Christmas Movie List

With December fast approaching I thought it appropriate to share a list of some of the films I like to watch. I'm not religious, and more importantly not Christian, so Christmas has always been about something different for me. Snow, family, Santa Claus, and a sprinkle of melancholy are some of the things that I think of. It's also the time for Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, and here in Scandinavia where the winter months get dark and cold, I'll take all the light I can get.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but just some suggestions. Feel free to write your personal favorites in the comments section below.

Home for the Holidays

This is the film that kicks off the Christmas movie period for me. Even though it's a Thanksgiving film, which of course is an American holiday, it has all the things connected with Christmas. There's snow, a dysfunctional family, and then there is love. Jodie Foster directs the film with astounding ease and it tugs at the heartstrings every time I see it. A classic.

Hook

The Steven Spielberg film that everybody hates, but I love. I saw it at the cinema and fell in love with it. Since then it's been a regular watch in December. Robin Williams as the grown-up Peter who's forgotten the magic of his past, and must rediscover his identity in Neverland, has all the makings of a classic, and to this day I'm baffled by the intense hatred the film receives.

Peter Pan

This was probably inspired by the inclusion of the flying sequence in the Disney Christmas Special shown here in Denmark every single year. The animation is gorgeous, the songs are wonderful, and the magic of the story makes it a must-see.

Die Hard

Everybody should know this as a classic action film by now. To me and fellow podcaster David this is also a great Christmas film. The whole thing takes place during an office Christmas party, and a ton of yuletide references in dialogue, as well as the soundtrack, make this the perfect unorthodox Christmas film.

Die Hard 2

Though not quite as good as the first film, this is nevertheless a great film. It manages to incorporate many things from the first film without ever feeling stale. This might just be Renny Harlin's finest hour as director, and the action sequences are still great and wonderfully over-the-top.

Lethal Weapon

From the opening credits this film manages to scream Christmas even though there's no snow. Taking place in the warmer L.A. climate we still get Christmas trees and decorations. There are also some great family scenes. As an added bonus this film reminds me why Mel Gibson became a star. He's on fire and Danny Glover is a great counterpart for his slightly psychotic performance. Not only a Holiday favorite, but one of the films I've seen countless times throughout my life.

Home Alone

I saw this with my dad at the cinema. I remember laughing my head off, and thinking that it was an amazing film. This is one of the titles I can't miss. It is a tiny bit of perfect John Hughes magic that Christopher Columbus directs with insane flourish and a great Tom & Jerry feel to the scenes with Marv (Daniel Stern) and Harry (Joe Pesci). Culkin has instant star quality and manages to be cute and obnoxious at the same time. Has some quite melancholy sequences and a fantastic score by John Williams.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

Though in many ways a copy of the first film, the story plays out on a broader canvas, and both the Pigeon Lady, played with great sadness by Brenda Fricker, and the Duncan’s toy store parts of the story are moving and funny. New York is used to great effect. Tim Curry is at his maniacal best, and once again the melancholy side of Christmas shows up.

The Hebrew Hammer

A Chanukah movie, this is a funny Jewish take on the Shaft character. Filled to the brim with inside jokes, and below the belt humor. Andy Dick as Santa’s evil son who wants to destroy Chanukah is great. I doubt if any gentile will get more than 1/3 of the jokes.

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Not really a film, but one of the three original Peanuts Holiday specials. Produced and aired in 1965 it feels completely fresh. The characters are lovable and Vince Guaraldi's score is nothing short of magical. Shown every year since its original broadcast it doesn’t get more classic than this.

Nightmare Before Christmas

The Henry Selick directed stop-motion animated film is a wonderfully dark Christmas film. The idea of the ghoulish people of the Halloweentown wanting to throw Christmas without understanding the concept is hilarious and Danny Elfman's songs are catchy. Jack Skellington is a great melancholic character. A must every year.

Jingle All the Way

Though not exactly a blockbuster at the time, this Schwarzenegger vehicle, that stands next to his turns in Kindergarten Cop, Twins and Junior, has gained somewhat of a cult status. Everything is exaggerated in the film, the humor is dark and at times wildly inappropriate, and Arnold hams it up in every scene. I love every second of it.

A Christmas Story

Though a classic in the states now, Bob Clark's love letter to Christmas is mostly unknown here in Denmark. This is one of the few Christmas films that actually revolves around what the time feels like for a child. Nothing supernatural. Just the story of a family. The grown-up narrator looking back is a great touch and the film is unlike anything else. The yearning for the BB gun, the bullies waiting on the way home from school, the slightly crazy parents, the little brother who doesn't want to eat, the leg lamp, listening to Little Orphan Annie on the radio, and many other pop culture references from the 50's, combine to make something magical. A coming of age story with Christmas as an underlying theme.   

It's a Wonderful Life

Tears my heart out every time. A classic.

Christmas Story

This Finnish film puts a new spin on how Santa Claus came to be. A dark and in many ways sad story. You've never seen Santa like this before. A heartbreaking story.

Elf

This Will Ferrell vehicle came before he was hit and miss. Zooey Deschanel looks awfully cute with blonde hair, and the story of an orphan human growing up amongst Santa's elves is quite funny.

Prince of Egypt

Although the film tells the story that’s the basis for Passover it premiered on december 25th and that was enough to turn it into a Christmas film. A beautifully animated story with great songs and a wonderful way of showing the story of Moses.

Dead Snow

Nazi zombies coming out of the snow-covered mountains in Norway. What's not to like?

Rare Exports

Another Finnish film on the list. This is scary, funny, moody and utter madness. A Christmas horror story.

The Polar Express

I hate the motion capture technique and the faces are stuck in uncanny valley. Nevertheless the story in this film is so good that I'm willing to forgive Zemeckis for not using traditional animation techniques. A magical tale with all the elements of a classic.

A Christmas Carol

This version is the one with George C. Scott as Scrooge. He does a wonderful job and the film captures the spirit of Dickens' story.

Scrooged

Bill Murray portrays an updated version of Scrooge and the film is insane and fast-paced.

Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year

One of Disney's Direct-To-Video Pooh titles. The friendship between Pooh and Piglet is the backdrop for a wonderful Christmas tale in the 100 Acre Wood.

The Muppet Christmas Carol

Michael Caine is a great Scrooge and the addition of Muppets to the story only makes it funnier. Still manages to break my heart with the Tiny Tim bit.

Fiddler On the Roof

By no means a Christmas film. The scope and length of the film makes it perfect for holiday viewing. Funny, beautiful, sad, disturbing and absolutely wonderful. The songs are fantastic. Topol is a great Tevye. And it has snow....

The following titles I plan to see this year. They are all first viewings, and I hope some of them will become part of the must-watch list.

Arthur Christmas

Miracle on 34th Street

White Christmas

It Happened on Fifth Avenue

A Christmas Carol (1938)

The Shop Around the Corner

Eight Crazy Nights

Exclusive: Joe R. Lansdale Interview

On September 10th Joe R. Lansdale's new novel The Thicket will be released. I thought that would be a great opportunity to ask Mr. Lansdale some questions about his writing and his life. He has an official website that you can visit here, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account.

Should you be so unfortunate not to have encountered Mr. Lansdale's writing before, here's a short introduction. He's written novels, short stories, comics, and screenplays. Several of his short stories and novels have been adapted for the screen, amongst which Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep has achieved true cult status. His work has a distinct Southern feel and often feature gritty characters that must go through hell before emerging on the other side hardened and slightly broken, if at all. Even when his narrators are sinful, or morally corrupt, he always makes sure that the reader feels somewhat sympathetic to their plight.

Edge of Dark Water uses a young girl as narrator in a
 Huckleberry Finn inspired dark tale.

I want to thank Mr. Lansdale for taking the time, and now without further ado, here is the interview:

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld: I'd like to ask you about geography in your novels and stories. From the viewpoint of someone who's never visited the Southern part of the United States I must say that you're really successful in creating images and evoking the places that the novels talk about. Can you talk a bit about what Texas means to you, and why you keep coming back there in your stories?

Joe R. Lansdale: East Texas is distinct, in that it is more like the rest of the South, not the Southwest, and it has trees and water and isn’t anything like people usually think of when they think of Texas. It’s like people who hear New York and think the whole state is concrete. It’s not. In fact, Upstate New York and East Texas look very much alike, except for the mountains in Upstate. They filmed Cold in July there, and it looks like East Texas, town included. To me the environment has a lot to do with the tone of the stories. I love Texas, warts and all, primarily because it’s what I know best.

DJR: You've written several novels that take place in the past, in the south. Is there any degree of autobiographical detail in your work?

JRL: A lot. My parents were older when I was born, so they lived through the Great Depression as adults. They had lots of stories. My grandmother came to Texas in a covered wagon and saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at some point. So many of the stories they told I borrowed, but my own personal autobiography is important as well. Hap Collins had many of the same experiences I had. Working in the rose fields.  Going through the sixties, a turbulent time, and I still think it was one of the most progressive times ever, warts and all again. But no generation is perfect. Even the so-called Great Generation had people who went to war to get rid of Hitler and Nazi oppression, came back and denied blacks voting rights etc. There was good and bad in every generation. So the sixties had a deep impact on me. But so have other aspects of my life. My wife and family. It all goes into the mill, if you mean for it to or not.

Lost Echoes is a dark and heartbreaking novel.

DJR: Are there any parts of your daily life that you draw inspiration from? Or is it all just hard work, hunkering down at the computer and typing?

JRL: Again, I borrow a lot from it. COLD IN JULY, now being filmed, had all sorts of elements from my life as it was then. The parts about wanting to be a good father and so on, thinking you’re always failing. It’s always there. I write about three hours a day, and that’s it. In the morning, five to seven days a week. There are exceptions, but that’s the usual. I have been on the set of COLD IN JULY for a couple of weeks, so it’s the first time I haven’ written in the morning because the hours were so erratic. I’ll be back to work again tomorrow, now that we’re home.

DJR: When you get an idea for a novel how does it work? Do you use outlines or write from beginning to end? Can you share your work progress?

JRL: I don’t outline. I just write. I get a mood or a general idea, maybe an scene or two in my mind, and it shapes itself as I write daily. I like it that way. It’s personal discovery every morning.

DJR: When reading your work it seems that you have a real aversion to injustice. Can you explain where that comes from?

I think nearly everyone does. I can’t imagine many who like the idea of injustice. But it was certainly ingrained in me by my father that life isn’t fair, but you can be fair. Or try to be.

DJR: Following up on that, your characters often seem preoccupied with justice in a very primal form. Using their own moral compass and ethical barometer instead of what society or their surroundings tell them. Where does this come from? Is it a part of your upbringing, or something else?

JRL: Well, my characters take extremes I’d like to take. My father did practice a bit of personal justice with his fists a few times. I don’t begrudge him any of it. I hate to sound crass, but they had it coming. I’m guilty of that myself when I was younger. I’m older and wiser now. Or maybe afraid of being arrested. Times were different then, as well. It was not uncommon for simple grievances to be worked out by the grieved. Not necessarily a good thing, just saying how it was. In my books, my characters are about justice when it is not applied, and they lack my sophistication, so to speak.

DJR: You've used a child narrator several times. How does it compare to writing a grown-up narrator? What is special, to you, about writing from a child's perspective?

JRL: Simply we’ve all been young and we all know the trials and tribulations of growing up. It’s something we can all connect with. The sense of discovery, both good and bad of someone young starting out in the world has always fascinated me.

DJR: Do you have any favorite coming-of age stories, that might even have inspired your writing?

JRL: There are plenty, and I’d be here all night. Suffice to say, that in varied forms, they appear in my books and stories. Even “Night They Missed The Horror Show" has a lot of truth in it, and some of the events happened to people I knew.

DJR: You often mention music and specific artists in your writing. What does music mean to you? Do you use music in your creative process? Is there any music you like writing to?

JRL: I love music. Blues. Country – the older stuff especially. Sixties soul and Motown, Rock and Roll until the early seventies. Outlaw Country. Lots of different kinds of music. I don’t listen to music when I write. Too distracting. I have really enjoyed listening to my daughter’s new album, RESTLESS. She’s a real talent and can do country, blues, rock, you name it. I know that sounds like a proud father talking, but every time people have thought that, they came back to me later, said, “Damn, she is good.” And she is.

DJR: You have a new novel, “The Thicket”, coming out on September 10th, can you reveal what the story is about?

JRL: It’s a turn of the century story told by a sixteen year old boy who has lost his mother and father to smallpox and has had his grandfather murdered and his sister kidnapped, and he has to seek her out with the aid of a dwarf bounty hunter, and another bounty hunter who is the son of an ex-slave and a gravedigger. Tension and excitement and adventure and humor and violence ensue.

DJR: Finally I'd like to ask you the title of a book, film, and record that has blown you away lately? If any.

JRL: I loved MUD. Had some of the same sensibility of my work, actually. I have read a lot of entertaining and good books lately, but frankly there hasn’t been a knock down killer as of recent. But there will be. There always is. I have had fun rereading the series that influenced Hap and Leonard in a way. HARDMAN by Ralph Dennis. These were done as a cheap paperbacks in a series that is really good but was marketed like a detective sex series, which it is not. They were genre, very well written, if hasty at times, and I know that they influenced my ideas about Hap and Leonard, among other things. But as for new, nothing killer. Last thing I read was a reread of FAREWELL TO ARMS, which is always good, and A FEAST UNKNOWN, an odd ball book by Phil Farmer. I have read them both before, the Hemingway many times, the Farmer for a second time; it’s a little rough in spots and seems to be about twice as long as it needs to be, but its Phil Farmer, one of my favorite writers. I think my favorite novel of his is LORD TYGER, though I’m very fond of a lot of his short stories. Check out THE BEST OF PHIL FARMER. Now that’s wonderful.

Review: In the Shadow of the Banyan

First off I have an admission. My knowledge of the conflict in Cambodia is largely limited to what I remember from The Killing Fields and history classes in school. Therefore when I sat down to read Vaddey Ratner's novel, I had to trust in her providing me with the necessary information to fully understand the story she wanted to tell.

Raami is a seven-year-old girl living under highly privileged circumstances. Her father is a poet, but more importantly a prince and therefore she is used to a life with servants and a beautiful house with everything the heart of a young girl might yearn for. She has a younger sister, still a toddler, and her uncle and aunt with their twin boys, and her grandmother all live in the house together with her and her parents. She is surrounded by family members and the environment is loving and nurturing. The only spot on this image of tranquility is the way polio has ravaged her legs and forces her to wear a leg brace.

Suddenly everything changes when revolutionary soldiers, the Khmer Rouge, come knocking on their door and forces them to gather what belongings they can pack and leave the city. This is the beginning of Raami's trials. Every time her family gets something taken away it is done with the promise of something better in return, and always talks about benefitting the cause and helping the organization. Soon hope becomes ever more fragile and Raami's faith in humanity and the kindness of others is put to the test.

The tale is a steady descent for Raami and her loved ones and through her we are witnesses to atrocities that supposedly are done for the benefit of the Cambodian people.

The novel is told through the eyes of a child, and not the grown Raami looking back. Doing this can be a double edged sword. The positive thing is that it gives the cruelties described more of an impact, both because everything is in the present tense, but also because a young child's ability to process and find meaning in the inexplicable violence surrounding her is vastly different and narrow compared to a grownup. The negative is that Ratner quite often uses imagery and language that far surpasses the way a normal child of Raami's age thinks and talks. I have yet to meet a young child that expresses herself like this:

“I realized with a start how the sparseness of one existence mirrored another, how an old man's poverty gave a glimpse of the hardship he must have endured when he was a boy, must have suffered his whole life, and that small forgotten patch of ground, with its dilapidated hut and drenched belongings, held in its reflection the deprivation of Papa's childhood friend. It was clear the old sweeper was a version of Sambath, and just as I saw a manifestation of my father in everything that was noble and good, he saw a manifestation of his friend everywhere, in every poverty-stricken person he met, and tried to do for each what he hadn't been able to do for his friend.”

That is not the language nor the realizations of a small child, but rather the grown woman. Therefore it might have suited the book a little better to be more honest and just tell the tale in hindsight, as it is done so anyway. It can at times feel a touch too manipulative and the book never manages to make one forget that this is really Ratner speaking through the young child.

Another problem, especially during the first 40-50 pages, is Ratner's prose. She uses poetic images and flowery language to such an extent that it tends to weigh down the prose and hinder the relevant and important parts of the story from shining brightly enough. Several passages early in the book are almost muddled by her attempt to weave poetry into every sentence in the book. At one point she seems to get a handle on herself and things become more balanced.

With the style that Ratner uses you also run the risk of lessening the impact of the atrocities described by doing it in such a beautiful way. Not that everything concerning human cruelty needs the most sparse of style, but Ratner would not have done wrong by looking at the way an author like Primo Levi describes the horrors of holocaust and a concentration camp.

One should always consider this while doing a work on real events, even when using a fictional form. This is the reason that Steven Spielberg did Schindler's List in black and white. He did not want to lend the events any form of beauty by having brilliant colors shining through. Ratner takes the risk and often times it pays off, but there are several instances where the evil deeds described seem lessened by the beauty her prose infuses them with.

Ratner has acknowledged that the book largely is inspired by her own life story. To such an extent that Raami's father's name is the real life name of Ratner's father. In the Author's Note at the back of the book she touches shortly on why she chose the medium of fiction and explains that it gave her license to reinvent and use her imagination where memory alone was inadequate. I'm not sure I fully agree with that choice, and would have loved to read a true biography from Ratner's hand where she could not soften blows with flowery prose.

Nevertheless In the Shadow of the Banyan is a beautiful read and the injustices of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot (who's never mentioned by name) are evoked vividly throughout the story. In many ways one is left with a sense of hopelessness, for humanity does not seem to have learned anything from all the lessons that have cost so dearly in human lives. The reign of the Khmer Rouge was short in years but has had devastating effects that are still evident to this day. This much is surely gleaned from the words of Ratner. I just find that more could have surfaced and stayed with me if she had not spent so much of the book waxing poetical. A shame because this might turn some readers away, making them miss an important link in the chain of human degradation and cruelty that ran through the 20^th century.