Tag: classic movies
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Non-Christmas Christmas Movies – First View Review of First Blood
Whenever you hear of a film with Rambo in the title, you’ll no doubt think of wall to wall violence, tidal waves of blood, and a soundtrack consisting mainly of gunshots, screams, and explosions. You may also think of bulging biceps as Rambo hauls back on the string of a bow so he can pick…
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Christmas Classic First View Review – A Christmas Carol (1938)
Over the years I’ve seen a fair few versions of A Christmas Carol, or Scrooge as it’s sometimes called, but this 1938 version is a new one on me! There’s no point going too deeply into the story because, as both Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes and Simply Red said, “If you don’t know…
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Christmas First View Review – An American Christmas Carol (1979)
Here we have an attempt to prove the ubiquity and relevance of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by taking it from Victorian-era London and plonking it down in Depression-era Concord, New Hampshire. I don’t if there’s any significance in the location but the time has obviously been chosen as one of widespread poverty, debt, and hardship.…
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Classic Christmas Rewatch – Home Alone (1990)
So I’ve been thinking about my favorite Christmas movie category – the ones I call Non-Christmas Christmas Films. This fun category includes such classics as Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Gremlins. Iron Man 3. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I have a useful list going here. But in that post, I ask if Home Alone deserves…
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Christmas Classic Rewatch Review – Scrooge (1951)
Elsewhere I wrote about how and why A Christmas Carol was written and how it’s been adapted many times on screens both large and small. It’s the most often adapted of all of Dickens’ works, with over thirty film outings. Oliver Twist comes second with a mere eighteen. It’s been faithfully followed from the original,…
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Classic Movie Rewatch – Raiders Of The Lost Ark after 40 years
What links a toilet cistern, fingering a cheese casserole, a Honda Civic rolling down a gravel path, whacking a pile of leather jackets with a baseball bat, and R2-D2? They’re all sound effects used during the production of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The toilet cistern is the sound of the lid of the Ark of…
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Rewatch Review – The Man Who Invented Christmas
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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…
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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,…
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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.…
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Miracle On 34th Street – 1947 vs 1994
A good story bears repeating. At least that’s the impression you get if you look into your average film studio’s output. Who knows… maybe there’s a future article in that? Anyhow, as it’s rapidly approaching Christmas, I thought I’d take a look at one of my favourite Christmas stories — and two films — I’m…
