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‘Tis the season for streamers, and also for streaming! Get amongst the Christmas cheer with your nearest screen. (Image: T Tiller)
‘Tis the season for streamers, and also for streaming! Get amongst the Christmas cheer with your nearest screen. (Image: T Tiller)

Pop CultureDecember 2, 2020

What I learned about Christmas by watching too many Christmas movies

‘Tis the season for streamers, and also for streaming! Get amongst the Christmas cheer with your nearest screen. (Image: T Tiller)
‘Tis the season for streamers, and also for streaming! Get amongst the Christmas cheer with your nearest screen. (Image: T Tiller)

It’s December. You know what that means? Christmas is here. You know what else that means? Christmas movies are here. Sam Brooks has watched all the Christmas movies on Neon, here’s what he learned from them.

‘Tis the jolly season! There’s no better time of year than to turn up the aircon, chuck a beer in the ice bucket, and watch some Christmas films made in countries where it actually snows during Christmas. (Note to people making Christmas films: shoot a few down here! You’ll make a killing!)

There’s a tried and true formula to a good Christmas movie. Obviously, it has to be set during Christmas. But! A successful Christmas movie also has to make you feel good, it has to have a love story where the obstacles to happiness are never so threatening, and it absolutely must fill you up with joy, not drain you of it. 

The key, secret ingredient, to a good Christmas movie is that it should teach you something about the silly season. For the past month, I’ve been making my way through all the Christmas movies on Neon – and between Christmas Bounty, A Christmas Cruise, Christmas in Montana, Christmas on the River, A Christmas Reunion, A Kiss for Christmas, The Magical Christmas Shoes, A Christmas Princess, Last Christmas, Black Christmas, Four Christmas, Homemade Christmas, The Best Christmas Ball Ever, Candy Cane Christmas, The Christmas Cabin, Homemade Christmas, Christmas Harmony, A Christmas Break, Spotlight on Christmas, Twinkle All The Way, Fred Claus, The Polar Express and Hustlers, which is absolutely a Christmas movie if you think about it, there’s a lot of them – to glean what I can learn about the silly season from these films that are so warm and fuzzy that there should be a section for them on the RSPCA website.

In the spirit of giving, I will share these learnings with you. They range from the obvious to the bewildering to the heartwarming. But one thing unites them all: The spirit of (filmed) Christmas.

There’s our Real (Christmas) Housewife, Denise Richards, changing her life entirely.

If there’s any time to have a major life upheaval, it’s the week before Christmas.

Christmas isn’t just the merriest time of year, it’s also the busiest! And it seems like everybody at Christmas decides that it’s the right time to change everything about their life. Have a job with a sustainable, clear career path? Start a business you have no experience in. Have a comfortable, secure place to live? Throw it away, you belong to the jolly season now! Got a significant other? Make them your insignificant past.

All of these things happen in A Christmas Reunion, where Denise Richards upheaves her Big City Life to run her recently deceased aunt’s bakery just a few days before Christmas even though she has to close The Big Account. Even reading that sentence stresses me out, but Denise will do as Denise does.

Your boss will be a dick around Christmas time, to give you more drama.

If you happen to be a boss in a Christmas film then I’m sorry, but statistics show you’re probably a dick. A dickboss, if you will. You will be wanting your employee to do a ridiculous amount of work over Christmas, even though they have their own dramas, romantic or family, sometimes both, to deal with. Take Sam (no relation), an efficiency expert and the main character in the movie Christmas in Montana. Her boss sends her to Montana (of course), expecting her to fix up a man’s ranch within about a week. The week before Christmas. Because he’s a dickboss.

If you happen to be an employee at Christmas time, first off: well done. It’s 2020. Things could be worse! Second off: Be prepared for your boss to ask unrealistic things of you and not understand that it’s the Christmas season, despite the fact that it happens every year and they might be reasonable otherwise. 

‘But it’s Christmas!’ is a reasonable response to any of life’s inconveniences.

Hot tip: If you want to get out of any situation, just say, ideally in a quivering voice, “But it’s Christmas!” Bonus points if your eyes are watering with sad juice. It’s perhaps the most uttered line in any Christmas film, and it works every goddamned time. It happens in all of the aforementioned films – bar one Jennifer Lopez-related exception – and I recommend saying it the next time you order a drink in a bar. See how far it gets you.

Look at those Christmas love interests!

If you want to meet a kind-faced man who you will fall in love with nearly immediately, Christmas is the season.

Ladies and otherly identified, if you’re single around Christmas then never fear, because chances are you’ll meet the love of your life and be inextricably entangled with him forever! He will have a kind face, be witty enough to make you laugh but not upstage you, and accept all of your weirdness.

Anything, absolutely anything, can be Christmas themed if you try hard enough.

A Christmas Cruise, which stars Vivica A. Fox as a writer whose millennial-obsessed boss (see above for: dickbosses) wants her to write about a sexy Christmas cruise, features a Santa themed stripper. I have not stopped thinking about who would want this and why, but I’ve never been more grateful that my mother refused to let me believe in Santa, because no white dude who works one night a year was going to take credit for gifts she paid for.

If you come from a small town, you will go back there for Christmas and never return.

Let these films serve as a warning to you – especially Christmas on the River, about a town which comes together to celebrate Christmas… and apparently nothing else? You do you, the River. 

If you come from a town which has no more than one set of traffic lights and you go home for Christmas, you might as well put down a lease and tie yourself to the ground. You’re never getting out. [Insert quaint town name here] has you now. You better get used to the word folks, because you’ll be hearing it a lot, and sometimes it will come out of your own mouth.

Yes, this is a Christmas movie.

Bounty hunters are a real thing.

This isn’t specifically Christmas related, but A Christmas Bounty – which follows the travails of a bounty hunter who gets reined back into the business for one more job – taught me that bounty hunters are a very real thing, beyond Boba Fett and Dog The. The bounty that they hunt is generally some sort of unpaid debt, usually to a bondsman, and has nothing to do with Bounty Bars. Which is a shame.

‘Christmas is light. Light defined by darkness.’

While this sounds like an observation you might read on a teenager’s tumblr, it’s actually a line from A Christmas Temp, where an artist winds up falling for a hotel manager who hires her to create a Christmas-themed display. I can’t figure out what it means, but I want it to be my new ‘live, laugh, love.’

Insert your face on the right.

Henry Golding will fall in love with you because of your plucky, messy charm.

Okay, this one is maybe more specific to Last Christmas and the fact that Emilia Clark looks like Emilia Clark, but a man can dream!

Christmas is for everyone.

No matter your job, no matter where you come from, no matter what your drama is, Christmas is for you. There is also already probably a film about it. No time like the present to dig in.

All of the films listed above are available to stream on Neon (look out for the Christmas rail). Click here to learn more, and get ready to get jolly.

Keep going!
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Pop CultureDecember 2, 2020

Why that last episode of The Mandalorian was so good

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That Star Wars show just had an episode that was a stone cold killer. According to José Barbosa, you can thank director Dave Filoni’s animation background for that.

[Spoilers for episode five of The Mandalorian follow, if you care about that sort of thing]

The year 2019 brought many TV streaming joys including that second glorious season of Fleabag and the bonkers but sad Russian Doll, to name just a couple.

But for sci-fi fans, nothing could compare to the buzz of moving between episodes of Watchmen and The Mandalorian as they rolled out. The former was chiefly a story about layers of meaning and history; the latter was stringently unconcerned with thematic layers other than exactly what it is showing you right this minute

That’s not a criticism of The Mandalorian – reasonably uncomplicated yet well made Star Wars fare is a balm after the ridiculous thrashing of the recent feature films (although I maintain The Last Jedi was probably the most interesting Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back, but its promise was squandered by the final film of the trilogy). 

The Rocketeer prepares for lift off!

If you’re looking for concrete examples of why The Mandalorian works so well, look no further than the latest episode, ‘Chapter 13: The Jedi’. It’s a high point for the series and it mostly comes down to basic pillars of storytelling as exemplified by writer/director (and series executive producer) Dave Filoni. And it’s surprising, at least to me, how much of it comes back to principles regularly employed in animation, where Filoni has worked for years.

The first is that often cited maxim that a successful character has to be recognisable in silhouette. In general every major character in The Mandalorian has a distinct profile: the bucket head and thin neck of the titular Mando; Baby Yoda (or Grogu as he shall henceforth be know) and his long elf ears; even Peli’s (Amy Sedaris) super curly perm –  all are designed to be read in an instant no matter where the character is placed in relation to the camera. 

(It’s interesting to note how the strongest design is reserved for the good guys. The bad guys are mostly baldy humans in cloaks; even the big bad Moff Gideon is just a slightly more chunky cloak person.)

A hat containing director Dave Filoni.

That clarity of design extends to The Mandalorian’s set design and general staging. Even though the cinematography of ‘The Jedi’ is somewhat desaturated you can easily read the characters and their positions within the environment. Take the opening scene, in which fan favourite Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) cuts through the armed scouts of magistrate Morgan Elsbeth. The action takes place within the misty remains of a forest, hundreds of burnt trunks thrusting into the sky. It’s a striking backdrop, but one that allows us to see all the characters – apart from Ahsoka, who uses the mist to her advantage, slipping in and out of the trees to ambush the scouts. Here movement – key to cinematic composition and directing the viewer’s eye – comes into play. Waving two great big white lightsabers also helps. 

The arrangement of people within their setting is so well planned that even the most drab settings – like a wintry, bare-branched forest – become beautiful. It’s not hard to see how Filoni’s animation background informed the choices here.

The introduction of Ahsoka Tano ranks up there with Joss Whedon at his best (for an example, see the one-shot crew introduction scene in Serenity). Ahsoka is a long established character in the Star Wars animated universe – she emerged as a character during Filoni’s tenure at the helm of The Clone Wars – but The Mandalorian can’t assume viewers know who she is. Thus ‘The Jedi’ begins with the forest scene, which shows us that she knows how to handle a lightsaber. 

Then, in her conversation with Morgan Elsbeth outside the town’s gate, we see she’s also extremely capable in one on one negotiation. Morgan does the old “I’ll kill innocent townspeople if you don’t stop” villain gambit. But Ahsoka’s been around too long to fall for that. She flips it back onto Morgan: she’s already killing the townspeople, she has one day to decide whether to give Ahsoka the information she wants or she’ll come back.

The rest of the story is a pleasing series of minor story set ups and pay offs: a character who helps out early on is elevated to head of the village, signalling that things will definitely change for the townspeople, and Baby Yoda/Grogu’s obsession with that round doohickey on the Raven Claw’s control panel comes back to help and then hinder the chances of Ahsoka training him in the ways of the force. 

In addition: the strung up townspeople we saw before are freed by the Mandalorian while Ahsoka distracts and dispatches Morgan’s army in the back alleys of the town. A perfect example of showing, not telling, the audience why the super bad-ass Jedi needed help: she couldn’t fight and stop townspeople being executed at the same time.

The final battle between Ahoska and Morgan is genuinely exciting and a good demonstration of the rule that a fight scene should tell you something about the characters and the story. It’s played out more as a stop-start testing of defences than the usual whirlybird Star Wars lightsaber fight, with its beats played out on the actors’ faces. Morgan is able to disarm Ahoska and remove one of her lightsabers from the fight; the Jedi, usually unfazed and cucumber-cool, is visibly worried. When I first watched this fight I was singing its praises, but on a second watch I’m slightly less entranced by it. In technical terms it doesn’t land for me: Rosario Dawson isn’t quite selling the saber swings and hits, and I’m not sure her foot work is all that convincing. But in terms of story and character it’s an exciting conclusion and Dawson is excellent as Ahoska. Roll on the spinoff series.   

Other small gripes are some of the line direction which has actors clumsily pausing in the middle of sentences. When the Mandalorian is required to show hesitation or unwillingness he does it in the most obvious way possible: “Wait here, I’ll … go get him”. While the awkwardness isn’t helped by the lack of a face to help him emote, it still comes across as something you might hear in a first reading. The dialogue in the series is so stripped back, in keeping with the overall vibe of the show, that I wish there was at least a touch of flair here and there. 

And what exactly happened between Ahsoka and Morgan? The last we see of them is Ahoska with her lightsaber at Morgan’s throat. Did the Jedi get her information? Did she nip off Morgan’s head or is Morgan slapped in chains in the dungeon? Morgan’s fate isn’t immediately essential to the story and it’s enough to know Ahsoka bested her in battle, but y’know … throw us a bone here, Filoni. 

Ultimately though, ‘The Jedi’ is the strongest statement of intent The Mandalorian has achieved thus far. And that’s mostly thanks to Dave Filoni applying the skills and story approach he’s honed in his years in animation.

Season 2 of The Mandalorian is on Disney+ on Fridays.

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