BEFORE: I'm back after a week away, ready to sprint to the Christmas finish line - just THREE films left in Movie Year 17 after tonight, all Christmas-themed. Plus my January and February chains are waiting in the wings. After Christmas I get another bit of a break, but I'm going to be working on New Year's Eve, so there might be a delayed start to January.
We enjoyed a week in a warmer climate, we sailed out of the Brooklyn docks on an MSC ship, which didn't stop until it hit Cape Canaveral in Florida, where we visited the Kennedy Space Center (in 2018 we went to the Johnson Space Center in Houston as part of BBQ Crawl #2) and finally stood under a Saturn V rocket, which is quite large. We also saw a space shuttle and that giant crawler thing that carried all those famous NASA rockets from the assembly building to the launch pad, moving at a top speed of 1 mph.
After that, the ship spent a day at the cruise line's private island and then 1 day in Nassau, Bahamas, where we went on a self-curated walking tour of historic Bahamanian government buildings and also gift shops. Then two more sea days, during which we enjoyed the ship's many semi-fancy meals and snacks and I beat everyone else on the ship at progressive trivia (the secret was to attend every single night, as the score was cumulative). Hey, while our friends and neighbors in NYC were freezing, we were dining on a ship's sundeck, enjoying the buffet in 70-degree December weather, it's hard to beat that. On the last night, we took in the ship's featured jukebox musical, "Rock Circus", but, you know, probably the less said about that, the better.
Ben Stiller carries over from "Dear Santa".
THE PLOT: After a tragedy, four siblings find a loving shelter in an unexpected turn of circumstances.
AFTER: Well, I'm not really sure WHAT I was expecting, but we're down to the last few movies and really, there's no changing the set-list, so I'm gonna get what I get. Kind of like Christmas presents, there's no telling what you got until you unwrap them. No takebacks, either, no swapping - my father's family used to do the "Yankee Swap" thing, where everybody in the room who wanted to participate would bring a wrapped gift (with a dollar value up to a specific limit) and then we'd draw numbers, whoever drew #1 got to pick the first gift, but whoever drew #2 could keep the gift they unwrapped OR force a swap with person #1, and so on. So if you went first and unwrapped a "good" gift, you had to pretend that it wasn't that great, or else you weren't going to hang on to it for very long. I think maybe person #1 got to force one last swap at the end, because they never had much choice in the first place. Anyway, people ended up trading gifts afterwards if they got stuck with something they didn't want, because it was a friendly game - now that side of the family doesn't get together any more, and I kind of miss that.
My point is, I can't swap this one out - I guess I thought I was going to get some slapstick comedy like "Christmas with the Fockers", and this just isn't that, it's more of a family drama than a holiday comedy. BUT there's Christmas stuff at the end, so it's going to count. Ben Stiller plays Michael, a real estate guy from Chicago who's notoriously single, but he drives to Ohio after his sister passes away, to check in on her four sons, who are now orphans. He'd only met the older two sons before, so it seems like maybe the sibling relationship had been strained for a few years.
Anyway, the kids are very unruly, but also they're dealing with the traumatic loss of their parents (no explanation at first of how both parents died at the same time, but they'll get there...) but they live on a farm and are home-schooled, so their social worker is having a really tough time finding foster parents for them. She assumes that Michael, as next of kin, will take over looking after them for a while, but he's just not the foster parent type - not at first, anyway. Naturally he has a hard time connecting with them at first, because they are out of control and hyperactive and willing to "punk" him at every opportunity. In addition to being far away from his job at a critical time, Michael also has to deal with life on a farm, no cell phone service in rural Ohio, a tyrannical town deputy, and a town full of weird characters who want nothing to do with becoming foster parents. Well, except one lady who already has a bunch of foster kids, and she seems both over-eager and wildly insane.
Michael attempts to befriend the man who owns the most property in town, he and his wife recently became an "empty nester" and seem to be interested in taking in children, only the kids disrupt the man's Christmas party with an out-of-control golf cart that destroys his Nativity scene and ends up in the pool. Yeah, what part of "be on your best behavior" did these kids not fully understand?
Michael re-opens his late sister's dance studio when he learns that one of the boys has adapted the famous ballet "The Nutcracker" to modernize the story, adding a samurai and a few pirates couldn't hurt, because the original ballet had sugar plum fairies and a Mouse King, so maybe it was in need of an update. This kind of reminded me of that part in "Sing Sing" where the inmates decided that "King Lear" really needed a time travel sub-plot so they could add in pirates and gladiators.
They found four brothers to play the brothers, and all four are trained ballet dancers, and live on the farm seen in the film. So it's tough to say whether they set out with this story in mind and just happened to find four brothers who fit the bill, or if the story was tailor-made around the family actors that they found. At the end we get to see the brothers dance in their altered version of the Nutcracker, the specific changes that they made to the plot aren't all that important, I guess as long as you have a Mouse King and a Nutcracker character, we can assume that everything else kind of fell into place.
There's a fair amount of actual heart and holiday spirit here, again it may not be the film I was expecting but I'm willing to make allowances and work with what I've been given, you know, because it is the holiday season and all that. Also, this is a good reminder that a lot of the big holiday films that Hollywood makes are set in big cities like NYC or Los Angeles, but there's Christmas all over the place, the cities don't have a monopoly on it.
Directed by David Gordon Green (director of "Prince Avalanche" and "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent")
Also starring Linda Cardellini (last seen in "Nonnas"), Homer Janson, Ulysses Janson, Arlo Janson, Atlas Janson, Toby Huss (last seen in "The Rental"), Maren Heisler, Edi Patterson (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Tim Heidecker (last seen in "Us"), Lucy Zukaitis (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Bryant Carroll (last seen in "Maggie Moore(s)"), Louis Heisler, Noah Fisher, Isabella Steele, Dominick Marrone, Vasily Deris, Alexander Louis, Rodrigo Almarales, Jeff Janson, Melissa Gelfin, Anita Farmer Bergman, Cliff Cash, Donna Grasso, Bridget Pervalle and the voices of Ari Graynor (last seen in "10 Years"), Ashley Rae Spillers (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Jerome Agean.
RATING: 5 out of 10 hard-to-catch chickens (and while there's no partridge in a pear tree, there is a snake in a toilet)
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