A Christmas Movie A Day

My friend Lance has amazing taste in movies but he hates the internet, so I’m posting his recommendations here.

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

The Godfather Part II (1974)

Today’s themes: Family, Betrayal, Vengeance, Immigrants, Murder, The American Dream

The Godfather Part II (1974) begins with the cold-blooded murder of Vito Corleone’s entire family. The three-hour and twenty-minute film follows the stories of two members of the Corleone family, patriarch Vito’s (Robert De Niro) introduction to a life of crime and wealth, and his youngest son Michael’s (Al Pacino) rise to infamy and cold, calculated, absolute control. These stories, spanning decades, are woven together through themes rather than actions, and compose one epic tale of sorrow and loneliness.

It’s impossible to separate this sequel from the film that precedes it, of course, and if you have the time, viewing both in one long, sumptuous, bloody binge is well worth your time, but this film is the better of the two. 1972’s The Godfather illustrates how war hero and reluctant Mafia Don Michael comes to assume the power he wields in this film, and is by comparison relatively straightforward and simple to follow. This film attempts - and succeeds - to more deeply explain the historical dynamics that lead to one family’s rise to power, and its fall from any pretense of moral balance.

These two films showcase the skill and perseverance of writer-producer-director Francis Ford Coppola, to whom Paramount assigned absolute control. After the success of The Godfather, the studio started work on a sequel, signing on all of the original (surviving) cast and giving Coppola a budget of $5 million that ballooned to $18 million by the time the film’s nine-month shoot was done. Perhaps most importantly from a visual perspective, Coppola retained master cinematographer Gordon Willis, who had cast a literal shadow over the first film with his insistence that the film should look as dark as its subject, and Mario Puzo once again assisted on the story and script.

The film is also a showcase for an acting style that came to dominate film starting in the 70’s. Actors were now being trained to work to the camera rather than to an audience. Voices were hushed, gestures were softened, and they began to rely on facial expression and closeness rather than the broader projection that the stage requires. The camera is pushed into the conversation as a participant rather than an observer which lends an intimacy to the scenes and makes the viewer an accomplice.

Coppola said he wanted to make a film about a father and son told from the same point of view, and from the same age, and with the same challenges. He didn’t want to simply repeat the success of The Godfather by repeating its story. We watch this family’s ascension and fall in parallel paths, able to see the decisions and reasons why each man chose those paths, and what price was paid. 

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Adam’s Rib (1949)

Today’s themes: Love and anger, Right and wrong, He and she, Four of a perfect pair

When everything comes together just right, it’s a feeling like no other. Somehow, in some small but magical way, even if you can’t find words to explain it, you can tell when the Bolognese came out delicious, but not like that other time when it was perfect. From a collection of pictures of the same thing within split-seconds of each other, you can pick out the perfect one.

Adam’s Rib (1949) is a case of a great script, a great director, and a great cast somehow and miraculously aligning all at once and in perfect harmony. It no doubt helps when the script, by married couple Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon (yes, that Ruth Gordon), was written for the stars, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, starring in it. Then, sprinkle on top the carefully loose film direction of George Cukor and a supporting cast that includes Judy Holliday, Tom Ewell, and David Wayne and it’s almost impossible for this film to find a bad note.

The film follows the ups and downs of a courtroom comedy between married lawyers defending, on one side, the rule of law itself while being opposed by the undeniable sexism of American culture. If a man defends his marriage and honor by shooting the other man sleeping with his wife he’s the hero, but if a woman does the same thing she’s the villain. 

When I mentioned Cukor’s carefully loose direction, what I mean is that he makes himself scarce and allows these actors and words to become the focal point, setting up his camera and simply watching what happens. When the camera moves, it’s concise and with purpose. There are several so-called long takes that another director might use to call attention to his own artistry and mastery of the camera, but Cukor wants to allow his actors to...act. The dialog is often so quick and smart that you might feel like the dumbest person at the best party you never attended.

To be sure, the film shows its age, finding some easy jokes in “women drivers” and the fact that women are as smart as men, but these are the exceptions. What you might not see coming is that both sides in the argument are given equal time. Tracy’s Adam isn’t a fool or a bad guy when he argues that laws apply to all people, while Hepburn’s Amanda dances around that truth by stating the opposite is true, that laws are applied differently depending on who committed the crime.

Above all, this is a love story. By this point, Tracy and Hepburn had been in a “secret” relationship for six years. Friends said she changed completely around him, growing softer (after all, she made her first husband legally change his name so her last name wouldn’t be Smith, which she considered “too plain”) and more motherly. She dotes on him here, and he flirts and seduces her right back. There is a ton of charm and friendship on display here, and how much is acting and how much real life blurs into insubstantial stuff. Every shot is tight, every word sparkles with wit. It’s a marvel it exists at all.

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Ultraviolet (2006)

Today’s themes: Nostril protection, Bullet veins, Skyscraper motorcycles, Sexy shirtless vampire supervillains

I feel like? Everyone needs to lose control now and again. Everyone needs to let loose and give away all their fucks and sort of fall into a deep, dark well of complete stupid, to ignore things like, you know, plot and logic and consistent characterization and let the crazy shit just wash over you. I mean, what do you want to watch when you’re completely done with your family, the presents, the pets, the year, and the world in general? How do you shut off your brain and slip into insanity?

In the year of our Lord 2006, someone had the genius brainstorm to shove $30 million into a movie machine and mix in pieces of every good and bad anime ever created without ever once stepping back and asking if any of it made sense. My friends, I present to you the majesty, the mayhem, and the miracle that is Ultraviolet. If you have not yet had the opportunity to feast your eyes, ears, nose, and throat on this loud, bright, violent, insane piece of filmic history, I urge you to rectify that error before the year and the decade are over.

It’s hard to pick just one Milla Jovovich movie out in which to showcase her oeuvre. I mean, this is an actress who has played the ultimate being in The Fifth Element, Alice, the ass-kicking zombie killer in every Resident Evil, Joan of Arc, Milady de Winter in easily the worst remake of The Three Musketeers put to digital celluloid, and Blood Queen Vivienne Nimue in this year’s failed Hellboy reboot. I mean, what can’t she do? But I will bet cash money on her role as Violet Song Jat Shariff (Yes! A character so confusing that she has four names!) In Ultraviolet, because what is Violet? Nothing less than a retributive super-human assassin delivery-messenger motorcycle vampire zombie! Nothing less! Who is also tasked by the Vice-Cardinal of Futureland Metropolis Utopia (not a real thing) to steal a weapon designed to exterminate all the stupid violent vampires who inhabit this world which turns out to be a six-year-old clone boy folded inside a slim plastic backpack and I almost forgot that the clone only has eight hours to live and also Violet is able to make unlimited bullets out of her own veins. 

If this sounds like a fever dream concocted during an extended Coke-fueled weekend in some billionaire start-up leader’s Beijing apartment while a zombie concubine goes down on him as he screams out the complete lyrics from Sympathy for the Devil, you’re not far off. I cannot - literally can not - adequately convey with mere words the insanity of this movie and how awesome it fails at everything one would normally associate with a blockbuster summer action film, and how it fails so completely that it crosses over from horror to wonder with every second of its 89-minute screen time. Like, I would try to explain some of the action set pieces that take place and how utterly dreadful they look, probably created on someone’s desktop computer while the director, one Kurt Wimmer, whose directing career ended with this gorgeous train wreck, stood behind them massaging their shoulders and whispering in their ear “remember, you will die.”

If I’m making this sound like a terrible film, believe me when I tell that it is. It’s awful. But it’s also so bat shit insane crazy ass over the top unbelievable that you have to watch it. Your life isn’t going to be complete without this in it. It’s like witnessing the moon landing if the moon landing involved driving up the side of a skyscraper on a motorcycle so you can jump that motorcycle through a helicopter that’s firing a machine gun at you while you spin in place wearing a bare midriff latex catsuit with perfect hair and lipstick.

I mean. Holy fuck.

Watch now

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

To Catch A Thief (1955)

Today’s themes: Charm, Joie de vive, Ridiculous hats, Bourbon, Robin’s egg blue convertible sports cars

I could, I suppose, start this off with another complaint about the state of the world today, except that’s how we got into this state. People wishing for a past that never existed, where the help knew their place and stayed there, happily satisfied with their lot and absolutely penniless. And, I suppose, I just did that, because the film for today’s Christmas viewing is exactly that, a portrait of a time and place that never really existed, but that some of us wish for. Like most things of its period, it is completely devoid of people of color, except as ornamentation, and features a cast that’s so white it might as well be made of fresh milk. I state all of this up front because it’s the type of thing we need, now, to think about whenever we dip our toes into Hollywood’s past, which was determined to pull us into the theaters not with tales of honesty and truth, but with veils of silk and tall cocktails politely tinkling in the night.

Even so, To Catch A Thief (1955) is a gorgeous whiff of the best cocaine you are ever likely to sample. Director Alfred Hitchcock is famous for many things, but chiefly for broadcasting his own shortcomings and sexual predilections up onto 80-foot screens to entertain us all, and this gentle little slip of a thing hardly even scratched the surface, but with good reason. In 1955, Hitchcock, who has already been directing films for 33 years, wanted a break. But he needed to keep working because in those days, film directors - even abnormally famous ones - didn’t command million-dollar paychecks. So, he figured, why not combine a job and a vacation in one and make a film in Monaco on the French Riviera? 

This film coasts on charm. It is smooth and glossy like a perfect lake for water-skiing. It is also chock-a-block with odd casting trivia like the fact that Brigitte Auber, who is playing a teenager trying to seduce her way into Cary Grant’s arms at the expense of the “much older” Grace Kelly was actually almost two years older than her rival. The inimitable Jessie Royce Landis, who plays Grace Kelly’s world-weary Texan mother is younger than Cary Grant, and went on to also play his mother in North By Northwest. Grant was talked into playing the part based almost solely on the shooting locale, and of course Grace Kelly met Prince Rainier during filming and married him within a year, thereby changing her name to Princess Grace of Monaco.

The plot is paper thin. There’s a jewel thief known as The Cat who lives in a perfect and gorgeous villa atop a perfect and gorgeous hill above a perfect and gorgeous view of perfect and gorgeous Monaco. Someone else has begun to impersonate him, though he retired long ago, but it puts him back in the crosshairs of the local police, so he sets out to discover who is actually committing the crimes in his name. Along the way, he befriends a Lloyd’s of London insurance agent who provides him a list of likely future victims, including a Texas oil widow and her young daughter, “an insecure pampered woman accustomed to attracting men”. Obviously they fall in love and set out to discover the solution to this mystery together, wearing incredible fashions by Edith Head and driving around one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

The Cat is played by one of Hitchcock’s most reliable alter-egos, Cary Grant, in maybe the Cary Grantiest role ever filmed. Grant, born Archibald Leach, and probably a bisexual who lived for a dozen years with Western star Randolph Scott, was the quintessential Hollywood leading man. He had an unplaceable accent (he was born in Bristol and arrived in the U.S. when he was 16 as part of a vaudeville troupe of actors) and was by all accounts a genius with a computerized brain that remembered everything, making memorizing lines a breeze. He was a comedian on stage, drawing inspiration from The Marx Brothers, before Mae West recognized his almost inhuman beauty and natural charm and cast him in two of her films, later claiming that she discovered him. His screen résumé is almost embarrassingly full, but it might be here that his full incandescent appeal is used to full advantage.

No one is likely to place this film among the best of Hitchcock’s canon. For that, you’ll be better off watching Vertigo or North By Northwest, either of which will showcase the director’s rather low opinion of women in general and his careful construction of puzzle plots. But for a pleasant diversion, filled with great lines and a collection of actors clearly having a great time tooling around in this French playground, To Catch A Thief sets the standard for every couple caper film and TV show to come.

Watch now

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Ōgon Batto (The Golden Bat, 1966)

Today’s themes: Capes, Super Destruction Beam Cannons, Machines that go PING!, Theremins, “Holy crap! Earth is in danger!”

Remember when you were a kid and believing you could be the heroes you saw on TV? Me, being old, I have a collection of heroes that I and my brother and his best friend Tony and my best friend Steve would go to the field near our houses (really just a very large vacant dirt lot) and act out all our favorite shows. Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, Flipper, Thunderbirds Are Go, even Lost in Space. They were varying degrees of lame, let’s be honest, with terrible special effects, men in rubber suits pretending to be monsters and villains, cool vehicles, even cooler wardrobes, and overwrought acting and plots ripe for replaying among the tumbleweeds and discarded mattresses as if we were on some amazing outer space planet fighting enemies bent on our destruction.

It’s often hard to remember what that felt like, that we could be heroes as easily as that, but it was mostly because the things we saw were…cheap. Easily mimicked, and simple to make believe into reality using cardboard boxes for lairs and old sheets for capes and ketchup for blood. In a way, computer-generated effects have ruined all that. Films and TV shows look too good now, and take themselves too fucking seriously. What we all need — kids and grown ups alike — is to remember what really crappy, really cool, really outlandish and exciting entertainment was. And in that spirit, I present to you Ōgon Batto (The Golden Bat 1966) in all its original amazing black-and-white glory.

I need to fill you in on some important stuff about Ōgon Batto the character before we dive into Ōgon Batto the motion picture. There is some confusion and learned discourse concerning who is the first superhero, and what a superhero is. For example, is Robin Hood a superhero? He’s certainly a hero, but does anything make him super? He can shoot arrows really well, and that’s all that makes Hawkeye a superhero. Is Black Widow a superhero? She can kick ass really, really well, but she has no super powers. She can’t fly and she can’t melt steel beams with her eyes. Still, it’s generally agreed that the first real superhero debuted in 1931 and was created by Suzuki Ichiro and Takeo Nagamatsu (who was 16 years old at the time), seven years before Superman ever leaped a tall building. Ōgon Batto is an ancient being from Atlantis who was sent forward in time 10,000 years to battle the forces of evil in present day Japan.

Ōgon Batto, the film, is an origin story from Toei Company and stars Sonny Chiba in a skull mask and very awesome cape and collar as the titular hero. The villain of the film, intent on destroying Earth by altering the orbit of planet Icarus and send it crashing into us, is Nazo, “the ruler of the universe,” who is apparently a giant four-eyed rat-squirrel (in the world’s loosest furry rat-squirrel costume) with one mechanical claw hand who really, really enjoys laughing maniacally and being just generally mean. To be fair, The Golden Bat, who appears on an island and must be resurrected from his 10,000-year slumber by pouring water on his chest (pretty simple!), also enjoys laughing maniacally while pointing his walking stick? I think? And flapping his cape about and generally being awesome.

There’s a secret organization that protects the Earth, there’s a super smart scientist who invents the only weapon strong enough to destroy Icarus and ruin Nazo’s evil plans, there’s the scientist’s granddaughter who forms a special bond with Ōgon Batto that super-annoys Nazo, though pretty much everything super-annoys Nazo. That is until he introduces us to his equally evil henchmen, Keloid, Piranha, and Jackal! That’s when things get really intense, what with masquerading as good guys and infiltrating headquarters and using flying submarines and whatnot.

But why spoil any more of this forgotten classic? If this film were rebooted by Michel Gondry today it wouldn’t look any different. The effects are simple but effective, the acting is melodramatic and overwrought, the action is breakneck and involves a lot of running, and I defy any kid of around six years old to watch this and not want to don their own skull mask and walking stick and start kicking alien butt. 

Watch the trailer:

Watch the full movie:

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Road House (1989)

Today’s themes: Good guys and bad guys, Something for the gals, Ridiculous premises, Wanton destruction

We all need something preposterous. Something outlandish and, quite frankly, too stupid to take seriously. Life is already so serious that taking a break from it and sinking deep and thick inside stupidity (in small amounts and not to make a habit of it) is like taking a holiday from our lives. We don’t necessarily have to go anywhere, and it only takes a little bit of stupidity, like getting an idiot injection, to overcome all the other horrible crap that gets thrown at us. It helps tremendously if the stupidity also involves the bad guy getting what’s coming to him, lots of skin and pretty people (vacant though they may be) and a heavy slathering of charisma to make it all go down smoothly.

Road House (1989) is a stupid, stupid movie. There are no deeper meanings to be extracted from it, there’s no performance that transcends its simple and predictable plot, you won’t care a whit about any of its characters or situations or dangers, and it’s like…the opposite of cool. Whatever cool is, this film isn’t that, except it thinks it is. I think? I mean, it’s actually hard to tell whether its actors and technicians and the people who wrote and directed actually mean what they’ve put up on the screen, but more importantly it doesn’t matter.

This film comes from the short, weird slice of Hollywood history when Patrick Swayze was hot. It lasted only the blink of an eye and we got only a handful of films out of it, but for a little while there Patrick Swayze was hot. But you would never know it from watching this film because although he’s the star of it and his chiseled and oddly shiny countenance is featured in nearly every scene, he leaves no impression whatsoever. And a lot of that is because what we get to watch instead is two other character actors who are so good it’s criminal.

First there’s Sam Elliott. Now, no one doesn’t like Sam Elliott. Sam Elliott, who always plays Sam Elliott in every role he’s been assigned, is maybe the most likable actor of the last 40 years. You probably don’t think about him much, and maybe haven’t been paying attention, but Sam Elliott is the proverbial guy that every man wants to be, and every woman wants to be with - except that I both want to be and be with him. He is effortlessly sexy, and no more so than here where he plays grizzled (Sam Elliotty) world-weary (Sam Elliotty) “legendary bouncer” Wade Garrett. He steals every scene he’s in so effortlessly that you may think he just wandered onto the set and everyone looked at him and thought, fuck yeah, this guy needs to be in this movie.

The second actor to watch is Ben Gazzara as villain Brad Wesley. It is absolutely obvious that Gazzara is also having the time of his life here. Any actor worth their salt will tell you that playing a villain is always more fun than playing the hero, and Gazzara here makes the most of it. Wesley is mean. He’s slimy. He’s reprehensible, morally repugnant, a misogynist, a racist, I mean, it’s like someone just went into a thesaurus and listed every word related to evil and tacked it onto his character, and Gazzara relishes every second of it.

If you have not yet seen this film and you select it from this list of possibilities and wonder, as it starts up, why the hell you’re waisting your time watching a stupid ass piece of shit about some tiny bar in the middle of nowhere ruled over by a smirking asshole who seems to just scare everyone into paying him because he owns a monster truck or something, just…chill. Relax. Sit back, grab some popcorn and a Cherry Coke, and allow the stupid to wash over you. Stop thinking for to hours and watch some shirtless dude with a ripped bod kick the shit out of another shirtless dude because the bar didn’t get their liquor delivery. These are the important issues. Deal with it.

Watch now

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Enter the Dragon (1973)

Today’s themes: Kicking ass, Kicking butt, Kicking bums, Kicking derrieres, Kicking kiesters

The last James Bond film starring Daniel Craig will debut early next year, and a lot of people are wondering who the next James Bond will be. Now, personally, I am confused about how the James Bond films work as a whole. Is every new James Bond actor’s cycle of films meant as a replacement for the old James Bond? Are we ignoring that there was another Bond before this one, or are we supposed to pretend not to notice that this James Bond looks nothing like the last one? Or is it that James Bond is merely a name that gets used by different spies, none of whom are actually named James Bond but they all assume the title and the role and carry on as if they’re the only one and no one mentions the other one they replaced? 

In the current age of equal representation, and with a female Thor on the way and teenaged Ghostbusters and Scarlett Johansson playing an Asian superhero robot, some people want a not-another-white-guy to assume the role. Why can’t we see someone besides an Eton-educated rich white dude playing this iconic action hero? But I’m here to tell you that it already happened, and you can watch this James Bond film right now. It’s called Enter The Dragon (1973) and it stars Bruce Lee as James Bond, infiltrating a villainous lair on a secret island populated by an army of henchmen bent on something something something complete world supremacy.

The saddest thing about Enter The Dragon, which unequivocally made an international superstar out of Bruce Lee, is that Bruce Lee was already dead by the time the film was released. On a budget of $850,000, the film raked in $90 million, or half-a-billion US dollars when adjusted for inflation. Okay? Huge. Massive. A cultural phenomena. The second saddest thing was that American distributors were so afraid of releasing a film with an Asian star that it padded out the script by inserting a white guy (John Saxon) so as not to scare Kansas, and a black guy (Jim Kelly) in an attempt to cash in on the emerging Blaxploitation genre. But Lee was not only its star, he was also a producer and - I shit you not - as an established director in his own right, he personally filmed the first part of the film that sets up his own backstory (yes, originally this was about a bunch of dudes who show up on a island and fight each other and had no plot to speak of) and inserted it into the finished product before it was released.

When I say this is a James Bond film in everything but its name, I mean that. Here’s the plot, such as it is: Lee (Bruce Lee) is approached by British Intelligence to investigate Hong Kong crime lord Han by traveling to Han’s private island and participating in a martial arts competition and prove that Han is a drug trafficker and deals in prostitution. Before leaving, Lee discovers that his sister’s killer, O’Hara, works on the island as well. Making his way there, he meets old fighting buddies Roper (Saxon) and Williams (Kelly) on a junk. Then some stuff happens, kick, kick, slap, hit, kick, and it all ends up in an extended kung fu fight between Lee and Han in a hall of mirrors that’s pretty awesome considering we have to follow two actors in a room of reflections on reflections and never see the camera.

Literally everyone loved this film. The critics loved it. It showed in sold out theaters in Japan, India, France, and Germany. The soundtrack by Lalo Schifrin, who also wrote the theme to Mission: Impossible, went gold. A copy of the film is in the Library of Congress for its cultural significance. It’s said that this movie inspired Akira Toriyama to create the Dragon Ball manga series, and Goku’s piercing eyes were directly based on Lee’s own penetrating gaze.

Lee was already a superstar in Hong Kong and this was going to be his entry into the American film market. Warner Bros. spent over $1 million to promote it, and it gave birth to the martial arts craze in the U.S. Watching it now, it still retains the sexy charm and crazy cool athleticism that so many of today’s films aspire to. Without this film, there would be no Jackie Chan (who appears for a split second as a henchman) and no Matrix and no Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Plus it is, for my money, one of the best James Bond films ever released.

Watch now

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Today’s themes: Family, Hurt, Fear, Bravery, Kicking ass, It takes all kinds no literally all kinds no even more kinds than that

This year, Martin Scorsese got pissed off because no studio wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make his movie about really old actors who are playing the same parts they’ve been playing for let’s face it a good long while now and make a film that doesn’t really break any new ground or say anything that other gangster films haven’t already said including a few of his own that coincidentally star some of these same actors but whatever the point is he took a shit on superhero movies kind of like when Ebert said video games couldn’t be art and I’d tell you what he said but I’m not on Twitter so I could give a flying bloody fuck what someone in Hollywood has their panties in a bunch for but the gist of it as far as I could tell was that Marvel films aren’t art.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is a motherfucking work of art. More than that, it is both state-of-the-art filmmaking as well as a family movie that everyone can watch together on the same god damned couch and manage to laugh and cry and scream together and all take something different away from it. Plus! If you get high? And watch this thing? Your brain will melt into euphoric puddles of psychedelic wonderment.

SM:ISV is based on a shit ton of things, none of which you’re likely to care about because although it is potentially confusing since you live in this universe and not one of the others, you know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man and he’s in love with Mary Jane and he has an Aunt May and he does cool shit and has a TV show and a catchy jingle and ice cream. But what if none of that were true? Or some was true and some wasn’t true, except not true exactly, more like it’s another truth somewhere else which is not here and it is.

Miles Morales lives in Brooklyn and goes to a private high school because he is extremely smart and talented. His parents love him and his dad is a cop. Their love is real and honest and doesn’t have a whiff of missing father syndrome or I hate my parents and therefore I shall be a vigilante. No, Miles is a nice, average, sometimes awkward, sometimes impatient, sometimes happy dude. And then a radioactive spider bites him, and you have no fucking clue what comes next.

I can’t tell you what a breath of fresh air this movie is. I’ll even go so far as to say that even if you don’t like superhero films, even if you think Spider-Man is lame, even if you’ve watched some Marvel Cinematic Universe and left the theatre bored or unsatisfied and, yes, even if you’re god damned Martin fucking Scorsese you will love this movie. Love! Love it! Even as I type this sentence I wish I was watching it again.

You know what? Don’t watch it. Don’t treat yourself. Don’t experience two hours of pure awesome that explodes with color and beauty and fun and bravery and just sit there by yourself, smug in your little world of meaningful movies, and be your own party pooper, Martin. Just do that. Watch now

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Waiting for Guffman (1996)

Todays themes: Hope, Small towns, White people, Musicals, Aliens, Musicals about aliens

Making the most with what we have is so anti-now. Now is about having your own space to feature yourself to make yourself feel more important. Now is about being on Instagram and trying to put yourself in your best light, Photoshopping away all your small and large imperfections, making sure your lighting is right, your hairs are all in place, you have the perfect pose in the perfect place for the world to see, so the world believes we are perfect, and beautiful, and utterly without flaws.

Waiting for Guffman (1996) is a celebration of the perfection of flaws. It is a film, like most of the films of Christopher Guest (and in this case, Eugene Levy) that can be taken one of two ways by you. You’re a member of the audience watching this faux documentary about a small town in Missouri that elects to celebrate its 150th anniversary by writing, composing, starring in, and directing a new play based on the town’s history. The first way is pure parody, in which we separate ourselves from it and sit back to laugh at these characters as they delude themselves into thinking that what they are making together is a classic, a Broadway-bound piece of perfect musical theatre that is true and beautiful. The second way is to become one of them, going in with our whole hearts, diving into the deep end with everything we are and everything we wish in order to find that spark of magic in everyone’s mundane lives.

I prefer the second interpretation, myself, perhaps because cynicism is so easy, particularly for me.

There are two characters here that form the heart and mind of the production and the film. The first one is never even seen, the titular Mr. Guffman whose promise and premise push the narrative forward to increasingly wonderful heights of delusion and wonder. Guffman is a literal MacGuffin, that unimportant device that Hitchcock made famous by inserting one into almost each thriller he made in his career; a plot device that is completely unimportant other than to use it to drive the plot forward. Without (Mac)Guffman, the film would die in the first reel, and lose its sense of drama and motivation. The second character is Corky St. Clair (Guest), an eccentric, egotistic, driven dreamer of a man whose broad and grand vision is the tent under which everyone else’s dreams are bound up, discovered and recognized for their talents and the things which make them special and different from everyone else around them.

It’s impossible not to give credit to the ensemble of actors in this film because a lot of it is improvised, making the actors their own authors. The secret of all these mocumentaries is the collected talent that’s provided for us, and to recognize that the actors aren’t making fun of the people they’re portraying - they love them. They love them openly and honestly and show them off warts and all. The point is never to make fun of these people, which would be more cruel than funny, and there are certainly plenty of comedy films that use that premise to wrench luges out of us. Here, the comedy is based on admiration for their determination and a love for their dreams. Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Guest, Levy, and every other actor in parts large and small are completely fearless to perform their hearts out performing their hearts out. 

If you have a dream, it’s easy to let others squash it underfoot, belittling it and you and trying to prop themselves up in reflection. But all dreams are sacred, and all dreamers are gods. It is easy to be trampled underfoot and give up in the face of insurmountable odds. It’s easy to listen when other people say your dream (and you) are unworthy, ordinary, and meaningless. But dreams are the things that push us forward in life. Dreams are the things that allow us to overcome obstacles and naysayers and persevere. The realization of your dream is apt to be imperfect and others may demean it and you. Like Corky and Co., just keep going. Your dreams are waiting, but they need you to make them come true.

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Lincoln (2012)

Today’s themes: Honor, Bravery, Deception, Ignorance, Tolerance, Facial hair

Today’s political climate is certainly...interesting. To think of what is happening all around us every day, historically speaking, is staggering. Hong Kong, London, Washington, Paris, Saudi Arabia, it is all literally too much to absorb. What will the future - if we allow it to exist - make of it? Will they even be able to make sense of it?

In 1865, as the American Civil War crawled on and on, the President of the United States was cast onto a precipice. Would he hang on to the war powers granted his office in a last ditch and nearly impossible gamble in passing a constitutional amendment banning slavery, or act in good faith with an adversary now anxious to end the war? Lincoln (2012) explores this horrible period from inside and outside The White House, awash with mud and blood, trying to form a more perfect union.

This is a somber, sometimes angry, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately very moving film. I’m not sure anyone would place it among Spielberg’s best, but if this was any other director’s film it could easily be theirs. Spielberg is a film craftsman, an artisan, carefully constructing every shot without an inch to spare. Even when he gets messy, as he does in the opening minutes here, shooting a vicious and horrid hand-to-hand battle on a blood-pooled battlefield, it is carefully choreographed. 

On the other hand, such care also means that this is a gorgeous film, bathed in natural light and deep blues, like traveling through a sumptuous cave. The script, too, is careful with every word, which in some actor’s mouths sound trite or stilted, but an actor as good as Daniel Day Lewis is here, he finds a natural cadence that makes the president’s words sound natural. Lewis is, as usual, note perfect in his performance.

A story as important as the banning of slavery deserves this level of heft and weight to it. This is a script that never stops, never lets up, pushing you into the smaller stories that construct this epic. And talk about a cast; Lewis, who won the Oscar, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and even Adam Driver in one of his first blink-and-you’ll-miss-it roles. 

This is one of those pictures where all the pieces, from the script to the director to the actors to the production design, costumes and lighting, come together at the right pace, and constructed like a Rubik’s you’re watching being slowly solved. The running of government has always been ugly, and both sides will do whatever it takes to win. The difference is what those sides are fighting for.

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

How To Train Your Dragon (2010)

Today’s themes: Friendship, Family, Fear, Trust, Flying

There are many tropes in fairy tales, and especially as portrayed in various Disney animated incarnations. Inevitably, one parent is dead, the other is overcompensating, and the kid caught in the middle of it all has to do something insane or heroic or heroically insane to prove that their parent’s unfounded fears or doubts are 100% wrong. As a kid, that all sounds great (aside probably from the dead parent part) but as a grown-up, it’s sometimes hard to care about what’s happening.

One method of testing one’s mettle is to challenge oneself to the impossible. Doing something you’ve never done before, because frankly you’re too stupid to understand that it can’t be done. When something is “the way it’s always been,” that’s supposed to stifle any arguments against it, whether it makes sense or not. But it is exactly the people who challenge the status quo, even a little bit, that can change the course of everything that comes after. And that’s essentially what How to Train Your Dragon (2010) is about.

In a Viking village on a remote island, dragon attacks are both frequent and violent. The chieftain, Stoick the Vast (the voice of Gerard Butler), is a famous dragon hunter, but his son, Hiccup (the voice of Jay Baruchel), is anything but. He’s smart, he’s thoughtful, he’s awkward, and he wants to live up to and impress his father. During one attack, Hiccup - did I mention he was smart? - constructs a bolas launcher meant to fling the heavy chained weapons skyward to take down these giant, violent, evil beasts. Though his inventions never quite work as intended, this one does. And he happens to hit the most dangerous and deadly dragon in the known world, the legendary Night Fury.

What happens next defies the village elders, the people of Berk, and the chieftain himself. Hiccup wants to know what happened to the dragon he hit, and he wants to prove that he’s as brave as any other viking. He does all that and more, but certainly not in the way anyone expected.

The secret of How to Train Your Dragon is in the titular dragon himself, the violent and dangerous Night Fury. The animators have managed to create in this voiceless creature the best aspects of doggos and kittens and mash that up with a giant winged beast who can fly. We need to fall in love with Toothless, as he comes to be called, as much as Hiccup does or all his escapades won’t matter. And Toothless is the thing in the film that grown-ups will become attached to, even as the kids are learning about defying expectations, the value of friendship, what it means to be really brave, and that sometimes when it comes to risking everything in honor of a true friend, you have to do it.

If there was ever a “children’s film” that deserves your perennial viewing, and becomes something passed down from generation to generation like The Wizard of Oz or The Sound of Music, I’d vote for this one, as well as its two sequels which are equally lovable and expand on the themes and explore something simple like growing up without losing the kid inside you. We all deserve a friend as true and as dear as Toothless in our lives. As Emerson wrote, “Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the trough of the human heart.”

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Kuroneko (“Black Cat”) (1968)

Today’s themes: Ghosts, Revenge, Horses, Cats, The beauty of black and white cinema

Ever since Dickens decided to portray Christmas as a time of haunted bedrooms, time travel, and the threat of living out your afterlife in chains and groaning, it’s been open season on unusual holiday stories. We tend to segment some films into certain times of the year based on their themes or plots, sequestering films about spirits and monsters to late fall to coincide with another holiday that also used to be more religious than Hallmark and Walmart would prefer. Why limit ourselves? After all, once your Christmas presents have been unwrapped and you’ve eaten your ham and deviled eggs and figgy pudding, the holiday is dead. Why not celebrate death as well?

One of the most beautiful films ever made is a horror film. Kuroneko (“Black Cat”) (1968), directed by Kaneto Shindo, is a ghost story, a folktale, a mystery, a tragedy, and a love story. It is complicated and simple at the same time, a story that takes a circular path that keeps returning to the same place with the same result, until it doesn’t. It portrays an act of violence so brutal and heartless that it is no wonder that it results in the creation of this beautiful and horrible haunting.

Parental guidance strongly suggested.

I will try not to give away too much of the film’s shocks and wonders; During a civil war, starving and exhausted samurai swarm like ants out of a bamboo grove and come upon the hut of Yone (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law Shige (Kiwako Taichi). The soldiers violently rape and murder the women and burn down the hut. Meanwhile, Yone’s son, Hachi (Nakamura Kichiemon), who is in northern Japan fighting this endless war, manages to kill the enemy general and return the head to the governor, who promotes the soldier to a samurai in his own right. Three years pass, and we return to the bamboo grove which is now haunted by ghosts who pursue the passing samurai from the now victorious army, preying on the soldiers to kill them in revenge for the deaths of Yone and Shige. But then Hachi returns, a samurai in his own right, and though the curse is clearcut and the ghosts must carry out their revenge, this is the son and husband of the murdered women. 

The film is a nightmare and a dream in one. Shindo uses kabuki theatre staging to portray the magic and horror of the haunted grove and the resurrected women inhabiting it. They float, they fly, they dance and they kill with grace and beauty, This is, after all, a kind of fairytale, and like all classic fairytales it involves violence and horror through a lens of childlike wonder. The Black Cat of the title is a bakeneko, cousin to the more familiar (to Western audiences) manekineko, which is recognizable to anyone portrayed as the smiling, waving porceline cat greeting you at many a sushi establishment. A bakeneko is the manekineko’s more devious cousin who will often eat the person whose form they take to trick and connive. Look for subtle and not-so-subtle portrayals of the supernatural cat throughout the film.

Kibuki theatre also makes an appearance in the percussive score by Hikaru Hayashi, which echos both the desolation and beauty which the film displays. There are some shots here that are breathtaking, and the cinematography and score combine effortlessly to enhance and amplify the mod of menace and beauty.

If Christmas is a time when we present gifts to our loved ones, perhaps it is also a time to reflect on those who have wronged us. If it’s easy to believe that a fat bearded man slides down a chimney in the middle of the night to spread good cheer and presents all around the world, is it so much harder to believe that the spirits of the dead also visit us, and visit upon us their anger at what other fates have been bestowed? 

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Today’s themes: Conclusions, Mourning, Anger, Denial, Vengeance, Computer generated emotions

Is there any emotion as satisfying as satisfaction? Christmas, itself - at least the nonreligious gift-getting aspects of it - is built on the concept of satisfaction. As a child, the days can seem to grow slower and slower as the morning approaches. You might have trouble sleeping the night before because of what’s coming. The very structure of the holiday and all its packaging, including the packaging, is predicated on surprise and satisfaction. What is Santa Claus if not the promise of happiness, fulfillment, gratification and achievement. It even comes at the end of the year, a conclusion of sorts from which all else one has done over the previous months are assembled, weighed, and compensated.

Avengers: Endgame (2019) is the culmination of not three, or five, or even ten previous films. The thread of anticipation started in 2008 with Ironman and continued through two other Ironmans, three more Avengers, three Captain Americas, three Thors, two Guardians of the Galaxies, two Ant-Mans, two Spider-Mans, and a Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Doctor Strange each. And that doesn’t take into account two seasons of Agent Carter, six of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., various Jessica Joneses and Luke Cages and Iron Fistses on Netflix, _ plus one admittedly forgettable Incredible Hulk that seems to have been abandoned by the side of the cinematic universe. That’s twenty-one films, at least five TV series, and by one estimation over six straight days of continuous stories, not including post-credits scenes. 

That achievement, in itself, would be remarkable, but what makes it nearly miraculous is that, by and large, every single film is good, and several of them are great. Much of that success is due to producer Kevin Feige’s control over keeping the horses in the corral, while also allowing the individual directors and screenwriters charged with taking these steeds around the track a good deal of leeway about how they would create each of these individual works, particularly James Gunn’s two volumes of Guardians of the Galaxy and Taika Waititi’s wildly creative reboot that’s not a reboot of Thor: Ragnarok. 

But coming back to Avengers: Endgame and setting aside everything that came before it, how does it measure up on its own as a film? Firstly, the task it is expected to fulfill is monumental. Consider how easy it would be to simply gather all the disparate threads laid down by its many predecessors and just tying it all up in a big knot without proposing any new ideas or doing anything rash to upset the apple cart. It would seem that safety is called for, here, because there are so many loose stepping stones set in place that tripping and falling is nearly a guaranty. Treading cautiously through the mine field would still assure that this movie would succeed financially, it’s nearly the surest thing Hollywood has ever produced, aside from Lucas’s rebirth of his own franchise in 1999 with Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and look how that turned out. Financially successful but nearly universally derided and mostly unloved and ignored. 

Endgame succeeds on nearly every level of its audacious attempt at becoming a sequel to twenty-plus films. It pays fan service as indeed it should, because its source material is nothing if not a religion for millions or billions of readers. It is both tragic and comic, both heroic and villainous, filled with violence and love in equal measure. It’s pure candy, of course, coated in chocolate and filled with marshmallow, but that doesn’t stop the actors and technicians involved from giving their all and turning in some performances that stagger and, yes, satisfy.

It’s Christmas morning. The wrapping is ripped away, the toys are scattered about, and Santa has eaten his cookies. So settle into the well-worn couch cushion where your butt belongs, turn on your new 65" 4K HDR flat screen, turn up the 7.1 surround AVR to 11 and fall into the one movie handmade to test the limits of your senses and emotions.

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

The Lego Movie (2014)

Today’s themes: Innocence, Breaking the rules, Conforming to society’s norms, Earworms

“Subversive” is a loaded word. Depending on who’s using it, it can be a weapon or a tool. Subverting expectations, subverting the mainstream, subverting meaning and intent, all of those can be positives or negatives. It mostly depends where you stand on the issues being subverted.

I propose that The Lego Movie (2014) is the most subversive film of the past decade. As proof, I need only refer to the Fox News reaction to its release. Charles Payne, host of Fox Business, warned parents against taking their children to what could otherwise be interpreted as a 100-minute toy commercial because it disparages the ideas of big business and capitalism. He claimed that the antagonist, who is, after all, named Lord Business, “looks a little bit like Mitt Romney.” I assume it’s because of his hair, which is made of plastic like the rest of him. His co-host chimed in with the undeniable fact that “Hollywood has long been dominated by the far left, which is very anti-capitalist,” which is why they never protect their properties and we all get to animate new Mickey Mouse movies in which Mickey fucks a pumpkin for twenty minutes.

The other main subversive element about The Lego Movie is that it defies your expectations that a movie about plastic building bricks can be any good. I mean, it’s about Legos! It’s right there in the title! Has Hollywood, finally, exhausted every original and thoughtful avenue of creativity and they are now making films about children’s toys? What’s next, Candyland: The Motion Picture? Lincoln Logs: 1999? Erector Set Man!

But it turns out that The Lego Movie isn’t just a mildly funny and entertaining film. It’s wildly good. I’m serious. I’ve introduced this movie to a few friends who resisted its charms because the movie they were imagining in their heads was akin to a poorly-made Saturday morning Hanna-Barbera cartoon with a talking cat living in Lego City who solves crimes or something. I mean…it’s just Legos. 

This is a film for the whole family, as movie ads sometimes posit. It’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon where the things that will appeal to adults are only of mild interest to kids, and vice versa. It is loud, it is colorful, it features primo voice acting from the likes of Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Nick Offerman, Liam Neeson, Alison Brie and Morgan Freeman. It’s re-watchability measurement is about an eight out of ten because there’s so much happening on the screen during any given moment - I mean, every frame is crammed with social commentary, topical in-jokes and puns that it’s a miracle the thing doesn’t just explode off the screen into your lap. There’s even a sequel of sorts that only plays at Legoland theme parks (The Lego Movie: 4D – A New Adventure) that even subverts the idea of theme parks while you are in a theme park in which the characters visit rides based on themselves and succumb to wearing VIP wristbands that hypnotize them into performing a live show in which they play themselves in a live show of themselves. 

I haven’t mentioned the plot because a huge part of the film’s charm and surprise is what happens. I mean…it’s good writing! In a movie about toy bricks! Writer-Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller specialize in taking known quantities and fucking with them until they are nearly unrecognizable, earlier using 21 Jump Street to make a comedy, and getting their asses fired from Solo: A Star Wars Story for god only knows what they were planning to do to the Star Wars franchise.

So settle in and pay close attention to the most subversive film from a mainstream Hollywood studio that also happens to be great for the kid snuggled onto your lap. Oh! And don’t worry about that theme song, Everything Is AWESOME!!! from The Lonely Island boys with Tegan and Sara. It’ll only be stuck in your head for about a year. Two at most.

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Blazing Saddles (1974)

Today’s themes: Racism, Nazi musical numbers, Gucci, Literally breaking the fourth wall, Farts

“If you’re alive, make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.”  - Mel Brooks

Very few people, before or since, had a year like Mel Brooks had in 1974. Film directors are lucky if they have one hit in a lifetime of work. 45 years ago, within the space of 10 months, Mel Brooks had two in a row. I would list them both here as a double feature because this is my list and I make the rules, but the second of those films, Young Frankenstein, is unavailable to stream anywhere online as of this writing. If you have it on DVD or Blu-ray, slip it in to your player and enjoy a certified Oscar-winning comedy classic, but lacking that ready availability, I’ll concentrate instead on the film that came out first.

Blazing Saddles (1974) was designed and conceived by Brooks as a vehicle for Richard Pryor, but the studio, Warner Bros., balked at insuring a man with a history of drug arrests. Pryor remained on board as a co-writer of the screenplay and is credited with many of the film’s best and most salacious lines, including the now legendary “’Scuse me while I whip this out.” It was also Pryor, along with the star who would replace him, Cleavon Little, who told Brooks to leave in the rather ample usage of The N Word throughout the film, which almost caused the studio (again) to shelve the film completely and take a loss, citing it as unreleasable as-is.

I’m sure you’ve seen this film already and I don’t need to tell you much about its plot. A small western town is in the way of the railroad and state attorney general “That’s Hedley!” Lamarr (Harvey Korman) convinces Governor Le Petomane (named for a famous French vaudevillian ‘flatulist’ who could pass gas at will and played by Brooks) to appoint a black sheriff to protect them, expecting the town to fall into chaos and leave it open to be easily overrun. When that fails, after Sheriff “Black Bart” (Cleavon Little) enlists the aid of drunkard gunslinger The Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) and dimwitted strongman Mongo (football star Alex Karras) to bring the townsfolk over to his side, Lamarr attempts to gang up on the town with an army of villains including The Klan, Nazis, and Methodists. 

The third half of the movie truly descend into chaos and becomes a genius meta-movie in which the film itself starts a battle with another film on the same lot and winds up in Graumann’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd. with the stars as the characters watching themselves finishing the film. 

This film is nothing short of a work of genius. The talents here, both in front of the camera and behind it, combined in some kind of miraculous gathering of perfect harmony. I would say that something like this never happened again except it happened again in December of that same year when a script that Wilder worked on with Brooks during filming became Young Frankenstein.

You’re already smiling as you recall your favorite parts of this film, whether it’s the toll road, Madeline Kahn’s tongue-twisted turn as Marlene Dietrich from Destry Rides Again, or Cleavon Little riding past Count Basie and his Orchestra in the middle of the desert with his Gucci saddlebags. Sure, there are lessons to be learned here about racism and preconceptions and greed, but in the end it’s just shit your pants funny, and I wouldn’t blame you if you started watching it again immediately after the final credits roll. 

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

The Station Agent (2003)

Today’s themes: Loneliness, Misunderstandings, Coffee, Trains real and imagined

Being alone isn’t naturally a human desire, but we all end up there at one time or another. It can be like an addiction, providing an escape from fear, from sadness, from the things or people we cannot otherwise manage. But escape from loneliness often requires facing the demons that put us there in the first place.

Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) loves trains. He works at a model train shop with his (only) friend Henry, the owner, spending his days inside this haven from people, who often stare and ostracize him because he’s a dwarf. One day, Henry dies, and leaves Fin a small piece of land with an abandoned train station situated on it. With literally nothing else in his life, he decides to move into the building. Thus begins The Station Agent (2003), written and directed by Tom McCarthy, his debut feature.

Fin just wants to be left alone. He is suspicious of friendship and distrustful of people. He aims the rest of his life’s direction as one spent alone, only venturing into town for food at the market, books at the library, and drinks at a dark bar. He (and we) are then introduced to Joe Oramas (Bobby Cannavale) who is unrelentingly friendly. Seemingly oblivious to Fin’s demeanor and desires, he is the puppy needing attention, but his love of life and insatiable curiosity about everything soon includes trains, and they begin taking walks along the abandoned tracks. Other residents of the nearby town are also introduced to Fin through situations both mundane and (comically) dangerous, including the librarian, Emily (Michelle Williams), who is dealing with an abusive boyfriend, and artist Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) whose personal tragedy causes her to push away any chances of love and affection.

This is Dinklage’s film, and he makes the most of the opportunity. The movie’s quiet contemplation of friendship and love has to find its soul in the form of a person who wants nothing to do with people. His entire life has been marred by derision and disparagement. He has, by now, lost any desire to be with someone, and he has therefore subjugated his desires and emotions beneath this cloak of fear and self-loathing. The actor’s expressive face and large, sad eyes have to convey this self-inflicted lack of emotion, making every look and small gesture broadcast the struggle inside him.

Fin is continually thrust into the light of friendship in one moment, then struggling not to douse the light in the next. People and relationships are unpredictable and his history has taught him not to trust anyone, even himself. When will this new person disappoint him, treating him like everyone else has ever done?

It has a happy ending. This is not a film about how terrible people are, it’s about finding the people who understand you and accept you just as you are. That’s all that love is, in the end. Strip away the words and gestures. We just want to know we can trust the people we love to always be there, even (and especially) when we don’t want them to be.

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A Movie for Christmas Day 2019

Inherit The Wind (1960)

Today’s themes: Friendly intolerance, Prideful ignorance, Fried chicken in court, Fear and loathing in Tennessee

Spencer Tracy was always good, in everything he did, for his entire career. Any actor is going to end up in a few clunkers, and some might turn in a lackluster performance but Tracy was always there, always giving everything the role requires, with an uncommon understanding of how the camera captures everything and will end up on a 40-foot high screen, so subtlety is key. A look can say everything.

In Inherit the Wind (1960), Tracy plays lawyer Henry Drummond, a liberal jurist hired by a big, fancy east coast newspaper to defend schoolteacher Bertram Cates (Dick York), who is on trial for defying a state law prohibiting the teaching of “Darwinism.” The state is represented by Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredrick March), a Bible-thumping politician there to defend the concept that humanity is a divine creation, special and pure.

The film, and the original play, use the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial for its basis, but that’s not what this story is about. This is not meant to be a simple retelling of that situation, but uses it as a framework to comment on McCarthyism and the right to think. It may feel like a rather hard-handed put down of organized religion and fundamentalism specifically, but don’t take it face value.

You’ve hopefully heard of Tracy & Hepburn, but this is a different movie couple working at their peak. This is the classic pairing of director Stanley Kramer and actor Spencer Tracy. There isn’t a wasted line or shot in the film, all in glorious black and white. Kramer knew Tracy well, and he allows us to linger on Tracy’s well weathered and expressive face in-between the lines of the script. Though credit must also be paid to Frederick March in making the most out of a thankless role. Brady is setup as a buffoonish blowhard, and March dives head first into bluster and bombast.

The fireworks are saved for the famous twist of Drummond calling Brady to the stand as an expert on the Bible, and it’s here that the theme of free speech gets a full-throated shout from Tracy, nailing the essence of the film’s message blatantly. It just feels good to hear someone say those words, that we all have the right to think, because that’s the real problem fascism would like you to please stop doing.

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