Ho ho ho! It is now March, but that will not stop me from looking back on a season of Christmas films they showed in the Light House in December. First up we have Comfort & Joy, Bill Forsyth's 1984 film. Now, some background here. This was Forsyth's third feature, following Gregory's Girl and Local Hero. Local Hero is a bit of an obsession in my beloved's family so I found myself heading off to see this with her and her sister. Despite the title, it's not really a Christmas film, or at least only in the sense that it is set around Christmastime without actually being about Christmas. It takes its inspiration from Glasgow's ice cream wars of the 1980s, when criminal gangs were selling heroin from ice cream vans and laying into any of their rivals who encroached on their turf. However, instead of being a film about drug gangs the film imagines a strange alternative history in which the ice cream wars are instead between rival producers of ice cream. The main character plays a radio DJ who somehow finds himself mediating between the battling gelato merchants after going through a bad break up.
I liked this film a lot. For all its whimsy, the plot seemed more coherent than the better regarded Local Hero. The humour is appealingly gentle and the Mark Knopfler soundtrack so effective that I started wondering if I might have reached the age where engaging with Dire Straits becomes a good idea. But I think a really big part of what appealed about this to me was all the Glasgow locations. Some of the city looked very familiar while some of it was very different: there is a scene on the banks of the Clyde with the Finnieston Crane in the background, something I saw lot of in my 2024 Worldcon related trips to Glasgow, except that instead of being surrounded by hotels and conference centres it is out in the middle of a semi-derelict port site. I also found it highly amusing that the protagonist seemed to be living around the corner from one of my gamelan friends, with whom I was staying on a November gamelan trip to GIOFest.
You can see a trailer for the film here.
The Holdovers is more directly a Christmas film. It's about some rich kids who have to spend the Christmas holidays in their posh boarding school because their families can't or won't take them, and also the cook and grumpy teacher who have to stay with them. In premise it sounds like heartwarming glurge but it is actually pretty affecting and has strong performances from all three of the principals: Paul Giamatti as the teacher, Da'Vine Joy Randolph as the cook, and Dominic Sessa as the main held over student. Sessa's performance, his film debut, is particularly impressive. I think this is the kind of film that will deservedly get shown every year around Christmas so you will get a chance to see it and should take that opportunity. I did overhear some young people talking about how they found it much more moving on the big screen.
The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best and most faithful adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, both funny and deeply moving. I suspect I will be going to the cinema for this every year until I die. The Light House audience was a bit boisterous but I decided it was best to lean into this.
Strange Days is Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 SF film set in the last days and hours before the start of the 21st century. It's not a Christmas film as such, but it does feature a guy dressed as Santa Claus being chased by some angry hookers. The setup revolves around this dodgy tech that allows people to record their physical sensations for playback by themselves or other people, with Ralph Fiennes playing a shifty vendor of these recordings. The plot is multi-layered, with one angle covering a rampage by murderous cops seeking to recover an incriminating recording but another key theme is the importance of letting the past go (something Fiennes' character takes a while to realise, as he spends a lot of the film playing back experiences from before his girlfriend left him). The central performances from Fiennes and Angela Bassett as his kickarse limo driving friend are very impressive and overall I like this film as much as I did when I first saw it. My beloved did however think it went on a bit, and given its 145 minute runtime I can see where she is coming from. It's also not always an easy watch, with one particularly intense scene inspired by Michael Powell's Peeping Tom making for extremely uncomfortable viewing.
images:
Bill Paterson in Comfort and Joy (Film-authority.com: "Comfort and Joy 1984 ****")
Strange Days (Dust on the VCR: "Renewed Access and Relevance in Strange Days (1995), a Film That Predicted Too Much of the Future")
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