Christmas In Connecticut

This week I continue my annual holiday mission to provide alternative Christmas movies. Of course, I love It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and Elf as much as anybody else, but I also think there should be other options, good options. There’s no end of Hallmark and Lifetime movies on TV with generic titles like A Christmas Wish and The Santa Plan, but I’m talking about real movies, things that are worth seeing and not anything that stars Jenny Mcarthy or former cast members of Beverly Hills 90210.

This year my suggestion is 1945’s Christmas in Connecticut. Directed by Peter Godfrey, the film stars one of my all-time favorites, Barbara Stanwyck, along with Dennis Morgan, a popular leading man of the day, and Sydney Greenstreet, the famous “fat man” from both The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

 

Stanwyck plays Elizabeth Lane, a young, single, city woman who writes a kind of Martha Stewart-esque feature in a Good Housekeeping type magazine. While sitting comfortably in her city apartment eating take out, she writes about her farm in Connecticut, her charming husband, and beautiful baby, and about cooking delicious, elaborate food. Of course, as I said, Elizabeth is single, lives in the city, and can’t cook her way out of wet paper sack. She consults a chef friend for details on cooking and basically makes the rest up. This becomes a problem when a returning war hero, a sailor who was stranded on a raft in the South Pacific for fifteen days, tells someone his only request is to have a Christmas dinner made by the famous Elizabeth Lane on her farm in Connecticut.

Elizabeth’s blustering publisher played by Sydney Greenstreet has no idea that her columns are totally fabricated, so he thinks her hosting the sailor is a great idea and an excellent publicity opportunity. He’s also obsessed with the truth and would fire her if he knew she was making stuff up.

So Elizabeth has to get a farm, a husband, a baby, and cooking skills in time to host this random sailor or be outed as a fraud and lose her job. She has a would-be boyfriend played by Reginald Gardiner who has proposed to her repeatedly, and as a matter of expediency, she decides she should finally accept his proposal because, if nothing else, he happens to have a large, beautiful farm in, you guessed it, snowy Connecticut.

The film beings to pick up speed once Elizabeth, her fiancée who insists they get married right away, the judge who is supposed to marry them, the chef Elizabeth brought to help with the cooking, her publisher who invited himself along, and the handsome and charming sailor are all under the same roof. The pace isn’t quite fast enough to qualify Christmas in Connecticut as a screwball comedy, but it’s definitely in that neighborhood.

 

As ever, Stanwyck is delightful. This is the first film she made after playing a cold, platinum blonde killer in Double Indemnity in 1944, and those two films side by side show her tremendous range. Here, she’s charming, smart, and flirty and she makes a great comedic and romantic lead. 

The Connecticut farm set is big, elaborate, and lovely. It’s a fantastic example of classic Hollywood set design and every bit of the snow covered farmhouse, the barn, and the snowy fields was built and shot indoors in sunny California. Like the great performances and the sort of silly, old fashioned plot, it’s an example of the Hollywood dream factory operating at its best.

So if you’re in the mood for some vintage Christmas cheer but have seen Jimmy Stewart running down the streets of Bedford Falls a few too many times, give Christmas in Connecticut a try.

This review originally appeared on Q90.1. www.deltabroadcasting.org

The Ridiculous Six

Adam Sandler has always been one of Hollywood’s laziest celebrities. Since his beginnings on Saturday Night Live in the 90s, Sandler’s work has rarely been anything but a collection of stupid accents, silly faces, and scripts seemingly cooked up by 14 year old boys. With a couple of minor exceptions when he ventured into dramatic acting in the early 2000s, Adam Sandler has just played the same low-achieving-but-still-secretly-awesome slacker for over twenty years. Admittedly, this formula has occasionally worked. Early on, Sandler made some dumb movies that were actually kind of funny. Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, and The Wedding Singer in particular were joyfully juvenile. They weren’t great movies, but they managed to get some humor out of their immaturity and vulgarity. Unfortunately for us all, Sandler and his regular crew of writers, co-stars, and directors continue to crank out the same lame stuff a quarter of a century later and needless to say, it’s lost a lot of its appeal.

With laziness being his hallmark, it makes sense that Sandler’s latest movie can’t even be bothered to it to the theater for its initial release. The supposedly comedic western The Ridiculous Six premiered on Netflix this week, and given the effort that went into the writing and acting of this movie, it makes sense for it to be most available to us when we are sitting half asleep on our couch at home covered in a fine layer of Cheeto dust. It is a powerfully superficial, casually racist, and perhaps most importantly really unfunny movie.

In it, Sandler plays a Caucasian man raised by Native Americans who gave him the name White Knife. Of course, he’s a deadly warrior and is engaged to be married to the prettiest woman in his tribe whose name is Smoking Fox. One day, White Knife’s real father, a criminal named Frank Stockburn played by Nick Nolte, shows up and wants to make amends for his past and reconcile with his son. Stockburn’s old gang shows up and kidnaps him because they want their share of the loot they stole together. Sandler’s character, now called Tommy, decides to reenter white society in order to rob banks so he can pay off his father’s captors. At each stop along the way, he encounters another guy who says Frank Stockburn is his father. So they form a gang to rescue the dad that none of them ever knew.

The ridiculous six of the title are the six illegitimate Stockburn boys including the sad Mexican cliché played by Rob Schneider, the mentally deficient cliché played by Taylor Lautner, Luke Wilson as the handsome one, Jorge Garcia as the funny overweight guy, and Terry Crews as the funny African American guy. Even this simple description makes the movie sound better and more sophisticated than it actually is. It’s a collection of racial stereotypes, dumb sex jokes, dumber toilet jokes, and Adam Sandler wandering through it all trying to do some kind of quiet Clint Eastwood impression but ending up sounding like he took a couple of Ambien before each day of filming.

The film half-heartedly tries to satirize race and gender roles but fails. It’s not enough to simply point out that people say and do racist things or marginalize or objectify women. True satire uses exaggeration to make a point about those things. The makers of The Ridiculous Six are just happy to make poop jokes and have the Mexican guy walk around with a burro all day. The film wants to be a 21^st century version of the great Blazing Saddles. But like its star, the movie is simply too lazy for that and so, instead of Blazing Saddles, all we get is another crappy Adam Sandler movie.

The Ridiculous Six lasts for two hours, and that’s two hours too long.

A Few Words About Star Wars

The original Star Wars movie was released in 1977 when I was three years old. This was long before the days of VHS, DVD, Blu Ray, YouTube, or even pay-per-view, and so rather than leaving theaters in a matter of weeks, films stayed pretty much as long as they made money. Since people couldn't really watch movies at home and because TV went off the air at eleven or so, people also went to the theater a lot more often. Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope showed continuously in some theaters for over a year. Got that? After it was released in May of 1977, you could take a date to see it for high school graduation, catch a late show after fireworks on the Fourth of July, dress up as a Storm Trooper to see it for Halloween, catch it again at Christmas, and then take your prom date to see it in the spring.

In addition to these epic runs in theaters, there was also a time when a successful movie would get re-released in theaters after it had been gone for a while. These days, a movie generally only gets a theatrical re-release if it has been converted to 3D or if it's a significant anniversary or both. So Star Wars came out again in 1979, 1980, 81, and 82. (It came out again in 1997 but that's another story.)

I’m pretty sure my very first movie going experience ever was seeing the 1979 rerelease of Star Wars when I was five years old. 

Even though it was so long ago, I remember a couple of things with great clarity. We saw it in a single-screen theater in a little town called Rupert, Idaho. My brother and I sat together with Dad on one side and Mom on the other. Of course, all Star Wars movies start the same way: yellow words explaining the set-up of the movie crawling from the bottom of the screen to the top and then disappearing into space. My mom whispered the words to me because, you know, I was four. After the words disappeared, there was just a moment of silence and a field of stars.

Then came the moment that I (and most other nerds) remember perfectly: blazing across that field of stars comes a small, white ship, its thrusters glaring against the darkness of space. In the next second, a giant, triangular ship a thousand times bigger than the first one plows across the screen, shooting streaks of red lasers at the tiny, obviously outmatched first ship.

I was a kid and had no idea what a "rebel alliance" or a "galactic empire" were, but I didn't care. For the next two hours, I was transfixed - by Darth Vader and his obsidian-black samurai helmet, by Greedo and the other sketchy characters in the Cantina, by the weird asymmetry of the Millennium Falcon, and by the light sabers. Swords made out of lasers? Even at four, I knew that was a hot cup of steaming awesome. Seeing that movie was a big moment in my life, and it still resonates with me all these years later. 

Next week, I’ll take my family to see Star Wars episode VII: The Force Awakens, and unrealistically or not, my hopes are high. I am excited about the possibility of wonder and the potential return of the fun that was so absent in the prequel trilogy. I look forward to taking my kids and sitting next to them in the theater like my parents did over three decades ago. For a lot of people, Star Wars is an inter-generational thing we can enjoy and talk about and argue over. I hope the Force is with J.J. Abrams and his team and that this film almost 40 years in the making can somehow live up to the hype.