Last Christmas

Year 14, Day 357 - 12/23/22 - Movie #4,300

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

The Hundred-Foot Journey

Year 14, Day 354 - 12/20/22 - Movie #4,299

BEFORE: Helen Mirren carries over from "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" - nothing against this film just yet, but it's really here because it links my two Christmas movies this year.  I've got about 10 more Christmas-movies on my list right now, I know that seems like a drop in the bucket when you consider just how many holiday-themed romances get released on Lifetime and the Hallmark Channel each season, but I don't pay any attention to those, I try not to mix my holiday movies with my romance movies.  That being said, tomorrow's film is such a mixture, and that's how I'm choosing to wrap up Movie Year 14.  Hey, I'm just happy when I can end on any kind of Christmas movie, as the choices right now are sort of made for me by my choice of format. Form is definitely following function - and which Christmas movie(s) I watch is determined by the choices I made throughout the year.  It's a process. 

THE PLOT: The Kadam family leaves India for France, where they open a restaurant directly across the road from Madame Mallory's Michelin-starred eatery. 

AFTER: It's kind of funny, we just had Indian food a couple nights ago - we remembered that there used to be an Indian restaurant 2 doors down from this diner in Queens that we went to regularly for at least a decade, before the diner closed down during the pandemic.  Since then we've only got about three regular places to eat when we dine out, and that means we can get sick of them pretty quickly.  But we have to be careful these days, just because a place we used to go to appears to be still in business, according to Yelp, it still might be gone.  I don't understand why Yelp doesn't do a better job of updating its NYC database, or taking a minute to check in with the thousands of restaurants in the country to see if they're still in business - you used to be able to report to Yelp that a restaurant had closed, I guess maybe they disabled that feature?  Were there too many false reports from rival restaurants?

I understand why so many restaurants closed during lockdown, but what I can't understand is why so many of them, at least in NYC, have not been replaced.  The pandemic is over, people are going out again, the economy is supposedly better - or is it?  But with all of the major eateries I used to go to that closed down in the last 2 1/2 years, I can't think of one that got replaced by a new restaurant in the same space.  Somebody owns every building, and for every restaurant that closed, that's a landlord that's not getting any rent for that space.  Does that make any sense?  Who would rather keep a space unoccupied and NOT generating income when they could put a new business in there?  Are there just not any people with the money to open new restaurants, or invest in them?  Sure, times are tough, I get it, but if I owned a building with a restaurant space I would try very hard to DO something with it, so it at least generated some income.  It seems like it's maybe a great time to start a restaurant, with so much space available, but what do I know?  It's not like I have the money or knowledge to open a restaurant myself, so I guess we all have to get by with fewer places to eat until things really improve, I just don't know when that will be.

Anyway, we ate at the new Indian restaurant that replaced the old Indian restaurant we went to twice in the before-times.  See, it IS possible to put a new restaurant where an old one used to be.  The old owners probably leapt at the chance to sell the restaurant, and now the new owners are probably sitting around, looking at balance sheets, wondering how they're going to cover next month's rent.  The place wasn't deserted on a Sunday night, but it wasn't exactly packed, either.  Now it's the time of year when you'd expect people to get together with family and go out to restaurants and celebrate together, except we're not doing that, we cancelled any Christmas trip and plan to just eat at home.  It's just as well, with this big storm coming in, it's going to be too cold to go anywhere, holiday travel's going to be the worst this year, so perhaps we made a smart move.  And I think now I know why nobody's going out to eat, it's just such a hassle, when you can push a few buttons on your phone and have the food brought to you.  Or, you know, you can always cook at home if that's your thing. I usually grab take-out meals on the nights I work at the theater, and that's usually two or three nights a week.  They're maybe starting to recognize me over at the Popeye's and the Taco Bell. 

For us, the Indian food begins and ends with chicken tikka masala, plus naan and maybe I'll get some samosas too, if I'm really hungry.  If I should get tired of that dish, then I'll get shrimp biryani, but that can easily get too spicy for me.  What more is there?  I'm sure there must be countless varieties of Indian food, but once you've found the best dish on the menu, there's no need to vary from that flight plan.  Wikipedia is telling me there are really 38 regional cuisines across India, but who has that kind of time?  Obviously there's curry, which I think is the most popular Indian dish anywhere, but I don't mess with it because it could easily be too spicy for me. And sure, I know there are kebabs and chutneys and various types of flatbread, but I really just want to stick to my two dishes, and I'm OK with remaining ignorant about the rest.  Maybe I'm missing out, maybe there's an Indian dish out there that would really knock my socks off, but this way I'll never find out about it, so there's no FOMO. As for those 38 styles of Indian cuisine, I'm just going to pretend it's like BBQ, essentially all the same stuff only each region puts a slightly different spin on it. 

Oh, yeah, the movie. It really starts out as a depiction of class struggle, because the Kadam family patriarch decides to open a restaurant in the town near where their van broke down, and it's across the street from an upscale French restaurant.  Prior to that, the family tried making it in London, only they found that they hated the cliimate and the vegetables weren't fresh enough, it's probably a fair cop, as the Brits say.  So they leave England and head to Europe, but I don't think they really understood that the U.K. is actually part of Europe - of course they mean mainland Europe, but it helps to be precise, I always say.  Anyway, their van breaks down somewhere in the Pyrenees, near the town of St. Antonin, and the woman who helps get them to town feeds them some of the local produce, which they enjoy.  Well, at least they did their research before settling on a spot. 

The family opens an Indian restaurant, what else, and then it's a battle for market ingredients and the hearts of the local populace with Le Saule Pleurer (French for "weeping willow") across the street. Madame Mallory is the rival proprietor, and Marguerite, the woman who drove the Kadams into town, is a sous chef there.  Hassan Kadam is the family's chef, but he also has a desire to study classical French cooking, and he's got an eye for Marguerite, so you can probably figure out where the storyline's going to go from here.  Part of this seems like one of those dreadful Hallmark Channel romance plots, with two people from different cultures and different classes falling in love as they cook side-by-side.  Hassan makes an omelet for Madame Mallory and it's so impressive, she offers him a job in her restaurant.  (Conveniently, she'd JUST fired a chef for taking things a bit too far when trying to drive the Hassans out of town.)

Naturally, Papa Kadam is against his son going across the street to work in the rival restaurant, but it is what's best for his career, so he can get some form of classical training.  So Mr. Kadam relents, and it turns out to be best for everyone - Hassan learns to cook the French way, Madame Mallory gets a chance to increase her number of Michelin stars, and Marguerite gets a rival, friend and love interest all wrapped in one. And a new fusion of French cooking with a bit of Indian spices is formed, which turns out to be great for the diners - umm, except the ones who liked eating at the Maison Mumbai, because Hassan's brother just isn't as great of a cook as he was.  Try as it might, this film can't escape painting the Indian food as lower class and the French food as upper class, but shouldn't that be a matter of perception?  I mean, there could be an Indian restaurant with Michelin stars, it's not impossible.  

But things being what they are, the French restaurant wins acclaim and notoriety with the help of Hassan, and then he simply HAS to go to Paris.  Once word gets out about the better rating, naturally the job offers flow in, and Hassan accepts a job at a fancy restaurant that specializes in that molecular gastronomy stuff.  But, NITPICK POINT here, why is this a fait accompli, as the French say?  Hassan doesn't HAVE to go to Paris, sure, it's fine that he chooses to go to Paris, but it's not an absolute MUST.  Surely there must be some chefs who are happy where they are, serving their local community, and not every chef has to travel to a big city to find out if they can handle that.  Like anything else, I guess you have to go where the jobs are - but he HAD a job at Le Saule Pleurer, he could have kept it, especially if he liked working side-by-side with Marguerite.  Right?  

In his absence, Papa Kadam begins spending more time with Madame Mallory, but the film just can't quite bring itself to call this an actual romance.  OK, they dance together, but she still calls herself his "not-girlfriend". OK, so, then what are they? Just besties? Frenemies? Dating adults who hate labels?  It's unclear. Then it takes Hassan's brother traveling to Paris to cook for him to remind him how good Indian food was back home - did Hassan forget how to cook Indian food?  No, I get it, eating food from home can bring back memories, and this makes Hassan homesick for St. Antonin (which is weird, you'd think it would make him homesick for Mumbai...) and so he travels back to give Le Saule Pleurer another go, and maybe to finally get with Marguerite. I mean, that's great, Hassan, you do you, but we all saw this turn of events coming a mile away. 

And hey, the director also carries over from yesterday's film, both this and "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" were directed by Lasse Hallström - I suppose that's bound to happen randomly once in a while.  He's Swedish, but I guess it takes a Swedish guy to direct a film set in France about a relocated Indian family?  Well, it's beside the point because I've got just ONE film left to watch in 2022, and then another type of work begins for me - writing my year-end wrap-up and then trying to figure out how I'm going to start Movie Year 15.  More on that next time, perhaps. 

Also starring Om Puri (last seen in "Gandhi"), Manish Dayal (last seen in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"), Charlotte Le Bon (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Amit Shah (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Farzana Dua Elahe (last seen in "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time"), Dillon Mitra, Aria Pandya, Michel Blanc, Clément Sibony (last seen in "The Walk"), Vincent Elbaz, Juhi Chawla, Alban Aumard, Shuna Lemoine, Antoine Blanquefort, Rohan Chand (last seen in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Masood Akhtar, Cédric Weber (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Saachi Parekh, Shaunak Parekh. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 wild mushrooms

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Year 14, Day 352 - 12/18/22 - Movie #4,298

BEFORE: It's one week to Christmas, and after tonight I've got just two films to watch this year - so why don't I feel very cheery?  It's nearly "mission accomplished" for 2022, but I've been in a funk that I can't seem to shake off.  My mother's been in the hospital, then rehab, since just after Thanksgiving, that may be part of it.  My boss is running out of money yet again, so I feel like eventually the studio's going to close, but that's been the case for some time.  I've also been over-worked and over-stressed, so on the days when I'm home I just want to sleep and watch TV and try to de-stress, but then that just means I keep going from one extreme to the other, I'm either working hard or doing nothing, and there's no in-between.  So now after Monday I'm staring at a week of inactivity for the holiday break, and I'm somehow both looking forward to that, and also dreading it, it's not good for my mental condition, whatever that is.  

Another part of the problem is that we decided to not travel and see my family for Christmas, I stand by the decision, but then that's a realization that there's a sadness to the holiday now, it's never going to be like it was when I was a kid, maybe every adult has to face this at some point, and it can be difficult to come to terms with.  We'll do something for Christmas like make lasagna, and maybe we'll hit the outlet stores during the break, but right now holiday depression is a real thing.  My Christmas music mix has been ready for over a week, but I can't seem to bring myself to sit down and address the Christmas cards.  I'm going to force myself to do it today, by telling myself that the cards HAVE to go out on Monday to stand a chance of reaching people before December 25.  We'll see if that works. Honestly, I have been very busy, but both jobs have now slowed down greatly, so there should be no more excuses. 

Richard E. Grant carries over from "Withnail & I". The original plan was to watch TWO versions of the "Nutcracker" story here, as Mr. Grant also appears in the 2010 film "The Nutcracker: The Untold Story".  This film was apparently one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, earning only $17 million against a $90 million budget.  As a result, the film is not available anywhere, not on cable or any streaming service - perhaps there's a good reason for this, it might be THAT bad.  Or perhaps since the film was made to be screened in 3D it can't be broadcast as a regular, non-3D film.  Maybe Disney killed it somehow on all platforms to reduce any confusion over their own "Nutcracker" film that was released in 2018. Anyway, I learned a few months back that it wasn't popping up anywhere, so I had to factor that into my plans, and "Withnail & I" came up as a possible substitute. It's staying on my list in case it becomes available in the future, but I'm no rush to seek it out. 

THE PLOT: A young girl is transported into a magical world of gingerbread clowns, toy soldiers and an army of mice. 

AFTER: From what I understand of the famous Tchaikovsky ballet "The Nutcracker", very little of that story was retained for this Disney film.  For that matter, the ballet was based on an 1816 short story called "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" by Prussian author E.T.A. Hoffman - O just reviewed that plot on Wikipedia, and it's all about a little girl, Marie Stahlbaum, having dreams about the toys in the cabinet coming to life, and there's a battle between the dolls, led by the Nutcracker, and the mice, led by the seven-headed Mouse King and the Queen, Madame Mouserinks. There's a complicated back-story for how Nutcrackers came to be shaped like bearded soldiers, and a bunch of lard that was supposed to be put into sausages, but wasn't. And a princess got turned into a Nutcracker, the cure for that was to eat a magic nut that could only be cracked by a man who had never shaved or wore boots, and who could take seven steps backwards without stumbling. It's complicated.  But young Marie keeps dreaming about the Nutcracker at night, and one night she gives him a toy sword so he can defeat the Mouse King, this works and the curse is broken, he turned out to be the nephew of Drosselmeyer, the clockmaker and inventor, and once free he seeks out Marie in the real world, and a year later he finds her and brings her to the doll kingdom, where she's crowned the Queen, and she marries Drosselmeyer's nephew, even though she's only eight years old.  Yeah, there's something wrong with that ending for sure. 

The 1892 ballet scored by Tchaikovsky changed the story quite a bit, the girl's name was changed to Clara, for starters, and it starts on Christmas Eve during a party, which is interrupted by Drosselmeyer, the local councilman and part-time magician, also Clara's godfather. He brings four life-like dolls that dance at the party, also a Nutcracker in the shape of a man, which Clara likes, but her brother Fritz breaks. That night as Clara dreams, the Nutcracker grows to human size, and the room fills up with mice, who battle an army of gingerbread soldiers. The Nutcracker leads the army against the mice and the seven-headed Mouse King, and afterward the Nutcracker is transformed into a Prince, and he leads Clara into the forest. (Umm, and HOW OLD is Clara in this one?)

In Act 2, they reach the Land of Sweets, where the Sugar Plum Fairy has been ruling during the absence of the Prince. There's a celebration of sweets from around the world (which has been deemed to be fairly racist in modern productions of the ballet, with Caucasian dancers dressing up as Arabs and Chinese people, but whatever) and Mother Ginger has her children emerge from under her large skirt to dance at the party.  After a final waltz, Clara and the Prince are ushered from their thrones to a reindeer-pulled sleigh, and they wave goodbye to their subjects.  OK, so there's not a lot of story there, just one battle and then they're off to the magical land for a party, and "THE END".  But I get it, it's become an annual favorite among ballet companies, and it's (more or less) a respected piece of classical music.  

But times change and stories have to change too, and I'm sure there was a meeting at Disney about whether they should just leave the Nutcracker story alone or update it - and once you start talking about those Asian and Arab dancers and the fear of cultural appropriation, the plan became to scrap most of the Tchaikovsky ballet story, wipe the slate clean, and start over with a story that would appeal more to modern audiences. (Look, even Tchaikovsky thought that "The Nutcracker" wasn't his best work, he much preferred his version of "Sleeping Beauty".) But let's imagine what went on in that story conference - somebody probably said, "Why have just ONE magical land when we can have FOUR?  We can have Candyland, the Land of Flowers, the Land of, umm, Snowflakes, and the Land of Amusements!"  Gee, what other place is divided up into four lands, like Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland?  This has got to be an inside joke...

So this is what got retained from the original story and ballet - there's still a Clara who gets transported to a magical land, there's still an inventor and toymaker named Drosselmeyer, there's still a Sugar Plum Fairy and a Mother Ginger, and there's still a ballet, but the whole thing isn't a ballet, the ballet is the story-within-the-story that explains how Clara's mother came to the magical realm before she did, and she invented this machine that turned the toys into people, or something.  So, it was a giant magical land that was filled with non-living toys?  That doesn't seem to make much sense.  And then how did she build that machine, all by herself, and what powered it, and did she have an engineering degree, and so on...  And then she built an egg for her daughter with the same lock on it as the transforming machine, and she made sure that her daughter would inherit the egg, but not the key that would open it?  That seems all kinds of problematic.  

The story-crafters here then decided to throw a whole bunch of other elements into the mix, and the result is that this film feels like a mash-up of "The Nutcracker" with "The Wizard of Oz", "Alice in Wonderland" and the "Narnia" movies.  All of those stories feature very normal, regular girls who all want something more out of life, and they find it in after being transported to a magical land of fantasy that's probably some kind of metaphor for the real world and it's problems.  They also all feel like stress dreams to me, where they have to figure out the rules of those fantasy realms and try to solve a problem, only more and more obstacles keep getting placed in their paths.  Follow the Yellow Brick Road, obtain the witch's broom, eat the cake, drink the drink, win the chess game, defeat the evil power and then somehow solve the problems, save the land and wake up back in the real world. 

Here Clara has to enter the magical forest, chase a mouse that has that key, cross the bridge into the Fourth Realm, face Mother Ginger, and only then can she determine who the REAL villain of the piece is and tinker with the Machine to defeat the evil power.  Yes, there's a very modern twist here, in that the first character to be depicted as the villain isn't the villain at all, and the real villain is the one you'd most likely never expect it to be.  I've still got some N.P.'s, though:

NITPICK POINT #1 - the egg turns out to be just a music box, but it also functions as the "ruby slippers" of this piece.  It also enables Clara to realize that she had the power to act within her all along, which is an OK message, but it also makes me feel like the screenwriter couldn't think of something that was inside the egg that could be helpful to the plot. 

NITPICK POINT #2 - in the early part of the story, Clara fixes Drosselmeyer's clock/device, which is running backwards.  She tinkers with it and is able to reverse something so that it runs forward.  This would be a great way to foreshadow how she tinkers with the machine at the end of the story, only it doesn't really work.  It would make sense for her to similarly "reverse" the device that turns toys into people and people into toys, but instead her tinkering with it merely changes the AIM of the beam, which isn't the same thing.  She should be able to "reverse" the function of the device, only the story won't allow that for some reason.  Try again. 

The seven-headed Mouse King is replaced here by one mouse who can rally the other mice around him to carry him, and together they all form the shape of a giant mouse.  That's a pretty cool effect, similar to what was seen a few years later in "The Suicide Squad", with a bunch of rats all working together.  This is perhaps the best use of special effects in the whole film, but some may also find it very disgusting. 

NITPICK POINT #3: I was looking for something that would make me feel all Christmas-ey, but this just isn't it.  Nearly every connection to Christmas was absent here, except for the fact that maybe the party seen at the beginning is a Christmas Eve party.  Again, one wonders if this was all removed during a story conference at Disney.  Try again. 

Also starring Mackenzie Foy (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Jayden Fowora-Knight (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Keira Knightley (last seen in "Never Let Me Go"), Helen Mirren (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Morgan Freeman (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Misty Copeland (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Eugenio Derbez (last seen in "Geostorm"), Matthew Macfadyen (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Anna Madeley (last seen in "In Bruges"), Sergei Polunin (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Aaron Smyth, Ellie Bamber (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Tom Sweet, Jack Whitehall (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Omid Djalili (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Meera Syal (last seen in "Yesterday"), Charles "Lil Buck" Riley (last seen in "Her"), Nick Mohammed (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Charles Streeter (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 clockwork mice