Red One

 

The Long
List Goodnight

Red One
USA/Canada 2024
Directed by Jake Kasdan
MGM

I actually wanted to see Red One when it came out at the cinema but, alas, it was released in November over here in the UK and I really try not to watch Christmas films out of season (aka, out of December!) so I waited a few weeks. Weeks in which my perception of the film was changed by word of mouth... both from audiences who had seen it on Twitter and, yeah, it took an equally bad pasting from the critics too. So it would be true to say that, by the time I got to see this movie for myself (aka, in December!), my expectations for the movie had plummeted way below zero.

But I did see it and, what can I say? Once again I am reminded why the opinions of both fellow audience members and a bunch of professional critics should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt. Frankly, I loved Red One. It was everything I was expecting from a big budget Christmas movie plus, had the unexpected bonus of being cannily well thought through and a lot more clever than I think people realise.

So at the start of the film we are introduced to Jack O'Malley played by Chris Evans (I suspect taking on this role to further shed his squeaky clean Captain America image). He’s a somewhat criminal hacker known as The Wolf who is wanted by organisations like the FBI all over the world (in order to try and recruit him) and who, in his opening heist, shows that he would sink so low as to steal candy from a baby. At some point he is anonymously hired by someone to find the co-ordinates of an undisclosed location. Which he does, not realising he gives the villain of the film, played by Kiernan Shipka, the information required so her team can abduct Santa Claus, played by the always brilliant J. K. Simmons, for her own, world threatening and evil ends.

Meanwhile, Santa’s number one bodyguard Cal Drift, played by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, part of E.L.F (Enforcement Logistics and Fortification) needs to get Santa back for his annual Christmas run in two days time. So, working with Zoe, who runs a kind of ‘mythical creatures police’ organisation, played by Lucy Liu, he recruits the cynical, world weary Jack to help him find where Santa has been taken.

Tolerating their differences before the expected male bonding, they follow the leads and punch their way through various adversaries to give a crowd pleasing conclusion to the film, aided by E.L.Fs technology such as a device which shrinks and grows toys and people to be used as equipment for the mission (such as toys like Hot Wheels cars for transport, Raving Bonkers robots... which I think were known as Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots in the USA... and so on). So yeah, you get some Ant-Man style shenanigans in the action sequences too but, apart from getting a nice joke around Jack, who upon seeing how the toys are enlarged and made practical immediately asks a shop owner if he has a Wonder Woman action figure... there actually is a really vital logic as to why Santa and E.L.F would actually have this specific technology in their arsenal in the first place (but I’m trying to do this without spoilers so, just keep a look out in the last sequence of the film to find just how this comes in handy if you are Santa).

And, as I said above, I loved it. It’s got its heart in the right place, has some great action scenes (like fighting giant sized killer snowman on a tropical beach), shoe horns in some nice moments with Krampus and, yeah, in my opinion has some good chemistry going between the leads. Added to this it’s got a great, dynamic score by the great Henry Jackman which keeps things going but, alas, is not issued on a CD at time of writing.

So yeah, sorry if it deflects any credibility on my part but, I had a really good time with Red One and I hope it gets a Blu Ray release at some point soon so I can show it to my folks next Christmas. An entertaining movie, I reckon.

Christmas at Fontaine's

Store Wars

Christmas at Fontaine's
by William Kotzwinkle
Andre Deutsch ISBN: 0233975888

Wow. Sometimes it’s not the best idea to go back to something you loved as a teenager.

Christmas At Fontaine's was a book I read around about 1984. I spotted it in December in my local library, back when libraries were all about books and knowledge as opposed to computers and misinformation. I picked it up, not because of the jolly Santa pictured on the cover... at 16 years old I was not into Christmas nearly half as much as I am now... but because I recognised the writer’s name. William Kotzwinkle was, after all, the guy who had written the novelisation/movie tie-in for E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial. I don’t know why this resonated with me so much because I really hadn’t liked the movie (although I’d bought and read the book) but it was at a time when I still hadn’t figured out what parasitic, hand me down form of art the ‘novelisation of the movie’ is and, well, don’t judge me... I guess I didn’t know any better.

Anyway, I borrowed Christmas At Fontaines and read it and, then my dad read it also. We both loved it at the time but I couldn’t remember why we’d liked or indeed, recall hardly anything of the content of the novel as the years streamed past us. All I remember is that we both bonded over it and loved the decision, by one of the shop window display technicians who is a character in the book, to decapitate the reindeer in his attempt to make his window display something approaching ‘high art’. That’s all I could remember.

Perhaps that’s all I could remember because, reading it now as an adult, the book seems somehow slight and less engaging than it once did.

The action of the story, such as it is, follows a number of employees (including the owner) of a big ‘Selfridges style’ shop in New York called Fontaine’s. Plus, one other character who wanders the city outside as a bag lady and who spends all of her time in the book living out a distorted perspective of the world, projected by her own insanity.

So we have her, the two high tech window dressers, a lonely woman from kitchenware  and her lacklustre pursuit of the child hating manager of the toy section, Fontaine the owner, a tramp who is employed once a year by the store to be their Santa Claus and the security guard who spends all of his time trying to catch a person who has been living in the store overnight in the week leading up to Christmas. This last is the mystery at the centre of the book... is there a Christmas miracle going to happen here in this, frankly cynical and jaded view of the world that the author conjures up for us? Is it Santa himself, perhaps, disrupting the store after closing time?

Alas, the general grimness of the attitudes of all of the characters in this book pretty much clinches it that, unlike my apparent enthusiasm for them when I was in my teens, I really can’t find anyone to latch onto as a genuinely likeable character and so, since there is no real Christmas miracle at the end of the story, only a brief illusion of one, if indeed the story could be said to have an ending at all, then I found myself... not so much disappointed by the ending rather than, lets say, accepting that it rewards my lack of engagement by not delivering much of anything at all. A conclusion during which  some, though not all, of the characters find temporary respite from their day to day concerns and frustrations.

It’s well written enough and Kotzwinkle certainly knows how to pull the reader into the protagonists’ heads but, ultimately, there’s not all that much of these characters I could really feel was worth knowing about and so there’s nothing, for me at least, to empathise with.

Funnily enough, I talked to my dad about the book again this morning and he said he’d tried to read it again a few years ago but found it oddly disappointing. Maybe the book then, I think, is one which is perhaps very much ‘of its time’. I can certainly admire Kotzwinkle’s wordage and what I think he was possibly trying to achieve with this novel but, out of context of reading it at the time of its release when, it’s sad to say, the world seemed to be a much simpler and easier place to navigate, it just doesn’t seem relevant anymore.

Still, this is my Christmas novel for this year and I’m not saying its a bad tale by any means. It’s just not got a lot of weight to it, I felt, despite the grim fears, anxieties and broken dreams of the co-protagonists. Christmas At Fontaine’s is a seasonal novel set in a big department store so, if you want a Christmas vibe to your reading it’s definitely worth considering giving this one a look sometimes because, frankly, one man’s disconnect is another man’s Shangri La and, you know, books about the yuletide season are definitely outnumbered by everything else out there. So there you have it, William Kotzwinkle’s novel is a slice of jaded cynicism looked at through whimsy tinted glasses... if that’s what you’re looking for at Christmas then, why not give it a go?

A Christmas Horror Story

Night Of The Living Elves

A Christmas Horror Story
Canada 2015
Directed by Grant Harvey,
Steven Hoban & Brett Sullivan
Entertainment One DVD Region 2

Well this was a nice surprise. I bought this movie to watch in the run in to Christmas this year and expected it to be, at the very most, a halfway watchable, trashy Christmas horror movie with William Shatner in it. Imagine my surprise, then, when I started watching it... only to find that, not only is it a well made and entertaining seasonal movie but, also, William Shatner is pretty cool in it.

Starting somewhat forebodingly and in accordance with my original expectations of this film, the credits highlight some CGI, stylised Christmassy snowflakes which move around the screen and eventually focus on one blood stained snowflake while a famous Christmas song plays out. This is then followed by what looks like a very ropey CGI zoom around what turns out to be, kinda, Santa’s palatial residence. We start with a hook from near the end of the film (most of the rest of this is told in flashback) of a wounded Santa pulling out an axe to greet whatever awaits him outside his door... we then get a kind of ‘gluing’ segment which keeps cutting in and out of the movie, with William Shatner doing an absolutely wonderful job as a Christmas loving disc jockey on his Christmas Eve broadcast (a little like the radio presenter in The Fog, reviewed here, in terms of keeping everything in this film narratively framed).

We then go into one of four stories which all take place on the same Christmas Eve in the small town of Bailey Downs. This is the setting for Ginger Snaps and certain episodes of a show I don’t know called Orphan Black, too, because the directors have all worked on those in one capacity or another. Of course, being as this is a story which takes place at Christmas, I can also only assume that it’s deliberately name checking the George Bailey character of the greatest ever Christmas movie, It’s A Wonderful Life. All the stories are independent of each other but they all have a very small crossover with one of the other stories in this movie. And, rather than play out as four separate vignettes, the stories are all crosscut together so they progress throughout the length of the film and reach their respective conclusions at roughly the same time. Actually, this really shouldn’t work nearly as well as the writers and directors have got it to do here so... yep... lot of respect to the people behind this one.

So story number one deals with a murder in a school from a year before where two teens were killed ritualistically... one of them crucified against the wall with a Christmas message written in blood. For her student film, Molly (played by Zoé De Grand Maison) wants to shoot a documentary there so she and her two friends, Ben (Alex Ozerov) and Dylan (Shannon Kook), sneak into the school in the evening, as it’s closed for the holiday, to film the scene of the crime. Molly has been fired up by an ‘on scene’ video report by a policeman who has been off work with stress since the murders. Dylan gets a key from his girlfriend Caprice (played by Amy Forsyth) before she then gets in her car with her family to be one of the main characters in another, concurrent story. After gaining access to a forbidden area of the school, Molly and her companions get trapped in the darkened ‘off limits’ area and are subject to a ‘visitation’ by the ghosts of a restless spirit from many years before... yep, no spoilers here, not saying anything more.

Meanwhile, Caprice goes with her family on a car journey to visit a distant and strange relative. When they are at their creepy relative’s home, her younger brother deliberately breaks a Krampus figurine and the family are forced to leave. They head back home but when the father swerves to avoid ‘the real Krampus’ in a barren landscape, the car gets stuck in snow. The family then gets hunted by Krampus and... more blood and horror ensues.

Meanwhile, again, the policeman who has not been to work since the murder case investigation takes his wife and their kid to cut down a Christmas tree for their home, trespassing in a strange wooded area. The kid goes missing in the forest, pursued by ‘spooky camera POV 101’ and, when his parents find him again in a ‘not in the least bit suspicious’ opening/portal in a tree, things start going wrong for them when they get him home. In a pretty malevolent and ultimately violent way.

And while all this is going on, the ‘real Santa’, played really nicely by George Buza, has an elf on his hands that gets weirdly ‘un-Christmassy’, cuts his own hand off with an axe and then dies.He then returns from the dead and infects all the other elves... who become some kind of zombie creatures bent on Santa’s destruction and under the spell of Krampus. There’s also some very ‘non-Christmas’ dialogue in this section such as an elf shouting "I'm going to eat your f***ing brains out you Christmas c**t." Like all the different story strands in this movie, the action is pretty gory and this one has decapitations galore, not to mention a moment where Santa slices the top of an elf’s skull off with his staff to reveal the brain inside.

And as for the William Shatner sequences... well they’re really nicely done but, also,  there is a specific link to one of the stories here. I won’t tell you which but, one of them has a nice, if somewhat humdrum, twist which caught me by surprise because, although I’d already thought of it, I’d dismissed the notion and wrote it off as a budgetary restraint with an actor in a dual role. So this movie definitely scores some points for being able to take me by surprise here.

The film is not flashily directed but it nicely done and really shows the competence and craftsmanship of the cast and crew who have pulled together to make something which is a heck of a lot more fun to watch than I was expecting. There are absolutely loads of those kind of ‘person bends down or camera looks around to reveal something which wasn’t in the shot before’ jump scare style reveals in the movie but they are, at least, even when expected, well timed and work quite well. There are also a lot of those roving camera point of view shots that horror films sometimes use to indicate ‘another presence’ and build up tension. Again, nothing new here but very well done and it certainly doesn’t call attention to itself in a bad way. And, as I mentioned before, there’s a load of gory violence thrown into the mix and, although this shouldn’t really work in a Christmas movie, the film-makers really seem to get it all to fit together in as unobtrusive manner as possible so, once again, my Christmas hat off to them.

So there you have it. A Christmas Horror Story is not exactly the greatest seasonal terror tale on Earth but it’s certainly not the trashy excuse of a piece I was expecting it to be and I was thoroughly entertained throughout. And where else can you see Krampus and Santa Claus squaring off in a bloody battle to the death? Definitely one I’d recommend to all my friends who enjoy genre movies and one which I will, no doubt, return to in the Christmas movie viewing roster in years to come. No room for elf and safety here.