Monthly Archives: November 2018

The Christmas Chronicles (Dir: Clay Kaytis), Review by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

Netflix is known for taking risks and “The Christmas Chronicles” is no exception. There are six felonies in this film: 2 Grand Theft Autos, a kidnapping, money laundering, attempted murder, and whatever they did to that partridge in the pear tree.  Yet, it worked! I will admit that I am of the Y-Generation and Kurt Russell remains forever cool in my book, but this movie had some good story writing, great acting from veterans like Kurt Russell and Stevie Van Zandt, but great performances by up and comers Judah Lewis (The Babysitter) and Darby Camp (Big Little Lies) as well.

Clay Kaytis had his directorial debut with this film.  He is famous for being an animator for a panoply of films that you have taken your daughters to see: Frozen, Tangled, and Mulan…etc.  Clay was a pretty good choice considering the amount of animation that is in this film.  Honestly, it was a family movie that would have been a HUGE box office draw.

The film begins with a series of home movies featuring a classic nuclear family enjoying Christmas over the years…until 2017.  We learn that the father was a fireman who lost his life saving a family, leaving his family grieving and without the spirit of Christmas.  The mom is now taking extra shifts as a nurse, the daughter is REALLY into Santa, and the son is now a no-kidding degenerate car thief.  There are enough dark scenes in this film to classify it as Film Noir.

The family is trying to live as best they can and the daughter Kate is trying to reconnect with the memory of her late father by watching old home movies.  In one of the films, she sees a mystery arm delivering a package.  She convinces her brother that it could be Santa in the film and they decide to set a trap for him…..and IT WORKS!!! Not only do they catch Santa on film, they stow away onto his sleigh and cause Santa to crash.  He loses his sleigh, reindeer, bag of toys, and his magic hat.  The main ticking clock for the film is that Santa needs to get his presents delivered before christmas is up or christmas spirit will tick down to zero and it will be like the Hills Have Eyes or something.  The rest of the film is spent helping Santa retrieve these lost items and busting Santa out of jail to prevent the After Times.

And yes, Santa ends up in jail, charged with multiple felonies, and does a pretty amazing blues number with the E Street Band.  Yes, the E Street Band.  I know that a lot of this movie is starting to sound like a Christmas fever dream, but it works and my 7 and 9 year old girls were riveted and didn’t hurt each other for the duration of the film.  Thank you, Clay Kaytis…THANK YOU!

I would recommend this film and for you to subscribe to Netflix.  Otherwise, how will you understand half of my reviews?!!!!!

Merry Christmas!

 

30 Days of Noir #23: Framed (dir by Richard Wallace)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1947 film noir, Framed, is the story of a loser.

That, in itself, is not a surprise.  The loser who finds himself stranded in a strange place where he’s manipulated by nearly everyone he meets is a film noir archetype.  This is especially true when it comes to movies about men who end up getting manipulated by another film noir archetype, the femme fatale.  I mean, let’s be honest.  Most film noir “heroes” fall victim to their own desperation.  If they weren’t so obviously desperate to find money or sex, they probably wouldn’t end up in the trouble that always seems to follow them around.

Framed tells the story of Mike Lambert (Glenn Ford).  When we first meet Mike, he’s sitting behind the wheel of an out-of-control truck.  While the truck recklessly speeds down a steep hill, Mike desperately tries to keep from crashing.  It’s not until Mike pulls into a small town that he finally gets the truck to stop.  Of course, in the process of stopping, he also dings the back of someone else’s pickup truck.

It turns out that, until recently, Mike was a mining engineer.  After he lost his job, he found temporary employment as a truck driver.  He needed the money so he didn’t bother to find out what he was hauling or even if the truck had working brakes.  When Mike calls up the man who hired him and tells him that the owner of the pickup is demanding that Mike’s employer pay for the damage, the man hangs up on him.  To recap, before we’re even 10 minutes into the movie, we’ve seen that Mike can be tricked into driving a truck with no brakes and that he can’t even convince his employer to help pay for the damage caused by those faulty brakes.  In other words: Loser!

Anyway, the local cops are planning on tossing Mike in jail for reckless driving but fortunately, a local waitress, Paula Craig (Janis Carter), is willing to pay Mike’s fine.  She even helps a drunken Mike find a hotel room.  Is Paula doing all of this out of the goodness of her heart or is it all just a part of an elaborate scheme?  While Mike is getting a job with a local prospector (Edgar Buchanan), Paula is meeting with her married boyfriend, Steve Price (Barry Sullivan), and bragging about how she’s finally found the perfect patsy.

Yes, to no one’s surprise, Paula and Steve have hatched a nefarious scheme and Mike is about to find himself stuck right in the middle of it.  Of course, since this is a film noir, it should come as no surprise to learn that Paula and Steve are just as willing to double cross each other as they are Mike….

Framed is an entertaining if slightly predictable noir.  From the minute that Paula first appears, we know that she’s not to be trusted but part of the fun of the film is that those of us in the audience are always a step or two ahead of poor Mike.  You watch Mike in amazement that someone could be so dense but, at the same time, Glenn Ford is likable enough that you do hope that everything will turn out okay for him.  As for the film’s main villains, Barry Sullivan is perfectly slick and sleazy as Steve Price but the film is really stolen by Janis Carter, who plays Paula as if she were a panther waiting to pounce on her prey.

Framed is a film that will definitely be enjoyed by those who appreciate the shadowy landscape of an old school film noir.  It may not rewrite the rules of genre but it’s still an undeniably entertaining film about a loser and the people who use him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-INr2cINnt4

One Hit Wonders #23: “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass (Epic Records 1972)

Posted on by gary loggins

gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

You couldn’t go into any bar, pub, or tavern in my fishing port hometown of New Bedford, MA for literally decades without someone playing Looking Glass’s #1 hit from 1972, “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” on the jukebox – usually more than once a night!:

(And yes, that’s future country legend Kenny Rogers doing the introduction!)

The song/story of a barmaid in love with a sailor she can never truly have, because as he says “my life, my lover, my lady, is the sea” resonated with us locals, as I’m sure it did in every “harbor town” where barmaids work “layin’ whiskey down” to hard working seafaring men (not to mention that fact that it made a helluva great slow-dancing tune as closing time neared – ah, those were the days, my friends!).

The band Looking Glass was from New Brunswick, New Jersey, and consisted of Elliot Lurie (lead singer…

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Music Video Of The Day: More Than A Feeling by Boston (1977, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

An instant hit when it was first released in 1976, More Than A Feeling was a song that spent several years in the making.  The founder of Boston, MIT graduate Tom Scholz, spent five years working on the song, recording and re-recording it in his basement while working his day job at Polaroid.

When Boston finally signed with CBS Records, More Than A Feeling was the first single released off of their debut album and it has since remained a classic rock mainstay, with the chorus riff becoming one of the most familiar sounds in the history of rock.  Scholz has said that he was inspired to write More Than A Feeling by the Left Bank’s song, Walk Away Renée.  “I see my Marianne walk away” was a reference to an older cousin whom Tom Scholz had a crush on when he was nine years old.

For me, though, More Than A Feeling will always be the song that I used to listen to whenever I was driving a stolen car around San Andreas, looking for hot coffee and trying to avoid the police.

 

30 Days of Noir #22: Woman On The Run (dir by Norman Foster)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Like many film noirs, this 1950 film opens with a murder.

On a dark night in San Francisco, a man attempts to blackmail an unseen person called “Danny Boy” and gets shot for his trouble.  The gunshot is heard by a frustrated painter, named Frank Johnson (Ross Elliott), who is out walking his dog.  Frank sees the dead body being pushed out of a car and then catches a shadowy glimpse of the killer.  When the killer open fires on him, Frank runs for it.

Like a good citizen, Frank goes to the police but, when he learns that the victim was due to testify against a local gangster, Frank panics and vanishes.  When Inspector Ferris (Robert Keith) goes to see Frank’s wife, Eleanor (Ann Sheridan), he’s shocked to discover that Eleanor isn’t shocked by Frank’s disappearance and that she doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.  As Eleanor explains it, Frank is a notorious coward and, years ago, their once strong marriage became a loveless charade.  Frank’s vanished and Eleanor doesn’t care.

Or does she?

While it quickly becomes obvious that Eleanor is telling the truth about not knowing where Frank is, she’s not being totally honest about no longer caring about him.  For instance, when she learns that Frank has been hiding a heart condition from her, Eleanor goes to the doctor to pick up his medicine, just in case he should happen to come by the house.  Of course, it’s not always easy to get out of the house, especially now that the police are watching Eleanor.

Eleanor wants to track down Frank without involving the police and it seems like there’s only one person who is interested in helping he do that..  Played by Dennis O’Keefe, this person is a tough reporter and he says that he wants to do an exclusive story on Frank.  He offers to help Eleanor track him down and he even says that he’ll pay $1,000 for the chance to interview Frank.  The reporter and Eleanor are soon searching San Francisco, retracing Frank’s day-to-day life and discovering that Frank loved Eleanor more than she ever realized….

What’s that?  Oh, did I forget to mention the reporter’s name?

His name is Danny.

That’s right.  Eleanor is trying to find Frank so that she can save his life and working with her is the one man who wants to kill him!

Needless to say, this leads to a great deal of suspense.  On the one hand, you’re happy that Eleanor is rediscovering how much she loves Frank.  On the other hand, you spend almost the entire movie worried that Eleanor is going to lead Danny right to him.  Shot on location in San Francisco and featuring all of the dark shadows and tough dialogue that one could possibly hope to get in a film noir, Woman On The Run is an underrated suspense gem.  Full of atmosphere and steadily building suspense, Woman on the Run features a great and acerbic performance from Ann Sheridan and a genuinely exciting climax that’s set at a local amusement park.  Seriously, roller coasters are super scary!

Woman on the Run was directed by Norman Foster.  If you’ve recently watched The Other Side of the Wind on Netflix, you might recognize the name.  A longtime friend of Orson Welles, Foster played the role of Billy Boyle in Welles’s final film.

Thanksgiving Greetings From The Shattered Lens!

Posted on by Doc Bowman

From all of us at the Shattered Lens to everyone who will be observing and celebrating the holiday today, Happy Thanksgiving!

When the citizens of Jamestown, Virginia celebrated their first Thanksgiving in 1610, they had no way of knowing what the future would hold for not only America but also the rest of the world.  In fact, they had no way of knowing that we would someday have movies, music, television, social media, Netflix, dark web paranoia, and hungry kitten videos on YouTube.  If you had told them that the United States would someday have a literacy rate of 77%, they would have laughed at you.  If you had told them that, at some point in the future, a black cat would send holiday greetings to humans, they probably would have accused you of practicing witchcraft.  Silly pilgrims!

But today is Thanksgiving.  It’s not only a time for giving thanks but also a time for appreciating not only what you love but also what loves you.  Be kind to your family, your friends, your cats, and even your dogs.  As for those of us at the Shattered Lens, we are thankful to you for reading and commenting.  The flame-haired one tells me that, in another month, we will be coming up on the 9th anniversary of the founding of this site!  We’re thankful for those 9 years and even more thankful for the years to come!

Thank you for reading and Happy Thanksgiving!

A Thanksgiving Without Turkey? Say It Ain’t So!

Posted on by gary loggins

gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

Yet that’s what the Johnson family faces in this corny time capsule “A DAY OF THANKSGIVING”, made in 1951 by the Centron Corporation of Lawrence, Kansas, purveyors of educational and industrial films from the late 40’s up until the 1990’s:

You know something? Maybe those Johnsons aren’t so corny after all!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

FROM

CRACKED REAR VIEWER!

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Music Video of the Day: Cold Turkey by John Lennon (1969, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Happy Thanksgiving!  It is surprisingly difficult to find any good music videos about Thanksgiving so I decided to go with a video for a song that has nothing to do with Thanksgiving.  It’s called Cold Turkey.  Whether it has anything to do with turkey depends on who you ask.

When it comes to Cold Turkey, the official and most-accepted story is that John Lennon wrote it after a brief addiction to heroin and the song was inspired by the pain and difficult of quitting “cold turkey.”

Believe it or not, though, there are Cold Turkey truthers out there.  Fred Seaman, who was Lennon’s personal assistant in the late 70s, wrote in his book, The Last Days of John Lennon, that Lennon confessed to him that Cold Turkey was actually written after a bout of food poisoning and that he allowed people to believe that it was inspired by heroin withdrawal because the food poisoning story was too silly.  (Lennon claimed the poisoning was the result of eating a “cold turkey” on the day after Christmas.)  Personally, I think this sounds more like an example of Lennon’s famously sarcastic sense of humor than anything else.

Regardless of what inspired the song, Cold Turkey was Lennon’s second single away from the Beatles and the first song on which he was credited as being the sole songwriter.  (Even Give Peace A Chance was originally credited to Lennon-McCartney.)  Lennon originally wrote the song to be included on Abbey Road but, when the rest of the Beatles showed little interest in the song, Lennon instead recorded it with the Plastic Ono Band.

In 1969, when Lennon returned his MBE to the Queen, he wrote, “I am returning this MBE in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against ‘Cold Turkey‘ slipping down the charts.”