Twelve Lesser-Known Great Christmas Movies for Families
Posted on December 15, 2016 at 8:00 am
I love the Christmas classic movies and watch as many as I can every year. But there are many great Christmas films that don’t get mentioned as often and I like to remind families that these are worth making time for as well.
1. The Nativity Story This sincere and respectful story is a good way to remember that Christmas is about more than presents and parties. “Whale Rider’s” Keisha Castle-Hughes has a shy but dignified and resolute air and she glows believably as the very young woman who is selected as the mother of Jesus. And pre-“Llewyn Davis” and “Force Awakens” Oliver Isaac effectively conveys tenderness, doubt, courage, and transcendence as Joseph.
2. A Christmas Memory Truman Capote’s bittersweet memory of his childhood Christmas making fruitcakes with his elderly cousin, the only relative who cared about him is beautifully filmed with the magnificent Geraldine Page and Capote himself reading the narration. There’s a remake with Patty Duke that is also very good. So is reading the story aloud.
3. Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas The California Raisins guys put together this Christmas special, with the highlight the funniest-ever performance of “Carol of the Bells.”
4. Come to the Stable Loretta Young and Celeste Holm are French nuns trying to raise money to build a hospital. Their faith and goodness transforms those they meet.
5. Little Women “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents” is the first line of this classic novel based on the loving if sometimes tumultuous family of author Louisa May Alcott. The movie opens with an important Christmas lesson about the joy of giving.
6. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Based on the classic book, this stars Loretta Swit as the mother of six rambunctious kids who insist on playing roles in the church pageant.
7. This Christmas I love this movie about a family with five adult children who return home to celebrate Christmas with their mother and youngest brother. The outstanding cast includes Regina King, Idris Elba, Loretta Devine, and Chris Brown. Be sure to watch through the credits to see a great dance number.
8. Desk Set Before Google, companies had human beings to track down information. Katherine Hepburn plays the head of the all-female research department for a television network and Spencer Tracy is the engineer who is installing the company’s first computer, which takes up a whole wall and uses punch cards and vacuum tubes. Sparks fly — and not just in the equipment.
9. Die Hard Bruce Willis plays a cop visiting his estranged wife at her office Christmas party when the building is taken over by bad guys led by Alan Rickman in this action-movie classic.
10. The Polar Express Tom Hanks stars in this animated story based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg about a magical train ride to the North Pole.
11. Home Alone This comedy smash hit stars Macauley Culkin as a little boy who is accidentally left home when his family goes away for the holidays and has to take care of himself and guard the house from a couple of inept thieves. The slapstick is a bit over the top but the message of Christmas is surprisingly touching.
12. Annie The story of the plucky orphan from the comic pages became one of the biggest Broadway musicals of all time and one of its highlights is Christmas with Daddy Warbucks. The made-for-TV version and remake with Quvenzhané Wallis are also fun.
One of Hollywood’s brightest stars celebrates his first century today. Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch on December 9, 1916) tells his story in The Ragman’s Son and Let’s Face It. He is #17 on the American Film Institute list of Hollywood’s greatest leading men, with a range of roles from “Spartacus” to Vincent Van Gogh. As shown in “Trumbo,” he also showed enormous personal integrity and courage in defying the blacklist. He was also a producer who originally bought the rights to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” intending to play the lead himself, and ultimately turned the project over to his son (Oscar-winner Michael Douglas), who produced it with Jack Nicholson in the role. Celebrate his centenary by taking a look at some of his classic films, but don’t overlook his gift for light comedy in movies like “For Love or Money.”
No Small Parts: Learning More About Character Actors
Posted on November 27, 2016 at 8:00 am
I love character actors — from the silent era through the present, they are some of my favorite performers. I’ve written about the outstanding documentaries, That Guy…Who Was in That Thing and That Gal…Who Was In That Thing, which show the dedication, talent, and frustration of roles where you have to provide all the exposition and you have to be perfect every time so they can use the one take where the star was at his or her best.
So I was delighted to find Brandon Hardesty’s “No Small Parts,” a web series devoted to these outstanding actors. Short versions appear on the Internet Movie Database, but the full-length episodes are really worth watching.
Kim Novak is a sexy witch who will lose her powers if she falls in love in “Bell Book and Candle.” The outstanding cast includes Jimmy Stewart, Jack Lemmon, and Elsa Lanchester.
Angelica Huston is a very scary witch who can turn humans into mice in Roald Dahl’s “The Witches.”
Meryl Streep was a singing witch in Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.”
Copyright Disney 1937Jerry Roberts and Doug Heller are hosting a new podcast called “The Cave of Wonders,” a loving tribute to the special magic of Disney films. Episode one “looks into the tao of Disney and what it means to us and to our culture. Then, a discussion of Disney’s first animated feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Roberts and Heller answered my questions about the podcast.
What do you mean, the “tao” of Disney?
The ‘tao’ of Disney refers to the fact that Walt’s vision seems to have written the universal language for the animated feature. What has sprung from it is the central core of how animated features are made and ultimately what we come to expect from them. In truth, there’s Disney and then there’s everyone else. It seems to stand above the other studios in terms of their output.
What elements of Walt Disney’s original vision are most evident in the studio’s productions today?
Today they are still holding on to the emotional levels and character developments that Walt put into place. The original vision of Walt Disney can be seen most evidently in his first five animated features; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. The emotional levels are present even in films like Frozen and Zootopia but also the desire to go the extra mile. It’s the writing that has maintained Disney’s vision. Characters and ideas come first, not just the desire to jump onto whatever is popular at the moment.
You can tell me — who is your all-time favorite Disney animated character? Live action character? Song?
Uh-boy. The Disney company is 93 years old and they’ve made how many movies? I really can’t even begin to list the characters and songs that are my favorites. There isn’t one, there’s shouldn’t be. Disney has such a rich history with its characters and its music that choosing just one is impossible.
Will Disney ever return to hand-drawn animation?
At this point, no. Disney tried nine years ago to test the market to see if it would work again with The Princess and the Frog but it didn’t do as well as they had hoped. CG is the new landscape and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
Which Disney movie is the scariest?
For me, the scariest Disney picture was always Pinocchio. Concept terror, of course. I can’t imagine a more frightening scenario than bad children being turned into donkeys and sent off to work in salt mines and circuses. That’s a horrifying idea! They are punished, essentially, forever. They can’t talk so their parents think that they have effectively disappeared off the face of the Earth. I didn’t see this film when I was a kid, but if I had the message would have been with me forever. Behave yourself!
The movie that made people cry?
I’m going to say Bambi for the death of his mother, but I can’t imagine anyone not being touched by Dumbo’s late night visit to his mother’s cage after she’s been locked up. At the moment moment when little Dumbo wipes his tears on his mother’s trunk I defy anyone with a heartbeat to keep a dry eye.
How do you do a podcast about such a visual medium?
Conversation and lots of it. You speak as if the listener knows what you’re talking about. Doug and I assume that our listeners have already seen the film that we are talking about. We speak of the visuals in a specific way, I don’t think there’s quite a difficulty in that. It’s like talking about movies with your friends.
If you could inspire your audience to check out one overlooked Disney gem, what would it be?
The Rescuers Down Under. I know why the movie was overlooked in 1990 but I’m not sure why it continues to get overlooked today. Most people don’t know that this film came out between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, and even fewer know that it had the sad misfortune of opening on November 16, 1990, the exact same day as the release of Home Alone. That’s really too bad because this movie works on so many levels, I hate to think that anyone is overlooking it. The animation in this film is gorgeous, and the story is beautifully told as well. It’s a great adventures. It’s got great action scenes, a great villain voiced by George C. Scott, the backgrounds are breathtaking. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s a fantastic adventure film. Why are we overlooking this one?
