Top 10 romantic Christmas movies

I'm not saying that this is the definitive list of every Christmas movie ever made, but I am saying that.

10. Children of Men

Clive Owen shines as a shepherd in this tale of proto-Christianity. If you're afraid of police states, best move along.

9. You Kill Me

A bit of an overlooked gem, You Kill Me combines Polish hitmen with Buffalo, N.Y. The results are predictably combustible. (Featuring Ben Kingsley and Tea Leoni.)

8. Mr. & Mrs. Smith

There are probably better ways to celebrate Christmas, but do you want any of them?

7. The Family Man

The only Nicolas Cage film I will ever endorse. Also featuring Tea Leoni.

6. Cold Mountain

The tale of Inman traveling home to Ada is not exactly a Christmas story, but oh, how it burns.

5. The Cutting Edge

Two figure skaters, one toepick.

4. Christmas Story

Finally! you think. A real Christmas story. But have you stopped to consider how subversive it truly is? No? Go watch it again.

3 1/2. Elf

Had to fit this in somewhere.

3. Die Hard

Snape had never looked so good, Bruce thought to himself.

2. Sleepless in Seattle

Split as it is between Christmas Eve and Valentine's Day, I'm going to have to dedicate this movie to the entirety of the month of January. It deserves it.

1. It's a Wonderful Life

We've finally come down to it: the best Christmas movie ever. Summarized as boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy attempts suicide; and, along the way, discovers the true meaning of Christmas. Sometimes we call them the best because they are.

Folks, Jimmy Stewart:

And a very happy holidays, from my family to yours.

Falling Upwards

It's finally December! The season is well underway, and I am incredibly excited for my favorite holiday, Christmas.  In honor of that, for the month of December I will be covering only holiday movies. (For everyone who does not enjoy the holidays ... why are you here?)

Possibly my favorite holiday movie, if not one of my top five favorite movies of all time, is Serendipity (2001). Set in the early aughts, it raises the question of what would happen if you met an amazing stranger ... and then you never saw them again?

That's what happens to Jonathan and Sara.

After a meet-cute over a pair of gloves in a New York department store, the pair quickly discover that not only are they both not single, but they are both incredibly attracted to one another. I mean, you saw that picture. You can probably feel the fireworks from here.

Now, Jonathan is of the mind to exchange numbers, I quote, "just in case."

"In case of what?" Sara asks.

"In case of life."

Sara isn't so sure. She wants to believe in fate, in destiny. And so they part, never to see each other again. Or will they? (Cue the music.)

Just a reminder that this is what John Cusack looks like.

There is a coyness, a quickness, to Serendipity. Let us get you in on the joke, it says. It doesn't hurt that Jeremy Piven is in high form as Jonathan's best friend, Dean, obit writer and general scoundrel.

As Jonathan and Sara take their respective paths in their search for love, the film's constancy actually derives from their friendships--Jonathan's with Dean, and Sara's with her best friend, Eve. These relationships with people who have known them longer than any romantic attachment are the heart and soul of the film. Without them the plot might feel like a cheap deck of cards, easily tipped over.

Yes, Serendipity can be silly--but that's a part of the magic. We're all fools in love, it says, but you can be a fool if you want to be.

And that is what this is all about, right? Love. That beautiful and multi-varied thing. And maybe the source of it is chemistry or biology or something precise that can be pointed to. But maybe, as Serendipity suggests, maybe it's not. Maybe it's luck, or chance, or taking the early bus that day, and you won't know until it has landed straight in your lap, having fallen out of the sky.

Where does this leave Jonathan and Sara? Well. You never know.

Lightning could strike.

Have a good night and once again, happy December.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for Keanu Reeves

This week it's time to embrace the weirdness: narcolepsy, denim jackets, the one-two punch that is River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, and Idaho.

I'm referring, of course, to My Own Private Idaho (1991). Directed by Gus Van Sant, this is a movie that you'd swear makes you feel the chill through your windbreaker.

Gorgeous.

Phoenix and Reeves play Mike and Scott, two friends who hustle for cash and sleep, in Mike's case, anywhere and everywhere: gardens, the back of motorcycles, empty roads. His narcolepsy is the complicating element in his pursuit to find his mother, a journey which leads them from Idaho to Italy, and back again.

As Mike and Scott orbit around each other among bards and blank landscapes, the film becomes steadily more dream-like. It's just not a dream you've ever had before, or maybe one you've had so many times that you've forgotten how it ends. 

Does this look like a face to you?

Part of this is indubitably due to Gus Van Sant, whose track record for strangeness is high--he also directed Elephant, and, funnily enough, Good Will Hunting--but without Phoenix I feel the effect would be incomplete. 

His narration and unrequited love for Scott guide the film into what it is: a meditation, a novel, and a weird, strange masterpiece.

To sum up, in My Own Private Idaho not much happens, but what does happen--well, it's pretty interesting. So check it out. Embrace the weirdness.

Till next week.

Whiplash

Whiplash is the kind of film that you sit through white-knuckled, waiting to know what happens next. Miles Teller plays Andrew Neyman, a young drummer wunderkid--or, depending on the moment, not so wondrous. His ambition is to be the next Charlie Parker.

What follows is a chamber piece about what's inside of Andrew's head. We follow him as he is discovered by his college's most famous jazz director, Terence Fletcher, played by J.K. Simmons. It is not so much a discovery as a revealing, a veil lifted. 

Terence is mercurial and demanding and thrilling. Even as he tears Andrew down, there is a sense that his means will be justified by his ends. The push-pull relationship, heightened by the soundtrack,  translates into drama calculated to surprise.

There's no doubt that Whiplash is a good movie. Better, if you've ever played percussion. And yet there is one glaring flaw that cannot be overlooked: that is, there are no women in this film.

Of course there are actresses. There is an orchestra player and a lawyer and even a girlfriend. But there are no women. At no point are there two female people onscreen at the same time, much less speaking to one another. Andrew's mother is denoted by her absence, his girlfriend by her silence.

It is as though, encased in his own drama, there is no room in Andrew's head for much of anything besides Terence and his drum set. Fine. This is, after all, a movie about a boy.

But aren't we tired of art house films about boys?

Aren't there better things we could be spending our time on? If boys, why this type of story, with this perspective? Do we really have to accept this kind of under-the-table misogyny in our art? Can it even be art if it ignores half the audience? For that matter, where are the men? Terence isn't one. If it's a coming-of-age film there are no models, no real-life Charlie Parkers. There is no final exam, no test, no pass.

Leaving the theater, I wondered if in this alternate universe Andrew Neyman would ever grow up. Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn't matter. Whiplash could have been a great movie, but instead it settled for being a good one.

It Felt Like Love

Fourteen-year-old girls are mysterious creatures. No one knows this more so than Eliza Hittman, whose film It Felt Like Love was released at Sundance in 2013.

From the top there is a spareness to the visuals. As the main character, Lila, walks along the beach in pursuit of her best friend Chiara and Chiara's boyfriend, we can track her but not her surroundings.

Backgrounded by scenes of a forgotten Brooklyn, Lila and Chiara spend their time taking the bus to the beach, where they suntan (or, Lila's case, burn) and track things with their eyes. The one true excitement in their lives are their boyfriends (or, in Lila's case, the lack of one).

It's a quiet film.

It's only when Lila meets another, older boy--Sammy--that things change. With it comes a shift, a darkening, a molting. Lila begins wearing makeup and hanging around Sammy's work, begins buying groceries in another town just to say that she was in the area, just to say hi.

It Felt Like Love transforms into a fantasy. Here are the clockwork girls, here are the boys in blue, here are the fields we've come to know. Here is the song I love the most.

As the scenes begin to take on a sense of dissolution and Lila a haunted, doll-like quality, it can be difficult to tell if she is performing with us or at us. Like Degas' Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, she stands stock still when she should move, permanently adolescent until she isn't anymore.

What I love about this movie is when she does come of age, it is of her own choosing. No one--not her father, not Chiara, not Sammy--controls Lila's fate. Except Lila.

That's the hidden truth about fourteen-year-old girls that Eliza Hittman understands: that they, too, are powerful.

Crazymaking

What they never tell you in therapy school* is that you can be crazy without being crazy. Case in point: Bradley Cooper in the Silver Linings Playbook.

Yes, DeSean Jackson is in the house.

In the last two weeks I decided that the start of football season was an apt time to review a movie about the sport. As you might have guessed from the above image, Silver Linings is that movie.

But this is not a film just about football. No--it's about obsession, about wanting something so badly it blinds you to what is right in front of your eyes.

Released in 2012 just in time for Oscar season, the film features Cooper as Pat Solatano, a man in a mental hospital for assaulting his wife's lover. He suffers from bipolar disorder and a really, really bad  motto: Excelsior, meaning ... what does it mean?

Tiffany Maxwell, a young widow recently fired from her job for sleeping with the whole office, is the woman he meets after being released.

Jennifer Lawrence.

It's difficult to tell who is more crazy. I mean, when they meet at a diner he orders Raisin Bran and she orders tea.

For the record: Raisin Bran, every time.

Pat, still in love with his ex-wife, resists this premise. He thinks that she is the crazier one, until he's forced to acknowledge that in the bundle of insanity that is Pat and Pat's family and Pat's life, Tiffany Maxwell may be the only thing about it that makes sense.

Tiffany has her own life and her own persona and yet she's still willing to reach out and ask for what she wants, in addition to indulging the insanity that is football fandom. Listen to this video and tell me that this is not a girl who has thought through her argument:

That said, having seen it several times what keeps me coming back to Silver Linings is not actually the football or the crazy '80s style dance routines. No. What I like about this film is its acknowledgement of the obvious: that we are all crazy. We are crazy in love, we are crazy in fandom, and we are just plain crazy.

And that's okay.

EXCELSIOR.

How to say anything

Ladies and gentlemen, John Cusack

Sometimes there's no good way to say what you want to say. Or the meaning gets lost in translation, even when you try to translate.

Say Anything... is not a movie that has this problem. Released in 1989, it has since turned into one of the great cult success stories of the eighties. The film starts with John Cusack at the height of his powers as hyper-articulate slacker Lloyd Dobler, who happens to be in love/lust with a girl named Diane Court. Even the names in this movie have impeccable grammar.

Ione Skye, aka Diane Court

When Diane actually agrees to go out with Lloyd everyone is surprised, inspiring what I will argue is the greatest bit of dialogue between three teenage girls ever filmed:

DC: Hey, I know this is a strange thing to say, but maybe Diane Court really likes Lloyd.
COREY: If you were Diane Court, would you honestly fall for Lloyd? [pause] Yeah.
DC: Yeah!
REBECCA: Yeah.

I mean, feel free to fight me on this, but I feel I have a pretty solid case.

So. They go out. It's a date, it's a scam--whatever it is, it's magical. It's that instant connection based on romantic gestures and charm and incredible attraction. It's great.

It's also a movie.

By which I mean that it misses the mark, in terms of brutal honesty. It doesn't say just anything; instead it says very specific things about very specific circumstances. Like the fact that Lloyd doesn't want to buy anything, sell anything, or process anything as a career. And the fact that Diane has a theory of convergence. And the fact that jukeboxes cost about 9000 dollars. (Or did, anyway. This was the late eighties.)

There's something really unbelievable about all of this. For one thing, real relationships aren't montages. They require effort, and the willingness to have difficult conversations. For all their articulation sometimes when I watch Lloyd and Diane talk I am not sure they are really saying anything after all. They are talking to each other, not with each other.

That's the problem, isn't it? When you talk to someone, you aren't listening to them.

What brings me back to this movie over and over again isn't the infatuation or Lloyd's boombox. It's the last scene, when they are just sitting quietly on a plane, waiting for a sound.

*

The Hanks Conundrum

What happened to the trope of women booksellers? It feels like one day we all just woke up and instead of female leads shelving books in libraries and male leads drafting on architecture tables we had something called "Marketing Associate."

Of course, we all know what happened--

It was the 2000s.

--but that doesn't mean we have to give up the ghost entirely.

You've Got Mail (1998) was practically formed off the combination. Kathleen Kelly, otherwise known as the inimitable Meg Ryan, is a bookseller about to go out of business when she meets Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). Her rival's son.

Except it turns out that they've already met -- on the internet.

Dial-up, yo

AOL Instant Messenger is the centerpiece of the movie, and the undoubted inspiration point. I can only imagine the buildup was similar to when that guy wrote that script for that film that was going to be "about Facebook."

What redeems the movie is the chemistry; Hanks in particular is as sharp and clever as he ever gets. But let's be honest. The man could have good chemistry with a sock.

Or some chairs.

It's not even the best Hanks-Ryan combo--that would be Sleepless in Seattle, which is too perfect to critique.

What You've Got Mail is, really, is an antique. I say this because it so perfectly captures a moment in time--the late '90s, when AOL was just starting to become a thing--that to look back on it is to look at something so perfectly comprehensive as to be absolute. I mean, people who were zero years old when You've Got Mail was released are now sixteen and watching it still feels like yesterday.

Like Cary Grant, it's aged well.

It does make me wonder: how will filmmakers portray Tinder? (A word which, though I am the target audience, I had to check the spelling of twice.) Will it be a romantic tale of two people connected by the mere swipe of a thumb, or will it be humdrum and pedestrian? I hope the former, because in fifteen years a lot changes.

Heart, though. That stays the same.

When You Cannot Possibly Do Anything Else

Do you know those weeks when you cannot possibly do anything else but the thing that you are doing?

This is one of those for me. I am moving to a familiar city for a new job--here's a nice announcement, if you are interested--which has entailed, in the past few days, all the things that moving usually entails, as well as all the goodbyes that starting a new venture usually entails.

So for this week there can be no new post.

No new post, but one coming soon. And the next, and the next. I'll leave you with this clip from 13 Going on 30 (2004). It's a fun one.

Coming up next week? Something--Hanksy.

Love, Music

I hate musicals. They are trite, saccharine, and annoyingly loud, and by writing this I've virtually guaranteed that I will cover a musical sometime in the coming year.

Not today, though. Today I want to feature two movies that aren't musical so much as they are about music, starting with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008).

The film chronicles the beginning of a relationship between Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings), two high schoolers who meet on a night out in New York City. Together with their merry band of followers they search for Where's Fluffy?, an indie rock legend whose concert is set to go off at the end of the night.

I see you.

Where's Fluffy? is, of course, a MacGuffin. (A MacGuffin being the Hitchcockian device of a goal that is ultimately unimportant to the overall plot.) 

Instead it is the music, their private soundtrack, that pulls the plot forward. As Nick and Norah stumble together through the events of the night, the result is a non-quiet meditation on a young person's how to be, separately and as a part of a couple. 

What makes it memorable is itself the act of turning, and turning, and turning, until eventually ... 

... they face the same direction.

*

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) is a film that begins somewhat differently. Here the lovers are not new, not unknown, but the opposite. Indeed, they are familiars of hundreds of years. 

Tilda Swinton, Vampire.

Though they live separately, they are known best between themselves and no one else.

Tom Hiddleston, also Vampire.

Adam and Eve are thus the theoretical endgame of the Nick and Norah meet-cute.

But where Nick and Norah merely takes place in the darkness, Only Lovers Left Alive dwells in it. Coming together again, the couple discovers that what their unit suffers from most is not the dangers of the outside world, but those cultivated by their isolation.

Oh, and did I mention that Adam has a rock band?

It has some teeth.

*

Be back next week. 

October 21st, 1975

Given the news that broke yesterday of Robin Williams' passing, it seems only appropriate to discuss the movie that I almost, but not quite, discussed last week: Good Will Hunting (1997).

You see, Good Will Hunting is like The Devil Wears Prada in that both deal with a young fish out of water, a secret prodigy who gets taken underwing. They are also similar in that both are comforting movies, where deep themes are discussed in clever ways and all's well that ends well.

There's nothing comforting about Robin Williams' death. He didn't die of a heart attack in his 80's or after a long debilitating illness. He killed himself.

A part of my last job was to listen to old audio interviews to be made into CD compilations. It was a great job [internship, technically]. One of these CDs was going to be about comedians--the Greatest Hits, so to speak. And so I listened to many hours of comedians being interviewed and doing their funniest bits, comedians from every era.

I was looking for clips that were about 7 minutes long, max 15. In the process I came across an interview given by Robin Williams in the mid 80's. It was after his oldest son had been born and he had split with his first wife and given up cocaine, and it was an hour long.

I knew from the start that we couldn't use this interview. It was too crowded, too personal. But Williams spoke so passionately, so beautifully, about subjects so dear to my heart, that I listened to the whole thing. And then I listened to it again.

It was, I have no doubt, the best interview I've ever heard a comedian give.

I can't give you that clip, and I can't do anything else, really, but what I can do is give you a scene from Good Will Hunting. A picture of what it was like, once upon a time.

To Robin.