We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Four Christmas stories, more or less.
PRANCER (1989)
There's a certain kind of children's movie that likes to heap hardship on its young protagonist, and that's what director John D. Hancock and screenwriter Greg Taylor did in their 1989 film Prancer. Rebecca Harrell Tickell stars as Jessica Riggs, a young girl whose mother has recently passed away. She lives on a farm with her perpetually grumpy father John (Sam Elliott) and her pain-in-the-neck brother Steve (John Joseph Duda), the farm has hit a financial rough patch, and John is struggling so much that he's thinking of having Jessica move in with her aunt Sarah (Rutanya Alda). Understandably, Jessica is not very happy at all with how her life is going, and little Harrell Tickell did an incredible job of playing this troubled character. Blog contributor Priscilla commented that she hopes Harrell Tickell was just a really good actress, she's so convincingly miserable in the movie that it made her concerned for the kid's real life well-being.
I remember when Prancer first reached VHS. I probably would have been six at the time, and when I saw the poster at local video stores and heard the concept - "a little girl meets Santa's reindeer Prancer!" - I was excited to check it out. I remember being disappointed, because I was expecting something fun and magical... which this movie is not. Prancer is shockingly down-to-earth and downbeat. Hancock did not want to put anything obviously magical in his movie. He wanted to leave it entirely up to the audience's interpretation whether or not the reindeer really is Prancer or just a regular reindeer. Thirty years later, I can appreciate that approach a bit more than I did as a child, although I was still surprised at just how dark the movie was.
Jessica first sees the reindeer running through the woods, then sees it again while she's riding in her father's truck. Sporting an injured leg, Prancer is standing in the middle of the road, and John's first instinct is to get out of his truck and shoot the animal to put it out of its misery. Luckily, John isn't able to kill Prancer in that moment; otherwise this would be a short film. But it's not the last time he'll have a gun pointed at the reindeer before the end credits roll.
Prancer later shows up on the Riggs family farm, so Jessica hides the reindeer in a crumbling shack on the property so she can keep it safe and hopefully nurse it back to health. The only people she tells about Prancer are her friend Carol (Ariana Richards) and ill-tempered veterinarian Orel Benton (Abe Vigoda) - people in this movie can be very unpleasant, and Orel acts like a real jerk when he first sees Prancer. Jessica figures that she needs to get a message to Santa Claus so he can pick up Prancer before Christmas Eve, and she also has to find a way to feed the animal without her father knowing about it. Her plan to make some money involves cleaning the house of the eccentric Mrs. McFarland (Cloris Leachman), and is one of the more upbeat sequences in the entire movie.
Hancock and Taylor do not make this quest to help the reindeer easy or pleasant for Jessica, and even demonstrate a reluctance to give the story a happy ending. (And if you think it's a happy ending, Hancock might urge you to think again.)
Prancer is ostensibly a kid's movie, but I'm not sure how good it would be for kids to watch. It's quite depressing at times.
My favorite thing about the movie were the snow-covered country and small town locations. This looked like home to me, it looked like my childhood... and for good reason. As it turns out, most of the movie was shot just 40 to 60 miles away from a town in Indiana I have spent a lot of time in over the years, the area my father's side of the family is from.
FATMAN (2020)
Back in 1988, one of the jokes in the Richard Donner / Bill Murray comedy Scrooged (which I'm going to get around to writing about someday) was a preview for a TV movie called The Night the Reindeer Died, in which a group of heavily armed psychos launch an assault on Santa's workshop, and the only person who can save Santa, Mrs. Claus, and the elves - apparently the reindeer are doomed - is a minigun-toting Lee Majors. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the 2 minutes of Scrooged that were used to promote this fake movie. I wanted to see The Night the Reindeer Died, which basically appeared to be "Die Hard at the North Pole".
Thirty-two years later, the writing/directing duo of Eshom Nelms and Ian Nelms have brought the world Fatman, which is probably the closest we're ever going to get to an actual feature length version of The Night the Reindeer died. It's not exactly what Scrooged promised, but it's similar.
Mel Gibson plays a grizzled, beaten-down version of Santa Claus who is first introduced while doing some target shooting on his snowy farm property. There's nothing obviously magical about Santa's place here; he lives in a normal-looking farmhouse with his wife Ruth (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and the only above-ground structures are old barns. Don't worry, there are elves and an impressive workshop around here - and since Santa is struggling financially, he ends up having the elves do some off-season work building equipment for the U.S. military.
Chance Hurstfield plays a scumbag little rich kid named Billy Wenan, who regularly employs the services of an unnamed assassin / enforcer played by Walton Goggins. Billy is such a twerp, he even has Goggins' character abduct a young girl who beat him in the elementary school science fair so he can frighten her into saying she cheated and he can receive that first prize ribbon. Understandably, Billy gets a lump of coal for Christmas. That pisses him off so much that he hires Goggins to murder Santa Claus.
The assassin is already obsessed with Santa, he spends his earnings on a collection of items that were made in Santa's workshop. So he takes the job. He agrees to kill Santa. Now he just has to figure out where that workshop is.
The subject matter is goofy as hell, but the Nelms play it quite straight. A lot of the 96 minute running time centers on Santa dealing with a lack of money and the loss of Christmas spirit, and deciding to make that business arrangement with the military. The assassin's search for, and journey to, Santa's property also eats up the minutes. Don't expect to see that The Night the Reindeer Died action until the last third of the movie, because the Nelms take their time building up to it.
We're in strange days now. Just a few years ago, something like Fatman probably could have only been made as a low budget indie. Now filmmakers can get such a healthy budget for off-the-wall ideas that they can even get well-known actors like Mel Gibson to bring this stuff to life. Fatman moved a little slow for my liking and I was hoping for a bit more from the action (although there were moments when Goggins' rampage through the workshop is chilling to watch), but I find it amazing that this movie even exists.
DASH & LILY: SEASON ONE (2020)
Netflix's teen rom-com series Dash & Lily is probably not a show I would have gotten around to watch any time soon if it weren't for the fact that I'm spending the holidays at the home of the blog's own Priscilla, but since she wanted to watch it, I watched along... And as I watched, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Consisting of eight half-hour episodes, this season of Dash & Lily was quite charming and a breeze to sit through.
The title characters are a pair of New York City teens. Dash (Austin Abrams) is a cynic who hates Christmastime, while never-been-kissed Lily (Midori Francis) is full of the Christmas spirit. Although this show follows the relationship that develops between them, it takes a long time for them to properly meet. They begin interacting through the pages of a notebook with "Do you dare?" written on the cover, stuck on a bookstore shelf beside J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Dash finds the notebook and sees that the mysterious person who left it behind, with pages containing clues to follow and dares to carry out in a quest to discover their identity, must be quirky and interesting enough to be worth knowing. So he writes in the notebook and leaves it for Lily to find. That's how it goes for episode after episode, Dash and Lily taking turns writing to each other in the pages in the notebook and leaving it for the other to find in some pre-determined place in the city.
As Dash and Lily came to care for each other through their writing, I came to care for both of them as well. I was wondering when they would ever have a conversation face-to-face. I was rooting for them to meet and have a happily ever after. I also knew that "happily ever after" is tough to achieve, and I was glad when the show dug into the reality of that and added complications and other characters into the situation.
I was hooked on this show. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and now I'm waiting to hear if there's going to be a second season. If there's not, I'm fine with the ending as is, but if there is another one I'll gladly watch it.
The show is based on a novel by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn, and Levithan and Cohn have written a sequel to their novel, so there is already another Dash and Lily story that a second season could tell.
HARD EIGHT (1996)
It becomes obvious very early on in writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's debut feature Hard Eight (or, as Anderson wanted to call it, Sydney) that the filmmaker was destined for great things. The film opens with an intriguing stretch of dialogue in which veteran gambler Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) finds a down-on-his-luck fellow named John (John C. Reilly) sitting outside a diner in Nevada and offers to give him a cigarette and buy him a cup of coffee. While they talk over cigarettes and coffee, Sydney learns that John went to Las Vegas in hopes of winning $6000 so he can pay for his mother's funeral. That plan didn't work out. So Sydney tells John that he can take him back to Vegas and give him $50, and if he follows Sydney's advice he can earn a bed and a meal - not $6000, but a start.
So after we've had the opportunity to watch Hall and Reilly bounce dialogue off of each other for a while, the film segues into a fascinating sequence in which we watch John earn a bed and a meal from a hotel, and win some money, through a process involving slot machines and a rate card. By the time this sequence is over, we're about 20 minutes deep into the film, and Anderson has already proven that he's a hell of a cinematic storyteller.
From there, the film moves ahead two years to find that Sydney and John are still hanging out, now in Reno - and we see Sydney help another stray, this time a troubled cocktail waitress named Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow). Unfortunately, John and Clementine turn out to be a bad mix, because they're both rather dim characters who make bad decisions and cause the film to go in a dark direction. Things only get worse as time goes on, with a really unpleasant guy named Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) threatening to ruin Sydney's life.
Hard Eight is a typical first feature in some ways. It was made on a lower budget, only has a few characters, and most of the 98 minute running time (apparently Anderson's first cut was an hour longer, which seems quite excessive for this story) is taken up by a handful of scenes with lengthy dialogue exchanges. It's an impressive first feature, though, with a terrific visual style, interesting scenarios, and excellent performances from the cast. In addition to the actors already mentioned, Philip Seymour Hoffman stops by to make a memorable cameo as an obnoxious craps player.
This isn't a very Christmasy movie, but I always think of it as being a Christmas movie. Part of it is set around that time of year, the end credits song is even "Christmastime" by Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, so I suppose it counts.
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