The holiday watches

Kicking off 2024 by closing out 2023 releases.

And, we’re back. 

I hope everyone had a restful holiday season. Ours was enjoyable, with a lot of family gatherings, day trips and celebrations over the course of nearly two weeks. I’m very grateful to work for an employer that closes down between Christmas and New Year’s Day, and I had enough vacation time to tack a few vacation days onto that as well, so I’ve enjoyed an abbreviated work week (and next weekend, with the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, will be another long weekend). 

So, after easing into the work week, I’m also easing back into the routine of writing this newsletter. I’ve got some announcements pending for next week, I hope Perry and I can record one or two We’re Watching Here episodes this month, and I plan to return to Franchise Friday before January concludes. The final stretches of the year tend to take it out of me with the onslaught of releases (see the end for a barrage of recent reviews from CinemaNerdz), and I want to get back into the groove of making this a personal journey of thoughts on movies and pop culture, and maybe even delve a bit more regularly into some more personal and faith-related pieces over the course of the year. But let’s start slow, shall we? 

As could probably be expected, I spent a lot of my time off over the last few weeks catching up on some end-of-the-year releases. I also started viewing a few films as a volunteer screener for a local film festival, but I’m not at liberty to write about those at the moment. So, we’re going to wade in with a few quick looks at some late 2023 films. It was nice to take a few days to catch up on things that I didn’t have to do formal reviews on, and thankfully, I enjoyed all of these to some extent. So, here we go. 

• Of all the movies that I chose to catch up with right after Christmas, I have no clue why Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving was my first. Perhaps, I was still in a holiday mood. More likely, after a few weeks of catching up on prestige pics and uplifting fare, I wanted a pleasure that was a bit guiltier. And Roth’s slasher film definitely fits the bill. I thought his faux trailer for this was a highlight of 2006’s Grindhouse, and I’d heard enough good things about this one to give it a whirl, even if I’m not much of a fan of Roth’s previous work (I still think Hostel is a low point in my moviegoing history).
  
  I kind of hoped Roth would do something subversive and new with the slasher genre or at least bring the scuzzy grindhouse feel to it that he leant to its predecessor. But no, Thanksgiving is a straight-down-the-middle “Dead Teenager Movie,” as Roger Ebert would have called it. But at that, it’s pretty good. It uses a Black Friday stampede as the catalyst to have a man (or woman) in a John Carver mask slice and dice the residents of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the mystery is fairly effective. I think Roth still has problems creating likable protagonists (every teenager in this movie is pretty awful, and most of the adults aren’t too great, either), but he seems to have a bit more affection for them than characters in some of his other films. And, it’s a slasher, not a John Hughes movie. Roth seems most energized when it comes time to dish out the slayings, which are some of the most inventive, shocking and brutal I’ve seen, but delivered with a wink that knows it’s all in bleakly comic fun. Aside from when Scream gives it a poke in the ribs, I’ve pretty much outgrown the slasher movie, so I can’t say I give this a high recommendation. But it’s good at what it is and will please the genre’s fans, and Patrick Dempsey makes a holiday feast out of his Massachusetts accent. 
  

• When it was released to raves in early December, I was disappointed that my schedule didn’t include time to head out for Godzilla Minus One. The film was put out on a limited release schedule that initially was supposed to pull it from theaters after a week or two. But then, the film became a surprise fall hit, and I was delighted to see it still kicking around at my local AMC the week after Christmas. I made it the first movie of a double feature while my kids were burning off holiday energy at rec center camp.
  
  I always tend to be more of a Godzilla fan in theory than in practice. The idea of kaiju mayhem and large-scale destruction appeals to me, but it’s rare that the movies really thrill me once I sit down. I enjoy the original Godzilla for its importance as one of the great nuclear-age movies. I think the recent series of films from Legendary has been hit or miss (and I tend to root for Kong when the two go at it). But while I like the scenes of a giant monster rampaging through a crowded city, I’ve found these movies are traditionally low on characters I want to spend time with or root for.
  
  Takashi Yamazaki’s new film delivers both the large-scale mayhem and spectacle we expect from the Toho movies, while also giving us a very human story of redemption and family to cling to. I was just as invested in the story of Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who abandoned his mission, as I was in the threat posed by Godzilla. Ryunosuke Kamiki creates a character we pity, and his hesitant relationship with a survivor of the air raids and the makeshift family they make with an abandoned child is the heart of the film. The instant you see Shikishima freeze behind the guns when he has the chance to shoot Godzilla, you know what his arc will be, but it doesn’t matter. Kamiki gives us a character to root for, and it turns the idea of Godzilla into a potent metaphor for survivor’s guilt.
  
  As with Roth, Yamazaki doesn’t try to reinvent the genre. This isn’t a subversion of the Godzilla movies – in fact, there’s a sequence in the middle of the film that you could argue is a remake of the 1954 original. There are big monster attacks, outlandish plans from scientists to defeat Godzilla, and destruction on a large scale. But Yamazaki knows how to deliver the hits and also infuse it with a hint of Jaws (the sequences with Shikishima and the boat crew are some of my favorites) and Dunkirk, with civilian boats coming to the rescue in the end. It’s gripping, emotional and hugely entertaining — and made on a $15 million budget. I don’t want the big studios to steal Yamazaki away, but I hope they were taking notes – this is a bigger crowd-pleaser than any big comic book movie of the last year, and one of the most enjoyable times I had at the movies in 2023. 

• I followed up Godzilla by making the day a Japanese double feature, heading across the hall next to see Hayao Miyazaki’s newest (and, quite likely, final) film, The Boy and the Heron. And this is where I have to make a horrible confession to my readers: this was my first experience with Miyazaki. It’s not for a lack of desire; his earlier films were released before I had kids and largely before I was reviewing films, and I just hadn’t caught up.
  
  And I think that put me at a bit of a disadvantage with The Boy and the Heron, a movie I was quite taken with even as I found it hard to access. The animated fantasy follows a young boy in Japan during WWII who moves to his aunt’s house after his mother’s death. There, he encounters a talking heron (who’s a bit of an a-hole), a mysterious castle in the woods, an army of parakeets and more. It’s all rendered in some of the most gorgeous animation I’ve seen, with a story that’s dreamlike and hypnotic, even if it is hard to make a lick of sense of what’s happening.
  
  And I wrestled with that for the first half of the film. Maybe I just wasn’t used to how Miyazaki tells his stories, or maybe it was just the Westerner in me still demanding a three-act structure and a hero’s journey. But I actively resisted the movie for a long time before I finally realized that the movie might not make much sense from a plot perspective, but that it was doing something to me emotionally. And its final passages, so packed with thoughts about mortality, trauma, and the way our flaws clash with our desire to create beauty and meaning, hit me like a ton of bricks even if I didn’t quite understand why. I walked out a bit dazed and moved, and I would like to see the film again now that I know where the journey ends. But first, I think I really want to catch up on Miyazaki’s catalog.
  

• We also got around to seeing Wonka as a family, a movie I’d been mildly curious about. On the one hand, I wouldn’t call myself a huge fan of any of the previous Willy Wonka movies. I understand the iconic nature of Gene Wilder’s performance, but it’s been decades since I’ve seen his take on the character. I flat-out hate the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration from a few years ago. But I’m always curious about new musicals. I think director Paul King’s Paddington movies are the best family movies of the last few years. And I really enjoyed the Matilda musical from last year. All that, and audiences seemed to be enjoying this. So, we popped on a screener the good folks at Warner Brothers sent during awards season, and gave it a whirl.
  
  And…it’s fine. I think King understands exactly how much whimsy, heart and danger to put into a family film and, as with Paddington, he creates a colorful city for his colorful characters to play around in. I think Keegan-Michael Key is a lot of fun as the despicable police chief who grows fatter with every crime he commits and the movie’s digs at capitalism are often sharp and funny. Olivia Colman and Tom Davis have a great time hamming it up as the villains, and I appreciate that the film is funny and inventive when too many prequels and revisits these days are dark, grimy and obsessed with mythology. It’s a perfectly enjoyable family movie.
  
  The problem is with two of the key ingredients to the movies. First off, the songs are fine but instantly forgettable. There’s very little of the wit and catchiness from the Matilda musical or even the pop sensibilities of something like The Greatest Showman. Its two most memorable musical interludes both pull directly from the Wilder movie. And Timothee Chalamet, while a likable and talented young actor, seems adrift, trying way too hard to do what Wilder made look effortless. His wackiness feels forced, and his attempts at silliness seems like he’s aping Jim Carrey in spaces. I like Chalamet, but whimsy doesn’t seem to be his forte.
  
  But still, you could do worse for a family night at the movies. It’s colorful and funny and painless, and weird enough in places (a subplot about milking a giraffe) that it doesn’t feel too much like an IP grab. It’s perfectly adequate.
  

• Finally, I closed out New Year’s Day by watching the documentary Time Bomb Y2K on Max. It’s a piffle about the anxiety surrounding the “Millennium Bug” and the anticlimax that occurred as the clock struck midnight and everything was just fine. It’s compiled solely of clips from that time, with no written narration or talking heads from today, and it’s an interesting, if somewhat shallow, look back at something I remember fairly vividly.
  
  Twenty-four years on from the turn of the century, I’m still not sure whether Y2K was the work of alarmists or if we just addressed everything well enough to avoid catastrophe. I’m sure it was a little bit of both, but the doc doesn’t really seem interested in exploring that question, which I found a bit disappointing. Rather, it’s a look at the cultural upheaval we all felt as Dec. 31, 1999, grew closer and many people became convinced we were at the end of time.
  
  And at that, it’s an interesting watch, even if it pursues so many threads that none of them are explored with any depth. It definitely brings to light how many exploited and monetized fear in the lead up to the year 2000, and how the Y2K anxiety tapped into general fears about the turn of the century and the feeling many had that we were coming to an end of something. Most effectively, it captures the uneasy feelings we have toward technology, and serves as a reminder of just how much of a game-changer the internet was. Today, we take it for granted that we are connected with others around the world and that everything we do is connected to some sort of grid. But it was all new back then, and we feared the worst (look closely, and you can also see a similarity to our current reaction toward artificial intelligence).
  
  There’s a lot here that could be mined for a deeper look, but the film is more a flood of clips and soundbites, some of which are entertaining to revisit (I particularly laughed at everyone’s astonishment over the way President Clinton and Vice President Gore were able to communicate over video – at a rate that would be completely unacceptable today). As a time capsule and piece of cultural curiosity, it’s worth a look. Just don’t look for anything too deep.
  

• Finally, I encourage you to head over to CinemaNerdz to read the deluge of reviews I published just before and after Christmas. Read about how The Boys in the Boat bored me to tears, The Iron Claw emotionally devastated me, Poor Things showed me things I’d never seen before, American Fiction introduced a new voice and gave Jeffrey Wright one of his great performances, and Migration…was a movie I saw, too. Rather than bury you under links, just click on my author page and they’ll all be there. 

And, that’s where I’ll leave you for now! We’ll be back next week with some more thoughts, and I’m looking forward to where this conversation takes us in 2024!