Lawrence Gordon Clark directs Simon Gipps-Kent, Michael Bryant and Edward Petherbridge in these M.R. James period ghost story adaptations made by the BBC to be screened at the darkest hour over Christmas each year in the Seventies.
Shot on 16mm film, at gothic locations, with high production values for shoestring TV, with a focus on convincing atmosphere (a combination of dread and crumpets) these lesser celebrated A Ghost Stories at Christmas all stick the landing nicely. Camply overacted but all building to an unsettling head of steam, each contains a mystery that keeps you glued and barely glimpsed monsters that irritate your dreams days after you’ve turned the DVD disc off. Ghoulish children with overgrown corpse’s fingernails floating around the hallways. A black slime that follows you home. The spider baby hatchlings that live in the ash tree. All achieved on a low budget yet deployed at a point when James’s stock questing curious academic heroes are too close to the truth to notice the dangers. We are foolishly right by their side as they unravel the dark secrets that any sensible person would leave well enough alone. These shorts all work as more often than not the terror is only peeped at and ignored until those final fateful shots. Before then a patient deadpan rationalism keeps us blinkered as to the true shocks that awaits us all.
Éric Rohmer directs Marie Rivière, Vincent Gauthier and Carita Järvinen in this French romantic comedy where a miserable young woman embraces loneliness (poorly) when her holiday plans are ruined at the last minute.
Quite possibly the nadir of boredom that a competently made narrative film can achieve.
Nick Rowland directs Cosmo Jarvis, Barry Keoghan and Ned Dennehy in this Irish gangster movie where a small town enforcer feels his life spiral out of control when he is ordered to kill a local man.
All about muddy atmosphere and scruffy setting, this leans into its country milieu hoping for authenticity. Really it is just a Guinness soaked update of Mean Streets and Miller’s Crossing. Not bad sources to crib from. The frequent lurches into sentimentality all but neuter it by the end, which is a shame as when it is being a nasty little thriller it persuades and hits the spot. There’s a budget obliterating car chase and a late in the day surprise behind the door of a posh country house… but sadness and pretensions dominate just when you are primed to enjoy having a go.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa directs Atsuko Maeda, Shota Sometani and Tokio Emoto in this Japanese drama where a travel show presenter feels alienated in Uzbekistan.
A nothing movie… Yoko has a gruelling and confusing time filming her latest episode in a country where everything and everyone feels inhospitable and overbearing. There’s a nice interlude involving the liberation of a goat. Kurosawa injects a paranoid dream logic into the silent longueurs between repetitive incidents.
François Ozon directs Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and Fanny Ardent in this musical murder mystery where a family of femme fatales find themselves snowed in with a dead body on Christmas Day.
A class act. The song and dance interludes are not particularly memorable but the costumes and tantrums are. Pretty much each and every beauty, whatever their vintage, goes through a sexual transformation, as if the life-size Cluedo set is a cocoon for French cinema’s hardiest butterflies.
8
Serendipity (2001)
Peter Chelsom directs John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale and Jeremy Piven in this Christmas set romcom where a pair of starcrossed lovers meet cute and decide to let fate decide if they will ever meet cute again.
Pretty but very contrived. Cusack and Beckinsale suffer an endless series of near misses but you are not ever entirely convinced as to why they part company in the first place? OK… We wouldn’t have a movie otherwise…but… But! Cusack is a little too cool for all this while Kate, Piven and Molly Shannon treat it like the Hollywood big break it was. They sparkle just as much as a gorgeously decorated festive Manhattan.
6
Home Alone (1990)
Chris Columbus directs Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern in this family comedy where a precocious 8 year old has to protect his home from burglars when he misses the plane to Paris.
An iconic staple, still one of the most profitable sleeper hits ever. I remember it staying in cinema screens well past the winter, long into the spring. The acting is broad with Culkin proving a natural alongside pitch perfect work from his highly stung adult co-stars. The slapstick violence is wish fulfilment for little kids of all ages. Beyond the inventive concussions and blow torches, the film suffers from a mean streak. The rich McCallister family is awful in general and unwarrantedly nasty to our baby faced protagonist. You’d be quite happy if he were left to his own devices for far longer than a few days of popcorn and pizza. Or if he just left a few of his lethal booby traps up to deal with his cunty kin when they bolt through the door just in time for the credits. John Williams out Danny Elfmans Danny Elfman with his jaunty yet sinister wintery score.
6
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)
Jeremiah S. Chechik directs Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo and Juliette Lewis in this comedy where the Griswold family’s December goes to utter shit.
I have a massive affection for the Griswolds (Sparky, Rusty, heterosexuality confirming at an early age Beverly D’Angelo, the daughter) due to Vacation & European Vacation. They were family favourites in our house in the Eighties. Despite making money in the States, this went straight to video over here. NLCV isn’t quite as chaotic or expansive as it predecessors but has enough slapstick and Chase’s trademark mugging to pass muster. It actually is the Christmas setting that papers over the gaping flaws, lack of raunch and weaker bits. With its animated credit sequence and overly decorated house, the movie feels like a Christmas classic even if the joke in the cracker is a little tired and gravy stained.
5
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Henry Selick directs Danny Elfman, Chris Sarandon and Catherine O’Hara in this stop motion animation classic where Jack Skellington decides he wants to branch out into running a new holiday.
One of the greatest animations ever, this thrills and seduces norms and kooks alike. The relentlessly upbeat score dashes through the snow and the slime. Every scene is filled with delightful grotesques. Its breathless jam packed brevity means we never linger too long and outstay our welcome. Tim Burton’s iconic designs are still one of the most darkest yet profitable corners of the Disney Store but director Henry Selick did the graft. Some shots are so complex and cinematic you marvel at the Herculean effort put in to manipulating every element in the shot one painstaking frame at a time. Jack Skellington is a hero for all of us who want to be a little different, not just accept the hand we’ve been dealt. But I personally love the bug filled sack of swing Oogie Boogie. Ends on one of the sweetest moments in cinema history.
10
White Christmas (1954)
Michael Curtiz directs Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney in this musical romantic comedy where two pairs of music acts fall for each other over their Christmas break from performing.
Not quite as magical as Holiday Inn but more winningly focussed on Christmas. The technicolor VistaVision dance numbers are often mind boggling thanks to Vera-Ellen’s poise and skill, Edith Head’s vibrant costuming. Crosby and Kaye are a little creaky to modern eyes but the gals absorb all the focus with their effervescent star turns. The title number bookends the film… the first blast taking place in a bleak bombed out WWII holding point, the final bombastic revisit during a spectacular stage show where all the romantic misunderstandings are neatly straightened out to leave you with a mile wide smile and glow in your heart.
8
The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)
Bharat Nalluri directs Dan Stevens, Morfydd Clark and Jonathan Pryce in this biographical fantasy where Charles Dickens, in desperate need of a hit, self publishes A Christmas Carol while being pursued by his imagined creations and his own past.
A nice solid bit of London Victoriana, a period as visually synonymous with Christmas as Post-War Small Town America. I’ve read a big biography on Dickens in the distant past and this rings pretty true with the man as presented there despite being a broad comic book fanfic account of his mid-career slump. The expansive cast is noticeably better than the material and there are few surprises. It hits it marks with enthusiasm and confidence even if very little else is achieved.
Joseph Sargent directs Robert Shaw, Walter Matthau and Martin Balsam in this action thriller where armed men take a New York Subway train hostage and demand a cool million within a tight one hour deadline.
An immaculate entertainment. A salty sense of time and place… AND THAT TIME AND PLACE IS 70s NYC… the coolest, sleaziest, corduroy brownest time and place. A jazzy alarm bell of a score by David Shire, it just may be the greatest movie theme ever. A frumpy but wry turn by Walter Matthau, more Captain Philips meets Columbo than John McClane. A dictatorial slice of coiled villainy from Robert Shaw as the intractable villain with a plan. The crammed ensemble is just as poppin’. Even down to the twentieth or thirtieth billed there are gems of character actor work. Jerry Stiller gets crumpled laughs with every couldn’t-give-a-shit utterance that comes out of his mouth. The eventual kinetics pelt along with a real world logic and desperation grips like a vice. Will they make the cash drop deadline? Will the villains getaway? How can the hostages survive their fate? And the movie remains gleefully cynical and fleet footed right up until the final shot. A savoury double bill tasting partner with the first Die Hard. “What Do the Fucking Passengers Expect for a Lousy 35 Cents – To Live Forever?”
Carles Torras directs Celso Bugallo, Mario Casas and Déborah François in this thriller where a recently paralysed man becomes murderously jealous of his able bodied girlfriend.
A rote spool of nasty, where unpleasant people get their comeuppance unbelievably. At least it makes the effort to establish the title character as an unredeemable shit long before he is consigned to his wheelchair. A small mercy in terms of representation but I’m struggling to think of any other positives here apart from a technical competency.
Tom Tykwer directs Ben Whishaw, Rachel Hurd-Wood and Dustin Hoffman in this period adaptation of the modern classic where a murderer with a supernatural sense of smell kills beauties and tries to capture their scent.
One of the finest novels ever written, Patrick Süskind’s Perfume is an erotic journey into callous brutality, irony and sensual mastery in 18th Century Europe. This sturdy realisation of the dark magical realism does a fantastic job of visualising Jean-Baptiste Grenouille’s hyperactive nostrils. We share a world of filth, decay, beauty and delicacy with Ben Whishaw’s near-mute parasitic outsider. The stronger first half of the film has a camp, bigger than life performance by Dustin Hoffman as an ageing perfumer. He tags out and Alan Rickman comes in as a father desperate to protect his precious virginal daughter from the killer who stalks his region’s alleyways and boudoirs. Run Lola Run’s Tykwer switches to epic sweep mode here and loses the audience slightly after the superior intimacy of breathing the same smells as Whishaw for so long. The grand finale though is pretty writhingly unique and bravely lensed.
John Ford directs John Wayne, Jeffery Hunter and Vera Miles in this classic Western where a Civil War veteran and mixed race boy hunt the Native Americans who killed their family and took captive the young girls.
Pretty much every shot in this is a Technicolor marvel. Ford’s location work in Monument Valley is epic and unparalleled. Strange to think that pioneer colour cinematographer Winton C Hoch won three Academy Awards, lensed this sumptuous masterpiece, and then ended his career working on Time Tunnel & The Banana Splits for TV? It just doesn’t tally. Wayne manages to turn his simple man of action and vengeance into an enigma. We identify with him as he is the only one taking control, the loudest voice, the only undomesticated beast left in the wilderness. We don’t know if he is on a rescue mission or blinded by hate. His hatred towards the ‘Indian’ race is unfettered and palpable. There is no equivocating. He is racist. “Hero” as he is the only man left and driven enough to get the job done. Yet the film always frames such an attitude as wrong. His deeds posit him tipping over into becoming the villain, much like Red River we foresee a conclusion where the younger man might have to gun the old rabid dog down. Maybe the reason he hates the movie Comanches so much is they like him are a dying, outdated breed. Ethan Edwards and Scar are savage, nomadic and go against the grain of post-war humanity. Their strengths and outlook are not welcome at the wedding dance or the reservation. History is leaving their biases and violence behind, the pioneers no longer need a gunslingin’ alpha driven by righteous anger now the West has been won. The Searchers closes the doors on the old values as they serve their purpose after one last half decade spanning crusade. It is a ride of thrilling adventure and danger, far more sophisticated in its dramatic presentation of prejudice than modern eyes give it credit for. The point isn’t that racism gets the job done, it is that such an attitude has had its final day and is no longer welcome in a civilised society. That iconic shot of a door closing on Edwards is not a lament for his generation but punctuation.
David Michôd directs Brad Pitt, Anthony Michael Hall and Topher Grace in this war satire loosely based on the exploits of General Stanley McChrystal who took over the occupation of Afghanistan and tried to win the war of hearts and minds that literally nobody else was invested in.
An alright film – not as funny, or zany, or affecting as it needs to be but well made and navigating some harsh truths of modern geopolitics. I find it hilarious that something so solid has an arbitrarily low score on Letterboxd. The main reasoning seems to be the kids don’t like Brad Pitt with grey hair but I suspect the true symptom is that a glimpsed Barack Obama is painted in an unflattering light. The woke generation don’t like seeing their idolised icon behaving how a politician must and world leader has no choice but to. Slippery. I reckon this representation is closer to the truth and have no issue with that. But yeah… this is a “rubbish movie” as a broad Pitt plays his age and has an amusing old man run. Bless his goofy heart, he commits to it. Catch-2010.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 