As usual I kicked off my Christmas viewing with WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) wherein Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye dress up in drag, Rosemary Clooney wonders why love didn’t do right by her (one of my favorite songs from his musical), Dean Jaeger marvels how soft his soldiers have gotten in a decade of civilian life and the stars agree that everyone loves a minstrel show (it’s a minor miracle they didn’t do it in blackface).
While I often use this as a “talking lamp” I broke off and watched close for the many good bits like Danny Kaye and Vera Allen doing a romantic dance together early on. The parts are more impressive than the sum but they’re very good parts. “We’ll tell our kids we answered duty’s call/With the grandest son of a soldier of them all.”
As rewatching Jekyll and Hyde stuff is taking up most of my viewing time, it’s shame I wasted any of it on MEET ME NEXT CHRISTMAS (2024). Christina Milian has a Meet Cute one Christmas but they’re both attached — but if they’re free next Christmas, they’ll meet at a Pentatonix concert. Sure enough Milian throws out her cheating boyfriend but it’s so late in the season, she can’t find concert tickets! Oh noes! This was bland stuff, and making it a heavy handed product placement for Pentatonix doesn’t help. “When I was a teenager I bought Nsync tickets from a guy in an abandoned Quiznos.”
As TYG and I both loved Zootopia, we caught ZOOTOPIA 2 (2025) which proved a much better use of our time. In the first movie, bunny meter-maid Judy Hops (Ginnifer Goodwin) and fox grifter Jack Wild (Jason Bateman) cracked a major case threatening the eponymous city of anthropomorphic animals. Too bad for Judy’s ambitions nobody thinks one lucky break makes them into superstar cops — but a mysterious snake’s attack on the respected Lynxley family (snakes have been kept out since a cold blooded murder by one viper a century ago) convinces Judy they have a case that will prove they’re tops. Except of course, the case proves more than it first appears, but you probably guessed that.
This has fewer surprises than the first film but it’s great fun, with some neat visual touches and a subtext about discrimination and gentrification that doesn’t smother the film. Extra points for keeping Judy and Jack as best friends rather than having them fall into each other’s arms (though I won’t be surprised if the inevitable Zootopia 3 goes there). With Danny Trejo as an enigmatic lizard, Patrick Warburton as the windbag horse mayor, Shakira as a pop singer, Jean Reno as both members of another cop duo and David Straitharn as a villainous mastermind. “She’s a rabbit, isn’t she? Why not pull her out of your hat?”
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Having Judy and Jack fall into each others’ arms would lead to some awkward questions about interspecies couples which maybe the series doesn’t really want to get into. Can they have kids? What…sort of kids? Could get weird.
(I’m not judging. Currently writing an interspecies romance. But it might be a bit much for something this lighthearted.)
A fair point, but as long as they don’t have kids, I think most viewers would be okay with hand-waving the question.