Arbitrary Numbers: Top # Christmas Movies (in my collection)

Holiday times are upon us!  As I run around shopping for presents and planning parties and getting ready for Christmas wrestling this weekend, I find I am running out of time to just sit and watch films, even less to head to the movie theatre.  So I though I'd look about my collection, and the holiday spirit hit me!  I have so many wonderful things I own and want to watch in time for Christmas, and I know I won't have enough time!  So I decided I'll go ahead and just do an Arbitrary Numbers so I can talk about as many as I can as soon as I could so that you all can try to find them and add them to your shopping carts and get them just in time for the Holidays!  So let's begin this special Christmas task!

The Top 7 Christmas Movies 

(in my collection)

((that I feel like talking about))

Twas the Night Before Christmas

I really love Rankin and Bass cartoons.  Their claymation stuff gets a lot of attention, but their cartoons are especially ... special for me.  The Hobbit, the Last Unicorn, these were for me the first forays into my favorite genre, just as I was reading the Hobbit and the Belgariad and the Dragonlance books.  The Rankin and Bass Christmas stuff is probably even more well known, but I want to talk about my favorite one, which like I said, is animated.

Twas the Night Before Christmas is a fun musical addition to the poem, talking about a clockmaker trying to help the town but everything gets screwed up because of the mice in his house, who are anthropomorphic (big plus for my viewing as a kid).  The entire special, which is not long, ends with the poem itself.  I love this little thing, and am so happy to have it in my collection.  It isn't perfect, it's short, and the animation is probably too off-putting or "ugly" for some I suspect.  But like I said, I love it.

Grade: B++

It is very sad to know that Arthur Rankin Jr. had passed away this January.  I didn't even hear about it until recently.  Thank you very much for this little special, and so many others that touched my heart, as well as basically everyone else's.  RIP.

Ernest Saves Christmas

I talked about this in my machine gun style review RIGHT HERE.  Go check that out, because this is great.

Grade: B++

Mickey's Christmas Carol and The Muppet Christmas Carol

I bunched these two together because they are my favorite Christmas Carols on film!  These are filled with music and characters and wonder.  But they also do not miss the tone of the book, the ghost story and morality story.  You see Mickey cry for goodness sakes!  I love them both and watch them both every year.

I should also point out that I have the blu-ray of Mickey's and the DVD of Muppet.  Why?  Well the new blu-ray of Mickey's has a bunch of other winter and Christmas specials that make the whole thing a wonderful collection piece to own, only missing one Donald Duck short I remember from my childhood that I wish I had, which is hardly a knock for all the other things it adds.  But why didn't I upgrade Muppet Christmas Carol?  Because the blu-ray is missing a song!  A beautiful song sung by Michael Caine and Scrooge's lost love.  It is amazing and heartwrenching and beautiful and necessary in my eyes for the story.  You see, it isn't in widescreen, so the blu-ray just didn't include it.  But it is in fullscreen, which I can watch with an option on my DVD.  So there you go!  I'm sure you were all curious.

Grade: A+++ for both

Rare Exports

Wanna watch a weird quirky adventure film about Christmas and demons and hunting and little boys and Norway?  Rare Exports is a beautiful film.  It is a touching film.  And it is an exciting film!  Most people talk about Die Hard when they need a Christmas action movie, or Gremlins for a Christmas fun comedy horror.  But both of those films are really only kind of Christmas-y.  Rare Exports hits all the buttons those two films do, but it is all so much more about Christmas.  Rare Exports should not replace either, but it should sit beside them!

Included on the blu-ray are the two original shorts that brought the full film into being.  Both shorts are great, with the second being my absolute favorite, and are both a little more tongue-in-cheek and crazy.  As an entire package, it has become a yearly tradition, and I love sharing it with people.  So I'm sharing it with you.  See it!  Find it!  Do it!!

Grade: A++

Christmas Eve on Sesame Street

I feel like I talk about this special all the time.  There are actually two versions of the Sesame Street special for Christmas that came out at the same time.  THIS one is perfect.  The other one is garbage.  This one is about a sweet story of Big Bird worried that Santa can't fit down the chimneys, it is filled with wonder, it is filled with amazing music and great jokes, it has Bert and Ernie being ridiculous and doing the Gift of the Magi, it has Oscar singing a song about hating Christmas, it has the most amazing pratt fall sequence just ... at ALL.  *sigh*

I love this little special.  Even better, it is on DVD, and I'm pretty sure it can be found at Best Buys just around.  So take a look!  You will not regret it.

Grade: A++

Now, I could talk about a lot more movies and specials I own that mean something to me and I love watching, like Jingle all the Way or National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or Reindeer Games, which are all great and different for a bunch of reasons.  And who knows, I may just write reviews for them anyway later on this month.  But I really want to talk about a cool documentary I bought for my wife as a gift instead to close this little article out ...

I am Santa Claus

In this documentary, we follow five men, all "real beard Santas."  We see their life struggles, their regular world life, and we even get to see one man's quest to be a good Santa.  That man is Mick Foley, Hardcore Legend.  This documentary is not for families.  It is very adult.  And it is very touching.  

We watch four men, all vastly different, talk about what it means to be Santa Claus to them, all of them from different parts of the country, all from different walks of life, and all of them real people.  This isn't a "happy endings" kind of documentary.  This followed all of these guys for one year and cuts between and juxtaposes them as the film goes along.  You are allowed into their lives and get to see their hardships, their delights, just ... life.  It was a great documentary, and really touching as well as sad and poignant.  I cannot recommend it enough, and I am NOT a documentary person.

Grade: A+

There we go!  Now, I gotta go wrap more presents and other stuff.  Oh, did I tell you, I'm hosting a Dirty Santa party?  Do you wanna know what that is?  Well you are in luck, because I will be explaining it entirely and showing pictures of our game and party in ONE WEEK, on the 18th, which is one week before Christmas!  See ya then for that!  Also look forward to lots more Christmas reviews, wrestling reviews this Friday and on Monday, and a lot of great End of Year reviews!  Buh-bye!

IHAO on ... John Wick

The best thing about genre films is that they have certain rules they tend to follow.  And then what makes those films great are the little things.  The little extra miles, the little extra details, the little bits.  I cling to those things in film.  My favorite films tend to be genre films that focus on the little things.  Pain & Gain, Labyrinth, Snatch, Robocop ... and John Wick could easily join that group of favorites.

John Wick does so many things right, I hate to talk about any of them.  It is another first time director, though he has done a LOT of second unit and more importantly a lot of stunt work.  He was Keanu's stunt double in a lot of films, in fact.  And it is a very new writer as well, who wrote a very fun script filled with nice ideas and just fantastic scenes and fun dialogue.  The action in this film is incredible.  Some action films are gorefests, but the violence, while prevalent, is not the focus.  The character and his quest, that is what this film cares about, while giving you thrilling but never disturbing action ... except for one sequence very early on.  One heartwrenching sequence that is making me cry this second thinking about it again, even though it has been hours since I watched the movie, and I cried multiple times in theater watching the film and talking about it after because of this sequence.

The action is phenomenal.  And you see Keanu doing a LOT of it.  A lot of the driving, most of the fighting and gun play, is all Keanu, which adds legitimacy to the film and makes it all the more awesome.  On top of that, there are so many tiny acting choices that Keanu makes that elevate what could just be a simple revenge action film and makes it even better.  And it isn't just Keanu.  This film is stacked with great actors: Ian McShane, Michael Nyqvist, Willam Dafoe, Daniel Bernhardt, Kevin Nash, John Leguizamo, Lance Reddick!  Basically, every single role in the film is filled with a great actor, or a legitimate one at least.  And all of them bring that little extra to the table.

The story here is a simple one: John Wick has had his entire life come to a halt when the woman he loves dies of disease.  He gets hope through a simple gift, but an entitled mafia kid ruins all of that, not knowing who John Wick is.  And John Wick spends the rest of the film getting his revenge.

I ... loved this movie.  It is the best straight action movie I've seen this year, hands down.  I implore everyone to see it, action fan or not, because it is a great movie.  It has a hard to sit through moment in the beginning, which I feel was an earned one in the script, but hard to sit through nonetheless.  Damn it, I'm crying again.  Stupid emotional action movie filled with great everything from music to shots to storyboards to acting to direction to editing to EVERY THING IN THIS MOVIE IS GREAT!

Grade: A+++

IHAO on ... Snowpiercer

Not too long ago, I started watching a new youtube series called Every Frame a Painting, which is an editor's view on film.  He talks about a lot of great stuff in there, and I highly suggest watching his stuff.  He did an episode on Snowpiercer two weeks ago, and I was intrigued.  Because I'll be honest, it looked stupid.  Nuclear winter kills almost everything on the planet, the only survivors are on a train that navigates the whole world and never stops running, and has been like that for 18 years.  That sounds stupid.  Then I started noticing the things involved.

It is a french graphic novel, directed by the super talented Bong Joon-ho, a Korean director who made Memories of Murder and The Host (not the crappy Twilight one, the Korean Kaiju horror film), and stars Tilda Swinton, Chris Evans, John Hurt, and Ed Harris, plus Octavia Spencer and Song Kang-ho (an AMAZING Korean actor, like ... 9 Korean Best Actor awards).  This is ... how did they get everyone involved?

Let me tell ya, it is because this movie is as close to perfect as you can get with that ridiculous premise.  Science fiction is always about allegory.  Children of Men was a pretty movie that had really stupid messages and allegory.  Snowpiercer hits its mark perfectly.  It talks about what life is worth, class systems, religious terrorism, law versus choice, perception of reality, and all sorts of other things.  And you would think that a film talking about all of those things would end up being crazy pretentious on top of it all, but this film is incredibly deftly handed.  Bong Joon-ho is very very good.  The film is funny when it needs to be, exciting, tense, thrilling, horrific, incredibly heartwrenchingly sad, abundantly triumphant!  It goes through all these emotions in a smart, logical way that makes this film just an amazing watch.

The acting in this movie is across the board great, from every single character and even the extras.  Tilda Swinton, who is not an actress I like, knocks it out of the park with an incredible performance.  Chris Evans, who has proven he is a good leading man, plays an incredibly dense leading protagonist character, and has a fantastic monologue and some great scenes with John Hurt and Song Kang-ho.  The film does an incredible job of seeding ideas without straight dialogue.  Many films think that storytelling and dialogue are one and the same.  Gone Girl did a great job of doing storytelling without doing dialogue.  But Snowpiercer is able to implant ideas in our minds without ever saying the words.  It allows us to make logical leaps, then plays on those leaps so we better understand the world and the film.  It was crazy how many of us viewing it together all made the same leaps without ever talking to each other or the film having a character directly say it.

Snowpiercer may just be the best made film I've seen all year, right up there with Guardians of the Galaxy.  It is certainly a new favorite.  I cannot cannot suggest this enough.  If you can buy into its premise and allow the film to take you on its journey, you will not be disappointed.

Grade: A+++