Some Came Running

Well tonight thank God it's Deanna Durbin instead of you...

...or something.

It's that time of year again, when we pause to reflect on why one of the most peculiar and capital-"s" Surreal solstice-themed films of all time, Robert Siodmak's 1944 Christmas Holiday, is such an elusive commodity here in these United States. Have yourself a merry Christmas, be it little or big. And feel free to share your most favored/outré choices of holiday viewing below. As always, thanks much for reading, for support, and for prodding. Be well and see you next year, or sooner, if some irresistible blog urge occurs...

Green, easy

I observe in my MSN Movies review of The Muppets that, indeed, nobody doesn't like the Muppets. The new Jason-Segel-starring revival of the characters is a lot of fun, but I have to admit that I, like a certain commenter on a thread over at Jeffrey Wells' site, I'm a little bemused at, and I quote the other guy, "all these jaded, bearded fatsos who usually hate most things are suddenly going all gooey and weak-kneed at the joy and wonder of the Muppets." Yes, a lot of aspiring badasses or what have you have been taking some minutes away from their efforts to prove that fat, drunk, and stupid IS a viable way to go through life the better to publicly touch their inner childs, and quite the spectacle it has been, too; even funnier than the virtual site of dozens of young Brooklyn gentrifiers distracting themselves from agonizing over which private school they want to get their moppets rejected from and instead agonizingover the news of Kim and Thurston's separation. A funny little world we live in, with our little circumscribed objects of reverence, and all. One quite enjoyable side product of Muppet-love is an extremely informative and entertaining article by Sam Adams (who is not a jaded, bearded fatso, incidentally) about the odd roots of "Mahna-Mahna," which appears, in of all places, the usually-hardly-informative-or-edifying Slate. 

Speaking of friend Wells, though, he may be the only dude in the universe who complains about a fucking four-day weekend, on account of "everybody stops creating." Jesus, my man's a FREAK. Even as a freelancer, I dig a four-day weekend the most, and I'm not EVEN gonna stop creating—I've got a lot of Blu-rays to look at if I even want to think about getting a Consumer Guide Holiday Edition posted before the YEAR ends, AND I've got band practice on Saturday; gotta whip the rhythm section in shape for a December recording date. But this blog is going to be highly inactive until Monday, so enjoy whatever you are intending to enjoy, until then.

Is there anything Nicolas Winding Refn CAN'T do?

I'm decidedly mixed on Drive, for reasons I articulate in my upcoming review for MSN Movies, and as such I'm a little more impatient than I'd normally be with the utterly breathless and increasingly relentless unwarranted dribbling over the film and its admittedly talented director Nicolas Winding Refn. I hit a bit of a Twitter wall with it earlier today when one Industry Tweeter™ chimed in "Drive Director Refn Talks Scouting Gritty Los Angeles Locations." Ooooh, I thought. Refn went to gritty places to scout. No other director does that. So I tweeted some imaginary Refn headlines. They were: 

Drive Director Refn Heals Lame, Makes Blind See, Raises The Dead

Drive Director Refn Successfully Negotiates Middle East Peace Treaty; Tears It Up & Throws It In Your Face, Just For A Laugh

"Please Have Violent Sex With My Wife/Girlfriend," Dozens Of 30-Something Male Film Critics Beg Of Drive Director Refn

Drive Director Refn Allows Lars von Trier To "Kill" Him, Destroying Final Nazi Horcrux

Can you top these? Do you want to? Am I overreacting?

Have a delightful Labor Day Weekend. 

Here's to wilder New Year's!

Have a safe and happy one, you all. 

UPDATE: On examining this post, My Lovely Wife told me, "You should be thrown in prison." 

Image of the day, 12/25/10

White Christmas, Michael Curtiz, 1954.

Merry Merry: 2010

Once again, as is her custom, The Bride sends you best wishes for the holiday season. This has been quite an interesting year, and the past three weeks or so have been terrifically intense, bringing events of wondrous household joy, including Claire's highly delightful BAM debut with Mikel Rouse's Gravity Radio, concomitant visits from a posse of relatives (including the in-laws; it was my father-in-law's presence at a screening of Little Fockers that destroyed my opportunity to fudge my reaction to the film, and thus properly join the herd of independent minds...), and lastly, a holiday brunch of some ambition. I'm a lot happier than I was at this time last year (photographic evidence below the fold), but I'm also exhausted. So...

Maintenance of tradition department

"We're millionaires, boys! I'll share it with all of you!" Uh-huh.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. More holiday ape stuff here and here. 

Happy 4th of July!

From WInchester '73, Anthony Mann, 1950. Of course.

Posting's usually light on the weekends, and it's likely to be lighter still on this one, always a favorite in the Kenny household. Enjoy, all.

An SCR Christmas Miracle

Hullo dere. 

There is little of filmmaking import to report. I choose to honor a New Year's Resolution early, and not call some kind of referendum on a hiring at the L.A. Weekly. At least not here. ('Twas mentioned in my Christmas Topics, at The Auteurs'.) I haven't seen Sherlock Holmes yet. I did see Up In The Air, which I enjoyed up to a point, but not to the point where it would compel me to alter my year's best list. To tell the truth, I find the wildly divergent perspectives on the film that I've seen out there more interesting than the film itself. I am also curious as to the identity of Vera Farmiga's dorsal double. 

Truth to tell, the most interesting thing I've got is a travel tale. It begins, in O. Henry fashion, with My Lovely Wife buying a Christmas present for her dad. The present is a very nifty moustache razor from The Art of Shaving, and a box of the tiny, triangular blades said razor accepts. 

On the morning of the 23rd, Claire and I got up well before the crack of dawn, dragging down our suitcases in a slightly nervous daze, and taking the nice black corporate car to Newark Airport. Our extremely solicitous and attentive drive  —who was so solicitous and attentive that I didn't even mind the fact that he named his own tip on the payment voucher—came chasing after us as we dragged our suitcases into the Continental terminal at Newark."Excuse me, is this yours?" he asked, holding up the tiny box that held those triangular razors.

And indeed, it was ours. The question was, how did it escape from Claire's suitcase? The answer, alas, was easy enough: the zipper at the front of her formidable Samsonite case had slipped off of its track, and now its entire front panel was about to flap wide open. 

A Fritz Lang Christmas

Not something you'd really wish on anybody: the final minutes of Lang's Scarlet Street, with a desolate, derelict Edward G. Robinson walking the bustling New York streets as the sounds of Christmas carols mix with the voices in his head: the woman who made a chump out of him and the man who wrongly went to the chair for her murder, mocking him from the afterlife in between cooing at each other...and  then the crowds dissolve, the carols fade, and it's just him, and the cold, and the voices.

No; if you can do so, you should absolutely avoid having A Fritz Lang Christmas.

I'm gonna take a few days off from this enterprise to rest and enjoy the holiday. I'll be back around the 26th with, among other things, a surprising tale of airline employee helpfulness and ingenuity, but blogging will be light after it resumes at least until after the new year, because I think we've all got other stuff to do, no? In the meantime, have a joyous, peaceful time, and thanks as always for spending time here.