Snow Is Falling All Around Us: Unusual Christmas-Adjacent Films

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")

"Lost in France" (2016)

Some time ago, unknown to each other, two men with respectable white collar jobs went to a concert by Luke Haines. Both of them enjoyed the concert but one of them decided to jack in his job and become a documentary filmmaker who would start his career with a film about Luke Haines. That man was not me; rather it was Niall McCann and his Luke Haines film was called Art Will Save The World. More recently he made a another music-themed film, called Lost in France, which is about the Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground and acts that have appeared on it (Mogwai, Arab Strap, The Delgados, etc.). The film kind of takes its title from the time a load of Chemikal Underground acts played a small music festival in Mauron, France back in the 1990s and then brings some of these artists back to play gigs in the same place again. Several of the artists and label organisers (overlapping categories) say in the film that the French music festival was not a particularly seminal experience in the label's life but the device still works as frame on which to hang things.

For all my interest in the music of Glasgow, my focus has been more on Belle & Sebastian, their friends and relations and older acts like Teenage Fanclub, the Vaselines, and the Jesus and Mary Chain etc., who might be seen by some as more "indie" than the Chemikal Underground acts. I do not know The Delgados at all, I know Arab Strap almost as a caricature (the joke among some of our friends was that they were basically a band fronted by the Ewan Bremner character from Mike Leigh's Naked) but I have at least seen Mogwai a few times at All Tomorrow's Parties even if I have never fully surrendered to them. The film therefore was an interesting window into a mysterious and half-glimpsed world.

The film also works as a meditation on the nature of the music industry generally. There are the usual discussions of why some artists become successful and others less so. The film features Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, who apparently had some links to Chemikal Underground in days of yore, and he himself notes how the fates made his band successful while others failed to attract a wide popular audience (though he does say "I mean, I'm not saying 'why were we successful?', because I know why we were successful: we wrote a lot of catchy songs that people liked"; it would be a strange universe if the popularities of Arab Strap and Franz Ferdinand were reversed). The more general point is made that Chemikal Underground started at a time when people still bought records rather than streaming or downloading music for free. Stewart Henderson of The Delgados and Chemikal Underground itself notes that in days of yore the income from record sales meant that the label was able to support small-scale bands playing gigs in relatively out of the way places in the USA (in expectation of further record sales); that will not be happening any more. So the film ends up being a bit elegiac for a now vanished era, with an accompanying sense that perhaps music is something that is coming to an end.

That said it is not a mopey film. The musicians have a lot of roffles on their second trip to France and with their reminiscences about the first. One my favourite possibly unintentionally hilarious moments was when they arrive once more in Mauron and are greeted by some French bloke who was involved in organising the original festival. He shakes the men's hands and then gives a monster hug to Emma Pollock (solo artist and member of The Delgados) that perhaps over-lingers, while her husband/partner (another Delgado) stands around awkwardly.

Less appealingly this did come across as a pretty blokey scene and it would have been a total sausagefest if it had not been for Emma Pollock. She also seemed to be slightly flying the flag for the more "indie" Glasgow, with her nice coat being in striking contrast to the more non-descript outfits of the blokes.

Anyway, as mentioned above, this whole scene is one I am relatively unfamiliar with and after seeing the film I was struck by the idea of purchasing a representative record by each of the key acts referenced in it. So to what extent can readers recommend to me albums by the following artists: Mogwai, The Delgados, RM Hubbert, Emma Pollock and Arab Strap?

Readers may also be interested to hear that Niall McCann has now made another music-themed film, The Science of Ghosts, which deals with the musician Adrian Crowley and which will be shown at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival on 26 February 2018.

image source (The Quietus: Interview with Lost In France Director Niall McCann)