Movie of the Month: The Christmas Cottage
I was expecting this made-for-TV Christmas movie to basically be like all the others, with stock writing, flat characters, forced cutesiness, and a wholesome but stale message about love (see my section on Stinker of the Month below).
However, for this film, I was incorrect in that assessment, for the most part. Don’t get me wrong though; this movie did have some flat, unbelievable characters and writing, strained charm, and an obvious message about love and family. Not that those are bad things to have in a movie, but if this sort of thing isn’t handled just right, it can be rather implausible and garish! And truthfully, about a half hour in, I was getting worried when Aaron Ashmore was learning to be an electrician from Richard Moll (the big guy who played Bull in Night Court) and they started having a Christmas display war with the people across the street, and then Ashmore and Jared Padelecki’s dad, played by Richard Burgi, showed up as a cardboard thin character, a drunk with grand schemes that never paid off, and Padelecki (of Supernatural fame, though never as good as Jensen Ackles), playing a painter named Tom, started painting a mural of all the townspeople, but looked at it as beneath his talents, and Marcia Gay Harden was actually a welcome addition as his struggling mother, and there were cameos galore from the likes of Chris Elliot, Charlotte Rae, Ed Asner, and Nancy Robertson who we enjoyed as Wanda on the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas. None of this kept this movie from being just another forgettable Christmas movie among the hundreds of made-for-TV Christmas flicks that have been released over the years. Yet there are three elements that made this rise above the normal holiday dreck: Given some of the plot elements, such as the holiday decorations war, it managed to eventually focus on the correct elements and overcome such other loud and obnoxious holiday films as Christmas with the Kranks and Deck the Halls; in the end, I realized this was the story of Thomas Kinkade, the famed Christian “Painter of Light,” and that revelation was handled just perfectly for me; and most importantly, Peter O’Toole added real weight to this film as Glen, Thomas Kinkade’s mentor who lived close by and was slowly losing his ability to paint, or even think. He added a real gravitas to this movie and it managed to make me appreciate Peter O’Toole as an actor like I never had before. The part was maybe just a throwaway part like most of the other characters in this movie, but he did such a wonderful job with it, it lent not only his character a substantial veracity, but it managed to give the other characters and the entire proceedings an authenticity as well that otherwise would have been sorely missing.
Runner Up: Did You Hear About the Morgans?
And here, I have to apologize. I saw the old black and white version of Julius Caesar this month, and starring Marlon Brando, James Mason, and John Gielgud, and I also saw Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, which, like The Christmas Cottage, took a while to find its direction but by the end, redeemed itself as a very involving ghost story about a murdered, black soul singer and her murdered little girl reaching out from beyond the grave to haunt and condemn the grown children of her murderers to commit the same horrible atrocities their fathers had committed, and to do it upon their own children! With films of this caliber or weighty, thematic material, why did I pick Did You Hear About the Morgans? as my choice for second favorite movie of the month? Well, these kinds of lightweight films deserve a bit of recognition too! It reminds me of the lyrics to that Alan Jackson song, “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning”: “Did you turn off that violent old movie you’re watchin’ / And turn on I Love Lucy reruns.” It’s why light comedies never win Oscars (nor should they probably), but in a serious world, we sometimes need these light, frothy, and fun diversions, and Did You Hear About the Morgans? is, if nothing else, light, frothy, and fun. Julius Caesar was terrific, with great performances, and, of course, was well written by Shakespeare, but it was also full of violence, as all of Shakespeare’s tragedies were, and Bag of Bones had some very shocking and disturbing scenes given its subject matter, yet, to its credit, Did You Hear About the Morgans? had little of this seriousness (aside from the plot contrivance that got the feuding husband and wife characters into witness protection in the first place). The movie was really nothing more than excuse to get two charming actors together in a fish out of water tale, and though I’m not a fan of Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex in the City, she, along with costar Hugh Grant, has lots of likable charm to spare here. I also liked Sam Elliott, though I suspect Mary Steenburgen only took her part to make fun of Sarah Palin (and there was at least one obvious Sarah Palin joke made from it), but even so, I get the feeling even she found the heart of this character (and if not, it’s her loss).
Stinker of the Month: Trading Christmas
Runner Up: Kingdom of the Spiders
My gosh, I did NOT want to put this movie on the stinkers list, yet of all the movies I saw this month, this was still one of the worst, I’m afraid. The acting was pretty bad, from everyone, least of all Shatner, the writing and the dialogue are dreadful but appropriate for a B-movie about killer spiders, the production values are very low, it’s dated, and the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Just how fast do these spiders breed? Yet this movie still delivers in the one area it set out to deliver, and that was with the spiders. There are tons of big, hairy tarantulas running all over everything and everyone in this movie. They really didn’t slouch on giving the main audience for this sort of thing exactly what they wanted, which was simply dumping a whole bunch of big spiders all over everything. So scenes such as the one where the little girl is swinging and the camera pulls down to reveal the grass covered in spiders, or the pilot using DDT to kill the spiders but then being covered in spiders in the cockpit and screaming like a little girl and crashing the plane, or scenes of the rampage on the town, or crawling through the air vents as the small band of survivors take refuge, coming in under the door, dropping down the fireplace, crawling all over William Shatner as he tries to make it up the stairs to safety, and that ending, regardless of the fact that it’s so unbelievable; these are all great scenes that manage to do what so many other B-movies eventually fail to do, and that is to really deliver the goods. If you’re going to have a movie called Kingdom of the Spiders, the best thing you can do, even on a shoestring budget, is to give the audience a bunch of big, scary spiders, and that is the one thing these filmmakers managed to do here! That’s why I didn’t like putting this on my stinkers list, yet this was still not the best of films really. Call it a guilty pleasure at best, especially if spiders give you the heebie-jeebies!
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