12 Days of Christmas Runners-Up

Christmas is less than two weeks away!

You know for all the Christmas classics, there are way too many holiday specials that don’t get the attention they deserve. So this year for the twelve days leading up to Christmas, I’m going to highlight an overlooked Christmas special each day. The only thing is I’m omitting mere Christmas episodes of TV shows unless they were made apart from the main series, because there are too many of them. As for today, here are my honourable mentions:

“A Garfield Christmas” -The musical numbers aren’t very good but it’s got a decent humble story, a fun cast including Pat Carroll as the most awesome grandma, and everyone’s favourite sarcastic cat.

Bah Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas Carol -Yeah in a lot of places it’s stupid but it captures the Looney Tunes’ personalities right and in a fun take on a classic story.

Mickey’s Christmas Carol -A really wonderful, beautiful telling of the Dickens’ classic that’s a great introduction to the famous story. Alan Young is of course superb as Scrooge McDuck and the song “Oh What a Merry Christmas Day” is perfectly joyous.

“A Chipmunk Christmas” -Like “Mickey’s Christmas Carol”, this one may be a bit too popular to belong on my list proper. Suffice to say a corny morality story is made better by stunning animation and a really endearing heart.

“The Star Wars Holiday Special” -See it! Just see it! It’s batshit insane! Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and a surprisingly unfunny Harvey Korman join Luke, Han, Leia, and way too many Wookies in celebrating “Life Day”. it’s so ridiculous even George Lucas pretends it never happened!

Comments

Disney's Mulan, Cultural Appropriation, and Exploitation

I’m late on this one I know. I wasn’t willing to spend thirty bucks back in September for a movie experience I knew was going to be far poorer than if I had paid half that at a theatre. So I waited for it to hit streaming for free to give it a shot. In the meantime I heard that it wasn’t very good, but I remained determined not to skip it entirely, partly out of sympathy for director Niki Caro and partly out of morbid curiosity. Disney’s live-action Mulan I was actually mildly looking forward to early in the year in spite of my well-documented distaste for this series of creative dead zones by the most powerful media conglomerate on earth. Mulan was never one of Disney’s classics, a movie extremely of its time in its “girl power” gender politics and with a decidedly American take on ancient Chinese mythology. It got by on a couple good songs and a strong lead, but it was a movie that could be improved upon, and this new version looked like it had the potential to do that, em...

The Subtle Sensitivity of the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai

When I think of Wong Kar-wai, I think of nighttime and neon lights, I think of the image of lonely people sitting in cafes or bars as the world passes behind them, mere flashes of movement; I think of love and quiet, sombre heartbreak, the sensuality that exists between people but is rarely fully or openly expressed. Mostly I think of the mood of melancholy, yet how this can be beautiful, colourful, inspiring even. A feeling of gloominess at the complexity of messy human relationships, though tinged with an unmitigated joy in the sensation of that feeling. And a warmth, generated by light and colour, that cuts through to the solitude of our very soul. This isn’t a broadly definitive quality of Wong’s body of work -certainly it isn’t so much true of his martial arts films Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster. But those most affectionate movies on my memory: Chungking Express , Fallen Angels , Happy Together , 2046 , of course In the Mood for Love , and even My Blueberry Nig...

The Wizard of Oz: Birth of Imagination

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue; and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” I don’t think I’ve sat down and watched The Wizard of Oz in more than fifteen years. Among the first things I noticed doing so now in 2019, nearly eighty years to the day of its original release on August 25th, 1939, was the amount of obvious foreshadowing in the first twenty minutes. The farmhands are each equated with their later analogues through blatant metaphors and personality quirks (Huck’s “head made out of straw” comment), Professor Marvel is clearly a fraud in spite of his good nature, Dorothy at one point straight up calls Miss Gulch a “wicked old witch”. We don’t notice these things watching the film as children, or maybe we do and reason that it doesn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. Despite being the part of the movie we’re not supposed to care about, the portrait of a dreary Kansas bedighted by one instant icon of a song, those opening sce...

Reviews of the Bosch

Search This Blog