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4/27/24
1/5/24
Alternative Christmas Movies
The "x" in xmas stands for alternative or counter. Here's a list of movies that you may find even alternative to the now usual alternative Christmas movies. Click on the title for more info.
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Hands down the best circuitously Christmas movie, it's about an ice cream war in Scotland, and by avoiding Christmas directly, reaches the spirit of it in a much better way. See further comments here.
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My culture's ritual for the holiday season is a party watching both of these movies -- best to use a Saturday and start in the late afternoon -- with an Italian potluck feast: antipasto, pasta, main courses if you want or a giant load of pasta and meatballs, Italian wine, cigars, and don't forget the cannoli. This subversive twist to the family also involves the fact that, in case you didn't notice, the two movies span a Christmas and a New Year's, as well as wedding, funeral, communion, baptism, and of course, numerous assassinations. You know, family stuff. See comments here.
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The "Christmas in Heaven" finale cinches it, but there's something about this stocking full of more Flying Circus style sketches that seems at once so profuse and overstuffed and smelling of fancy new chemicals and so delectably scathing of it all.
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Hardly a coincidence that one of Monty Python's members also made something so scathing of it all, and picked up on the Christmas angle, too. You may not remember that this dystopia set "somewhere in the 20th century" also takes place at Christmas time, with generic gifts and company parties all part and parcel of capitalist state overlords. It's also Terry Gilliam's best movie and the best thing done by any of the Pythons apart from their collective output.
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Movies that have Christmas time as their setting, the backdrop, but are about everything else going on, have the decided advantage of evoking so much more than just specious holiday recognition. It's the time to return from college, and Barry Levinson's depiction of that time in Baltimore in the early 60s, for a group of school chums with a diner at the center of their activities, reminds us of the unofficial gatherings and customs, too. Check out Kevin Bacon stealing baby Jesus' crib.
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Way before Diner, there was this. What better way to spend the holidays than with a wisecracking couple with friends from both sides of the tracks, as they make a general homage to liquor and solve a murder? With a forced dinner party to top it off! See more comments here.
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What better displacement of Christmas than sexual anxiety, conjugal friction, intrigue, guilt, and a spiral of dread? See comments here.
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A nice diversion from usual fare? Batman and Christmas go together in a way you may not realize with Tim Burton. See comments here.
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Before Batman Returns, there was more direct Christmas subversion. Sunny suburbs with no snow, a Christmas Frankenstein with scissors for hands. See comments here.
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Transgender sex workers on the streets in Hollywood. Vomiting in a cab. Blowjob in a car wash. It's Christmas! See comments here.
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If you need Christmas as an excuse to see this other great Coppola film made in between the Godfather movies, once again the California setting -- in this case San Francisco -- won't make it seem very Christmasy. You gotta pay as close attention as snoop Gene Hackman to catch the decorations in Teri Garr's apartment, or when Harrison Ford offers Hackman some Christmas cookies. See comments here.
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What is it about Christmas and assassination? If you want that "Fairytale of New York" feeling, this rough little noir gem features NYC in all its 1961 grim beauty, and killer narration.
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A double feature with Comfort and Joy (see no. 1 above)? Not so fast. This may have the least to do with Christmas of any of these. Or ice cream. See comments here.
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Christmas and murder, you just can't keep 'em apart. This movie has cozy little Christmas title cards in between a somewhat lighter attempt at hardboiled. See comments here.
12/15/22
Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episodes
If not necessarily the best, these are favorite episodes that can serve as recommendation for where to start. The numbers refer to season.episode. MST3K is not just about the movies it featured, but also about the riffing and the framing scenes of the extended crew, the mad scientists as well as Joel or Mike and their robots and a host of special visitors. So episodes are considered for the target movie and the fun made about it.
While the show, which launched in the late 80s and was primarily in the 90s, cut its teeth on B movies of earlier eras, this was the first 80s movie and the first in color for the national broadcast version of the show. The first of many 80s apocalypse 101 movies that the show would roast, this has a particularly let's-do-a-play-in-this-old-factory quality to it, with especially garbly delivery from one actress with an unplaceable accent.
The star-producer whose character's name is Rommel and his go-go hat, the gravelly-voiced couple with their love scenes, Michael Pataki and Hoke Howell at their thespian hokiest, a character named Cooch so that Pataki can say it, and the concept at the center of it all, the platform stuck to the side of motorcycles so that -- you can do that. This may be the culmination of 60s exploitation concepts at their squirreliest. It's not even particularly incompetent, it's just such a gas of goofballs trying to be -- hip? The crew are inspired, too, as easy as it is to make cracks at this one, and their particularly deft stroke is the turn on the movie's love theme, "Only Love Pads the Film."
A movie that's so shamelessly ripping off, it even has the credits of another movie. This hybrid of hackdom switched up in production when E.T. came out, but that means it makes even more bad 80s. It even has a picture of Ronald Reagan. The crew goes to town on this one, especially the music.
More properly "Attack of the the Eye Creatures," as the crass repurposing of the movie leaves its mark on the title card.
This episode is significant because the show is responsible for the re-discovery, or really even far more general exposure, of this movie. Crew member Frank Conniff, who played TV's Frank of the mads, chose the movie from tapes that were sent in, so he's credited with unleashing this again on the world at large. This is a textbook of movie incompetence, and the MST3K crew are your collective Bob Ross.
While the movie has its own dubious appeal, a sub-Walking Tall attempt at a Joe Don Baker vehicle, with crude humor -- or maybe it should be crud humor -- that had a theatrical release but looks like a TV pilot, this is a great example of the crew making the episode even better. Their unflinching enjoyment mostly at Baker's expense reportedly provoked threats of physical violence from Baker. Riffs on the name alone would lead to a running gag across episodes, the name becoming like an ironic war cry or tagline for general viewer agony. This was also the final episode with Joel Hodges as the victim host on the Satellite of Love, as well as the introduction of the next, Mike Nelson, so it's a grand send-off.
The show introduces another auteur of awful, Coleman Francis. Well, unless you, for some astonishing reason, encountered his movies otherwise. And this wasn't the first of his movies they presented, having covered The Skydivers earlier the same season, but this one is truly the piece of greatest resistance. Mike Nelson has said outside the show that this was the hardest movie of all for him to have to endure in the repetition for preparation. But they made it through, and with some crackling riffs to try to lighten the existential weight of this movie's badness. On top of everything else about this, Francis, who cast himself, also got John Carradine, a name most famous for doing anything, no matter how low budget, and as if that wasn't enough, also got him to -- sing!
The last show of the Comedy Central days was treated somewhat like a finale (they didn't know yet they would be picked up for the Sci-Fi Channel) -- Trace Beaulieu and his head mad scientist character were bid adieu -- and the crew framing segments rival the movie for plot and action. Check out Mike Nelson as Captain Janeway! The movie is a very 70s smelling combination of derivativeness, stop motion, carnival ride make-up, laser cannon for an arm, nerdy studs and nerdier nerds, witless revenge as an excuse for witless explosions, and Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowell!
Even public TV gets in! Produced by PBS's flagship station WNET along with a Toronto-based company, this was shot on video and originally shown in the U.S. on PBS's American Playhouse, then had a VHS and LaserDisc release. Did Raul Julia do this as a donation or favor? For 1984, it's interesting how it prefigures all of us stealing work time to watch videos on our computers, but it'a also a very 80s version of 1984, with a glossy but tinny version of dystopia, like a mall, and then the sort or prim meager cast to its oddness, with brains exposed and projecting into baboons and Casablanca dress-up. This is the one episode where the crew had me in tears laughing.
9.10 The Final Sacrifice
10.1 Soultaker
10.4 Future War
12/8/22
Alternative Halloween Movies
Movies that are not merely scary or "horror," as that is defined by the genre that goes by that term. It so happens that most of these movies are ones I find much scarier than conventional scary movies anyway, regardless of the occasion, but that'll work for Halloween time, too. Sometimes it's not a matter of being scarier, so much as more something: adventurous, involved, evocative, capable of creating an environment or atmosphere, interesting in other ways.
- Nosferatu (Herzog)
- Alien
- The Vanishing
Original French-Dutch.
- Seconds
Far creepier and more horrifying and much better than Manchurian Candidate.
- The Shining
Perfect example of more insinuating, greater effect than mere horror.
- Eraserhead
- Rosemary's Baby
- Repulsion
- The Night of the Hunter
- The Wicker Man
Original, please, really.
- Vampyr
- Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer
- Jaws
To remind you of summertime.
- Frenzy
- The Tenant
- Manhunter
Superior to Silence of the Lambs in many ways, especially Hannibal.
- Little Otik
- Tetsuo
- The Stepfather
- The Fly
Cronenberg, although the original gets honorable mention.
- Don't Look Now
- Solaris
Original, please.
- Deliverance
- The Thing
- The Honeymoon Killers
- High Plains Drifter
- Blow Up
- Village of the Damned
- The Incredible Shrinking Man
- The Thing from Another World
- Haxan
- Color out of Space
- The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Gets genuinely ghastly.
- The Lost Weekend
12/22/22
Top 10/100
Because of the Sight and Sound poll, and just in case anyone wants an idea for measure, here's a list of my 100 favorite movies. The top 10 is pretty much firm, though the order can change, and after that, about which group of 10 they fall into (20, 30, etc.) is probably as precise as it would get, though even changes in order might switch a few between those. The list would probably be different every time I made it, the further down the list the more likely to change, so the date above is the last time I modified it. The broader the scope of movie experience, the more difficult it gets, really impossible, to make an absolute estimation of a best movie, or ranking. But there are still movies that stand out, that become landmarks, whether by circumstance, association, any sort of profession of affinity, thematic or theoretic or aesthetic principle. So the two poles of this exercise: absurd and unavoidable. Along with such a list for you to get an idea of my taste(s), there is that declaration, as well, about playing with lists. I've often challenged others, when thinking of favorite movies, to list or think of not one, or ten, but 100, if only to demonstrate how many more movies you've seen than you usually realize, but also to jog lose from just one or a few movies at hand or clung to. That sense of the excercise is far more worthy than the idea of some definitive ranking of movies.
Le Million
Persona
Man with a Movie Camera
M
Nosferatu (Herzog)
Trouble in Paradise
Badlands
Dr. Strangelove
Chinatown
Citizen Kane
+10
The Godfather
La Jetee
Seven Samurai
The Black Stallion
Oliver Twist
Pather Panchali
Duck Soup
Stalker
Alphaville
Veronika Voss
+20
Weekend
Pennies from Heaven
Fargo
No Country for Old Men
La Maman et la putain
Nashville
Aguirre, Wrath of God
Devi
Alien
Mulholland Drive
+30
The Godfather Part II
Battleship Potemkin
Earth
A Cry in the Dark
Eraserhead
Vertigo
Tokyo Story
High and Low
Blue Velvet
The Third Man
+40
Irma Vep
Inland Empire
The Rules of the Game
Osaka Elegy
The 400 Blows
The Night of the Hunter
Ohayo
Ashes and Diamonds
Sherlock Jr.
Nobody Knows
+50
The Thin Red Line
Betty
The Story of Qiu Ju
Close-Up
Raise the Red Lantern
Whisky Galore
The Vanishing
24-Hour Party People
Careful
Where Is My Friend's House?
+60
Comfort and Joy
Shoot the Moon
Sans Soleil
Taxi Driver
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Zero de conduit
Old and New (The General Line)
Kanal
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
The Exterminating Angel
+70
Tropical Malady
The Magnificant Ambersons
The Maltese Falcon
Once upon a Time in Anatolia
October
Loveless
The House of Mirth
Greed
Christmas in July
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
+80
Shadows
Henry V
La Dolce Vita
Solaris
Annie Hall
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Come and See
Happy Together
The Florida Project
Chungking Express
+90
Alice
Brazil
Bedazzled
The Thin Man
Repulsion
Jaws
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
The Sorrow and the Pity
Strike
Cabaret
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Entries by Greg Macon for the Facebook group Movie Brains, related to film comments on this website, Fixion. Text for movie comments © 2022 Greg Macon. Banner image from By the Law by Lev Kuleshov.
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