BEFORE: Well, here we go, last movie of the year, and I've saved it for Christmas Eve Eve, aka "The Night Before The Night Before Christmas". This was the destination I set for myself once I got the October horror-thon all sorted out, the tricky thing was just getting in the correct number of steps. It turns out that it's all about the steps. A couple last-minute additions meant that a couple films had to be jettisoned from the list, but hey, there's always next year.
First of course, I have to get my ducks in a row for THIS year, there's the tedious practice of double-checking my stats, as there always seems to be one or two actors who appeared multiple times and I didn't catch it - I'd hate to leave someone off of the year-end countdown if they truly deserve to be there, so that means double-checking the appearance counts by a second method to be sure. Then I've got to check some scores and give out my usual (but also very unusual) awards - like, I think "Best Animated Mice" has to be a category this year, and it's certainly been a weird year like that.
But the first step in figuring out next year's schedule is NOT picking a film for January 1, because I can't be sure where that might lead me 30 days later when I start my annual Romance-a-Thon in February. So the first step is figuring out the best chain I can make from the romance films on my list, and then I can count backwards to New Year's, and hopefully forward to St. Patrick's Day as well. I've got a chain in mind, I'm just not sure yet if it will work - there are too many ways to organize the romance films, it turns out, because I really have THREE different chains and I'll have to choose between them in the next few days. That's tough when I also have to write my year-end wrap-up at the same time - BUT both jobs are shut down for a week, so having the time is not the problem. More on that next time.
Amit Shah carries over from "The Hundred-Foot Journey".
THE PLOT: Kate, a young woman who makes bad decisions, is working as an elf in a year-round London Christmas shop, and she wants to be a singer. However, she meets Tom there, and her life takes a new turn. For Kate, it seems too good to be true.
AFTER: Well, it's good to be an expert on certain things, and for me, one of my areas of expertise is Christmas music. I spend a few hours every year making a mix that I send out with my Christmas cards, for the last 20 years it's been on CD, but last year I went digital, so I just send out a link to the 25 or 26 songs posted on my Dropbox, and people can download the tracks as mp3s, burn them to a CD if they want, or just play them on any device they have. I'm usually against file sharing and copyright violations, but screw it, this is a more environmentally friendly way to spread a little Christmas cheer. (Also, I was hearing back from more and more friends each year that they no longer had CD players, or computers with CD drives...)
30 years of making Christmas mixes, and I've never repeated a song. Well, I have repeated songs, yes, because there are only SO many Christmas songs, but I always send different versions of the same songs. Partially this has been a reaction to spending many years listening to the SAME OLD versions of holiday songs - Gene Autry, Bing Crosby, Sinatra and Perry Como, even the Elvis version of "Blue Christmas" is totally worn-out, it's old hat. I've devoted my time to shaking things up a bit, finding new versions of the old songs that people may not be aware of, and that means doing some research each year to see what bands have released Christmas Albums, or what strange compilation CDs I can find. This was all a bit easier when there were still record stores, and I could just go to Tower Records and load up, now I have to resort to Amazon, which makes me feel all dirty - thankfully I'm still going through my backlog of CDs to find good tracks, but I think I only bought 6 tracks from Amazon, four of which were from the same band, Pomplamoose.
There's an art to making a good Christmas music mix - I like to have a theme, whether that's jazz or a cappella or style parodies, but the two most common themes I've used, the ones I keep coming back to, are straight rock (70's/80's) and "alternative", though that term has come to mean something very different than it did when I started this crazy journey. Nobody even uses that term any more in the music biz, because all the "alt" acts either went mainstream or they no longer exist, plus, what are they presenting an "alternative" to, at this point? Still, that's the term I stick with because it's ingrained into my process, I suppose. I like to have a good mix of fast songs and slow ones, some hard and some soft, and if my mix gets really diverse, that's fine by me. This year's mix featured Weezer, Train, Sia, Bad Religion, the Indigo Girls, Relient K, Sister Hazel, and more - and a cover of "Last Christmas" performed by The Trophy Fire. Stylistically, it's all over the place, sure, but when I finish putting the songs in the "proper" order, ideally it should all just flow together into a musical tapestry - I don't send it out until I feel it's got a flow and ideally an underlying holiday message. Just like with putting my movies into a particular order, it's a gut-check thing, and when I've got it right, by my standards, I can FEEL it.
But "Last Christmas" might be something of a divisive song - I think people either love it or hate it. The original, anyway - perhaps it also suffers from overplay, and hopefully some people end up preferring the cover version I've included on my mix over the George Michael original. The only Christmas song more divisive might be Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" - again, you either love it outright or you want to kill it with fire. But I play the odds, by including 26 songs this year, I hope that there end up being more hits than misses. Same goes for the 300 films I watch each year, I can only hope against hope that there are more hits than misses.
Thematically, is was a good follow-up to "The Hundred-Foot Journey", because both films turned out to focus on immigrant families that moved to European locations - last night it was an Indian family that moved to London, then France, and in this film it's a Serbo-Croatian family that moved to London. (NITPICK POINT: In the opening scene, which takes place in Serbia, why is the church choir singing in English?). The daughters in the family seem to have picked up the British accent quite well, and Emma Thompson does a great job of playing their Serbian mother, who just hasn't. That's a TOUGH accent to nail, but Ms. Thompson seems to be acquiring a reputation as a chameleon of sorts - she's in the new remake of "Matilda" as Ms. Trunchbull, and I hear she's almost unrecognizable in the role. SIDE NOTE here: Ms. Thompson recently visited the theater where I work part-time to promote that film, and walked right by me on her way to introduce the film. What's funny to me is that her ex-husband, Kenneth Branagh, appeared in the same place about 10 months prior, for a screening of "Belfast", and I seem to be the only person aware of this.
The first impulse here was to lump this film with all of the saccharine holiday/romance hybrids that you find this time of year on the Lifetime and Hallmark channels - Discovery got into that market this year, also, with holiday romance films that guest-starred Food Network celebs like Ree Drummond and Duff Goldman. Umm, spare me, please - I hope I never get desperate enough to watch such dreck. Right now there are 10 Christmas movies left on my list, so the goal for 2023 is the same as this year's, to end on a Christmas-y note - and I can't even start to figure out which one(s) until mid-October, but I can confirm it's good to have options, even if those options are films like "Fatman" or "Violent Night". I've been trying to watch "All Is Bright" and "The Christmas Chronicles" for several years now, but if I live by this linking system, I die by this linking system.
But let me say that this film is a cut above your average holiday/romance hybrid film, even if I can't properly explain why. Part of that is the writing, and Emma Thompson wrote this screenplay, based partially on the George Michael song, of course. Remember that she also wrote (or co-wrote) the screenplays for "Sense and Sensibility", "Nanny McPhee" and "Bridget Jones's Baby", among others. She's got two Oscars, and one of them is for Best Screenplay, so there. "Last Christmas" is very well written, even if I can't tell you EXACTLY why, because I don't want to spoil it. Just trust me and check this one out, if you can - I was blown away by what I didn't see coming.
There's a lot here outside the romance aspect, because Katarina/Kate has a lot of work to do on herself and her relationship with her family. She's also struggling as an out-of-work stage actress and singer, plus she's totally unfocused on her job at the Christmas shop, and she can't seem to keep an apartment or a steady roommate either. Couch surfing is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, because later in the film we learn that she also had a health problem, so she's in recovery physically as well as emotionally. The film falls just short of suggesting that all of these things are connected, her mother paid more attention to her when she was sick, which she enjoyed but also got very annoyed by. So the film gets this right, too - you can't be expected to have a constructive relationship if the other parts of your life are a mess.
In the middle of all this, she meets Tom, who she deems "weird" at first, because he doesn't use his cell phone and he only shows up in her life, he claims to work nights but also disappears for days at a time. And while she enjoys spending more and more time with him, and finds herself falling in love, he also reveals that he's unreliable, and that Kate needs to strengthen herself, because she can't just depend on him to make everything OK. Of course he's right about this, but what REALLY is up with this guy? She runs down the checklist, maybe he's gay, maybe he's married, maybe he's as broken as she is, but it's none of these things. Perhaps he's just smart enough to know that another person can't be the answer to anyone's personal problems.
Along the way on this crazy holiday journey, Kate keeps making mistakes - outing her sister to her parents is definitely neither cool or PC. Growing emotionally is a process, and it takes time to learn to not be so selfish, even at the holidays - but it's important. Kate learns that the homeless mission where volunteers always needs more help, so that's a step in the right direction. Kate starts busking to earn money for the shelter, then eventually decides to put on a much grander event, and that turns out to be a better way to showcase her talents than going on one fruitless audition after another. Over time she fixes things with her family, her boss and then maybe, just maybe NEXT year she can give her heart to someone special, as the song goes.
Because of circumstances this year, I haven't been able to feel very Christmas-y, except when I put my music mix together. My mother went into the hospital the day after Thanksgiving, and now she's in a rehab facility, trying to get strong enough to go back to her apartment. My wife and I cancelled a trip up to Massachusetts to see my parents, partially because we were just up there for Thanksgiving, and the drive back was horrendous - now, with a winter storm moving in, that turned out to be a smart move. But, I don't feel very festive if I'm far away from most of my family - we'll drive up in mid-January, so that's something. And we haven't done any Christmas shopping, but we're planning to hit the outlets on Long Island next week, maybe by then we'll be feeling more festive. This weekend we're just going to stay indoors, make lasagna like we did the last two years, and maybe watch something holiday-related. I'll push for "Bad Santa 2" but I don't think that's going to fly - at least there's always "A Christmas Story" running on cable.
Anyway, I think I'm ending the year on a high note, which is a great thing. Don't write this film off, I think it's very clever, even if I can't get more specific than that. (No spoilers.). And hey, two more "Star Wars" actors appear here to cap off the year - Emilia Clarke, obviously, and Peter Serafinowicz supplied the voice of Darth Maul in "Episode I: The Phantom Menace".
Also starring Emilia Clarke (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Henry Golding (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Michelle Yeoh (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "Cruella"), Lydia Leonard (last seen in "The Fifth Estate"), Boris Isakovic, Rebecca Root (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Ingrid Oliver (last seen in "The Hustle"), Laura Evelyn, Patti LuPone (last seen in "The Comedian"), Rob Delaney (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Peter Serafinowicz (last heard in "Sing 2"), Sara Powell, Peter Mygind, Maxim Baldry (last seen in "Mr. Bean's Holiday"), Madison Ingoldsby, Lucy Miller, Margaret Clunie (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn"), John-Luke Roberts (last seen in "Dolittle"), Bilal Zafar, Ritu Arya (last seen in "Red Notice"), Ansu Kabla (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express" (2017)), Fabien Frankel, Angela Wynter, Ben Owen-Jones, David Hargreaves (last seen in "Othello" (1965)), Joe Blakemore, Calvin Demba (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Anna Calder-Marshall, Jassie Mortimer, Michael Matovski, Jake Lampert, Jade Anouka, Rene Costa, Nichola Jean Mazur, with cameos from Sue Perkins (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Andrew Ridgeley and archive footage of George Michael.
RATING: 7 out of 10 Christmas gibbons
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