The week after Halloween is a strange time to be writing about Christmas movies. Almost like cooking a Thanksgiving dinner in July.
But if department stores can display Lady Gaga masks beside Christmas ornaments and Hollywood can release A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas while we’re still digesting our Halloween haul, I can write about some movies that put the tinsel in Tinsel Town.
Harold and Kumar isn’t your average Christmas movie.
I doubt Jimmy Stewart would have considered burning down the family Christmas tree part of his wonderful Yuletide life, but Harold and Kumar aren’t the first to put the X into Xmas.
Many movies are set at Christmastime — the Brat Packer flick Less Than Zero features an LA Yule, and Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve — but I’m thinking of movies that use the holidays as a springboard for the action.
The raunchiest Christmas movie has to Bad Santa, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a boozed-up, thieving department store Kris Kringle.
Unsentimental and crude, Bad Santa is bound to make the elves choke on their eggnog.
Dan Aykroyd also played a less than cuddly Santa in Trading Places. Drunk, disorderly and waving a gun around, he even has a fish hidden in his fake beard.
Unwrap Mixed Nuts, the 1994 Nora Ephron black comedy, and you’ll find Christmas tree theft, lunatics and the worst Christmas gift ever: a dead body.
Staying up on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa to come, will be easy after watching Black Christmas. You’ll be too scared to sleep!
The tinsel terror about a mysterious killer in the attic is considered to be the first modern slasher movie.
Gremlins mixes horror, humour and ho ho ho’s. Set at Christmas, the story of little creatures who turn nasty when wet features a gory story about a missing father, a chimney, an overstuffed Santa suit and the punchline, “And that’s how I found out there was no Santa Claus.”
A very merry Crime Christmas can be had in both The Ref and Reindeer Games.
In The Ref, cat burglar Dennis Leary soon regrets breaking into the home of squabbling couple Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis on Christmas Eve.
Reindeer Games sees Ben Affleck reluctantly rob a casino at Christmas.
The movie is such a lump of coal that one of its stars had this to say about it: “That was a bad, bad, bad movie,” said Charlize Theron.
A new movie called Anonymous asks a question that has kept academics debating for decades. Was it actually William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, who wrote the plays and poems attributed to him?
The film suggests it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) who actually put pen to paper.
Then to hide his identity he hired a semi-employed actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) to act as his literary beard.
There is no evidence to support the movie’s theory but at least one detail is consistent with history — the likeness of Shakespeare. Even though no painting of the Bard was done during his lifetime, the 1632 Martin Droeshout portrait showing the writer with, “a huge head, placed against a starched ruff,” has become the accepted version of his appearance in art and on film.
Shakespeare and his ruffed collar has popped up in everything from The Simpsons’s 2007 videogame to the Bugs Bunny cartoon A Witch’s Tangled Hare.
Playing the Bard as a lusty poet in Shakespeare in Love made Joseph Fiennes a star, but he was far from the first actor considered for the role. Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh both turned it down before Ralph Fienne’s little brother snapped it up.
The movie, about how Shakespeare’s love affair with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) helped him overcome writer’s block and pen Romeo and Juliet in her honour, earned 13 Oscar nominations and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Gwyneth.
One of the stranger depictions of Shakespeare on screen came in Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear.
Called “Godard’s most insane, headache-inducing and inscrutable movie,” by one critic, it features Peter Sellars (not the Pink Panther actor, but an avant guard theatre director) as William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth.
In the movie’s post Chernobyl world, all of the world’s culture has been lost and it’s up to folks like Shaksper Junior to try recreate it. Searching for inspiration he scribbles familiar phrases in his notebook — “Love’s Labors Lost. As you wish. As you wish. As you wish. As you witch. As you which? As you watch. As you watch…” — as he tries to piece together the works of his long lost relative.
Best remembered as the Woody Allen movie you haven’t seen — the comedian plays Mr. Alien in an uncredited cameo — King Lear is a head scratcher, even for the often unfathomable Godard.
What do beloved hoofer Gene Kelly and post-millennial wild man Charlie Sheen have in common?
The Hollywood stars both were “all for one, one for all” in a Three Musketeers movie.
Kelly was the heroic D’Artagnan in the 1948 version of the Alexandre Dumas story, while Sheen was — unsurprisingly — the arrogant womanizer Aramis in 1993.
The swashbuckling exploits of D’Artagnan and his three friends first appeared in print in 1844. Sixty years later a French film detailed their exploits for the first time.
Since then they have swashbuckled though an all-girl version called Barbie and the Three Musketeers, an old west adaptation starring John Wayne and bow wowed in an all canine edition called Dogtanian and the Three Muskethounds.
This weekend the all-new Three Musketeers brings their swashbuckling style to the big screen for the 30th time in the last century.
The Gene Kelly Three Musketeers is probably the most accurate adaptation from page to stage, but the most entertaining — and star studded — has to be The Three Musketeers: The Queen’s Diamonds.
The 1973-era movie is bawdy, outrageous and action packed, with lavish set design and an even more lavish cast, including Michael York, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee, Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway.
Highlights include a chess game played with trained dogs and monkeys and some of the best sword fighting this side of an Errol Flynn movie.
The Musketeer (2001) features plenty of swordplay, but amps up the action with crouching tiger choreography by martial arts master Xin Xin Xiong.
Starring Justin Chambers as D’Artagnan, the story will ruffle the giant feather plumes worn by Dumas purists but as an action movie — Roger Ebert wrote, “Occasionally the action is interrupted by dialogue scenes” — it is the most exciting of the recent Musketeers movies.
Occasionally the Musketeers have appeared as supporting characters.
In 1998’s The Man in the Iron Mask, the aging D’Artagnan and his posse — played by Gabriel Byrne, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich and Gérard Depardieu — come out of retirement to rid France of an evil king, Louis XIV and replace him with his twin brother, both played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Based on Dumas’s novel Count of Bragelonne the story was also the basis for The Fifth Musketeer, a 1979 movie with the unlikely cast of Beau Bridges as Louis XIV and Alan Hale Jr. (best known as The Skipper from Gilligan’s Island) as Musketeer Porthos.
If the premise of Real Steel sounds familiar, it’s because the last time you saw it was in black and white, coming to you from the Twilight Zone.
“The Twilight Zone episode called Steel with Lee Marvin, written by Richard Matheson, was in the ’60s,” says Real Steel director Shawn Levy.
“It was about a robot boxing promoter, a guy who owns robots and fights them for money. From there we beefed it up.”
In its original run the anthology series mixed and matched science fiction, comedy, supernatural and occult stories usually featuring ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
Hosted by Rod Serling, it was must see TV with a catchy theme song, which influenced thousands of writers and directors.
Three series and a movie have officially claimed the Twilight Zone name but dozens of other films have been either directly — or indirectly — inspired by the show.
Submitted for your approval, here is a list of movies that owe a debt to one of the greatest television shows ever:
The 1996 Kyle MacLachlan thriller The Trigger Effect was a reworking of a classic episode called The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, which shows the effects of a power failure on a neighbourhood. Named the best Twilight Zone episode by Time Magazine, the show is still shown in classrooms to illustrate how lethal a mix intolerance and panic can be. The film pays tribute to its television roots by placing its main characters at the corner of Maple and Willoughby Streets, a reference to another famous episode, A Stop at Willoughby.
The Cameron Diaz movie The Box was a remake of Button, Button, a story from the series’ 1980 reinvention and Child’s Play, the movie which introduced the murderous doll Chucky seems to have looked to a 1963 episode called Living Doll for inspiration.
Two towering artists of modern horror can count the Twilight Zone as seminal to their work:
The show perfected the use of the twist ending, which M. Night Shyamalan would later incorporate into his work. His most famous film, The Sixth Sense has echoes of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a 1964 episode about a man who is revealed to be dead.
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King called the show “damn near immortal” and it’s been hinted that his novel Christine (later made into a movie) was inspired by the driverless car episode A Thing about Machines.
Cancer is no laughing matter, but a new film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young man afflicted with a rare and deadly form of the disease is both heartfelt and humorous.
50/50, based on the real life experiences of screenwriter Will Reiser, was written to show how he and his best friend Seth Rogen (who plays a character loosely based on himself in the film) dealt with the trauma of the diagnosis by trying “to find the humour in the situation [because] we were not good at talking about it at an emotional level.”
The result, which hits screens just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, is touching, poignant and funny.
Here are some other inspirational films about cancer.
The Terry Fox Story, the 1983 HBO biopic of the cancer research activist and his Marathon of Hope, was shown in theatres in Canada and Britain, but was the first television film ever made for a cable network in the United States.
Starring Eric Fryer, an amputee who, like Fox, lost a leg to cancer, the movie details Fox’s goal to raise one dollar from every Canadian and create awareness of cancer issues.
Also based on real life is The Doctor, a 1991 film starring William Hurt as a physician who becomes more compassionate after he is diagnosed with throat cancer. Based on the book A Taste of My Own Medicine: When the Doctor Becomes the Patient by Dr. Ed Rosenbaum, the movie co-stars Christine Lahti, Mandy Patinkin and Adam Arkin, all of whom also played doctors on Chicago Hope.
Other films show the different ways people react to a cancer diagnosis. In My Life Without Me, Sarah Polley plays a 23-year-old mother of two diagnosed with a terminal endometrial cancer.
Choosing to keep the news to herself, she makes a secret list of all the things she wants to do before she passes. From the sublime —“Tell my daughters I love them several times” — to the ridiculous — “Get false nails. And do something with my hair.” — the items on the list give her life purpose and meaning.
In Life as a House, Kevin Kline is George Monroe, an architect’s model builder with terminal cancer. The diagnosis forces him to look at his life — “Hindsight,” he says, “it’s like foresight without a future”— and rebuild his dilapidated house as well as his tattered relationships.
Two plus two equals four isn’t really a compelling idea for the plot of a movie, but filmmakers have often turned to mathematics as the basis for a story.
The Coen Brothers focused an entire film around the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics. In A Serious Man Prof. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) teaches his classes the principle, but desperately wants to believe, despite the equation, that life makes sense. It’s not a movie about wave-particle duality and the DeBroglie hypothesis—it’s a very human story about a man searching for answers—but the math is crucial to the story.
The same holds true for Moneyball, the new Brad Pitt movie opening this weekend. The story of a baseball team’s general manager who uses algorithms and computer-generated analysis called sabermetrics to draft his players isn’t strictly about the math, but the story wouldn’t be the same without it.
A Beautiful Mind shows how mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe in the role that won him an Oscar, would visualize math problems in order to identify patterns and solve equations.
The Hangover uses a similar trick. At a Las Vegas casino Alan (Zach Galifianakis) counts cards at a blackjack table as mathematical equations appear on the screen. In reality none of the equations—like the Fourier theory of additive synthesis—have anything to do with cheating at cards, but it’s a funny scene that inspired the facebook page “Alan from The Hangover makes math seem AWESOME.”
A love poem called The Square Root of Three appears in the raunchy comedy Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. “I fear that I will always be a lonely number, like root three,” writes the lovelorn Kumar (Kal Penn), “A three is all that’s good and right. Why must my three keep out of sight?”
The Da Vinci Code famously uses the Fibonacci sequence—1 – 1 – 2 – 3 – 5 – 8 – 13 – 21— as a key to unlock the movie’s mystery and Cube sees people trapped in a giant cube with mathematic problems as clues to their salvation.
The John Astin comedy Evil Roy Slade features some frontier math. Schoolteacher Betsy asks Roy, “If you had six apples and your neighbor took three of them what would you have?”
Sarah Jessica Parker is best known as Carrie Bradshaw, the sharp-tongued figurehead of Sex and the City, the long-running ode to post feminism and stylish clothes. But before Mr. Big and the Louboutins she was a movie star with some classics– like Footloose–and some stinkers–like Dudley Do-Right –to her credit.
This weekend she’s back on the big screen for the first time in a non-Sex and the City movie since the 2009 flop Did You Hear about the Morgans? In I Don’t Know How She Does It she plays a version of Carrie all grown up with kids and a job in the financial sector. It’s a far cry from her first big movie, Footloose.
She played Rusty, a role Parker called the “best friend of the pretty girl.” The movie and its fancy footwork earned her a Best Young Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Musical, Comedy, Adventure or Drama nomination at the Sixth Annual Youth in Film Awards.
A few forgettable films followed like Firstborn—described as a “heavy-handed suburban sitcom”—Girls Just Want to Have Fun—called “a total wannabe in the realm of 80s teen flicks”—and Flight of the Navigator, which features the voice of Pee Wee Herman as a robot.
It wasn’t until she teamed with Steve Martin in L.A. Story that things started looking up. In this surreal look at life and love in Los Angeles Parker plays SanDeE*, a ditzy blonde who aspires to be a spokesmodel. “Um, it’s just a model who speaks,” she explains. “You know, and she points at things like merchandise, you know, like a car or washer and dryer. Sometimes it’s something really small, you know, like, like a book or fine art print.”
The movie broke her out of the teen movie mode and displayed her deft comic timing which was put to great use in Honeymoon in Vegas opposite Nic Cage. A few flops later she appeared in the critically acclaimed Ed Wood with Johnny Depp. Playing the much put-upon girlfriend of the world’s worst director, she calls the actors and crew of his film Bride of the Monster “the usual cast of misfits and dope addicts.”
Her most spectacular pre-Sex and the City role, however, is in Mars Attacks. In it she plays a flighty talk show host, who literally becomes a talking head when she is beheaded by aliens.
If Jaws kept people out of the water, Contagion, this weekend’s all-star Towering Inferno of germ movies, will keep them from touching their faces.
The average person touches their face upwards of 3,000 times a day, and in the world of Contagion everything that comes in contact with your skin — an elevator button, a glass at an airport, a handrail on a ferry — could be fatal.
In this world of big diseases with little names like SARS and H1N1, germs are the new Frankensteins.
The movies have used microscopic germs and viruses as bogeymen for years.
In Warning Signs an experimental virus turns people (including Law and Order’s Sam Waterston) into rage filled maniacs, a plot echoed in Resident Evil when a virus gets loose in a secret facility. “The T-virus is protean,” says the Red Queen, “changing from liquid to airborne to blood transmission, depending on its environment. It is almost impossible to kill.”
The Thaw sees Val Kilmer unleash a prehistoric plague when he discovers a diseased Woolly Mammoth carcass. Eli Roth gave new meaning to the term cabin fever in his virus movie of the same name and the movie Doomsday sees most of Scotland devastated by a deadly germ.
Michael Crichton dreamt up the idea for The Andromeda Strain when he was still a medical student. The story of a deadly alien virus was inspired by a conversation with one of his teachers about the concept of crystal-based life-forms. His novel was a bestseller and the author — who would later go on to write the sci-fi classics Westworld and Jurassic Park — actually makes a cameo appearance in the hit 1971 film of the same name. He can be seen in the scene where the star of the movie, Dr. Hall (James Olson), is told to report to the government’s secret underground research facility.
Outbreak features germs of a more earthbound kind. Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey star in this 1995 film about an outbreak of a fictional Ebola virus called Motaba spread in the States by a white-headed capuchin monkey. If the contagious simian looks familiar, no wonder. It’s Betsy who also appeared as Ross’s pet Marcel on Friends.
The sitcom spoofed Betsy’s work in the disaster film by showing the monkey on a poster for a fictional film called Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan.
The most famous “found footage” film begins with the words, “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared into the woods of Burketville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”
Thus began the Blair Witch Project, a movie Roger Ebert called an “extraordinarily effective horror film.” He also called it a “celebration of rock bottom production values” for its rough hewn camera style and effective no-budget scares.
Those are trademarks of found footage-style movies. The premise is almost always the same: someone has recovered film left behind by, as Wikipedia says, “missing or dead protagonists,” and pieced it together to tell a (usually) horrifying story. This weekend, Apollo 18 uses (fictional) found footage from NASA’s abandoned Apollo 18 mission to reveal the reason the U.S. has never returned to the moon.
In the wake of Blair Witch, theatres were overflowing with found footage movies, partially because they’re cheap to make, and partially because audiences raised on reality television seemed to respond to them. Movies like The St. Francisville Experiment, The Last Horror Movie, September Tapes and The Curse tried, most unsuccessfully, to cash in on the box office bonanza of Blair Witch, but [Rec], a Spanish horror film about a haunted building was the most successful, artistically and financially. If you missed the Spanish version you can always check out the shot-for-shot remake, Quarantine, starring Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter.
Less successful but interesting is Redacted, a Brian De Palma war film shot through the lens of one of his characters. De Palma came up with the idea when he was asked by HDNet Films to make a movie for $5 million on HD. In creating the story of U.S. soldiers on a revenge rampage after one of their friends is killed by an IED, he earned the ire of many conservative groups who called for boycotts of the film and producer, Dallas Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban.
If the Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are the commercially successful of the genre and Redacted the most contentious, the most controversial must be Cannibal Holocaust. The 1980 fake cannibal found footage doc that was so convincing the director was arrested and charged with murder. Police believed several actors had been killed on screen but charges were dropped when the actors showed up at the trial, safe and sound.
The week after Halloween is a strange time to be writing about Christmas movies. Almost like cooking a Thanksgiving dinner in July.
