Author: Rob Williams
-
Rewatch Review – Deck The Halls
—
Deck The Halls joins the pantheon of films that I seem to be the only person who likes them: Cats, Gemini Man, Ghostbusters (2016), Godzilla (1998), Alien Resurrection, Planet Of The Apes (2001), Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace… I enjoyed them all! OK… Phantom Menace was a bit of a disappointment. But Deck The Halls is almost universally…
-
Rewatch Review – The Nightmare Before Christmas
Full disclosure… I am a big Tim Burton fan. I’ve seen and enjoyed all of his films. Yes… even his Planet Of The Apes! And the thing is that you tend to think of him as a live action director, albeit with an eye for the more cartoonish aspects of life. So, is that why he…
-
Christmas Movie Review – Happiest Season
—
Happiest Season is a Christmas film. I thought I’d better just make that clear given the article elsewhere! Anyway, this is a Christmas film through and through. The essence of it is a couple going away to spend the holidays with one of the families. It’s a fairly standard rom-com where one of the couple…
-
Rewatch Review – The Man Who Invented Christmas
—
A lot of what we now think of as Christmas traditions going back centuries actually started out as little more than whims of fashion — many of which are less than two hundred years old. The Man Who Invented Christmas tells the story of some of those fashions. When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol there wasn’t really a…
-
Rewatch Reviews – Arthur Christmas
First off, I LOVE Arthur Christmas! It is funny, entertaining, and endlessly re-watchable. The talent on display is awesome and the attention to detail is breathtaking. There are so many little things that you either see for the first time when you watch it, or can point out to other people who haven’t spotted it. It’s…
-
Classic Movie Rewatch Review – Trading Places
I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve watched Trading Places over the years, and not always as a Christmas film. It’s a comedy first and foremost, then it’s a social satire, and only then is it a holiday film. For the sake of the half dozen or so people who haven’t seen it,…
-
Christmas Indie Movie Review – Middleton Christmas
Middleton Christmas — or There’ll Always Be Christmas — as it’s sometimes now called is, I will be blunt, not my cup of tea. It might have appealed to my mother were she still alive, so maybe it’s a generational thing. She might have overlooked the things that irked me, but I found them too…
-
Christmas Indie Movie Review – Cup Of Cheer
—
Cup Of Cheer is, allegedly, a comedy. There are moments of incongruity, surprise, repetition, inversion, exaggeration, and slapstick. There’s only one thing missing and that, sadly, is anything remotely funny. It is supposed to be a parody of the archetypal, traditional Christmas film. Cup Of Cheer starts with a big city journalist, Mary (Storm Steenson) being sent to…
-
A US Classic From A UK Perspective – A Christmas Story
A little background… At the start of the decade a change in circumstances meant I had a lot of spare time during the run up to Christmas. So what was I going to do? What I did was got hold of a load of Christmas films and thoroughly got into the spirit of the season.…
-
All About A Christmas Carol
—
So Many Retellings Of A Short Story Scrooge, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner… let’s make a Christmas favourite of him! I’m going to luxuriate in the knowledge that I’ll be talking about a story that is nearly two centuries old and, therefore, will be paying no heed to the usual dread…