Reading Freely

Happy 2025, people!

WHAT have you finished reading recently? I’m within an hour of finishing the Audible version of Strange Weather in Tokyo, but finishing it would give first blood to fiction and that will not do.

WHAT are you reading now? I’m 60% into My Holiday in North Korea, which is quite funny.

WHAT are you reading next? I’m 30% into Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization.

And now, December movies!

Scrooged, 1988. A Christmas Carol but Bill Murray is a TV network president who gets the Scrooge treatment.   Pretty sure this is a rewatch but it’s been decades. As a Christmas comedy, it was fun. As a adaptation of A Christmas Carol I didn’t buy it at all.   I never got a sense that Murray’s character was changing — and I know Murray is capable of conveying that kind of change, because he did it in Groundhog Day.

The Wedding Party, 1969. Very early Brian de Palma film with a very early Robert de Niro playing a groomsman.  The plot: an Al Pacino doppelganger is getting married, and his friends keep trying to talk  him out of it, as does his future-father-in-law.  I don’t know if he went through with it or not because the friend and I were distracted by conversation of Where’s the Cat and then we went on a building search to find said Cat.  Neither of us were too much interested in the movie. Lots of weird camera work, with oppressive darkness and a multitude of bad cuts.  Unfortunately, we had to bury the Cat some days later.

Happy Christmas, 2011.

Me: (searches “Christmas”)

Me:

ANNA KENDRICK!  There’s a plot that involves AK being dumped by her boyfriend and then moving to Chicago to crash with her brother and his wife and then meeting someone, bla bla bla.

Chicago, 2002  A musical inspired by two female murderers in Prohibition-era Chicago, who compete for celebrity.  Lots of familiar faces and fun music.

Raging Bull, 1980. I’ve wanteda to watch this movie since I seen it on da JOE PESCI SHOWWWWWWWWWWW!   In one episode he got his brudder Robert de Niro on to talk about Bobby’s show, RAGING BULL! It’s abouta boxer whose gotta tempa!

A Christmas Carol, 1999. Patrick Stewart. The best version, and I’ll brook no argument.  Ladyfriend hadn’t watched this, so after we watched a  community theater production of the play, we watched the movie proper.  Never spotted Vicar of Dibley actors before!  It so happened that the week we watched it was the 25th anniversary of this particular version.

Joker: Folie à Deux. Wasn’t going to watch this, but a friend just watched Joker and really wanted to try this out, and since it was Joaquin Phoenix on his dime I was agreeable. Very interesting movie on multiple levels:  the discord between the official setting of the movie (after the 2010s) and the cars,  clothing, etc;  the use of music, and so on.  Didn’t too much care for the story in which Fleck is reduced to simply a crazy person whose movement turns on him after he loses touch with the ‘Joker’ persona after …..something is done to him in the prison by the guards. His recurrent paranoia bout being betrayed does not help.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, 2024. A heartwarming story of a town learning the meaning of Christmas when a group of feral hellions bullies their way into the Christmas pageant, and then have to have the story, characters, etc explained to them because they’re very unchurched. Funny and sentimentally appropriate for the season. I recently listened to the audiobook and spotted a difference in the two narratives: the movie is more Imogene-focused and hints that she’s obsessed with being in the play because it’s a chance for her to escape her hard life (basically raising her siblings and having to be tough, tough, tough) by playing as the sweet and loving Mary.

Frosty the Snowman, 1969. A possessed hat brings a mound of snow to life and kidnaps a child to take her to the North Pole. Pursued by an evil scam artist who wants the hat to himself,  the Snow-Man is nearly done in but enlists the help of an elderly trickster to escape.  They let the child go, however.

Bullets over Broadway, 1994. A Woody Allen film in which a True Artiste finally finds funding to produce his play independently, with one proviso: his patron, a mobster, wants his goomar in a part, nevermind she can’t act. The Artiste gets a dream cast aside from that, although the goomar (Olive)’s bodyguard becomes a problem when he insists the play sucks and Olive needs more lines. Over time, the bodyguard starts offering insightful advice, advice that actually makes the play better. As the Artiste finds his play becoming great thanks to other people’s visions, he’s also falling in love with one of the actresses. Amusingly, the bodyguard becomes so involved with the play that he knocks off the girl he’s supposed to be protecting because she’s ruining “his play”.. Fun comedy with a nice soundtrack. Paulie Walnuts has a minor part, as does the guy who played Frank Lopez in Scarface. Also, Jim Broadbent, who I only know from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye, appears here as a prominent actor with an eating disorder. 

Jingle All the Way, 1996.  Ahnold plays a workaholic dad who habitually prioritizes work over going to his son’s karate events, and now he’s done it again: he’s forgotten to get Jamie The Toy everyone wants this year.  Cue him spending Christmas Eve frantically searching town and getting into various misadventures involving Sinbad.  I was amazed by how many quotes from this have lodged themselves in my head for 30+ years. “PUT THAT COOKIE DOWN!” 

The Losers, 1970. A group of rough bikers is recruited by the CIA to rescue a CIA agent in a “neutral village” near the Cambodian/Vietnamese border  that the American army can’t enter for fear of angering the Chinese, who are already there. It goes….about as well as a plan invented by the amoral and unaccountable CIA can be expected to go. Interesting period piece given that it was filmed DURING the Vietnam war. Random love song.

To Grandmother’s House We Go, 1992.   A Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen film that was part of my childhood.  Rewatch with the ladyfriend.   Oh, the nostalgia! MK & A play a pair of twins who run away from home to give their mom a break from single parenting, and are then accidentally kidnapped by an elderly couple who are also serial robbers of UPS/Fedex drivers. Nostalgic and adorable.  

Dark Star, 1974. …I don’t know. John Carpenter film about a crew on a spaceship who blow up planets that might destabilize Earth’s colonization efforts. Then the computer goes AWOL and one character has to inflict psychoanalytical talk on said computer. It makes me understand why Star  Wars impressed people so much. 

The Warriors, 1979. A big gangbanger convention has been called in da Bronx, where a man known as Cyrus announces that they’s more gangsta den cops and so we oughta be able to run da city. However, he’s shot by members of one gang, Da Rogues,  who frame another gang, The Warriors, who then have to make it from Da Bronx to Coney Island.   It’s an action movie with…unintentional comedy.   My favorite gangs were Da Baseball Boyz and Da Coverall Rollerskate Gang. But it has a fan base even today! Can you dig it?

The Bikeriders, 2024. Based on a journalist’s true account, the story of an MC from the sixties to the seventies as the original members find their club exploding in popularity and becoming something they don’t recognize. Great character drama, great acting especially from Tom Hardy. Good stuff. (I’ve gotten a lot of really good Tom Hardy this year. Can’t believe he’s the little weasel in ST Nemesis.)