This Week in Cinemasochism: Kirk Cameron's SAVING CHRISTMAS (2014)

I thought I had this movie pegged.  The poster said it all, I figured: the evangelical former teen idol Kirk Cameron at the center, in a Chuck Norris-like pose, wielding a candy cane like a sword and protecting a snow globe as if it were the baby Jesus himself.  The tagline, "Put Christ back in Christmas," suggests a full-on acceptance of our declaration of War on Christmas, and that Kirk will be there to meet us on the front lines.  Watch out, liberals and atheists, 'cuz evangelicals are coming to kick your ass!

I embarked upon this 80-minute film ready to get served a lesson in the True Meaning of Christmas.  But then the movie dug into its plot, and... well, I was humbled to find that I wasn't in the movie's crosshair at all.  It isn't even a straw-man attack on secularism so that evangelical audiences can cheer on the defeat of those who would insist on "Happy Holidays" in every store.  Though there's lip service paid to the "wet blankets" who don't want Christians to celebrate "too loudly," Cameron surprisingly aims to the right rather than to the left.  It's targeted at people who think Christmas needs to be more pure, more religious, more centered on Jesus.  Kirk positions himself as the liberal reformer, who's here to tell those stiffly stiffersons to lighten up: that all the decorating, singing, celebrating, gift-buying, and ho-ho-ho-ing is perfectly okay!

After a five-minute introduction featuring Cameron himself sitting in front of a Christmas tree musing about what Christmas means to him and sipping from what I'm pretty sure is an empty cup of cocoa, we go to a lavish Christmas party hosted by Kirk's sister (played by his real life sister--Bridgette, not Candace).  Kirk learns from his sister (she's billed only as Kirk's sister) that her husband, Christian White (the symbolism here is about as subtle as a brick), has been struggling with Christmas lately.

Rather than join in the celebration, Christian (played by the film's co-writer/director, Darren Doane) has elected to sit in his car and stew.  Kirk goes out to sit with him to try to bring him out of his Scrooge attitude.  Christian explains that he can't shake his skepticism about Christmas.  How does our celebration of Christmas represent the Christian faith at all?  Wouldn't the more Christian thing be to take all the money we spend on presents and trees and decorations and use it to feed poor children?

A question that leads even the most liberal among us to think: well, yeah, wouldn't it be?  Nah, I guess not, and the prospect of all those starving kids doesn't seem to bother Kirk a lot, since he listens to Christian's fairly legitimate quibbles with an unending smug grin, as if he's just waiting to deliver him a yuletide smackdown.

He never really answers the question about the poor children.  Instead, Kirk deters the conversation to an absolutely befuddling thesis on Jesus's swaddling clothes in the manger, the relevance of which I'm still attempting to grasp.

It's around this point that we realize that the entire movie is going to be made up of Kirk and this guy sitting in a car talking.  Kirk essentially runs through every element of Christmas celebration that has a pagan or secular origin and explains that, see, it's Christian after all.  The Christmas tree hearkens back not to the winter solstice but to the tree of knowledge from Genesis.  The act of material gift giving isn't materialistic at all; it's a representation of God's spirit being made material in the form of Jesus, get it?  And most ridiculously at all, the shape of the presents under the tree really seems to resemble the cityscape of Bethlehem!

Cameron, Doane, and crew must have realized soon into production that their car conversation wasn't enough to sustain a feature film, as most of the actors seem to have been directed to milk every beat for as long as they can.  The movie's barely an hour long if you take out Kirk's long introduction and the interminable final dance number, followed by a "credit cookie" outtake sequence that, if it isn't  hilarious, is at least loose and goofy enough to show that the movie was made by human beings and not robots.

There's little plot to speak of, though the monotony of Cameron's feature-length lecture is broken up slightly by the appearance of two Happenin' Black Dudes who occasionally converse about being restricted from celebrating Christmas.  It culminates in one of them delivering an off-the-cuff beat poem presenting a litany of conspiracy theories; it's here, I think, that the filmmakers mean to downplay the whole "War on Christmas" thing as kinda silly, which is commendable, though if you listen closely, the dialogue seems to equate fears of the Koch Brothers and Citizens United with 9/11 truthers and chem trail watchers.

The movie isn't completely unwatchable; it appears to have been made with a modicum of production value.  Cameron has a completely vapid screen presence, though Doane has a certain lumpy charm as the Scrooge character.  And though the movie is patently offensive, both logically and religiously, it is effective as a crass curiosity: here is, from the country's most prominent right-wing straight-arrow devout Christian, a defense of tacky materialism in the name of Jesus.  It's okay to get gaudy on Christmas; it's a little disingenuous to say the Bible told you to.

* out of ****

P.S. I didn't mention the "Game of Thrones"-style Santa Claus fight scene.  It's not as much fun as it sounds.

Niagara Falls, Frankie Angel: Why SCROOGED (1988) is the Best Christmas Movie of All Time, and Bill Murray's Best Performance

I first saw Scrooged (and loved it) when I was six years old.  I was surprised, then, once I reached the age of reason, that the movie actually wasn't very well received.  Roger Ebert, who is the critic of record as far as I'm concerned, called it "disquieting" and "unsettling," and even its star, Bill Murray, was semi-apologetic about it in an interview, hedging that it "could have been a really, really great movie." Well, it is.

Few movies nowadays are completely dependent on the persona of the lead actor to succeed.  Scrooged is an iconic Bill Murray performance, the best of his career, and probably the only time the actor has truly been permitted to own a movie.  Murray is a powerhouse in the film, and it is entirely centered around his performance.  If his progression from miserly millionaire to humble humanitarian were not believable, the film would fall apart.  The movie is co-written by Michael O'Donoghue, the brilliant "Saturday Night Live" co-creator who helped to shape Murray's persona.  I assume it was O'Donoghue who took Ebenezer Scrooge and made him into a character only Murray could have played.

Murray is Frank Cross, the youngest TV network president in history.  His network, IBC, has its reputation riding on a multimillion-dollar live presentation of Scrooge (the more things change...) with Buddy Hackett as Ebenezer.  Cross, who shed much of his humanity while climbing the corporate ladder, lambastes his executives, tortures his harried assistant (Alfre Woodard), ignores his only brother (real-life brother John Murray), and reluctantly sucks up to the chair of the board of directors (Robert Mitchum) to keep a stronghold on his job. (A sniveling kiss-ass played with relentless grinning positivity by John Glover represents a plausible threat.)


When his deceased old boss (John Forsythe) appears to him and warns him of the three ghosts, he's appropriately skeptical.  Scrooged takes place in a world where Charles Dickens's story has been eaten, devoured, and regurgitated by every Very Special TV Hour known to man.  The TV show Frank is producing, while well-mounted, is as cynical an exploitation of Christmas as has ever been presented.  Scrooge's first appearance is preceded by a kickline of street urchins played by the Rockettes, and Tiny Tim (Mary Lou Retton) accentuates his "God bless us" line with a somersault and several backflips.  Mitchum, whose performance is a deadpan masterpiece, presses onto Frank that cats and dogs are becoming a key market, and urges him to feature mice more prominently in the show (the more things change...).

Murray, playing a truly deplorable character in early scenes, lends a unique vulnerability to Frank.  His frequent ironic quips are hysterically funny and delivered with inimitable timing, but also portray an unfortunately distant character who cautiously avoids relating to people or feeling feelings.  Frank is less a Dickensian miser than a 1980s yuppie who's desperate to hang on to the fortune for which he's stepped on so many people.  One of those people is his ex-girlfriend Claire (Karen Allen, whose smile lights a thousand Christmas trees), a charity organizer whose plain niceness is confounding to him.

Frank's character arc is always believable, and more complex than the fairly simple journey of the typical Scrooge.  His dealings with the first two ghosts are riddled with false epiphanies and rationalizations: when the Ghost of Christmas Past (played as a reckless, unshaven cab driver by David Johansen) takes him to see his childhood home, he scoffs, "I get it. You're here to show me my past, and I'm supposed to get all dully-eyed and mushy." The Ghost's response to this is one of the funniest lines in the film, and right on the money.

Murray reportedly disagreed with director Richard Donner's vision for the film: maybe Murray saw it as more of a straight comedy while Donner, who shortly thereafter co-created the terrific "Tales from the Crypt" TV series, wanted to accentuate the horror aspects of the film.  Donner was correct; the performances provide the comedy, and the movie only works if played straight against it.  Danny Elfman's haunting score sounds like the Nutcracker Suite appropriated by Philip Glass.  Above all, the movie isn't afraid to take the ghosts seriously.  Forsythe's first appearance, in ghastly Tom Burman makeup, is admittedly pretty scary, and Frank's walk through his future is a stripped-down nightmare (though Donner allows himself one indulgent shot that's a cheeky Hitchcock parody).

It all culminates in a third-act explosion in which a newly reformed Frank ambles onto the set of his Scrooge special, interrupts the broadcast and delivers a speech that in the mouth of any other actor would seem maudlin and unnatural.  It could not have been easy, but Murray finds the absolute right note, and his utter joy and earnestness in proclaiming, "I get it now!" is a truly moving transformation.  It's a gargantuan outpouring of emotion that's comparable to Hickey's last-act monologue in The Iceman Cometh: it's that honest and that good, and Murray is more alive than he's ever been in anything, as a man who's completely taken aback to learn that he's still capable of feeling joy.

**** out of ****

 

Have Yourself an Evil Little Christmas, Part 1: BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

(Warning: video contains obscene language.)



Though Halloween gets most of the attention when it comes to grisly teen murders, witchcraft, and other general supernatural happenings, Christmas doesn't lag far behind.  The difference is that it's a lot harder to make a horror film set around Christmas without seeming cynical.  Any movie featuring a serial killer in a Santa Claus suit is merely using the holiday ironically as a platform for disturbing imagery.  However, there are films that manage to avoid that pitfall.

Bob Clark's Black Christmas, which predates Halloween by four years, is the foremost example.  I'm surprised that it's not widely counted among the best horror films ever made, because it certainly is.  Though it's not the first of its type (Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood pioneered the genre), it set the trend for the American stalker/slasher film.

The setup is intricately played.  A group of sorority girls is preparing to celebrate Christmas.  Some are going home, others are staying at the house, some are clandestinely staying with boyfriends.  A phone rings.  It's an obscene caller, and it's made clear that the call is not out of the ordinary.  Gradually the call transforms from sexual to threatening, and future calls become more and more psychotic.  Then a girl goes upstairs to the attic and never returns.

It seems strange at first that Clark would go on to direct the funniest, most endearing Christmas movie of all time, A Christmas Story (not to mention Porky's, and lamentably, Rhinestone and Baby Geniuses), but the two holiday films are not worlds apart.  Both are held together not primarily by plot but by character.  Clark toys with our expectations, not through the lazy whodunit game of which-one's-the-murderer, but through subtle character development and imagery.

The police, led by Lt. Fuller (genre stalwart John Saxon), are well-meaning but of limited help.  A high school girl reported missing at the same time is both a warning and a distraction.  At a time when many college girls are disappearing to undisclosed locations with boyfriends, no one is sure what to suspect.

At the center is Jess (Olivia Hussey), one of the sorority girls, who is the victim of most of the obscene calls.  She is pregnant and unsure if she wants to keep the baby, which disturbs her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) to the point where he exhibits destructive behavior just as the killing begins.  Surely suspicion falls upon Peter, who is a credible suspect.  Or is he?

Clark doesn't rely on gore.  In fact, there is barely any blood in the film. He sometimes uses non-graphic but unsettling images (e.g. a dead girl wrapped in plastic rocking back and forth in a rocking chair) to drive the horror element of the film. The rest of the time, he uses suggestion, often cutting away before anything gory happens. He knows that people are scared most by what they can’t see and what they don’t know; he carefully shows us some things and obscures others, and tactically reveals to us some things of which his characters remain unaware.

The obscene calls that punctuate the film are a masterwork of oddball terror.  It sometimes sounds like there are multiple speakers on the other end.  They soon escalate beyond mere sexual harassment and into madness.  The calls are wild and disorienting; no overt threats are made, but the voice on the other end is wild and disorienting.  No sense can be made of the killer's ramblings, but they have a definite urgency that makes them threatening.  By the end of the film a certain amount of lucidity can be deciphered, as if the calls reveal an alternate story that makes sense to the killer but no one else.

The movie works largely because, like A Christmas Story, it feels authentic.  The sorority setting is believable, and the girls who inhabit it are likable and complex.  Margot Kidder in particular is dynamic as a foulmouthed, brutally honest sister who refuses to be victimized.  Even the cops, usually a stereotype in movies like this, aren't written off but are given real personalities: Douglas McGrath is particularly memorable as Sgt. Nash, a slightly boneheaded policeman (who incidentally ends up blurting out the movie's most memorable warning, plagiarized five years later by the far inferior When a Stranger Calls).

The conclusion is sure to disappoint many, since there really isn't one.  People often look for some sort of catharsis at the end of a horror film, which Clark and his writer Roy Moore refuse to provide.  There's only the tension left hanging there; it never releases.  The final tracking shot seems to tease some kind of certainty, but there is only a final line: four words which make no superficial sense, but are as taunting and crushing as anything I've ever heard spoken in a movie.  And a ringing phone.

**** out of ****

HAVE YOURSELF AN OKAY LITTLE CHRISTMAS!

There have been joyous ones and somber ones, but I believe that 'N Sync's "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays" is the first and only Christmas song to use the word "okay." Whether you're excited or bitter about the holidays, the term "okay" usually doesn't fit.  Kudos to 'N Sync for blanding it up '90s style!




Have a Totally Okay Holiday!