veronica (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aberration) wrote2025-12-26 07:10 pm
aberration) wrote2025-12-26 07:10 pm
let your heart be light
So in January I decided I wanted to make a Christmas movie advent calendar just of movies that I hadn’t seen before, and I did do this to the extent that I made a list of 24 movies, and then… that’s it. And of course I sort of forgot about it, but managed to remember by late November, so we did it! We watched all 24 movies!
And I probably should have anticipated this given that I picked the movies, but despite all the movies involving Christmas to some extent (my rule was pretty much, does the movie take place over Christmas, if yes then it counts – sure yeah Die Hard would be a Christmas movie but I’ve seen it so), this gave us a pretty broad swath of genres, a lot of festive family-friendly fare but also like, noir! War drama! Black comedy! French New Wave! It did make me want to try to come up with more movie marathons with some theme that can work through many different kinds of movies.
I’ve logged these on letterboxd, but in any case, here are briefly 24 Christmas movies I hadn’t seen before:
White Reindeer (2013)
This is an indie dark comedy about a very average, suburban, Christmas-loving white woman whose husband is brutally murdered in early December. Obviously a dark premise, and I saw one review call it "unrelentingly crass," which is … also accurate, but I was also surprised by how consistently earnest and heartfelt this ended up being. Like it would start into some thread that yes does feel very crass – the main character looks through her husband’s computer after his death and finds that he clearly had a fetish for Black women, and had an affair with a stripper, and then seeks out the other woman not really out of any anger but just a kind of curiosity that clearly turns to finding comfort in being with someone who also loved her husband. Or a later storyline where a neighbor couple initially seem to not want to invite her to a housewarming party, but then it’s revealed it’s really a sex party, which the main character does attend, and the sequence includes a scene where the main character and neighbor wife chat in the bathroom while both wearing, you know, the kind of paraphernalia you’d have at a sex party, but it’s a very open and even sweet conversation?
I guess I’d be forewarned that this is definitely darkly humorous, but I was impressed how it wasn’t only that, how it achieved that without exactly ever being misanthropic, the way dark comedies often are.
Gremlins (1984)
Yeah I’d never seen this before. My strongest reaction was ‘oh I can see the influence this had on Hocus Pocus.’ And maybe it’s nostalgia goggles talking but I think Hocus Pocus is a better movie? A lot of the premise of this is weird to me, like this inventor dad is SO DESPERATE to get his son a good Christmas gift, and his son… is a full-grown adult who already has a pet? Is that really so dire?
Also Katie’s tragic Christmas backstory is so funny I’m sorry just. Everyone dad in this movie is unbelievably fucking stupid.
Single All the Way (2021)
This is a saccharine gay romcom where two gay BFFs/roommates, um, I can’t remember their names let’s just say, Chris and Steve*, leave Los Angeles for the holidays to visit Chris’ family in a small town in New Hampshire**, with Chris initially wanting Steve to pretend to be a couple with him so his family won’t give him shit for always being single, but then before they can get into this charade Chris’s mom announces that she wants to set Chris up on a blind date and Steve immediately takes the opportunity to NOT do the fake boyfriends thing, but then over the course of the holidays the family clues in that Chris and Steve are definitely into each other despite that, remember, Not All Gay Men Who Like Each Other Personally Also Want To Have Sex With Each Other, Chris’s mom read that in a book.
So I mean, this might be your thing if you like saccharine romcoms. I didn’t even mind most of it, I just got kind of tired of what felt like a lot of the characters stating and then restating the tropes the movie was using. And it is the source of the Jennifer Coolidge "the gays love me," line.
That beings said I saw a letterboxd review call this "get out for gay people" and I really… can’t disagree.
* I can’t emphasize enough that these are not their names I just can’t remember the names and I refuse to look.
** I mean I think, probably.
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Hadn’t seen this either and it’s amazing????? I love everything about it?????? I could watch Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole sniping at each other all the time?????????????
Also very funny to me that this included a scene of Eleanor wrapping in Christmas gifts in cloth and string, was that a thing I’m seriously asking I don’t know.
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
I’d only seen the 1994 version, but I really enjoyed this. Maybe because I laughed too hard at the hero lawyer calling the DA’s son to the stand, and when the DA looks back at his wife like "wtf???" she just HOLDS UP A SUBPOENA, amazing.
I also had the impression that the 1994 version came down more on the side of, no there is a Santa Claus and it’s this guy, where I felt like this one hedged more to, he’s a kindly old man who isn’t doing any harm, but I’m not sure.
The Apartment (1960)
This is a very fun movie with a perfect ending that also raises many questions like. Did companies in the 1960s have ANYTHING resembling an HR department, what the actual fuck. I mean I guess I know the answer to that but holy shit.
Also early on the protagonist says the rent for his one-bedroom Manhattan apartment is $85/month, I went to the inflation calculator and this is $926, what an absolute fucking steal that would be now.
Tangerine (2015)
This is a movie by Sean Baker, now known particularly for Anora, about two trans women, with more or less a slice-of-life narrative taking place over Christmas Eve. Sin-Dee spends the evening tracking down her shitty boyfriend/pimp, Alexandra tries to get people to come see her perform at a bar. I’d let others speak to its quality as representation; it’s interesting, and often sweet and funny. It also by the end kind of devolves into a five-person shouting match that even I was hitting a point of, oh my god everyone needs to stop arguing in my living room. But I’d also recommend it.
I also didn’t know until after watching that it was Filmed On Three iPhones. I personally find that pretty damn impressive.
Ma nuit chez Maud | My Night at Maud’s (1969)
This is a French New Wave film about a man, Jean-Louis, who runs into an old college (I think) friend of his, who in turn invites him to spend Christmas Eve with him at the apartment of a woman friend of his (the titular Maud). Jean-Louis is a… not a devout but let’s say regular-church-attending Catholic, school friend and Maud are atheist Marxists, and most of the film is the characters conversing about various topics through these perspectives, as well as school friend leaving and Jean-Louis spending the night with Maud.
So this movie is almost entirely just people talking to each other, and I really liked it, because the characters are quite nuanced and have very interesting conversations that demonstrate how these big identities of Catholic and Marxist/Atheist belie much more complex interiors. Maud and Jean-Louis also make a nice brief romance, the kind of relationship that is clearly not going to last, and is nice to see explored in its clearly temporary nature.
Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020)
This is a friendly-family musical mostly about a grumpy old inventor whose granddaughter comes to visit and, you know, reawakens his spirit, eventually. And you know, it’s fine. The costumes are great! The actors are fun! The music is, um. Well I really liked one song. I have some… notes about the narrative, like that this kind of feels like ‘what if Victor Frankenstein was a toymaker but we dismissed his creature’s existential crisis as just vanity,’ idk.
Look if you like cute colorful Christmas stuff, there’s enough here to enjoy to get through the otherwise Aggressively Fine most of it.
Let It Snow (2019)
This is a teen romcom about a bunch of teens who are variously impacted by a snowstorm and look okay, I hated this, I found it just insipid, it may have unfairly put me off ever reading anything by John Green.
But you know. idk YMMV if you like teen romance.
Lady in the Lake (1946)
This is a Phillip Marlowe detective story with a very weird central gimmick which is that the entire movie, aside from brief narrator interludes, is shot from first person perspective. It gives the movie the feel of a video game, which is also very weird because that frame of reference didn’t exist in 1946 (at least, Wikipedia tells me the earliest instance of something akin to a video game dates to 1947), though some posters even advertise the movie as "You and Phillip Marlowe" solving a mystery.
I thought it was a solid mystery story, and the first person perspective meant that the character most often seen onscreen isn’t the male main character, but the leading lady Audrey Totter, who does a great job keeping an air of mystery to her character so that it’s unclear whether she’s the detective’s earnest ally or a femme fatale. And her death glare is amazing, which goes to my favorite thing about this movie – because every other character tends to be at minimum annoyed with, if not actively hostile toward the protagonist detective, watching this is basically an hour and a half of getting glared at, which is very funny to me.
醜聞 | Scandal (1950)
This is a Kurosawa movie about a celebrity painter and a singer who are the subject of tabloid allegations of an affair when they’re photographed together at a hotel. The painter hires an attorney to sue the tabloid for defamation (I think, essentially), but the attorney, driven by alcohol and gambling addictions, is bribed by the tabloid to throw the case.
I like the premise here, and a lot of about the execution, but ultimately felt this could be meandering and repetitive – like, we get it, the attorney is compromised, that has been established we’re good. The attorney also has a daughter who has tuberculosis and is the sort of angelic, urging him toward good character, which I just… didn’t find that interesting. But I did, in particular, enjoy the Christmas scenes.
Joyeux Noel (2005)
This is a fictional portrayal of the 1914 Christmas truce, a number of spontaneous unofficial ceasefires that occurred early in World War I. It was interesting to watch this in, I guess, the current climate, as it depicts a conflict that I think to modern viewers lacks clearly defined stakes. The film opens with scenes of British and German school children reciting war propaganda about wholesale slaughtering their respective war enemies, something I wondered about as to its historicity. But the combatants show little personal hostility, something that can work because there isn’t much delving into the reasons behind the war, and to the extent those reasons would be resonant to the on-the-ground combatants, they’re certainly not resonant to modern viewers. My point, I guess, is that this kind of anti-war film, where soldiers across enemy lines can lay down their weapons and recognize their common humanity, feels genuinely at tension with a reality of newly rising fascism. I respect its anti-war message, but I also don’t know entirely how to reconcile that.
In any case, it’s emotional and generally well done, though again it did leave me wondering about the historicity of its depiction of World War I.
Klaus (2019)
This is an animated movie that basically creates an origin for the Santa Claus myth. Which is… not something that I necessarily know that I needed, but it was fine, perfectly cute. I was weirdly distracted by just how much it reminded me of The Emperor’s New Groove: Jason Schwartzman sounds so much like David Spade does he always sound that much like David Spade; spoiled, conceited male protagonist paired up with stoic, thoughtful big guy. This obviously doesn’t have the same level chaos because uh, what movie does, but yeah it sure did really distract me.
東京ゴッドファーザーズ | Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
This is a great movie about an alcoholic middle-aged man, transgender woman, and teenage girl who are homeless on Christmas Eve and discover a baby abandoned in a dumpster. The sheer amount of tragic, sweet, and wacky adventures that are packed into this movie’s 92 minutes, not to mention the very nuanced character work for all three protagonists, is so impressive. If I were going to choose a movie from this list to make a repeat viewing for Christmas, this would probably be it.
8-Bit Christmas (2021)
This came off like an updated attempt at A Christmas Story, with Neil Patrick Harris as a dad telling his daughter about the Christmas of his childhood when he really wanted a Nintendo. However, this lacks all the charm and most of the humor of A Christmas Story, devolving into a boring lecture about how the real meaning of Christmas is FAMILY, blah blah blah, jesus let children be children who want toys oh my fucking god.
However, talking about this movie to a friend led to him telling us about the Christmas of his childhood when he wanted a Nintendo, which was a delightful story that was just, so much better than this movie, so I guess at least I got that out of watching it.
Batman Returns (1992)
This was too silly for too long for me. I started mentally comparing it to other movies that I know are bad and trying to think of a difference that wasn’t basically answered with "money," and well, failing in that. But yeah okay I like Burton’s set designs of a … vaguely fascist aesthetic Gotham.
Little Women (1994)
This was a perfectly fine adaptation of the book. I honestly don’t have enough investment in the book or this movie to say much more, other than I did spend a lot of time complaining about Laurie.
Feast of the Seven Fishes (2019)
This is a perfectly cute movie set in 1980s rural Pennsylvania, about a young Italian-American man who meets a young WASP woman and ends up inviting her to his family’s Christmas Eve tradition of the "feast of seven fishes." It’s a pretty straightforward, syrupy sweet family Christmas movie, but the characters were enjoyable and uh, we could relate to the family represented, even in very small things like, everyone keeps coming in through the backdoor into the kitchen instead of the front door, and of course that door is right up against a chair that gets jostled every time.
I’ve also learned that I am extremely prejudiced against men named Prentice. Probably very unfair.
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
This is a film based on a play about a couple who exchange letters through an anonymous pen pal service? I guess? Before unknowingly meeting in person when they start working in the same shop. They’re rivals who annoy each other in person, inevitably discover the truth about their secret pen pals, etc. This really… felt like a play that was made into a movie, and I think I was supposed to find the man discovering the truth first and then basically emotionally manipulating the woman about it charming, which I did not, but you know. Again, ymmv.
Anyway, this was the basis for You’ve Got Mail 58 years later.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Robert Downy Jr. is a pathetic neo-noir protagonist. Which I enjoyed a lot, honestly, but I think I would’ve liked it more if it hadn’t not only reproduced but doubled down on noir misogyny.
The Thin Man (1934)
Yes I should have already watched all these movies years ago okay I know I’m going to get on it now.
Happy Christmas (2014)
This is a very mumbly, lowkey movie that takes place at Christmas, about a young woman with addiction issues, played by Anna Kendrick, who moves in with her brother, his wife, and their young baby. It took a bit for me to get into it, but ultimately I felt like it did a nice job exploring how Kendrick’s character has a clear positive effect on the lives of his brother and his wife, even while also presenting… obvious challenges. The wife is also played by Melanie Lynskey, and I think this may be the first time I’ve seen her in a role with her New Zealand accent.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
An entertaining Judy Garland musical, though tbh the main reason I’d suggest anyone watch this movie is for the two psychotic younger sisters, and learning about…. whatever the fuck Halloween was in 1902 idek. While I think this is generally considered a Christmas movie, this would kind of push my definition of it since it’s more like, Christmas appears during the movie rather than the movie being set during Christmas. But this movie originated "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" so I think it has to count.
Did you know a "cakewalk" originated in slavery, yep looked that up due to watching this.
And I probably should have anticipated this given that I picked the movies, but despite all the movies involving Christmas to some extent (my rule was pretty much, does the movie take place over Christmas, if yes then it counts – sure yeah Die Hard would be a Christmas movie but I’ve seen it so), this gave us a pretty broad swath of genres, a lot of festive family-friendly fare but also like, noir! War drama! Black comedy! French New Wave! It did make me want to try to come up with more movie marathons with some theme that can work through many different kinds of movies.
I’ve logged these on letterboxd, but in any case, here are briefly 24 Christmas movies I hadn’t seen before:
White Reindeer (2013)
This is an indie dark comedy about a very average, suburban, Christmas-loving white woman whose husband is brutally murdered in early December. Obviously a dark premise, and I saw one review call it "unrelentingly crass," which is … also accurate, but I was also surprised by how consistently earnest and heartfelt this ended up being. Like it would start into some thread that yes does feel very crass – the main character looks through her husband’s computer after his death and finds that he clearly had a fetish for Black women, and had an affair with a stripper, and then seeks out the other woman not really out of any anger but just a kind of curiosity that clearly turns to finding comfort in being with someone who also loved her husband. Or a later storyline where a neighbor couple initially seem to not want to invite her to a housewarming party, but then it’s revealed it’s really a sex party, which the main character does attend, and the sequence includes a scene where the main character and neighbor wife chat in the bathroom while both wearing, you know, the kind of paraphernalia you’d have at a sex party, but it’s a very open and even sweet conversation?
I guess I’d be forewarned that this is definitely darkly humorous, but I was impressed how it wasn’t only that, how it achieved that without exactly ever being misanthropic, the way dark comedies often are.
Gremlins (1984)
Yeah I’d never seen this before. My strongest reaction was ‘oh I can see the influence this had on Hocus Pocus.’ And maybe it’s nostalgia goggles talking but I think Hocus Pocus is a better movie? A lot of the premise of this is weird to me, like this inventor dad is SO DESPERATE to get his son a good Christmas gift, and his son… is a full-grown adult who already has a pet? Is that really so dire?
Also Katie’s tragic Christmas backstory is so funny I’m sorry just. Everyone dad in this movie is unbelievably fucking stupid.
Single All the Way (2021)
This is a saccharine gay romcom where two gay BFFs/roommates, um, I can’t remember their names let’s just say, Chris and Steve*, leave Los Angeles for the holidays to visit Chris’ family in a small town in New Hampshire**, with Chris initially wanting Steve to pretend to be a couple with him so his family won’t give him shit for always being single, but then before they can get into this charade Chris’s mom announces that she wants to set Chris up on a blind date and Steve immediately takes the opportunity to NOT do the fake boyfriends thing, but then over the course of the holidays the family clues in that Chris and Steve are definitely into each other despite that, remember, Not All Gay Men Who Like Each Other Personally Also Want To Have Sex With Each Other, Chris’s mom read that in a book.
So I mean, this might be your thing if you like saccharine romcoms. I didn’t even mind most of it, I just got kind of tired of what felt like a lot of the characters stating and then restating the tropes the movie was using. And it is the source of the Jennifer Coolidge "the gays love me," line.
That beings said I saw a letterboxd review call this "get out for gay people" and I really… can’t disagree.
* I can’t emphasize enough that these are not their names I just can’t remember the names and I refuse to look.
** I mean I think, probably.
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Hadn’t seen this either and it’s amazing????? I love everything about it?????? I could watch Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole sniping at each other all the time?????????????
Also very funny to me that this included a scene of Eleanor wrapping in Christmas gifts in cloth and string, was that a thing I’m seriously asking I don’t know.
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
I’d only seen the 1994 version, but I really enjoyed this. Maybe because I laughed too hard at the hero lawyer calling the DA’s son to the stand, and when the DA looks back at his wife like "wtf???" she just HOLDS UP A SUBPOENA, amazing.
I also had the impression that the 1994 version came down more on the side of, no there is a Santa Claus and it’s this guy, where I felt like this one hedged more to, he’s a kindly old man who isn’t doing any harm, but I’m not sure.
The Apartment (1960)
This is a very fun movie with a perfect ending that also raises many questions like. Did companies in the 1960s have ANYTHING resembling an HR department, what the actual fuck. I mean I guess I know the answer to that but holy shit.
Also early on the protagonist says the rent for his one-bedroom Manhattan apartment is $85/month, I went to the inflation calculator and this is $926, what an absolute fucking steal that would be now.
Tangerine (2015)
This is a movie by Sean Baker, now known particularly for Anora, about two trans women, with more or less a slice-of-life narrative taking place over Christmas Eve. Sin-Dee spends the evening tracking down her shitty boyfriend/pimp, Alexandra tries to get people to come see her perform at a bar. I’d let others speak to its quality as representation; it’s interesting, and often sweet and funny. It also by the end kind of devolves into a five-person shouting match that even I was hitting a point of, oh my god everyone needs to stop arguing in my living room. But I’d also recommend it.
I also didn’t know until after watching that it was Filmed On Three iPhones. I personally find that pretty damn impressive.
Ma nuit chez Maud | My Night at Maud’s (1969)
This is a French New Wave film about a man, Jean-Louis, who runs into an old college (I think) friend of his, who in turn invites him to spend Christmas Eve with him at the apartment of a woman friend of his (the titular Maud). Jean-Louis is a… not a devout but let’s say regular-church-attending Catholic, school friend and Maud are atheist Marxists, and most of the film is the characters conversing about various topics through these perspectives, as well as school friend leaving and Jean-Louis spending the night with Maud.
So this movie is almost entirely just people talking to each other, and I really liked it, because the characters are quite nuanced and have very interesting conversations that demonstrate how these big identities of Catholic and Marxist/Atheist belie much more complex interiors. Maud and Jean-Louis also make a nice brief romance, the kind of relationship that is clearly not going to last, and is nice to see explored in its clearly temporary nature.
Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020)
This is a friendly-family musical mostly about a grumpy old inventor whose granddaughter comes to visit and, you know, reawakens his spirit, eventually. And you know, it’s fine. The costumes are great! The actors are fun! The music is, um. Well I really liked one song. I have some… notes about the narrative, like that this kind of feels like ‘what if Victor Frankenstein was a toymaker but we dismissed his creature’s existential crisis as just vanity,’ idk.
Look if you like cute colorful Christmas stuff, there’s enough here to enjoy to get through the otherwise Aggressively Fine most of it.
Let It Snow (2019)
This is a teen romcom about a bunch of teens who are variously impacted by a snowstorm and look okay, I hated this, I found it just insipid, it may have unfairly put me off ever reading anything by John Green.
But you know. idk YMMV if you like teen romance.
Lady in the Lake (1946)
This is a Phillip Marlowe detective story with a very weird central gimmick which is that the entire movie, aside from brief narrator interludes, is shot from first person perspective. It gives the movie the feel of a video game, which is also very weird because that frame of reference didn’t exist in 1946 (at least, Wikipedia tells me the earliest instance of something akin to a video game dates to 1947), though some posters even advertise the movie as "You and Phillip Marlowe" solving a mystery.
I thought it was a solid mystery story, and the first person perspective meant that the character most often seen onscreen isn’t the male main character, but the leading lady Audrey Totter, who does a great job keeping an air of mystery to her character so that it’s unclear whether she’s the detective’s earnest ally or a femme fatale. And her death glare is amazing, which goes to my favorite thing about this movie – because every other character tends to be at minimum annoyed with, if not actively hostile toward the protagonist detective, watching this is basically an hour and a half of getting glared at, which is very funny to me.
醜聞 | Scandal (1950)
This is a Kurosawa movie about a celebrity painter and a singer who are the subject of tabloid allegations of an affair when they’re photographed together at a hotel. The painter hires an attorney to sue the tabloid for defamation (I think, essentially), but the attorney, driven by alcohol and gambling addictions, is bribed by the tabloid to throw the case.
I like the premise here, and a lot of about the execution, but ultimately felt this could be meandering and repetitive – like, we get it, the attorney is compromised, that has been established we’re good. The attorney also has a daughter who has tuberculosis and is the sort of angelic, urging him toward good character, which I just… didn’t find that interesting. But I did, in particular, enjoy the Christmas scenes.
Joyeux Noel (2005)
This is a fictional portrayal of the 1914 Christmas truce, a number of spontaneous unofficial ceasefires that occurred early in World War I. It was interesting to watch this in, I guess, the current climate, as it depicts a conflict that I think to modern viewers lacks clearly defined stakes. The film opens with scenes of British and German school children reciting war propaganda about wholesale slaughtering their respective war enemies, something I wondered about as to its historicity. But the combatants show little personal hostility, something that can work because there isn’t much delving into the reasons behind the war, and to the extent those reasons would be resonant to the on-the-ground combatants, they’re certainly not resonant to modern viewers. My point, I guess, is that this kind of anti-war film, where soldiers across enemy lines can lay down their weapons and recognize their common humanity, feels genuinely at tension with a reality of newly rising fascism. I respect its anti-war message, but I also don’t know entirely how to reconcile that.
In any case, it’s emotional and generally well done, though again it did leave me wondering about the historicity of its depiction of World War I.
Klaus (2019)
This is an animated movie that basically creates an origin for the Santa Claus myth. Which is… not something that I necessarily know that I needed, but it was fine, perfectly cute. I was weirdly distracted by just how much it reminded me of The Emperor’s New Groove: Jason Schwartzman sounds so much like David Spade does he always sound that much like David Spade; spoiled, conceited male protagonist paired up with stoic, thoughtful big guy. This obviously doesn’t have the same level chaos because uh, what movie does, but yeah it sure did really distract me.
東京ゴッドファーザーズ | Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
This is a great movie about an alcoholic middle-aged man, transgender woman, and teenage girl who are homeless on Christmas Eve and discover a baby abandoned in a dumpster. The sheer amount of tragic, sweet, and wacky adventures that are packed into this movie’s 92 minutes, not to mention the very nuanced character work for all three protagonists, is so impressive. If I were going to choose a movie from this list to make a repeat viewing for Christmas, this would probably be it.
8-Bit Christmas (2021)
This came off like an updated attempt at A Christmas Story, with Neil Patrick Harris as a dad telling his daughter about the Christmas of his childhood when he really wanted a Nintendo. However, this lacks all the charm and most of the humor of A Christmas Story, devolving into a boring lecture about how the real meaning of Christmas is FAMILY, blah blah blah, jesus let children be children who want toys oh my fucking god.
However, talking about this movie to a friend led to him telling us about the Christmas of his childhood when he wanted a Nintendo, which was a delightful story that was just, so much better than this movie, so I guess at least I got that out of watching it.
Batman Returns (1992)
This was too silly for too long for me. I started mentally comparing it to other movies that I know are bad and trying to think of a difference that wasn’t basically answered with "money," and well, failing in that. But yeah okay I like Burton’s set designs of a … vaguely fascist aesthetic Gotham.
Little Women (1994)
This was a perfectly fine adaptation of the book. I honestly don’t have enough investment in the book or this movie to say much more, other than I did spend a lot of time complaining about Laurie.
Feast of the Seven Fishes (2019)
This is a perfectly cute movie set in 1980s rural Pennsylvania, about a young Italian-American man who meets a young WASP woman and ends up inviting her to his family’s Christmas Eve tradition of the "feast of seven fishes." It’s a pretty straightforward, syrupy sweet family Christmas movie, but the characters were enjoyable and uh, we could relate to the family represented, even in very small things like, everyone keeps coming in through the backdoor into the kitchen instead of the front door, and of course that door is right up against a chair that gets jostled every time.
I’ve also learned that I am extremely prejudiced against men named Prentice. Probably very unfair.
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
This is a film based on a play about a couple who exchange letters through an anonymous pen pal service? I guess? Before unknowingly meeting in person when they start working in the same shop. They’re rivals who annoy each other in person, inevitably discover the truth about their secret pen pals, etc. This really… felt like a play that was made into a movie, and I think I was supposed to find the man discovering the truth first and then basically emotionally manipulating the woman about it charming, which I did not, but you know. Again, ymmv.
Anyway, this was the basis for You’ve Got Mail 58 years later.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Robert Downy Jr. is a pathetic neo-noir protagonist. Which I enjoyed a lot, honestly, but I think I would’ve liked it more if it hadn’t not only reproduced but doubled down on noir misogyny.
The Thin Man (1934)
Yes I should have already watched all these movies years ago okay I know I’m going to get on it now.
Happy Christmas (2014)
This is a very mumbly, lowkey movie that takes place at Christmas, about a young woman with addiction issues, played by Anna Kendrick, who moves in with her brother, his wife, and their young baby. It took a bit for me to get into it, but ultimately I felt like it did a nice job exploring how Kendrick’s character has a clear positive effect on the lives of his brother and his wife, even while also presenting… obvious challenges. The wife is also played by Melanie Lynskey, and I think this may be the first time I’ve seen her in a role with her New Zealand accent.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
An entertaining Judy Garland musical, though tbh the main reason I’d suggest anyone watch this movie is for the two psychotic younger sisters, and learning about…. whatever the fuck Halloween was in 1902 idek. While I think this is generally considered a Christmas movie, this would kind of push my definition of it since it’s more like, Christmas appears during the movie rather than the movie being set during Christmas. But this movie originated "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" so I think it has to count.
Did you know a "cakewalk" originated in slavery, yep looked that up due to watching this.
no subject
I did not know Lady of the Lake was filmed in first person and this is fascinating to me, I have to get on that and also Tokyo Godfathers which I've been wanting to watch for many years.