Angelina Jolie is a dying MARIA (2024) Callas, fighting her terminal illness with dubious meds only to have the hallucinatory side-effects push her into her flashback booth. There she remembers the highs of singing, the struggle to succeed, her involvement with magnate Aristotle Onassis and more. This is a good film—visually it’s much stronger than Conclave—with a standout performance from Jolie. “Don’t sing, shout — shout loud enough that Puccini could hear it!”
Rewatching WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) it struck me, not for the first time, how arbitrary fame and success are: if the movie had done its minstrel show sequence in blackface, no way would it still be a Christmas perennial (it would more likely end up in the Christmas Obscurity category with Holiday Inn).
Fortunately that’s not the way they rolled (though yeah, doing a minstrel show in any form still raises issues) so I can still enjoy the story of Broadway superstars and WW II vets Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye putting on a show in Vermont to save their admired former general’s inn from closing due to a shortage of guests. The Irving Berlin score is mixed — What Do You Do With a General? is forgettable, Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me has always worked for me—but with Crosby, Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, it’s a winner. “Whenever I figure out what that means, I’ll come up with a crushing reply.”
OUR LITTLE SECRET (2024) is my first flop of the Christmas movie-binging season. Ten years after Lindsay Lohan turned down her male BFF’s marriage proposal, she’s accompanying her current boyfriend to his mom’s (Kristen Chenowith) for Christmas—and guess who his sister’s new boyfriend is? I let this plod along for a half hour before throwing in the towel. “We don’t have time for you and my dad to have another 30 minute conversation about the origins of refrigerators.”
THAT CHRISTMAS (2024) is an animated film in which the inhabitants of a small British seaside town must cope with disapproving teachers, stranded presents, overworked mum Jodie Whittaker, The Madonna singing Madonna in the Christmas pageant (“I’ve made up my mind—I’m keeping my baby!”), nice and naughty twins (“There’s always an evil twin.”) and hopeless crushes. Can Santa (Brian C ox) provide everyone’s character arcs with a happy ending? This one worked for me; Billy Nighy voices a lighthouse keeper.“We used to be shepherds — now we’re organic vegetable farmers!”
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN WONDERLAND (2024) has Santa (Gerard Butler) drag his grumbling reindeer off the usual route to answer an old letter from Wonderland’s Princess Alice. Alas, it’s not the Alice but the Red Queen, and Santa never answering has turned her as anti-Christmas as Narnia’s White Witch. This starts slow but picks up as it progresses. “Oh no, not another song!”
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