Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, is back with his thoughts on Christmas movies that are not warm, fuzzy and sentimental.
By MIKE FRIED
THE REF
**** 1/2
It’s a tale as old as time. A bickering couple runs into a cat burglar smelling of cat piss and he takes them hostage and, well, he’s still regretting it.
When I saw this 31 years ago, I was the only person in the movie theater and I could not understand why. This is a thoroughly hysterical movie that resonates on so many levels. First, while released in March, it is now a Christmas classic. Second, the screenplay is one of the most acerbically funny ones that has ever been written for a Christmas movie, Bad Santa included. This is way better than Bad Santa. Third, this movie features not only a hysterically wiseass performance from Denis Leary — in his first leading role — but two first class performances from Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis as the bickering couple and the three of them make this just a joy to behold.
And the supporting cast is equally brilliant. The great Christine Baranski is, as always, hysterical and Raymond J. Barry takes a rare comedic role as the embattled chief of police. And in a bit of brilliant casting, nice Mrs Banks from Mary Poppins — Glynis Johns — plays the bitchiest mother-in-law one can find. And it marks the screen debut of the great actor JK Simmons playing a character named Siskel (after Gene Siskel, who ravaged LaGravanese’s screenplay for The Fisher King.)
But it is Ted Demme’s steady direction of Richard LaGravanese’s script that makes this fly. Between Judy and Kevin’s bickering and Denis’ attempts to maintain order, it really works.
It really is a hysterical film that gets better with every viewing and this absolutely deserves a decent physical release. It is only available on a crappy DVD that doesn’t look good in today’s big screen televisions.
I’m still laughing !
WATCH IT
THE HOLDOVERS
*****
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is one of those Christmas movies that one needs to watch a couple of times because of the nuances contained within. This nuance sets it apart from other similar films and the story outline is not as revolutionary as one might think. The story centers around three people stuck at an elite prep school over the winter vacation, a student whose rich parents don’t have time for him, a bereaved mother, and a despised pretentious teacher.
Payne has made a movie that feels like it was filmed in the 1970s. While shooting digitally, he desaturated the film in post-production to make it look like a 1970s film and it didn’t hurt that he included the 1970s version of the studio logo, the Focus Features logo as well as the 1970’s MPAA R-rated rating card. So not only does the movie take place in 1970 it feels like a creature of the 1970s. The movie is marked by a terrific script by David Hemingson and directed ably by Payne.
Paul Giamatti is his usual wondrous self as the teacher Paul Hunham, a wall-eyed, mean fellow who has been on the Dean’s shit list at the Barton Academy for a long time. When one of his fellow teachers makes up a story about his mother being sick, the task of staying over the holidays and watching the children who can’t go home — the holdovers — falls to him.
And he is a bastard. There’s no two ways about it. He is rude to his students. He knocks them down with sarcasm, and he honestly doesn’t care about any of their complaints. But, like the rest of the characters in the piece, he learns to grow. Giamatti’s eye prosthetic is hysterical to look at. He plays such a sad sack with B.O. for which he has a technical name and he has been alone for most of his life — and he carries a secret.
Dominic Sessa as Angus Tally, the one remaining student holdover is a newcomer to acting and what an absolutely splendid job he delivers in his debut role as the student whose parents have abandoned him. He wants a drink, (Miller Highlife, the champagne of beers), he wants to hang out with a girl at a Christmas party and he wants to see his real father, not caring, one bit for his stepfather.
But the real stand out in this movie is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary, the head cook at the Barton Academy whose son, Curtis, a former student at Barton, was recently killed in Vietnam. In my opinion, she is the anchor of the piece and delivers, by far, the strongest performance in the film, and she delivers a performance that I would not have expected from her, having only seen her in TV shows like Only Murders in the Building. The depth of her grief is absolutely palpable. It is truly a performance to watch. Her Academy Award was well deserved.
And it’s the performances in this film that matter. Like I said, before the story is not particularly groundbreaking — the story of several uncommon people thrown together in a situation has been an oft-told tale; however, in this case, the three main characters deliver what are, in my opinion, career-best performances, and that says a lot. Parenthetically I might add at this juncture that Giamatti’s performance as Pig Vomit in the movie Private parts is my favorite role of his (especially his monologue during the closing credits), but I will acknowledge that it is not his career best, no matter how he pronounces WNBC.
I don’t care that Alexander Payne doesn’t want this to be considered a Christmas movie.
It is.
And one of the best — yet it cannot unseat Die Hard as the best Christmas movie.
And I am going to say it — no matter how good Cillian Murphy was, Paul Giamatti’s performance deserved the fucking Oscar and the movie was the Best Picture of the year.
TRADING PLACES
*****
This Christmas movie, a takeoff on the Prince and the Pauper, involves a very rich guy name Louis Winthorpe III and a very poor petty criminal named Billy Ray Valentine. Winthorpe‘s bosses Randolph and Mortimer Duke believe that the question of heredity versus environment needs to be decided. They decide on an experiment. They will make Winthorpe penniless and make Billy Ray Valentine the Managing Director of Duke and Duke. While Billy Ray seems to take to his new lifestyle, Winthorpe is a bit adrift in his pauper lifestyle something he has never been prepared for. He seeks revenge.
All three of the lead actors are great in this movie, but I honestly don’t know if the movie would have succeeded without the exuberance of Eddie Murphy. He carries nearly the entire movie and he is hysterical in every scene that he is in. This is not to discount the efforts of his costars Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis but this is Murphy‘s movie.
Aykroyd comes off a bit stiff, like his character, but he’s been funnier in other movies especially Ghostbusters and Spies Like Us. Still he plays an excellent straight man. And Jamie Lee Curtis does an admirable job of shedding her Scream Queen image in exchange for showing off her comedic chops and other things.
I cannot praise Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy enough as the Duke brothers, because they really had to play a couple of despicable characters and by all accounts they were actually very genteel, nice individuals. As the antagonists in this film they do a tremendous job.
Besides Murphy, this film belongs to the very funny script by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod and the direction by John Landis. Landis gets the most out of his actors and the script is just an extraordinarily literate takeoff of Mark Twain‘s classic which didn’t have Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in it.
The story is genuine but the jokes are very funny and well framed by Landis.
This is a funny Christmas movie.
Its depth of character and its sense of humor make this a rewatchable film and earns it a WATCH IT and a score of 5/5
You may decide to give this a 4/5 but “It ain’t cool being no jive turkey so close to Thanksgiving.”
“YEAH”
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
