screaming down the aisles. What I can’t picture is who will attend this movie. Anybody? Movies like this are a test of taste. If you understand why Kill Bill is a good movie and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not, and Bad Santa is a good movie and The Cat in the Hat is not, then you have freed yourself from the belief that a movie’s quality is determined by its subject matter. You instinctively understand that a movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it. You qualify for Bad Santa.
Bridget Jones’s Diary ½
R, 95 m., 2001
Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones), Colin Firth (Mark Darcy), Hugh Grant (Daniel Cleaver), Honor Blackman (Penny), Crispin Bonham-Carter (Greg), Gemma Jones (Bridget’s Mum), Jim Broadbent (Bridget’s Dad), James Callis (Tom), Embeth Davidtz (Natasha). Directed by Sharon Maguire and produced by Tim Bevan, Jonathan Cavendish, and Eric Fellner. Screenplay by Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, and Helen Fielding, based on the novel by Fielding.
Glory be, they didn’t muck it up. Bridget Jones’s Diary, a beloved book about a heroine both lovable and human, has been made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it. The book, a fictional diary by a plump, thirty-something London office worker, was about a specific person in a specific place. When the role was cast with Renée Zellweger, who is not plump and is from Texas, there was gnashing and wailing. Obviously the Miramax boys would turn London’s pride into a Manhattanite, or worse.
Nothing doing. Zellweger put on twenty-something pounds and developed the cutest little would-be double chin, as well as a British accent that sounds reasonable enough to me. (Sight and Sound, the British film magazine, has an ear for nuances and says the accent is “just a little too studiedly posh,” which from them is praise.)
As in the book, Bridget arrives at her thirty-second birthday determined to take control of her life, which until now has consisted of smoking too much, drinking too much, eating too much, and not finding the right man, or indeed much of any man. In her nightmares, she dies fat, drunk, and lonely, and is eaten by Alsatian dogs. She determines to monitor her daily intake of tobacco and alcohol units, and her weight, which she measures in stones. (A stone is fourteen pounds; the British not only have pounds instead of kilos but stones on top of pounds, although the other day a London street vendor was arrested for selling bananas by the pound in defiance of the new European marching orders; the next step is obviously for Brussels to impound Bridget’s diary.)
Bridget’s campaign proceeds unhappily when her mother (who “comes from the time when pickles on toothpicks were still the height of sophistication”) introduces her to handsome Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who is at a holiday party against his will and in a bad mood and is overheard (by Bridget) describing her as a “verbally incontinent spinster.” Things go better at work, where she exchanges saucy e-mails with her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). His opener: “You appear to have forgotten your skirt.” They begin an affair, while Darcy circles the outskirts of her consciousness, still looking luscious but acting emotionally constipated.
Zellweger’s Bridget is a reminder of the first time we really became aware of her in a movie, in Jerry Maguire (1996), where she was so cute and vulnerable we wanted to tickle and console her at the same time. Her work in Nurse Betty (2000) was widely but not sufficiently praised, and now here she is, fully herself and fully Bridget Jones, both at once. A story like this can’t work unless we feel unconditional affection for the heroine, and casting Zellweger achieves that; the only alternate I can think of is Kate Winslet, who comes close but lacks the self-destructive puppy aspects.
The movie has otherwise been cast with dependable (perhaps infallible) British comic actors. The first time Hugh Grant appeared on-screen, I chuckled for no good reason at all, just as I always do when I see Christopher Walken, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, or Jack Nicholson—because I know that whatever the role, they will infuse it with more than the doctor ordered. Grant can play a male Bridget Jones (as he did in Notting Hill), but he’s better as a cad, and here he surpasses himself by lying to Bridget about Darcy and then cheating on her with a girl from the New York office. (An “American stick insect,” is what Bridget tells her diary.)
Colin Firth, on the other hand, must unbend to become lovable, and when we do finally love him, it’s largely because we know what an effort it took on his part. Bridget Jones’s Diary is famously, if vaguely, patterned after Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Firth played Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of the novel, and now plays another Darcy here. I didn’t see the TV version but learn from the critic James Berardinelli that Firth “plays this part exactly as he played the earlier role, making it evident that the two Darcys are essentially the same.”
It is a universal rule of romantic fiction that all great love stories must be mirrored by their low-comedy counterpoints. Just as Hal woos Katharine, Falstaff trifles with Doll Tearsheet. If Bridget must choose between Mark and Daniel, then her mother (Gemma Jones) must choose between her kindly but easy-chair-loving husband (Jim Broadbent) and a dashing huckster for a TV shopping channel.
The movie strings together one funny se
t piece after another, as when Bridget goes in costume to a party where she thought the theme was “Tarts and Vicars.” Or when she stumbles into a job on a TV news show and makes her famous premature entrance down the fire pole. Or when she has to decide at the beginning of an evening whether sexy underwear or tummy-crunching underwear will do her more good in the long run. Bridget charts her own progress along the way, from “tragic spinster” to “wanton sex goddess,” and the movie gives almost unreasonable pleasure as it celebrates her bumpy transition.
Christmas in the Clouds
PG, 97 m., 2005
Tim Vahle (Ray Clouds on Fire), Mariana Tosca (Tina Pisati Little Hawk), Sam Vlahos (Joe Clouds on Fire), M. Emmet Walsh (Stu O’Malley), Graham Greene (Earl), Sheila Tousey (Mary), Rosalind Ayres (Mabel Winright), Jonathan Joss (Phil). Directed by Kate Montgomery and produced by Montgomery and Sarah Wasserman. Screenplay by Montgomery.
Christmas in the Clouds is part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part historic breakthrough. The history is made because the movie is about affluent Native American yuppies. So many movies about American Indians deal in negative stereotypes that it’s nice to find one that takes place at an upscale Indian-owned ski resort. The only alcoholic in the cast is a white undercover investigator for a guidebook.
The romance begins through a misunderstanding. Through an online dating service, Joe Clouds on Fire (Sam Vlahos) is paired off with Tina Pisati (Mariana Tosca). She’s a chic New York professional woman whose name sounds Italian but whose family name is Little Hawk. He’s a likable codger whose son, Ray Clouds on Fire (Tim Vahle), manages the resort. Joe has not been entirely honest about his age and is about thirty years older than Tina. Meanwhile, the resort is expecting a surprise visit from the critic of luxury hotels, and Mary the reservations manager (Sheila Tousey) keeps an eagle eye for anyone checking in who looks like he can spell Zagat.