BEFORE: Perhaps you spent your pre-Christmas weekend hanging up lights, or decorating your tree, or even baking some pies or cookies. We spent part of today picking up 2 large (60 lbs) bags of sand from Home Depot, and then finding out that the store does NOT sell empty sandbags to fill, or even filled ones. Because we had a big storm last week that caused a small amount of water in our basement, we decided to finally do something about that, in addition to the garbage bag that we've taped up to seal the door to the backyard. Before each storm this fall we took time to clear the stairwell of leaves, but if enough rain falls and flooding starts, then more leaves get dragged down to the backyard drain and it inevitably clogs up, then the water fills the stairwell and eventually comes into the basement, either a little or a lot. So we bought the sand today and ordered sandbags online, when they arrive next week we'll have to spend a day filling sandbags and blocking the door on the backyard side, and hopefully that will keep the water from coming inside, once and for all. We're tired of staying up until 5 am during an overnight rainstorm, and I'm just upset that it took us years to come up with sandbags to solve the problem. We can't get it done by Christmas, but perhaps before the next big storm, and since it doesn't seem to snow in NYC any more, that could be in December or January.
I've said it many times, that I don't take suggestions for what films I watch and review. Well, that's not exactly true, because I pay attention to reviews and how other people feel about certain movies, even if that's sometimes an unconscious process. In the case of "The Christmas Chronicles", my BFF Andy recommended this film to me, probably sometime in 2019 or so, and, OK, sure, I'll put it on my list, maybe I'll get to it someday, and maybe I won't. Time went by and I watched "The Grinch" in 2019, "Bad Santa 2" and "Klaus" in 2020, "The Man Who Invented Christmas" in 2021 and "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" and "Last Christmas" last year. Finally, I got down to just a few holiday-themed movies on my list, and I had the slots and the linking opportunity to work this one in.
Darby Camp carries over from "Clifford the Big Red Dog", and that was always how I planned to get HERE, so, well, at least my plan worked out. So I'm going to try very hard to forget that there might have been a better way to get here, through an additional Christmas movie, and now that movie is stranded out in the cold, and maybe I can work toward including it next year, and maybe that will work, and maybe it won't. But hey, it took me four years to include THIS film, so all things are possible over time, except for the things that aren't.
THE PLOT: The story of a sister and brother, Kate and Teddy Pierce, whose Christmas Eve plan to catch Santa Claus on camera turns into an unexpected journey that most kids could only dream about.
AFTER: Well, this turned out to be rather a fun, action-packed movie about what I think is one of the most ridiculous topics possible, the Santa Claus legend. God, these stories have been done to DEATH, haven't they? All those stop-motion holiday specials about how Kris Kringle got his red suit and his flying reindeer, how he flies all around the world on Christmas Eve and delivers presents to billions of children in every time zone, despite logic and physics all telling us that this is an impossible feat for anyone, except perhaps a magical Saint who is also king of the Elves and lives at the (quite uninhabitable) North Pole, making electronic toys in a woodshop somehow. There's absolutely nothing in that story that makes a lick of sense, but if you point that out to anyone under 12, then suddenly YOU'RE THE BAD GUY who HATES CHRISTMAS, when really, all you were trying to do was to get your nieces or nephews to think for themselves, question everything and maybe use a bit of logic to determine what's real and what isn't.
(I posit that maybe older people would be less likely to fall for the lies and half-truths of certain politicians if they were trained at a younger age to question the stories they were told, and maybe taught to use that gray matter between their ears to figure out when they're being fed a giant pile of B.S. But I digress.)
So if you're going to go and make a modern version of the Santa Claus story, you might as well lean into it, I suppose, because there's no sense in half-assing it, or by maybe saying Santa's magic has really been advanced technology all this time, like he had a super-sonic sleigh before there was the Concorde, and he used computers to track holiday requests before most of us had laptops at our disposal. Nope, the only way to go here is to depict old-school Christmas magic, and that means that Santa can basically teleport, can turn into "coal dust" to slide down tiny chimneys, and that his toy sack is essentially a "bag of holding" that has infinite space, and also uses some kind of portal to connect to the North Pole, so he doesn't have to keep stopping back at home base to pick up more presents - instead his bag is constantly full because it's drawing from the gift-verse, which is multi-dimensional and restocked by the elves.
The elves have their own language here, and they're small, more like the house-elves from the "Harry Potter" movies than the elves we saw in "Lord of the Rings", or the elves seen in every Christmas special ever, like that one that wanted to be a dentist. (Hermey! I had to look it up...)
I'd say that maybe the elves here look a bit more like gnomes or tiny dwarves, but what do I know? It's a design thing I think. They also remind me of those mechanical dolls from "Barbarella" with the sharp teeth. Don't mess with the elves, that's all I'm saying. When Santa gets in a jam and crashes his sleigh and loses his reindeer, he knows that he's going to need the help of the elves to get Christmas back on track.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, the film focuses first on two kids whose father passed away a year or two ago, and their Christmas is now very different. Their mother has to work all night at the hospital just to make ends meet (leaving the kids unattended at home, which I'm pretty sure is unsafe and illegal, just saying). Kate's going through old camcorder tapes of Christmases gone by (where her mother conveniently announces the YEAR in every bit of Christmas footage, which I think nobody does IRL, just saying) and when she pauses the footage, she sees a hand in a red jacket putting a present under the Christmas tree. It just has to be Santa, right? So Kate convinces her older brother, Teddy, to take a night off from stealing cars (umm, yeah) and wait up with her to get more camcorder footage of Santa Claus. (Another NITPICK POINT, simply nobody in 2018 still used a camcorder for anything. Again, just saying.)
Since it is Christmas Eve, and this is a movie, sure enough, Santa Claus does come to their house, and Santa doesn't notice that these kids aren't in bed, sleeping. But wait, I thought he knows when you are sleeping, and he knows when you're awake, so WTF? After just missing him with the camera, the kids run outside to see him leaping from rooftop to rooftop, but also, they see his sleigh and reindeer hovering over the street, so naturally they find a way to climb up and jump in. After all, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Well, it turns out a lot, because when Santa realizes that there are two kids aboard his sleigh, he loses his concentration, his hat, his sack of toys and his reindeer, I think in that exact order. The sleigh crash-lands in a bad part of Chicago, and the race is on to get the sleigh fixed, the reindeer and the toys back.
During the process of saving Christmas, we learn that that Santa's got some skills, for starters he knows every street in the world, and he also knows every KID or former kid in the world, he remembers them even after they became adults, and he remembers what they wanted for Christmas every year. The script has to bend over backwards a little bit to make these skills very important, but there's a certain backwards logic to that, especially if these are the skills that he NEEDS to have to not only save Christmas, but also teach these kids a little life lesson about believing in Christmas again, after the tough year they've had. And I suppose once you've ridden on a flying reindeer or watched the names on Santa's list being magically crossed off, then yeah, I suppose you'd have to be a believer again, right?
Things do not go well in Chicago, though - attempts to get help from the diners in a pub prove futile when nobody quite understands this is the REAL Santa, and it's easier for everyone to assume he's a homeless man who somehow knows their names and what they wanted for Christmas when they were kids. Santa's knowledge of who's been naughty and who's been nice means that he also knows the bartender served time for grand theft auto, and so Santa and the kids get chased out of the bar, however they also jack the stolen car to go look for the reindeer. But this means that the police are now looking for THEM, and when the police track them down, they bring Santa to jail while Kate and Teddy ride off on the flying reindeer to find the toy sack and somehow contact the elves for more help.
This leads to the best scene in the film, BY FAR, which is Santa Claus in jail, magically producing instruments for every other prisoner (who just happen to be members of Steven Van Zandt's side band, the Disciples of Soul) and performing the song "Santa Claus Is Back in Town". Remember that this Christmas song was made famous by Elvis Presley, and Kurt Russell once played Elvis in a movie, so the whole time I was thinking, "Oh, I get it, he's Elvish Presley!" Kurt Russell filled the Santa role very well, playing a grandiose character that also reminded me of his role as the planet/god Ego in "Guardians of the Galaxy vol. II" which was released the year before this one.
Yeah, I've still got issues with the depiction of Christmas "magic" because it's just going to feed that desire in young kids to believe in impossible stories, and I'm not sure that does society any favors as a whole. Like, come on, kids, you know that those Christmas presents you want come from a STORE, right? Like, if presents come from Santa's workshop then why all the commercials on TV telling your parents to go to Wal-Mart or Marshall's or Macy's, right? Put. It. Together. Please. Because I don't want to have to be the bad guy here. There was footage a week or two ago of some U.S. senators or representatives debating the values of whole milk over almond milk and oat milk, which apparently was an attempt to reverse some Obama-era edict against whole milk. And this older Representative from North Carolina, Virginia Foxx, championed the benefits of whole milk, which were that the proteins in whole milk give Santa Claus the energy he needs to deliver all the Christmas presents and jump from rooftop to rooftop. I can't believe this speech is now officially part of the Congressional record, but this 80-something year old woman was completely serious, that it's whole milk that gives Santa Claus his magical powers. Man, is that dumb, because everybody knows that it's really all the sugar in those cookies he eats at every house that gives him his energy. Really, it's not that complicated, sugar makes kids hyper, so logically it would do the same for Santa, plus also give him diabetes. But good news for Santa, we have Ozempic now, so he can control his A1C levels and maybe also lose some weight, just watch out for those side effects, Santa, which could include nausea, diarrhea, constipation, dizziness, blurred vision, fatigue, kidney damage, headaches, flatulence, difficulty swallowing, and irritability.
I've never seen any of the "Santa Clause" movies, and really, I have no intention (as of this writing) of adding them to my list. Maybe someday that will change, but right now, they're banned from consideration along with the "Transformers" and "Fast & Furious" franchises. I mean, anything is possible but some films are just SO FAR down on the list that I'll be 100 years old before I could even get to them, so essentially never.
Also starring Kurt Russell (last seen in "The Mean Season"), Judah Lewis (last seen in "Demolition"), Kimberly Williams-Paisley (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Martin Roach (last seen in "The Man from Toronto"), Lamorne Morris (last seen in "How It Ends"), Oliver Hudson (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Goldie Hawn (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Tony Nappo (last seen in "In the Shadow of the Moon"), Vella Lovell (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Lauren Collins (last seen in "Charlie Bartlett"), Steven Van Zandt (last seen in "The Irishman"), Jesse Gervasi, David Kohlsmith (last seen in "Shazam!"), Kaitlyn Airdrie, Jack Bona, Jameson Kraemer, Sofia Park, Seth Mohan, Kayla Lakhani, Glen McDonald (last seen in "Goon: Last of the Enforcers"), Danielle Bourgon (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Chai Valladares, Ish Morris, Jeremy Raymond, Chris LeBlanc (last seen in "Trumbo"), Marc Ribler, Jeff Teravainen (last seen in "Hollywoodland"), Elizabeth Phoenix Caro, Stan Harrison, Clark Gayton, Ravi Best, Ron Tooley, Eddie Manion, Anthony Almonte, Jack Daley, Andy Burton, Lowell Levinger, Richard Mercurio, Maureen Van Zandt,
and the voices of Debra Wilson, Kari Wahlgren, Andrew Morgado, Debi DerryBerry, Michael Yurchak (last seen in "Are You Here"), Jessica Lowe (last seen in "Blended").
RATING: 7 out of 10 cellmates with hidden musical talents
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