Merry Christmas!
Dec 25From all of us to all of you…
A very merry Christmas!
And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, just have yourself a fantastic day!
(Don’t go see The Spirit, though. Everyone says it sucks.)
Jingle Bell Grok: Blame Bea Arthur
Dec 24Alert Nerdian Jeff put out a call to our good pal Fake George Lucas for a contribution to our Jingle Bell Grok holiday feature. As always, we received a poorly-faxed note a short while later, sent from a Kinko’s in Marin County, CA. Our thanks to Fake George Lucas for his time and talent…okay, just the time.
I was fucking Bea Arthur.
There, I said it. The BIG SECRET is out. Gawd, you people! Vultures! Leeches! Dianogas!
And yet…and yet, it’s time for you to know this, o people, my people. You have wondered for so long–you have watched in confusion every holiday season on abruptly-terminated YouTube links and bootleg VHS dubs, you have discussed it in hushed tones at conventions and with your minister, you have written the Lumpy/Mala slashfic that has fueled many a lonely night at the Ranch.
Now, the truth can be told–in fact, it was just told. I just told you.
I made the Star Wars Holiday Special because I was fucking Bea Arthur.
Jingle Bell Grok: Holiday Movie Backups
Dec 24Quick. You have 12 hours to get to the video store before we’re locked down for Xmas day. And while you’ll no doubt catch your favorite holiday flicks, don’t you think it might be time to mix it up a little? Perhaps clean the mental palette a bit, and try something different. Something not typically considered a holiday movie.
I’m not talking about Die Hard. I’m not talking about Gremlins. Everybody looking for a quirky xmas film picks those. No no no. You need something off-the-radar, something that would win you a bar bet. And don’t sweat it, I’m here to help. Better yet, these movies are typically in stock on Christmas Eve – everyone else is fighting over the last copy of Jim Carrey’s crappy Grinch, but you’ll be set.
Jingle Bell Grok: Genre-Related Visual Mix Tape
Dec 23The other night, Bravo had a pretty cool back-to-back double feature going on: Ghostbusters II and The Princess Bride. It aired these two movies over and over again, a repetition-happy tribute to mood-sensitive slime and “as you wish”-ing. I love blocks of entertainment like that — stuff that sort of goes together just because, that you can marinate in for hours on end. Kind of like a mix tape, but with movies and TV (that sounded dumb — yeah, neato, with movies and TV! — but you know what I mean).
So here’s my very own Holiday Genre-Related Visual Mix Tape — with quick clips from each offering. The things I’ve chosen are slightly offbeat, and yes, sometimes I’m stretching to get them to fit into the delicate matrix I’m attempting to construct. But they all say “holiday” to me and are a perfect mash-up for those woozy hours after all the food and booze and presents.
Jingle Bell Grok: Jimmy Stewart In Drag
Dec 22There are a lot of Christmas films out there that are easy to hate for their blatant attempts at mawkish manipulation of their audiences. A good Christmas film will leave us with a warm and fuzzy feeling and the ones that try a bit too hard to do so probably can’t be faulted for at least trying. But there is one holiday film that lurks out there that can’t even claim the pretense of trying to infuse its audience with holiday cheer- the 1977 made-for-television movie It Happened One Christmas.
If you’ve never had the unfortunate opportunity to clap your eyes on this film, and it seems to have vanished from television schedules in more recent years, you are one of the fortunate ones. Imagine the classic It’s A Wonderful Life, but in drag, badly acted and with any semblance of soul and life drained from it by a hideous parasite and you come close to approximating It Happened One Christmas.
The hideous parasite in question is Marlo Thomas, who stars in the film as the female equivalent to Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, Mary Bailey Hatch. Wayne Rogers, with a look in his eyes that betray him questioning his decision to leave MASH, is cast as Thomas’ doting husband, George Hatch. Cloris Leachman rounds out the main cast as Mary’s guardian angel Clara. (Get it!? It’s sort of like Clarence, but not!! Ugh….)
I honestly don’t know what the writers hoped to accomplish by simply switching the genders of the lead characters. Nothing new is gained by having George Bailey suddenly sprout breasts and become Mary Bailey Hatch.
Nothing, that is, except a giant stroking of Thomas’ ego. It really takes some giant, in this case metaphorical, balls to think that one can just step into a role made famous by an acting icon like Jimmy Stewart and believe they can somehow improve on the role. Especially when acting opposite someone like Orson Welles in the Mr. Potter role. And don’t think one can argue that she is just an actress for hire on this project. She executive produced the thing. She knew what she was doing and damn her eyes for it.
Outside of the transgendering of Jimmy Stewart, this film offers no new take on the material. In fact, the script follows the screenplay for It’s A Wonderful Life pretty closely except for the substitution of gender specific pronouns. I would like to think that any remake has the potential to find a new slant on the existing material, for better or worse. Since the original film hadn’t quite become the nearly ever present holiday classic it would be in just a few years’ time, perhaps the writers and Thomas were just trying to pull a fast one.
But doesn’t matter what they thought they were trying to achieve. It Happened One Christmas would remain one of the most odious holiday film offerings in the history of cinema. That is until Ron Howard made a live-action version of the Dr. Seuss’s classic The Grinch Who Stole Christmas with Jim Carrey.
[Note: Like myself and Newsarama’s Mike Lorah, guest blogger Rich Drees is one of less than a dozen media/geek bloggers to come out of Northeastern Pennsylvania, where many people still do not know what blogs is. When he’s not having awkward conversations with Peter David about scripts that David barely remembers writing, Rich runs Film Buff Online , which you should check out.]
