The Lemon Drop Kid

Every winter break, I try to offer an alternative Christmas movie for people who want to break the monopoly of the holiday trifecta of It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and Elf. I love each of those films, and there’s nothing wrong with them other than their profound ubiquity at this time of year. A film that is touching or hilarious the first time becomes less so when you’re in hour 14 of a 24 hour, round-the-clock marathon of it being played over and over again. 

 So if you’re looking for a fun holiday movie for the days leading up to Christmas, my recommendation this year is 1951’s The Lemon Drop Kid starring Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell. It’s based on a short story of the same name by Daymon Runyon, the newspaperman and writer who wrote short, funny sentimental stories about gamblers, dance hall girls, Irish cops, gangsters, and losers. His stories were the basis for the great Broadway musical, Guys and Dolls, and you can see a lot of the same material in The Lemon Drop Kid.

The Kid, as played by Hope, is a gambler and hustler who makes his dough at a Florida track, touting horses and bilking rubes. Everything’s hunky dory until he accidentally convinces a beautiful dame to switch her bet. The new horse finishes in last place and the original horse wins, meaning the woman and her gangster boyfriend, Moose Moran, lose out on ten grand. Moran tells the Kid to pay him back by Christmas or else.

He flees to New York, his hometown, and decides to take advantage of the season by posing as a street corner Santa in hopes of collecting enough cash to keep his head from ending up in his stocking by New Year’s. He gets busted pretty quick and realizes that if he’s a Santa collecting for a specific charity, he can get away with it. So The Lemon Drop Kid quickly dreams up the Nelly Thursday Home for Old Dolls, a retirement home for older women. Of course, he has no intention of handing over the dough, but none of the gangsters, gamblers, and low-lifes who help him know that. Throughout all this, the Kid strings along his long-suffering, on-again, off-again girlfriend, Brainey Baxter played by Marilyn Maxwell. She’s definitely the brains of the two, but she has a soft spot for her slick-talking, constantly conniving man.

The film is feather light. Hope, as the Kid, is breezy and fun, playing every threat on his life and run-in with the law like a stern talking to from his mother. His palpable chemistry with Maxwell should come as no surprise as the two of them had an ongoing, real-life affair that was such an open secret, most of Hollywood simply referred to Maxwell as the other Mrs. Bob Hope.

The gallery of wonderfully named Runyon characters like Oxford Charlie, Straight Flush Tony, and Sam the Surgeon fill out the cast and fill every interaction on screen with funny asides and cartoony gangster talk. It’s the sight gags and physical comedy that are the highlights of the film – Bob Hope standing over a heat register after coming in from the cold and having his white suit balllon up, the giant wad of knitting he pulls from his bag when he’s posing as an old woman, a cow with a Christmas wreath around its neck wandering out of a room that just exploded. Sixty six years old and it still made me laugh.

The other notable thing about The Lemon Drop Kid is that it featured the premiere of the classic holiday song, “Silver Bells.” Hope and Maxwell sing a lovely version, and it’s fun to see that seemingly ageless songs like that actually came from somewhere.  

The Lemon Drop Kid is lighthearted and silly and not a bad way to spend a free winter afternoon or evening with your family. Enjoy it and have a very happy holiday and Merry Christmas.   

Coco

I’ve been worried about Pixar for a while. After an unprecedented fifteen year, eleven movie stretch of filmmaking excellence, the computer animation juggernaut hit a rough patch. Cars 2 ushered in an era of meh sequels and only pretty good originals. Even films from this period that I love like Brave and Inside Out somehow didn’t have the same firing-on-all-cylinders magic of the Toy Story trilogy, The Incredibles, Wall-E, or Ratatouille. However, when I saw the first trailers for Pixar’s latest, Coco, I was more troubled than ever. It seemed that the company had left the sad territory of retread sequels and entered into full-on plagiarism. 

 At least based on the trailers, Coco appeared to be a stone cold rip off of 2014’s The Book of Life. The Book of Life is also a computer-animated story of a young Mexican man who wants to be a musician but the tradition of his family business keeps him from realizing this dream. Through the course of his struggles, the young man passes over to the land of the dead where everyone is a skeleton and lives in an ornate, fantastic cityscape. Not to ruin things, but in the end, the young man triumphs and he returns to the land of the living. His family relents, and he’s able to follow his dream and be a musician.

If you saw the initial trailers for Coco, you probably understand why I was so concerned. It literally presented like a souped-up version of the exact same story.

However, I am happy to say that appearances were deceiving. Of course, there are surface similarities between the two films, but the tone, approach, and story are actually very different. And while I liked The Book of Life, I loved Coco.

The animation alone sets the newer film apart from the older one. The technology and technique of computer animation seems to experience dramatic leaps between each Pixar film, and Coco is definitely the highpoint so far. One difficult thing for computer animators to pull off is depth of field. Despite photorealistic rendering, many CGI images look flat. But Coco’s depictions of everything from the plaza of a small Mexican village to a sprawling customs office in the Land of the Dead (obviously based on Los Angeles’s famous Bradbury building, by the way), you feel actual layers of depth. It’s a new level of realism and immersion. Combined with the ingenious production design, particularly of the Land of the Dead, the film is a first-rate visual pleasure.

But of course, no one is really moved by technological advancement unless it’s in the service of something human, and the themes of Coco, while very culturally specific, are universal. The film is not just some general, pro-family message but rather it’s specifically about the importance of remembering and passing on heritage, of making sure our children know about our parents, who they were and what they cared about and struggled with. It’s also about the things that bind families together – work, stories, food, and music. One of the final scenes features the protagonist, Miguel, singing a song of comfort and love to his ancient and barely present great grandmother, Coco. The moment when the old woman opens her eyes and looks at her great grandson in recognition, joy, and gratitude is a wonder of animation, voicework, writing, and sentiment. 

The whole film is a success, and there isn’t a wrong note in it. The Book of Life was a lighthearted, cleverly designed jukebox musical that entertains my eight year old and is a pleasant way for a parent to spend 95 minutes. There are similarities between the two films, but ultimately Coco is so much more resonant, beautiful, and accomplished. Even though the two films take place in the same country, it’s as though they’re from different universes. If any film can mark Pixar’s reemergence as makers of great, original films, Coco is it.  

Justice League

There’s an obscure character from the DC Comics universe called the Patchwork Man. He’s basically a Frankenstein rip-off character who is stitched together from different parts of people who were of varying sizes, shapes, colors, etc. He’s a shambling, pathetic creature who is meant to be pitied because of how his various pieces don’t line up. I was thinking about the Patchwork Man as I watched another DC Comics creation, the new Justice League movie.

The film means to be a big franchise tentpole that brings together already introduced movie versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman while also introducing new potential franchisees like the Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman. About half the film is a “getting the team together” story and the other half is the team battling against extensive CGI animation.

Famously, director and head DC movie universe architect, Zach Snyder, had to leave the production with quite a bit of work left to do due to a family tragedy. Sadly, Snyder’s daughter took her own life last spring, and the director decided he needed to step away from work in order to spend time with his other children.

Warner Brothers tapped Joss Whedon to take over. Whedon, of course, is no stranger to sprawling, special-effects driven superhero team films, having helmed the first two Avengers movies. He had the skills and experience to finish work on a project of this type, and in that sense, was the ideal choice.

The Patchwork Man came to mind as I watched Justice League because of Snyder and Whedon’s dramatically differing tonal and stylistic approaches. Snyder got his start in music videos, and it shows. Like his spiritual brother, Michael Bay, he’s all about the image, the picture, and the story and the characters are secondary at best. Visually, he likes cold palates, indulgent slo-mo, and lots of showy, overpowering CGI imagery. Whedon, on the other hand, is a writer first and therefore loves character, dialogue, and intricate plots that build over time. His visuals are fine, but he’s more of storyteller than a picture-maker. Whedon’s tone is almost always light, snarky, playful, and ironic – a huge contrast to Snyder’s usual solemn, wannabe mythic tone.

So even though Whedon had the skills to continue the work Snyder began, it was the equivalent of asking a folk singer to finish a half-written song by a heavy metal band. Consequently, the finished product is tonally uneven and narratively conflicted. Snyder is the guy who turned Superman, the purest hero of them all, into a neck-snapping killer and who actually killed Superman off. Some of that grimness and nihilism remains in Justice League, but at the same time, it also features Batman, of all characters, dropping sassy one-liners, which is clearly the work of Whedon. With footage guided by one director stitched together with extensive rewrites and reshoots by another director, the film never settles on one tone or approach.

Narratively, it would seem that Whedon shifted the entire story of the film. Snyder’s version was reportedly meant to lead up to a second film featuring a cosmic super battle against intergalactic bad guy, Darkseid. My guess is that Whedon thought that was too similar to what the Marvel movies are building toward with Avengers: Infinity War and so, changed the film’s focus to a single standalone villain who is conquered at the end. There are vestiges of Snyder’s story left in the film that are never developed or even explained. Though certainly not a complete flop, the film has underperformed at the box office. I can’t help but think that its lack of resounding success has a lot to do with its disjointed nature.

A Justice League film by either Zach Snyder or Joss Whedon would probably be pretty interesting, but this one by both of them fails to cohere into anything other than a patchwork mess.