Written by Cameron Geiser

Welcome to This Week in Cinema, a yearlong film criticism project wherein I will be watching a new film that I haven't seen every single day.

This Week in Cinema continues the trend this month for accidentally picking a movie per week that isn’t a Christmas movie at all. At least this time Christmas was actually in the title, and if I’m being honest, I picked Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence because I thought, “Hey a Christmas movie made by a Japanese filmmaker, in the 1980’s, AND it stars David Bowie?” How could this not be an excellent discovery? Oh, well… you’ll just have to discover below why it was so shockingly different from my expectations. Other than that, this week’s films were more of the same for the most part. Middling Christmas movies that are easily digestible and highly emotionally manipulative, some better than others. We have, of course, another trifling Ben Affleck Christmas movie in Reindeer Games (It’s tangentially related to Christmas). The original Miracle on 34th Street was actually pretty great. As was We’re No Angels, a comedy set during Christmas directed by Michael Curtis- who also directed Casablanca and both that film and this film starred Humphrey Bogart, a win-win for sure.

However, the other three films for the week were a strange amalgamation of titles. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale was a Horror/Fantasy film from Jalmari Helander, the filmmaker that gave us the excellent World War Two revenge action flick, Sisu. Red One, the bloated Netflix Christmas movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Chris Evans was… fine, but nothing special. However, the last film to be mentioned was an Anime film called Tokyo Godfathers and it was outstanding and highly recommended. But after all that, did I learn anything? While there wasn’t an overarching lesson, there were a few smaller lessons that appeared. The first one was that after Surviving Christmas and Reindeer Games, I forgot how insufferable Ben Affleck could be back in the early 2000’s. He’s not a bad actor, but he was cast in so many poor choices back then. I haven’t even seen Gigli, but I know I don’t want to. The other lesson of the week was a further note in the general decline of American media over the last century.

Obviously this isn’t something that holds true for every piece of art within the cinematic medium, but broadly there are some concerns when looking back on films made for adults in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Before the rise of the Internet you can see (generally speaking) more complex storylines, more subtlety, more mature discussions, and less literalism. Just compare We’re No Angels and the original Miracle on 34th Street with Red One and The Christmas Chronicles as one example. However these notions are all within the realm of popular media versus the breadth of range that is possible in cinema and I concede that this can be debated ad nauseam ‘til we’re all blue in the face when these are simple Christmas movies meant to evoke nostalgia and make money more than anything else. But it is something to consider.

December 15th

Reindeer Games (2000)

2.5/5

As I have seen several of John Frankenheimer's films now, I assumed a Christmas Heist film from the late great filmmaker would be a surefire hit. Frankenheimer gave us The Manchurian Candidate, Grand Prix, Seconds, and Ronin (which has the best car chase scene in any film ever, go watch it), but unfortunately he also gave us this, Reindeer Games. The frustrating thing about the film is that it has a lot of components that could work under the right circumstances. Besides Ben Affleck starring in the lead role, the other two major characters are played by Charlize Theron and Gary Sinise who all try their damndest to work with the material they’re given. Unfortunately for them the script, written by Ehren Kruger, is dogshit.

The plot is that while in prison, Rudy (Ben Affleck) has a cellmate, Nick (James Frain), who starts up a long distance relationship of sorts with Ashley (Charlize Theron) and after Rudy witnesses his cellmate getting stabbed to death in the cafeteria, he claims to be Nick once out and having met Ashley. After a terribly shot sex scene, Gabriel (Sinise) Ashley’s brother, who found her letters to Nick, tries to coerce Nick/Rudy into giving him and his gang information about a Casino in Upper Michigan. Because that’s what Nick told Ashley. There is so much unnecessary over-explaining all over the script, it’s nauseating. Clearly someone saw and fell in love with Quentin Tarantino’s early work but never quite learned the right lessons from Tarantino. I could go on, but then I'd be regurgitating hack plot points and committing the same sin this film does, too much needless, pointless talking. I'd avoid this one if I were you, and no, it will not make it into my Christmas film rotation.

December 16th

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

4/5

I had never actually seen the original Miracle on 34th Street, and I'm glad that I now have as it was charming and had the Christmas spirit that I was looking for. In New York City during the Macy's parade, the Santa Claus hired for the parade shows up drunk as a skunk and the real Santa Claus wanders in and decides on a whim to take up the mantle and show them how it's done. After a rousing success during the parade the Macy's department store hires him as their in-store Santa. There are a few fantastic little moments like when an orphan girl from the Netherlands is brought in to see him and she comes alive when he speaks perfect Dutch with her.

Things get dicey for Santa however when a parent says that she can't afford the toys at Macy's that her son wants as he tells her exactly where to find that same toy at a discounted price in a competitor's store across the street. When management finds out, they throw a hissy fit until they realize that this tactic is a gigantic public relations success as the people of New York love the act of humility and graciousness during the Christmas shopping season. After speaking Dutch to the orphan, one of the employees asks how he knew a foreign language so perfectly and he admits that he's the real Santa Claus. This causes some concern and Kris Kringle is brought to the psychologist on hand, who's a cynical crank and claims a sanity case is required, leading to the courtroom trial with Santa Claus having to prove that he's the real deal. Miracle on 34th Street was simply charming and I highly recommend it during your next Holiday season. It's certainly going to be in my rotation for the Holidays going forward.

December 17th

Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

5/5

This animated film from Japan was the best Christmas film I saw this year. The story follows three homeless misfits in Tokyo that discover an abandoned baby while looking through the trash for food on Christmas Eve. They are the middle-aged alcoholic Gin (Toru Emori), teenage runaway Miyuki (Aya Okamoto) and former drag queen Hana (Yoshiaki Umegaki). They are the definition of a found family who work together, despite their differences and wildly diverging backstories, to track down the parents of the lost child. Director Satoshi Kon, who also directed Paprika and Perfect Blue, performed a cinematic miracle of storytelling with this one. The script is a perfect distillation of the ideas of family, fate, and justice within the holiday context. While tracking down the parents of Kiyoko, named by Hana as the meaning implies both “pure child” and the Silent Night story, we learn more about each character as their interweaving stories unlock past traumas that inform their personalities and actions within the film in profound and heavily empathetic ways. Their pasts are revealed in devastating form, maximizing the emotional story potential with each new fact. But beyond the pitch perfect writing, the animation is breathtakingly beautiful, as are the moments of true danger that are sprinkled throughout the story. The tension, humor, sadness, and humility of these moments throughout the film are truly impressive and one of a kind. I cannot recommend this one enough, it will most definitely be in my Christmas rotation going forward.

December 18th

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)

3.5/5

Adapted from the life story of Sir Laurens van der Post, specifically directly from the two Novels that he wrote about his time as a prisoner of war in Java during World War Two called The Seed and the Sower (1963) and The Night of the New Moon (1970). Within the first few minutes of this film, I realized that this was not a Christmas film when the electronic lo-fi score kicked in and a particularly bloody seppuku was performed almost immediately. I was wearing a Christmas Sweater for this one too. This prisoner of war film is unique in that David Bowie stars as Major Jack Celliers, a soldier that was brought to the Java camps and became a person of interest almost immediately. Not least of which was due to the extremely repressed romantic obsession of Celliers by Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto), the leader of the Camp. The other two major players in the story are the titular Lt. Col. John Lawrence (Tom Conti), the main connection Yonoi has to the prisoners as he's the only one fluent in Japanese but he's also empathetic, sensitive and patient.

Then there's the brutal but level-headed Sergeant Hara (Takeshi Kitano) that Lawrence had befriended during his time in Java, almost like a comically violent sidekick to Yonoi- waiting to snap, but with an uneasy amount of patience. The tension in the film is between Yonoi and Celliers who seem to acknowledge that each other are similarly bonded by willpower and grace, but also because the safety and lives of the rest of the British prisoners depend on Yonoi and Hara decidedly not cracking down on them all with undo force. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was a far more psychological take on the POW film than most within the sub-genre of war films. It is also obsessed with the power struggles between authority and the subjugated. Curiously the acting styles between the British and Japanese traditions were wildly different and they clashed at times but I never found it too damaging to the story as a whole, but rather a unique feature of it. This was a surreal, highly tense, and fascinating film that I do recommend overall- just not as a Christmas film.

December 19th

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)

3/5

I’m not much for combining Horror with Christmas. Though admittedly I still can’t believe that Terrifier 3 worked as well as it did for me, so maybe I’m just a hypocrite in this regard but this combination almost always doesn’t really do it for me. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is generally entertaining to me because it fully embraces the wacky supernatural pretense with genre heavy, “big”, acting and surreal imagery. The general gist of the Horror Fantasy Christmas story is that some miners believe they have accidentally come across the grave of Santa Claus, however in this story Santa Claus is more of a Krampus figure, torturing bad children for their misdeeds. A few local kids believe they have stumbled across Santa and plead for retribution from their father for sneaking into the area where the miners found Santa’s grave.

The children and one of the parents try to bring the naked raving old man in for a reward, but they discover that the lonely old man is actually one of Santa’s “Elves” and not the big man himself. Which leads to them discovering that the real Santa is a huge horned figure that’s being thawed out of a giant ice block as hundreds of “Elves” are collecting children into a giant net for the evil Santa demon… thing. I could explain further but just know that this film is constantly unpredictable and very cheesy. Rare Exports uses a few elements of the Santa Claus mythology, like distracting hundreds of naked old men, err uh “Elves”, with gingerbread as the humongous net of kidnapped children is flung around by Helicopter- if this sounds like a strangely psychedelic experience, that’s because that’s what watching this movie feels like. It’s super weird, but a fun watching experience. It will not make it into my Christmas movie rotation though.

December 20th

We’re No Angels (1955)

3/5

When three convicts escape from Devil's Island during the Christmas season, they initially plan to sneak into a local business on the island, murder the staff, and steal as much as they can before jumping ship the following day. Things change once Joseph (Humphrey Bogart), Jules (Peter Ustinov), and Albert (Aldo Ray) were atop the roof of a family business repairing shingles when they overhear Felix's (Leo G. Carroll) troubles financially. This leads them to snoop and listen in on the other members of the family who all have so many problems in their lives that the crooks feel bad about their intent and decide to help the family instead. This leads to the trio cooking them Christmas dinner, singing a song, all kinds of cheesy but charming acts of altruism. The dialogue is quick-witted and the performances are all adequate for the material given. We're No Angels was a fun little Christmas movie with a unique charm about it. I'd certainly put it into the rotation and give it a rewatch in the future.

December 21st

Red One (2024)

3/5

This Netflix Christmas movie with an insanely bloated budget isn't exactly bad, it's just bland and unimaginative. It's the perfect film to throw on in the background if you're doing your laundry and glancing up every ten or twenty minutes for some flashy candy cane flavored eye candy. It's obvious they were trying to “Marvelize” the Santa Claus mythos, but that format here just doesn't really fit. The plot of the film is that Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is kidnapped and it's up to his security guard Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), (an eye rollingly cringe name seemingly created by a twelve year old) to work with infamous “Naughty Lister” Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to help track him down and save Christmas. There are moments where the film rises above its slop status. The entire Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) scene of the film for one example, but for the most part the film is purely interested in attempting to blend Mission Impossible antics with Marvel Superhero snark and heroics. In the end Red One is just a so-so Saturday morning cartoon.

Cameron Geiser is an avid consumer of films and books about filmmakers. He'll watch any film at least once, and can usually be spotted at the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Northern Michigan. He also writes about film over at www.spacecortezwrites.com.

This Week in Cinema, I Learned…Dec 15-21 2024