Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I forget where I recently read that this film introduced the song “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (perhaps it was not on a blog, but on the front of the box). So I decided to pop in this film which I bought last month the night after White Christmas.

Okay, so it’s a little romance with singing (although it includes a dance number to “Skip to My Lou”). Judy Garland plays the middle daughter in a family of five children. The oldest son is going off to college; the oldest sister is hoping that a boy going to Yale is going to propose to her; the older younger sister is played by Joan Carroll who in the next year would have a meatier role in The Bells of St. Mary’s; the youngest is five years old and definitely gives off a creepy vibe as she says her dolls have fatal diseases and then has funerals for them and buries them. They live with their folks in a nice (real nice) house in St. Louis. And the bulk of the film is Judy Garland singing about the boy next door. Their father announces that he will be running a new New York office for his law firm, throwing the family in disarray.

The movie covers almost a year in the life, with a section for each season starting with summer 2003 and going to the opening of the World’s Fair in 2004. The winter/Christmas scene seems longest and does, in fact, serve up a wistful “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as the youngest daughter laments leaving St. Louis. But, as a romance, it all wraps up with happy couples in the end staying in St. Louis.

Not an unpleasant couple of hours; probably better if you’re into the genre. You know, I lived in the St. Louis area for, erm, 20+ years on and off from 1983-2009, and World’s Fair memorabilia was still a thing at that time. The centennial was a bit of a big deal. But I was too young to get into it. I’m sure this film grafted some of that onto a new generation in 1944 and beyond. This film was a period piece when it came out; it’s doubly so now, being an artifact of its time as well as an idealization of the time it depicted. I mean, if they made period pieces now set forty years ago, they’d be set in the 1980s. Oh. But the times have not changed quite as much in the last 40 years as in the period between 1904 and 1944. But perhaps I am merely old enough to have that perspective, being that I remember not having cell phones and social media as normal in a way that kids these days would not.

The movie also introduces two new songs which have become American Songbook standards: “The Boy Next Door” and “The Trolley Song”. I associate them with Stacey Kent as they both appear on her album The Boy Next Door. Perhaps it’s the familiarity with Kent’s versions that make me prefer them over Garland’s.

Alright, alright, alright. Now, do I dig out The Bishop’s Wife or go right into the action-oriented Christmas movies? Stay tuned!

Well, after watching Holiday Inn, of course I put this videocassette into the VCR the next evening. The label on the video indicates I paid twice as much for it as Holiday Inn, but they both look like church youth group garage sales. Probably different years. They haven’t had one of those sales in years, which explains why have accumulating boxes of “donations” in my garage.

This film starts with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire Danny Kaye putting on a show near the front in France, 1944. It’s Christmas Eve, and their division is about to move up, so they want to give the guys something pleasant before they do. And they want to honor their outgoing General Waverly who is being replaced with someone straight from the Pentagon. After the show, Phil Davis (Kaye) pulls Bob Wallace (Crosby) from a falling wall, saving his life. When they meet in the hospital, Wallace expresses his gratitude and offers to do anything for Davis–and Davis responds by showing him a song, which is a duet–although Wallace claims he works alone, he now has a partner.

A decade later, they are a successful act on tour with their show when they meet two sisters, Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy (Vera-Ellen) Haynes, a sister act whose brother served with Davis and Wallace. When the girls announce that they’re heading to Vermont (and have to get out of town fast), Davis gives the girls their plane tickets and stalls the local law while the girls escape. He then connives a trip to Vermont with Wallace with the girls, and they discover that the inn where the girls are to perform is owned by General Waverly. The inn might as well be closed: with no snow in Vermont this year, no guests are staying at the inn. But Wallace and Davis bring their show to the inn for rehearsals and then call their old service mates to come see it to support the old man. And finis!

Watching them on consecutive nights leads one to compare the two, and I definitely prefer Holiday Inn. The songs are better, and this film has a couple or three song-and-dance numbers just grafted onto the narrative under the pretense that they’re parts of the show being rehearsed. One, the “Choreography” number, laments that the talents of individual singers and dancers are being lost to the large song and dance numbers that are merely synchronized movements of masses. Crosby and Clooney share a good number that fits into the plot as does “Snow”, but they’re almost exceptions.

The film has Vera-Ellen in the role of the young attractive woman. Too young for Crosby’s character, she pairs up with Kaye. How does she compare to Marjorie Reynolds?

Continue reading “Movie Report: White Christmas (1954)” →

When it comes time to re-watch the movies featuring White Christmas, I must watch them in order: This film and White Christmas. Of the two, I like this one better. I mean, face it: Danny Kaye, the co-star in White Christmas, is no Fred Astaire. Full disclosure: I also own and enjoy A Couple of Song and Dance Men, their 1976 LP.

On Christmas Eve, a song-and-dance troupe is about to break up. Joe Hardy (Bing Crosby) is set to wed Lila (Virginia Dale) and move to a farm in Connecticut, but unbeknownst to him, she has decided she wants to keep singing and dancing and to marry their partner Ted Hanover (Astaire). Hardy moves to the farm and spends a year as a gentleman farmer in a humorous montage, but decides it’s too much work. So he decides to open an inn–a club more than an actual inn–which is only open on holidays. He comes to New York on Christmas Eve to hunt for talent, and his former booking agent passes this information to a part-time florist, Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds) who auditions with Hardy at the Holiday Inn and joins him for the show.

However, on New Year’s Eve, opening night, Lila elopes with a Texas millionaire, and an intoxicated Ted comes to Holiday Inn. A humorous dance routine ensues with Linda keeping him on his feet in the spotlight, and everyone raves about his new partner–but he doesn’t know who she is. He and his agent vow to find out who she is whilst Joe tries to keep her identity a secret. Hijinks and musical numbers ensue until Ted and his agent discover her identity on Independence Day, when Hollywood men are in the audience hoping to scope out Ted with his new partner for picture. Linda breaks her engagement with Joe because he doesn’t trust her and goes to Hollywood with Ted, leaving Joe alone again. But at the prodding of his housekeeper, Joe goes to California to win her back.

Alright, alright, alright. I cannot deny that this is a musical with song-and-dance numbers with various holiday songs, including two renditions of “White Christmas”. But it’s Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, so it’s worthwhile. And as I mentioned, I watch it almost every Christmas season.

The film has come under fire in certain quarters because one of the subterfuges to hiding Linda from Ted is to perform a tribute to Abraham Lincoln in black face. Which is verboten now, but in reality, it’s only makeup, and the song and dance number does not look down on black people–it makes them sound grateful for the man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Although the more modern we get, perhaps that’s verbotener. And the housekeeper at the Holiday Inn is a black woman with two children, and her character is of the black housekeeper type. Which I chose to see her as an individual and not of a type and, again, the film does not look down on her nor black people in general, but once you start dealing with “types” you’re open to inchoate stochastic racism in the ether, which I didn’t find in the number, the housekeeper nor her children, but I am likely an old white racist. So there you go. I can watch old movies without high dudgeon anyway.

But enough about all that. Let’s talk about Marjorie Reynolds, who played Linda Mason.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Holiday Inn (1942)” →

I pulled this film from the Nogglestead media library as a Christmas movie because I remember that it has Bing Crosby introduce his version of “Adeste Fidelis” which is on about 10% of the Christmas records at Nogglestead (or such was the case before I began buying new Christmas record in earnest about a decade ago) and that it has a related children’s Christmas program scene, but as it turns out, the Christmas scene is but one portion of the film. I might as well call Penny Serenade a Christmas film because it has a children’s Christmas program as part of it. Neither of these films is, technically, a Christmas movie. However, I watched it.

Bing Crosby plays Father O’Malley who comes to St. Mary’s, a church with a school that is falling into disrepair. He’s warned by the housekeeper that he’s in for a new experience surrounded by nuns, and he butts heads with Sister Superior (played by Ingrid Bergman thirteen years before Indiscreet and in full bloom) on a couple of topics. The film has three co-plots: A young girl raised by a single mother comes to the school and struggles to fit in; a boy has learned too well the “turn the other cheek” message of the school, but he needs to learn to box–and the tomboy Sister Superior is happy to help him learn; and a wealthy businessman is building a large office building next to the church on land they had to sell to him for repairs on the church, but they hope he will donate it to the parish even while he hopes to buy it from the church even if he has to have it condemned. Father O’Malley navigates these struggles and deals with a health issue that Sister Superior suffers from but that the doctor does not want her to know about.

The film has a rendition of “Adeste Fidelis” as I mentioned, but also a couple other Bing Crosby numbers. BUT IT IS NOT A MUSICAL. Don’t be hitting me with those negative waves so early in the afternoon, man.

The film is a sequel to Going My Way from the year before, for which Bing Crosby won an Oscar as the best actor. I’d be happy to find it in the wild, but old old movies are thin on the ground in the antique malls and book sales. It’s a bit of a testament, though, that sequels and “franchises” do not exclusively belong to the modern cinema.

Now if you excuse me, I am off to watch a Christmas classic.

This 2004 film comes from a time where Tim Allen was at the height of his celebrity, returning to the genre where he saw his greatest success in films (the Christmas comedy, as The Santa Clause and its sequels were far better received than, say, Joe Somebody). It’s based on a book by John Grisham who was at about the beginning of the ebb of his bestselling dominance I presume–I can’t think of another book of his after Skipping Christmas, but that might be because not long after I stopped looking at the bestseller list to see how Robert B. Parker’s latest work was doing.

At any rate, Allen plays an accountant. His daughter leaves after Thanksgiving to travel to Peru in the Peace Corps, which will leave Allen’s Luther Krank and his wife Nora, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, alone for the holidays. Fearing being alone for the holidays, Luther accounts for the money that they spent on the previous Christmas and convinces Nora that they should not spend any money on Christmas and should take a cruise with the money instead.

So the first part of the story deals with how their co-workers and neighbors deal with them when they’re not decorating and whatnot. Dan Ackroyd plays the local neighborhood leader who tries to pressure them into decorating like all of the neighbors do. The Kranks cancel their annual Christmas Eve party, which upsets their friends who have been coming to the party for years. Co-workers start calling Luther “Scrooge.” Collectors for the police charity, played by Cheech and Jake Busey, don’t like being rebuffed in their collection efforts. But the Kranks soldier on, until their daughter Blair calls on Christmas Eve as they are packing for their trip: She has arrived in Miami with her Peruvian fiance, and she wants to show him how they celebrate Christmas.

So the second part of the film covers the Kranks who try to decorate and get something of a party together for Blair’s homecoming. When Ackroyd’s Frohmeyer sees them, he calls the neighbors to help out. Not to help out Luther, but to do it for Blair. So they try to decorate, find Blair’s favorite foodstuffs, and whatnot. And we get an ambiguous appearance of an umbrella salesman who seems to know everyone but whom nobody knows. Could it be… SANTA?

The film has its heart in the right place, but it falls a little short. I don’t know–somehow the film makes what must have been some long-term relationships with friends and family seem a little shallow. Maybe the film somehow misses a sense of Christmas in it–the film has the decorations and trappings of it, but not much of a sense of Christmas in spite of the change-of-heart gifting that sees Luther give the cruise tickets and package to a neighbors where the wife is suffering from cancer (the book was published in the Before Times, where tickets did not have names on them or something). Maybe that change was very subtle, because although Nora calls Luther selfish right before it, throughout the film, the character does not come across that way. Perhaps it’s shaded differently in the book. Perhaps I’m too fresh from viewing the hijinks in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation that some scenes–icing his lawn so carolers cannot stand out there and sing to him–might have been more mean-spirited in the book. Or maybe Tim Allen has played too many nice guy characters in the past so that we put the best possible spin on his behavior. I expect the book differs.

It’s entirely possible that I’ll buy the book sometime to hide in my stacks as an annual Christmas novel. But I won’t be pulling this out of the Nogglestead video library around Christmas too often.

This film is also entitled National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Reunion which clarifies which holiday is involved, as I discovered when I watched it after Thanksgiving and totally ruined it.

Well, not really. This made-for-cable movie features Judge Reinhold as a California anaesthesiologist whose family is consumed by materialism and modern society who wants to have an old fashioned Thanksgiving, but he lacks family outside his immediate family–and has for a while, apparently, as eating out is the family’s general practice. But he receives a letter from a distant, forgotten cousin (played by pre-Walter White Bryan Cranston) inviting them to the old family homestead for Thanksgiving. So we have a fish out of water comedy as the spoiled and upper class family from southern California meet the hippie cousins in Idaho, where the Snider name has a bad reputation ever since the country cousin made an error in a state championship football game decades earlier.

So hijinks ensue, and the town Sniders discover that the country Sniders have invited them because they need some money as country Snider pere has had some bad luck with his businesses around his inventions and his washing machine repair services. So the town Sniders have to determine what to do, but their car disappears and then their daughter disappears–she’s discovered the joys of country boys and their hillbilly deluxe trucks. But all’s well that ends well when the country Sniders and town Sniders team up to save the day and reconcile the Snider family with the townsfolk.

So an amusing bit of clearly television fare. Not destined to be a holiday classic, but then who knows? Although the fragmentation of culture might mean that “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is the last Christmas classic ever.

A couple of pieces of the film resounded with me: first, Bryan Cranston does battle with a washing machine at one point, and I know the feeling. November and December weekends here at Nogglestead has seen me inside both my washer and my dryer multiple times trying to keep the commodity-level things operating for another year or so. Or maybe just a couple of weeks. Second, the story line about the football championship took place whilst the local high school football team made it to the state championship ever. No game-losing errors, but they did lose to a Catholic school from the St. Louis area which, as a private school, can recruit football players. So no curses on my boys’ friends.

On the scale of “National Lampoon” branded movies, it’s not amongst the best, but still not a bad hour and a half.

Also, note this trivium: The DVD sold for $.99 at Vintage Stock at some point, but I bought it for a dollar at the antique mall. Which means it appreciated in value, but the person who had the booth at the mall probably paid fifty cents or less for it.

Alright, alright, alright, my film watching has not shifted to Christmas movies exclusively, gentle reader. So I picked up this film one quiet evening at Nogglestead.

You might recall the plot: In the near future, a crime syndicate from a farther future sends people back in time to be killed because the victims could easily be tracked in that future (but apparently time machines cannot). So the hitmen in the movie’s present wait at a certain time for someone in a hood to appear, and they kill that person and dispose of the body, keeping the silver that is secured to the victims’ bodies. When they find gold on the body, that indicates they’ve killed their future selves and “closed the loop.” I am not sure why that would be a thing, but it’s part of the movie’s lore, so….

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, one such killer in the future / past who starts having doubts about his job as his drug and alcohol intake increase. When a co-worker, Seth, lets his future self escape one such loop-closing, Joe tries to shelter him but eventually turns him over as the future Seth/old Seth tries to get to a particular location while suffering debilitating injuries inflicted on current Seth. How Seth would be able to conduct his hits or live to be old Seth who is uninjured at the outset but gets injured as young Seth is tortured…. Well, don’t overthink it, just go with the look and feel of the movie.

So when it’s time for old Joe to go (in the future) he (played by Bruce Willis) resists, leading to the death of his wife. He fights as the future bad men are throwing him into the past, so he’s loose and gets the drop on the younger version of himself. And we get some flashbacks from his point of view, and they’re a little different and are changing. But he learns that a kingpin in the future called Rainmaker is killing all the loopers, and Old Joe tries to kill the Rainmaker as a boy by doing the Herod thing (so is Looper actually a Christmas movie?) He goes child hunting while young Joe goes to a farm with a young boy to await old Joe’s arrival, and….

Well, like I said, just go along for the ride and don’t try to overthink it. Or think about it after all. The whole thing kind of comes off as a script based on the idea for a video game. I mean, shoot, loot the bodies, level up (although I guess they’re not leveling up, really). According to Wikipedia, the “thought-proviking” film appeared on a number of best film lists for 2012. Which is probably more a sad commentary on the quality of film and critic thought in the 21st century than any real philosophical or scientific (why does it sound right that one of those ends in al and the other ic? Now that’s thought-provoking) measure.

Given Bruce Willis’s later diagnosis, I can’t help but wonder if he was already in decline here as his performance is a bit wooden. I would rather re-watch Hudson Hawk, Blind Date, or The Color of Night than this film.

I am not sure that I have seen this film all the way through, but I probably have at some point and might even uncover another copy of it in the library (which happens slightly more for films than for books, fortunately, although the Nogglestead to-read stacks would be less daunting at times if I could like Thanos snap my fingers and half of them disappear–although I’d rather not give my beautiful wife the idea that that is an option). But as it is coming up on Christmas time, I thought I’d watch some Christmas movies, starting with this one.

I watched National Lampoon’s Vacation last year but skipped National Lampoon’s European Vacation because I haven’t seen the DVD or videocassette recently in the wild. It’s all right, though–of all the Vacation movies, I’ve probably seen European Vacation most as it was on Showtime in that brief interval where I was supposed to stay in the trailer, not have friends over, and not go outside while my sainted mother was working. Which meant a lot of Showtime.

At any rate, Clark Griswold invites both his and his wife’s parents along with some family members to stay for Christmas–even though they argue amongst themselves. He’s planning–and put a deposit on–a swimming pool in anticipation of a healthy Christmas bonus. Set pieces include getting the family Christmas tree, struggling with Christmas lights, Cousin Eddie’s arrival, and then the holiday dinner. Side plots include annoying the 80s-archetypical Yuppie neighbors.

You know, I suspect this only became a “Christmas classic” because of the time period it released–the end of Generation X’s youth where large families and family gatherings were more common, and when we became adults and left many of these things behind. Or perhaps I’m projecting a bit, although I am too old-souled to apply classic to a film from the 1980s, especially in the tradition of a Christmas classic.

I did want to note that, unlike more modern films (::cough, cough:: The Heartbreak Kid), this film does not deconstruct marriage or the family for the humor. It takes family and marriage seriously, presents them as a good thing, and the gags take place in that context. The Griswolds find themselves in some crazy situations, sometimes as a result of the father’s actions, but marriage and the family are not presented as an impediment to Griswold’s life (although he does think about the Lady in Red, this time it’s less serious than in Vacation).

The film was amusing, and it’s entirely possible I will watch it again this season with my boys or family. But in the recent search for a specific film I’ve seen before, I pulled out a number of actual Christmas classics to watch, so maybe not. I guess Christmas is only two weeks away, which is probably 10 movies tops.

The film featured Nicolette Scorsese in the aforementioned “Woman in Red” role that Christie Brinkley played in the first film–the woman whom Clark thinks about.

Continue reading “Movie Report: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)” →

I think of this movie as coming after Ben Stiller’s peak period, but to be honest, something happened in 2006 that killed our cinema-going days for a while (before the insipidity of modern movies completely killed it). My oldest was born in 2006, so I missed a lot of movies between then and forever except for those I’m catching up on via home media (whose reach is already waning as streaming takes over). Looking at his IMDB listing, Stiller has remained active, although mostly on sequels to things that came out before 2006. So I guess we don’t have to pen a “Where Are They Now?” entry about him just yet.

At any rate, in this film, Stiller plays Eddie, a sporting goods shop owner in San Francisco who feels pressure to get married because his long-time fiance is getting married and because his best friend (played by Rob Corddry, who also was in How To Be A Latin Lover and the Hot Tub Time Machine movies–so I’ve seen him often enough to learn his name), because his friend (he repeated because that other parenthetical grew long) who extols the virtues of marriage whilst being a henpecked husband, and because he, Eddie, is forty. So when he attempts to help a woman getting mugged on the streets of San Francisco, he meets an attractive woman who seems perfect. After a montage of them snogging in various locations over a couple of months, they marry and go to Cabo for their honeymoon.

During the trip, though, she starts to annoy him, and starts slipping things about her past (cocaine addiction and apparently a lot of varied sexual adventures, along with the fact that the “mugging” was an ex-boyfriend trying to reclaim his wallet which she stole from him). They don’t agree much on what to do, and on the first day, a beach day, she gets sunburned terribly and refuses to leave the room. So Eddie goes out to dinner and meets a woman in Cabo with her family, and then meets her family, and has a montage of pleasant trips with her whilst his new wife is laid up. So much so that she falls for him, too, but when she discovers he has a living wife (not a murdered wife, which is part of a story he told to kids at the wedding in scene 1 who also happen to be in Cabo at the same time), it’s over. Eddie has a montage of him trying to cross the border without papers as his wife burned all his belongings before returning to the U.S. When he arrives in Oxford, Mississippi, he finds that Miranda (played by Michelle Monaghan) has married an ex-boyfriend and is happy. Eddie reflects on his life and decamps from San Francisco, having lost his sporting goods store in the divorce, moving to Cabo and opening a business on the beach. Some time later, Miranda returns to Cabo separated from her husband and looking to rekindle her romance with Eddie, but the very last scene is Eddie telling his new Mexican wife the same lies he told his first wife when he was going to sneak off with Miranda.

So, basically, the whole thing is a deconstruction of marriage. I mean, he rushed into his marriage after a couple of months, only to discover some things about his new wife that he didn’t learn in those months when they were together all the time, apparently snogging but not shagging. And, in the end, he has not learned anything and is in the same place, with the same shortcomings.

This is a remake of an earlier film starring Charles Grodin. I haven’t seen it, but the Wikipedia entry makes it sound like Eddie was a less sympathetic figure. A cad, but in the end he marries the girl (and ends up at the kids’ table, which is where Eddie begins in this film). So there is some recognition of the value of marriage and that Eddie is outside the bounds of the mainstream or the “good.” But Ben Stiller plays, well, Ben Stiller, so the character comes of as sympathetic, it could happen to anybody, even as he plies deception and continues the deception to the end of the film and beyond. So I didn’t like the film and ultimately found it morally repugnant.

I bought this film late last month and popped it in as I’m more in the mood for films than reading these days, perhaps spurred by the realization that even though I know I will not finish reading all my books, I have a shot at watching all my unread videocassettes and DVDs if I put my back into it. So I have been a bit.

In this ultimately forgettable comedy from the 1980s, Chevy Chase is a sportswriter who quits his job in the city and moves with his wife (no children) to a…. Well, a hobby farm sized parcel way out in the country. Hijinks ensue as they deal with movers who get lost and are days late (with only a truckload of furniture, but I guess they are moving from an apartment to a home), the eccentric locals, the wildlife, and so on. Chevy Chase wants to write a book, and he starts on it. When he shares the beginning of it with his wife on their anniversary, their romantic mood is ruined when she says it’s not good. So their marriage founders, especially when she writes a children’s book that she sells and starts working on others. They plan to sell the house, hiring the townsfolk to act Norman Rockwellish for a couple who is interested in the property, but they decide to reconcile and stay. And finis!

You know, the 80s brimmed with “New Yorkers Move To The Suburbs/Rural Areas” comedies. Well, okay, maybe I’m only also thinking of The Money Pit just because I watched it earlier this year. But these fish-out-of-water tales really miss the proper zeitgeist of rural areas (and adding meth to them a la Winter’s Bone and whatnot does not correct this flaw).

I didn’t care for the film, as it was kind of shallow and hollow at the same time. The characters are underdeveloped, even for a comedy–in the best of movies, you get the sense that the characters have some sort of life off screen, but the characters here are just ciphers for cinematic manipulation. And it wasn’t that funny.

Although it did speak to me a bit: 1) When I first met my beautiful wife, I brought a manuscript of The Courtship of Barbara Holt and watched her while she read it at a coffee shop called The Grind in the fashionable Central West End. And 2) Something about the marriage rankled me–both participants showed some selfish tendencies, and the husband’s poisonous envy of the wife’s success was off-putting. I don’t know. Maybe I thought it would be too easy for me to become that person.

So I have seen it, and although I asked my boys, including the Chevy Chase fan, if they wanted to watch it, I ended up telling him (the fan) that he made a good decision as the film was insipid.

You know Chevy Chase made a fair number of films in the 1980s, but he’s mostly remembered for the National Lampoon’s Vacation films. And fittingly so. They were family-oriented films, which made the adults adults and not childish. Well, not completely childish. Which is often lacking from modern comedies.