Here one final holiday scene that I love. I present to you the ending of the greatest psycho Santa movie ever made, 1980’s Christmas Evil! Needless to say, if you haven’t seen Christmas Evil, the scene below counts as a spoiler.
If you have seen Christmas Evil then you know that, even though it’s about a possibly psychotic gentleman who thinks that he’s Santa Claus, it’s also a surprisingly sweet-natured and sincere little Christmas horror film.
And the ending, to me, is simply holiday perfection. Even the grindhouse can occasionally can get in the Christmas spirit!
Did everyone have a good Christmas? Did everyone get everything that they wanted?
If the answer’s yes, you have one man to thank for that!
Hooray for Santy Claus!
(You might recognize this song from one of our favorite holiday classics, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians! Apparently, it was performed by Milton DeLugg and the Little Eskimos.)
(Be careful listening to this song. As TSL contributor and Late Night Movie Gang founder Patrick Smith can tell you, once this song gets stuck in your head, it’ll never leave.)
For the past week, we’ve been sharing some of our favorite holiday scenes! Myself, I shared two scenes from It’s A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. However, I just recently realized that we hadn’t shared any scenes from a film that has, particularly in this year, emerged as a holiday favorite!
So, without further ado, enjoy this scene from Die Hard!
It came out in February of this year and it was kind of a big deal for a week. I think everyone was expecting it to be a big hit, just because there’s never much competition in February. Race is a biopic of Jesse Owens, the African-American runner who sets world records and won gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, defeating a legion of Aryan athletes while Adolf Hitler watched from the stands. Not only is that a compelling story but 2016 was also an Olympic year. Eddie The Eagle had already been a success due to the Olympic connection. Add to that, Focus Features promoted the Hell out of this film. In they weeks leading up to its release, I saw commercials for it on a nearly hourly basis. The reviews, when the came, were mixed but generally positive.
I’m not really sure how Race did at the box office. According to Wikipedia, on its opening weekend, it was sixth at the box office. Apparently, the film only had a budget of five million and ultimately made a profit of $20,000,0000. I guess that would make it a success. All I know is that it seems like, for all the hype, Race just kind of came and went.
In fact, I didn’t see Race until about two months ago. It’s one of those films that’s not really great but it’s certainly not bad. It’s pretty much the epitome of being adequate. It was well-made and generally well-acted. Director Stephen Hopkins occasionally struggled to maintain a consistent pace (Race is over 2 hours long and feels longer) but he still did a good job filming the scenes of Owens of running and competing. In the role of Jesse Owens, Stephan James was well-cast. You not only believed him in the dramatic scenes but he was also believable as a record-setting athlete. He had some great scenes with Jason Sudekis, who was surprisingly believable in the role of Jesse’s coach.
With all that in mind, why didn’t Race make more of an impression? I think that, too often, Hopkins allowed the film’s focus to wander away from Jesse and the inner conflict he felt as he won medals for a country where he was treated like a second-class citizen. There were too many random scenes of Jeremy Irons and William Hurt, playing Olympic officials and debating whether or not to boycott Hitler’s Olympics. During the second half of the film, Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten) showed up and we got a few scenes of her trying to film Jesse’s triumph at the Olympics despite the interference of Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbles (Barnaby Metschurat). All of these extra scenes are supposed to set Jesse’s struggle in a historic context but they’re unnecessary and distracting. All the context that the film needs can be found in the fact that Jesse was a black man living in America in the 1930s.
For the most part, Race is uneven but occasionally the film delivers a powerful scene or two. One of the most powerful parts of the film comes when Jesse, after setting world records and being proclaimed as a hero across the world, is informed that he still can’t enter a New York club through the front door. As well, the scenes depicting Jesse’s friendship with German jump Luz Long (David Kross) are poignant. In fact, they’re so poignant that I initially assumed that they were fictionalized for the film but actually, Jesse and Luz Long did become good friends during the 1936 Olympics.
Race is uneven but it’s not bad. Stephan James gives a good performance as Jesse and, if nothing else, the film provides a worthy history lesson.
The 5th Wave, which came out in January of this year (and that really should be all you need to hear), is the epitome of a “Who cares?” type of film.
It’s another YA adaptation, taking place in a dystopian future and featuring way too many characters for its own good. Aliens have invaded the Earth and they’ve attacked in 4 waves. There was the 1st wave, which destroyed all of the electricity. There was the 2nd wave which involved a lot of earthquakes and natural disasters. I imagine California fell off the mainland during the 2nd wave. The 3rd wave involved bird flu. The 3rd wave is important because it killed the mother of our protagonist, teenager Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz). You can’t be a YA protagonist unless you have at least one dead parents. That’s the rules of the genre.
The 5th Wave deals with the … well, the fifth wave. As far as I can tell, the 5th Wave involves turning every human left into a stock character from a YA dystopian novel. Basically, if you’ve sat through Divergent or The Maze Runner or The Giver or countless other YA adaptations, you already know who everyone is in The 5th Wave. Cassie is our heroine, which means that she spends a lot of time wandering around in the forest, killing potential threats, and thinking about how different things were back in high school.
And that’s really all she does.
See, The 5th Wave last nearly two hours and not a damn thing happens in the entire film. That’s because the 5th Wave is all about setting up a sequel. We meet a lot of characters. We get a lot of backstory. Imagine if The Walking Dead did a half-season with 6 shows straight of people talking about doing things but never actually doing any of it. (Oh, wait, they did just do that…) That’s pretty much what sitting through The 5th Wave was like. We learn that there are aliens disguised as humans. We learns that what’s left of the government cannot be trusted and I was totally happy with that plot development because seriously, the government sucks. As we watch Moretz, Ron Livington, Liev Schriber, and Maria Bello struggle to make some of the most cliched dialogue ever sound compelling, we learn that being a talented actor doesn’t mean that you always get to appear in interesting films.
Things drag on and then they end. Why do they end? Because that’s the way YA adaptations works. Nothing can be resolved in just one movie. Instead, everything’s about setting things up for the next installment. At the very least, all YA films have to be a part of a trilogy. And the third part of the trilogy always requires at least two parts to tell the entire story. That’s just the way things works.
And really, I thought that Divergent was the most soulless YA adaptation that I had ever seen. But the 5th Wave makes a strong case that perhaps it deserves the title.
I guess we could wait to see what happens when part two comes out but seriously, who cares?
I’ve been so busy from the holidays that I forgot to share the trailer for next year’s The Lost City of Z. Based on a historical novel, The Lost City of Z features Charlies Hunman as explorer Percy Fawcett and follows him as he and his son (Tom Holland) and an assistant (Robert Pattinson) obsessively search for a missing civilization.
The Lost City of Z was directed by James Gray, who is one of those directors who has always been more popular with critics than audiences. It seems like every year we’re told that Gray’s latest film will be an Oscar contender. Remember The Immigrant? How about We Own The Night? Both of these films were promoted as being surefire Oscar contenders, both of them flopped at the box office, and both of them are now kind of forgotten. Will that happen with The Lost City of Z?
Well, The Lost City of Z is one of those things that sounds like it should be a surefire Oscar contender (and it got very positive reviews when it premiered at the New York Film Festival) but it’s being released in April. Traditionally, it’s thought that films released that early in the year will be forgotten by Oscar time. However, both The Grand Budapest Hotel and Mad Max: Fury Road were released early in the year and both managed to do quite well when the Oscar nominations were announced.
Some day, someone will get around to making the ultimate Tina Fey movie, which will basically just be 4 and a half hours of people talking about how much they love Tina Fey while Tina makes silly faces in the background. Until that day comes, viewers will just have to settle for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
In Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Tina Fey plays Tina Fey playing real-life journalist, Kim Baker. When the film starts, Kim accepts an assignment as a war correspondent in Afghanistan. Though she starts out as neurotic and intimidated, Kim soon steps up and emerges as a passionate and committed journalist, one who is dedicated to revealing the truth — both good and bad — about what’s happening in Afghanistan. Helping her along the way is a BBC reporter, Tanya Vanderpool (Margot Robbie) and a Scottish photographer named Iain (Martin Freeman). Iain and Kim may be attracted to one another but Kim has a boyfriend (Josh Charles) back in New York. How long do you think it takes for Kim to catch her boyfriend cheating via Skype?
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is one of those movies that you just know was made to be an Oscar contender. Not only does it deal with a big important subject but it stars a popular performer in a change-of-pace role. Except, of course, it’s not really that much of a change-of-pace. Tina Fey’s a good actress but you never forget that you’re watching Tina Fey. You never think to yourself, “Kim is caught in the middle of a firefight” or “Kim is getting addicted to the rush of being a war zone.” Instead, you think, “Any minute now, Tina Fey’s going to start shooting a gun and it’s going to be funny because she’s Tina Fey.” Towards the end of the film, when a U.S. soldier who has lost his legs tells Kim to never stop trying to tell the people the truth about what’s happening in Afghanistan, you don’t think, “Don’t give up, Kim!” Instead you think, “Wow — so that soldier lost his legs so that Tina Fey could have an Oscar moment.”
If I haven’t already made it clear, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is an extremely uneven film, one that never seems to be sure if it wants to be a relationship comedy, a media satire, or a serious look at the realities of war. The film works best when it concentrates on the friendship between Tanya and Kim and it’s nice to see a film about two women who are colleagues and friends. When Tanya first showed up, I was worried that the film would devolve into one of those “Women can’t work together” diatribes or that Tanya would immediately be set up as some sort of mean girl rival for Iain. Instead, the film explores how women support each other through even the most difficult of circumstances. But then there’s other scenes that just don’t work as well, like the scenes with Alfred Molina as an Afghan politician who has a crush on Kim.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has its moment but ultimately its too uneven to be of much consequence.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
4 Shots From 4 Holiday Films
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011, dir by Todd Strauss-Schulson)
I’ve spent so much time talking about how much I love It’s A Wonderful Life that I’m running the risk of overlooking my second favorite Christmas film of all time, 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street!
So, now that you’ve had a chance to enjoy the radio version of It’s A Wonderful Life and the behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of that classic film, why not sit back and listen to Lux Radio Theater’s production of Miracle on 34th Street!?
This was originally broadcast on December 22nd, 1947 and it features the cast from the film — Natalie Wood, Edmund Gwenn, John Payne, and Maureen O’Hara!
Now that you’ve either seen the film or listened to the radio adaptation of It’s A Wonderful Life, how about a documentary about how this classic film came to be in the first place?
The Making Of It’s A Wonderful Life was apparently made for television and was broadcast in 1990. Hosted by actor Tom Bosley, it’s a warm and appreciative look at a much beloved classic.
