Your Christmas Movies! Whatcha' Watchin' this Christmas season?

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Home Alone (1990)

A laugh out loud Christmas tradition with some wonderfully funny dialogue to complement the scenes of mayhem. In particular i love this exchange between Kevin's mum as played by Catherine O'Hara and John Candy's Gus Polinski as she hitches a ride home with Gus's Polka band.

Kate McCallister : Have you ever gone on vacation and left your child home?

Gus Polinski : No, no. But I did leave one at a funeral parlor once.

Gus Polinski : Yeah, it was awful. The wife was distraught and we left the little tyke there in the funeral parlor all day. All day. You know, we went back at night and apparently he had been alone all day with the corpse. He was okay though, after two, three weeks he came around and started talking again...

The Blu-ray looks so much better than the dvd releases which appeared to be upscaled from vhs all these years.

[trebor8273]

My first viewing but will be plenty more, not hard too see why many say this is their favourite version of a Christmas Carol this is helped by Simms wonderful performance who is aided by the likes of Michael Horden, George Cole,Ernest Thesiger and Hattie Jacques in various roles, the atmosphere is helped greatly by being in black and white.


Now watching.

[MrBarlow]

Scrooge. 1970.

Aside from the Alistair Sim version, this one is always played on the television, Albert Finney plays the bitter miser in this musical version alongside Sir Alec Guiness who played Marley and hat a bit of a bad time in the role. Kenneth Moore plays the Ghost of Christmas Present and Edith Evans as the Ghost of Christmas Past. There are some good musical numbers that can be entertaining to all, even Anton Rodgers thanking Scrooge while dancing on his coffin can still be a laugh.

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[nicholasrope]

Daddy's Home 2

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg take their families including Fathers, John Lithgow and Mel Gibson to a Winter Cabin where some humorous mishaps occur. It's a rather enjoyable flick.

The Grinch

There are roles that people are born to play and Jim Carey as The Grinch is one of them. One of the better Xmas Movies out there with a early role for Taylor Momson (Before Pretty Reckless)

Office Christmas Party

Decent but far fetched Adult Comedy which sees T.J. Miller throw the biggest Christmas Party in order to get Business Deal. Jennifer Aniston excels as the mean Boss/Sister.

[MrBarlow]

Santa Claus Is Comin' T Town. 1970.

A mailman tells the story of Santa Claus to some children.

I totally forgot that this even existed, saw it when I was primary school maybe twice, three times at the most. Fred Astaire provides the voice of the mailman and brings along his singing talents as well. Mickey Rooney provides the voice on Kris Kringle and Paul Frees as the greedy Burgermeister Meisterburger. This is one of those jolly happy kids/family animation film that lasts under a hour but entertaining.

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[MrBarlow]

Rabid. 1977.

Somewhat sequel as people claim it is to Cronenberg's sexual craving experiment gone wrong film Shivers, instead of a parasite this time it's the contagion Rabies.

Cronenberg teams up with producer Ivan Reitman for a second time for this low budget horror that does show but can't help notice the green foam at the mouth and grey ish face make up but does still entertain even with Marilyn Chambers who was hired to give the movie a bit more sex appeal, why not hire a 70s adult film star to appear in a horror.

The acting may not be at it's best, the main stars seem to put a lot of effort into the film where as those with small roles seem to be a bit wooden and not very enthusiastic but with a good amount of killing even with a Santa Claus getting shot does make good entertainment.

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[Demdike@Cult Labs]

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

It's a wonderful last forty five minutes that elevates this film to classic status.

Those final scenes never fail to bring a tear to my eye.

[MrBarlow]

Lethal Weapon. 1987.

The start of the buddy cop for Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as the unlikely duo who formed a partnership and friendship. Gary Busey was certainly in his prime before going off the rails a little bit and Mitchell Ryan as the general. This does have a good appearance by Tom Atkins who gets in to deep. Richard Donner done a great directing job with this and made it his own franchise with many laughs and good action scenes along the way.

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[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)

Dan Stevens plays Charles Dickens who is suffering from hard ship following the failure of his last three books. He decides to write a story and publish it himself and the film shows how the lives of the people he meets in Victorian London inspire him to write perhaps his greatest novel - A Christmas Carol.

Similar in a way to the BBC's excellent series Dickensian in how it reinvents Dickens writing, this film features many ideas and nods to other Dickens works and it's fun spotting them all, but at the heart of things is of course A Christmas Carol and the way it plays out here in an entertaining revisionist way.

Unfortunately something about the film prevents it being what i would call classic Christmas viewing. I can't put my finger on what exactly, but it's the sort of film you could revisit every few years rather than annually.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Several festive faves have had a rest this year such as Christmas with the Kranks, Elf, Deck the Halls, Bad Santa, Sint, The Bishop's Wife and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Annoyingly i meant to watch films i'd only seen once previously such as A Christmas Story (1983) and A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011) but i guess time has more or less run out now as tomorrow i'll be giving a first time watch to The Bells of St Mary's and the usual Christmas Vacation, finishing off with Scrooge and A Ghost Story for Christmas with Christopher Lee. With a break at ten thirty to watch The Mezzotint on BBC2.