It’s been two years since Kate Pierce (Darby Camp) and her brother Teddy (Judah Lewis) met Santa Claus (Kurt F*cking Russell). Now, Kate’s mom (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) is dating a new man (TYRESE GIBSON) and the family is on vacation with him and his son, Jack (Jahzir Bruno), in Cancun. However, Kate and Jack are abducted and sent to the North Pole by the renegade elf Belsnickel (Julian Dennison). The pair must help Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus (Goldie Hawn) stop Belsnickel from taking the Star of Bethlehem and destroying Christmas.
Also, Mrs. Claus gets a village named after her.
END SUMMARY
So, I was pretty explicit in my review of the first film that this movie literally only worked because Kurt Russell is a hell of an actor and can make almost any character badass or cool. You would think that wouldn’t extend to Santa Claus, but he pulled it off. Unfortunately, while Santa in this film is still the cool character from the first film, the story in this film fails on almost every level.
The elves continue to be a very weird choice.
The problem is that the film shifts from being Santa’s plan to help inspire the Christmas spirit in a young girl to being about trying to stop a generic evil character from taking over the North Pole. That means that the conflict and the threat is now external, so you have to find a way to make it feel like there are stakes. Unfortunately, that’s never the case here because the Kurt Russell version of Santa is an invincible force of nature. He has magic, he knows martial arts, he’s almost omniscient, and often he only seems to have any problems because apparently he is amusing himself. Having a character like that guiding a third party can be interesting. Having that character dealing with a threat directly makes you wonder why the movie isn’t four minutes long. Even with Belsnickel’s elf artifice and magic, Santa generally just swats his threats aside easily. It never feels like there was any chance Santa doesn’t win this fight, a sentence that is just so weird to write.
This is the only Santa who can say “Bring it.”
The film also really tries to expand on the mythos of this world’s Santa and it made some odd choices. It conveys that this is actually THE Saint Nicholas of Myra, which raises a number of questions, including why he looks like the version of Santa from the most recent century and why a Greek bishop in Asia Minor in the fourth century looks like Kurt Russell. I’m also curious if this version resurrected the three children murdered by a butcher. On top of that, they reveal that this Santa is actually powered by the Star of Bethlehem which is basically saying that Santa runs on Jesus juice. It probably helps curb complaints by some groups, but I also think that saying that elves were the ones who monitored the Star of Bethlehem probably causes a lot of other dogmatic issues.
It doesn’t help that the bad guy was once played by Dwight Schrute.
Overall, though, the only thing that keeps this movie interesting is Kurt Russell, but you could just as easily rewatch The Thing if you want to see Kurt Russell being awesome in a snowy location.
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If you love an underdog story, then you will love this.
SUMMARY
In the 1970s, Actor Bing Russell, father of Kurt Russell, started the only independent ball club (not owned by a major league team) in the Northwestern US, the Portland Mavericks. True to their maverick name, they did not play by the “rules” that defined traditional teams. They hired outcasts who had been kicked out of the Majors, they hired people who had aged past their primes, they hired minorities as coaches, they had the first female general manager in baseball. Moreover, they won a lot against teams that were better funded. During their entire run, they never had a losing record. Their story is that of a scrappy group of warriors rebelling against the MLB Corporate overlords. If the whole thing wasn’t true, it’d sound ridiculous.
In glorious ’70s quality film.
END SUMMARY
This is one of the best documentaries that I’ve seen in a long time. Due to my lack of interest in most professional baseball since the 90s, I hadn’t really considered watching it when it came out, but that was definitely my loss. You don’t have to like baseball to like this movie; in fact, knowing almost nothing about baseball won’t hurt you at all. This story isn’t about how a team made great catches or hit home runs, it’s about a team with a lot of personalities that would never have been allowed on a field in any other circumstances.
Mostly, the haircuts would be banned until the 80s.
Much of the movie is narrated by the surviving members of the team, including Kurt Russell, who played for them briefly before injuries forced him back to acting, Todd Field, the Oscar-nominated writer/director who was a batboy for the team, Rob Nelson, Jim Swanson, Frank Peters, Robert Richardson, and Jon Yoshiwara. A ton of other great personalities appear in archive footage, due to the amount of film clips there were of the team, mostly due to the fact that they were fan favorites.
It was a fun time for everyone.
While a few elements of the movie didn’t really work great for me, mostly the ways in which they present the newspaper clippings, those were overshadowed by the clear love of the story that comes out through the film. It makes sense, given that the directors are the grandsons of Bing Russell, Chapman and Maclain Way. There are an insane number of twists and explanations at the end, alone, that would have made the entire film worth watching, and it feels like the creators knew exactly what they were doing with that final set of revelations. Moreover, the final act crystallizes what the Mavericks were really doing, trying to prove that the monopoly of Major League Baseball was really just killing America’s love of the game. Given the fact that American interest in the sport has been dropping compared to the amount of money spent on payroll and promotion for the last 20 years, they had a point.
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I take on the task of looking at three takes on the same idea over 3 generations.
*Update* I have reconsidered these films now and I would like to say the following: The Carpenter film will literally always win. It’s a masterpiece. However, I do admit that the 2011 film has a lot more going for it than I thought the first time.
SUMMARY
Each of these movies is an adaptation of the story “Who Goes There?” from 1938.
Fun fact: John Campbell was a horrible racist, which I guess just means he lived through the ’20s.
The general plotline of the films is that an Antarctic, or Arctic, research station finds a frozen alien spacecraft. The alien is revealed to be a threat to the world, because it consumes life forms and then propagates itself at a rapid pace, sewing a large amount of distrust among all of the humans. Everything else is going to be part of the compare and contrast.
END SUMMARY
This is the conclusion of my 13 reviews of Halloween. Four of the reviews were classic movies, four of them were reader requests, and four of them were independent movies/lesser seen films. This review has all three of those, but they’re all adaptations of the same story. This review originally ended up being over 3500 words. I’ve edited it heavily in order to get it to a reasonable length for a blog post. Maybe one day I’ll post the full thing, but… well, due to my own stupidity, I didn’t save a copy of the full review, I just cut it down. Long story short, this is a long story, short.
A little background here:
The Thing from Another World was made in 1951 by Christian Nyby, who really was just an editor throughout most of his career. It was in black-and-white and was produced by Howard Hawks’ studio, the makers of Scarface and The Big Sleep. It was a low-budget sci-fi horror film that was designed mostly to capitalize on the anti-scientific-exploration mentality that was prevalent after the world realized that “oh hey, atomic bombs are bad now that Russia has them” as well as the growing threat of “communism.” It was a big hit both commercially and critically, doing better than more well-known films like The Day the Earth Stood Still. It’s still considered a classic monster movie and holds up better than most movies from 1951.
This shot was considered original in 1951.
The Thing is a movie made by the legendary John Carpenter in 1982. It could represent any number of potential social issues, because the central focus is that anyone could secretly be an alien and you’d never notice. That said, it could represent absolutely nothing and still just be a great horror film. The Thing was a critical flop of epic proportions, with most of the people saying it was too bleak and too slow to be a decent film. However, as time passed, the film was reconsidered by most audiences, where it went from being one of the most hated films of all time to one of the most celebrated films. It stands today as one of the best examples of practical effects in the 1980s and of suspense in films. The fact that it is so dark and depressing, what made people hate it when it came out, is now what sets it apart from other horror films. It’s just a masterpiece through and through.
This shot is just… damn amazing. Even with something so amazing, it’s still so barren.
The Thing is a prequel to the 1982 movie that was made in 2011 because you can always cash in on nostalgia. While the Carpenter film depended heavily on practical effects, the 2011 movie tried to replace it with CGI. Sadly, the CGI did not improve the film. While the Carpenter film has a slow pace to increase the paranoia and uncertainty of the audience and the characters, this version seems to go slow solely because the Carpenter version did. It also suffered because the end of the film had to correspond with the observations of the location from the Carpenter version. Ultimately, it wasn’t very successful either critically or commercially.
This dove right into the uncanny valley.
The big constants in every version are the alien, the setting, the team, and the paranoia. I’d originally intended to go through each, pick a winner and a loser in each category, and then do an overall analysis to determine the best movie. The problem was that I immediately knew that the one done by John Carpenter was going to win every category. It’s one of the best horror films ever made and one of my favorite movies, so… yeah, that one is going to win literally everything. Instead, I’m just going to explain WHY it wins.
1) The Alien
The alien is a global threat. In The Thing From Another World, the creature feeds on blood and is plant-based. It’s blood subsequently grows other plants, which will eventually feed on more blood. In this way, if it were to get out of the tundra, it would cause carnivorous plants to take over the world. In the 1982 The Thing and its 2011 prequel of the same name, the alien consumes living matter and can absorb the memories of anyone it eats, allowing it to perfectly duplicate its victims. After it consumes enough mass, it can duplicate itself into another organism, making any number of itself until it could eventually consume everyone on Earth without anyone even knowing it.
Everyone in this photo might be the Thing.
If it comes down to why The Thing wins here, it’s a combination of, ahem, things. First, the alien in the older movie, while it is played by the legendary James Arness, is nowhere near as scary. It’s also nowhere near as focal to the threat of the film. It basically shows up, gets injured, drives a guy insane, then dies in an incredibly stupid trap. It’s still fairly lethal, but much easier to deal with, due to it not propagating on its own. Also, it’s extremely humanoid, which removes some level of intimidation.
This was the scariest thing in the atomic age, aside from bombs.
Meanwhile the Carpenter alien is a nightmare. It not only infiltrates with ease, but quickly consumes and spreads itself at such a fast pace that neither the characters nor the audience can ever be sure who is human and who isn’t. Now, you may point out that this is the same monster from the prequel, and that’s technically true, but A) it’s inherently not original, B) the creature is nowhere near as creative in its killing, and C) the digital special effects for it just don’t match up to the practical effects of the Carpenter film. *Update* Admittedly, CGI did allow for a lot of shots that couldn’t be done practically, but Rob Bottin and special-effects legend Stan Winston really came up with some disturbing shots for the Carpenter version.
2) The Setting
Every version of the movie takes place in a frozen wasteland. This is essential to the story, because it is the only reason why the creature doesn’t immediately start taking over the world.
In The Thing From Another World, the setting is the North Pole, which is unique among the movies in the sense that it’s on the exact opposite side of the world, but… how the hell would you know? I mean, it’s just a snowy desert. However, unlike the other two movies, the setting is much more tied in with the military. It’s ostensibly an arctic research base, but it is run by the air force and staffed by airmen. The base also is designed to be visited more often, keeping the feeling of isolation at a much lower level than the other films. To be fair, the movie is supposed to be more of a monster epic, as opposed to a psychological thriller, so the lack of isolation isn’t as noticeable.
Most of the setting is just the outfits.
The 2011 version takes place at the set which the cast of the 1982 film briefly visit, that of a Norwegian research station called “Thule,” an ancient term for the border of the world (solid reference there, guys). Similar to the 1951 movie, though, the fact that people keep coming and going from the station removes some of the elements of isolation compared to the Carpenter version. The station is also designed for more clinical research, which makes it seem more pristine and somewhat unloved. However, the movie does include the inside of the alien ship, which… actually is kind of a disappointment. The ship looks similar to most spaceships from alien movies, with hallways designed to accommodate humanoid inhabitants. This is despite the fact that the alien that inhabits it is a shapeshifter who wouldn’t need such regular dimensions. It still looks cool, but not as cool as it could be. Yes, we technically see part of it in the original, but there was a lot of room to expand on this in inventive ways that I think didn’t happen.
Seriously, it’s so clean and organized.
Then there’s the original. The people staffing the American research station aren’t scientists, they’re blue collar workers. They wreck stuff. They put their feet on stuff. You really believe this is the kind of place where a bunch of guys get stuck together for months at a time. But mostly, it drives home that this is the kind of place that is separated from the rest of the world. They can barely go outside for any amount of time, so the inside is kind of dirty and crowded and lived in. The shots of the landscape just show whiteness and emptiness everywhere; it’s perfectly bleak and isolated.
The darkness just shrouds the void. I love that.
3) The Team
This is probably the category in which each of the movies is the most fundamentally different. It’s a little unfair that John Carpenter had Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David, and Donald Moffat, although the 2011 film did have Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton. The Thing from Another World’s biggest star was James Arness as the monster, and he had only just started his career at that point.
He wasn’t even on Gunsmoke yet, but he did smoke a bit here.
However, it’s not just the performances and the caliber of actors that set the John Carpenter film apart. It’s the kind of people being portrayed. In The Thing from Another World, most of the cast are either military or scientists. A lot of them don’t know each other and thus, any distrust between them is kind of easy to create. Several of the people already have inherent issues, because the scientists don’t like the military and vice versa. None of the characters are particularly memorable aside from Carrington (Robert Cornwaite), a scientist who becomes obsessed with the alien. In the 2011 Thing, the team is composed almost entirely of scientists who were working at the Norwegian Antarctic research station. They have history together, but they trade out fairly frequently. They’re also always rational about the situation, reacting to it more analytically than would maybe be natural. Then, there’s the Carpenter version.
I can’t keep the cast straight, because… they’re mostly just people in parkas.
The 1982 The Thing features a team of blue collar workers who have all been stuck together for a long time. They’re close, almost to a familial point, but they’re not a pleasant family because they keep getting stuck together for such long periods of time. They have a level of “f*ck off* that they wear on their sleeves. Additionally, these are mostly normal humans who frequently react with emotional outbursts. One of my favorite scenes in film is when R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell), gets mad at losing to the chess computer on site and pours scotch into it, destroying it. It’s such a perfect representation of the kind of people who are at this station, and they’re so much more relatable to the viewer than teams of scientists or military personnel. By making the characters more normal, it makes the horror of their situation more understandable to the viewer and more powerful.
I mean, these are literally just the guys who do stuff like this for the money.
4) The Paranoia
Since this is the core theme of the original story, each of the versions has tried to convey it with varying levels of success.
In the black-and-white film, the paranoia comes from the fact that the monster can propagate an entire army via the seed pods on its body and that it can convince people to follow it based solely on its superior genetics. It was apparently seen as a metaphor for Communism in the McCarthy era. The monster, while humanoid, drains its victims and grows new emotionless soldiers to replace them. I don’t think it’s a great metaphor, but then again I have the benefit of knowing how the Soviet Union panned out so far. Ultimately, while everyone is afraid of the threat of the monster, it still doesn’t give the same level of “trust no one” as the other films.
That said, it does still tell you that people are crazy.
In Carpenter’s film and the re-make, the paranoia is because you actually can’t trust anyone. Moreover, in the 1982 film, the audience is in the same boat as the characters. We see a character get eaten and absorbed by the thing, but only in shadow, and we never get any confirmation who that character was. That’s the point, though: Anyone could be the Thing and you’d never know. Now, the creature appears fairly early on in the movie and nobody knows that it is an alien at first because it appears as a sled dog. That means, in retrospect, it could potentially have killed and assimilated anyone, because no one was even aware of the threat. Ergo, anyone can be the monster. Trust no one.
The prequel has a similar premise, because it’s ostensibly the same monster, but it has two major flaws. First, it takes almost an hour to get the thing into the movie and we know that it wasn’t there before. In other words, everything we’ve seen before then had to involve only humans, so we can’t read anything into those actions. Also, the people are aware of the Thing and its powers almost immediately, meaning that while the paranoia is palpable, it goes from 0 to 60 in about 2 scenes, rather than the slow build of Carpenter’s film.
So the winner is: Carpenter’s film. I literally said that it would at the beginning. There was never a question. However, I like all of these movies, although I admit that the 2011 prequel feels mostly unnecessary. *Update* It does have some good performances and a few added locations that at least expand the story a bit. The Howard Hawks film is a great monster movie that, while definitely dated, still can keep your interest and the prequel, while flawed and derivative, still does an amazing job of keeping the continuity of the previous film. However, Carpenter’s movie is not just one of the best horror films ever made, it’s one of the best movies ever made. Rather than being a metaphor for a particular idea like Communism, Carpenter managed to make a film about one of the most perpetually disconcerting inherent aspects of human consciousness: You will never, ever, truly know another human being. Now, you can have people you are close to, people you are completely honest with, or people you think you can understand, but you will never be positive that they’re that way with you. They could always be hiding something or, more likely, they could just change in a way that isn’t reflected physically. In this movie, Carpenter plays upon one of the most basic issues in the human experience and points out that, when we are forced to confront that fact, we immediately start turning on each other. It’s truly a bleak outlook that most movies wouldn’t even try to take on.
Happy Halloween, my readers. Regular schedule will come back in November, with probably a few hiccups due to plans.
If you enjoy these, please, like, share, tell your friends, like the Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/JokerOnTheSofa/), follow on Twitter @JokerOnTheSofa, and just generally give me a little bump. I’m not getting paid, but I like to get feedback.
Kurt Russell decides to put on the boots and the red coat and go a little wild in this strange Christmas film.
SUMMARY (Spoilers if you don’t know how Xmas specials work)
Teddy (Judah Lewis) is a kid who is just starting to break bad after losing his father, but he still loves and looks after his little sister Kate (Darby Camp). On Christmas Eve, Kate, who has video of Teddy stealing a car, blackmails him into trying to catch Santa Claus (Kurt “Call me Snake Burton Claus” Russell). Despite Teddy being sure that Santa doesn’t exist, they succeed in finding him and sneaking onto his sleigh. Unfortunately, they spook Santa and, despite the fact that he once survived a trip through a Stargate, Santa crashes the sleigh, losing the reindeer and Santa’s hat that is the source of his magic. Together, the three have a series of wacky adventures to save Christmas and some lessons are learned.
With some fun special effects and costumes.
END SUMMARY
So, this is basically a gritty-ish reboot of every “X saves Christmas” movie. We’re in a world where Santa is a myth, despite the fact that it’s implied he delivers most of the presents in the entire world. In fact, people seem downright motivated to ignore incredibly obvious evidence that he is, in fact, the real Santa Claus and therefore magical. Santa is even completely open about his existence and the existence of magic and elves and whatever else is required for the movie, but people still deny him. This set-up is cliched and f*cking stupid, but it’s also tradition so we’re going with it. Additionally, almost every other standard Christmas film trope (and there is literally a page of them) is invoked at some point. It wouldn’t shock me if the people that make these use that trope page as a checklist.
He literally flies overhead all night in plain view.
The kids, too, are pretty standard stock for a movie like this. There’s the bad kid who needs the spirit of Christmas to get all up inside him so that he can learn that he’s headed down a bad road and then there’s the adorable one that has the “heart of truest believer” or whatever version of that phrase the film used. They bicker when they need to, they’re stupid when they need the plot to be stretched, they make up with the cute scenes when the movie needs you to feel things, and they learn valuable lessons about stuff because this is a Christmas movie.
Can you guess which one is which from this screenshot?
However, Kurt Russell is… just so damned charismatic as Santa Claus that I actually enjoyed it anyway. He’s not the sweet old Santa from Ernest Saves Christmas (Played by Douglas Seale) or the goofy Santa of Santa Claus: The Movie (Played by David Huddleston) or even the wisecracking snarker Santa of The Santa Clause films (Played by Tim Allen). Kurt Russell’s Santa is basically what I imagine it would be like if R.J. MacReady or Jack Burton actually became Santa. He’s a smart-ass, he’s a bad-ass, he’s a little bit dirty, he manipulates situations so well people barely realize it, and he NEVER tries to be subtle. Also, he doesn’t look like the traditional Santa as much as he looks like the guy who regularly tells you about all of the medical benefits of LSD or gun ownership when you come into his shop. A running gag in the film is people pointing out that he doesn’t look like the traditional Santa Claus popularized by Coca-Cola, something that annoys him greatly.
He’s just so damned handsome. Talk about aging well.
Overall… this movie is surprisingly fun. Look, is it a masterpiece of cinema? No. Is it cliche as hell? Yes. Is it going to change your perspective on life or the universe? Not unless you take a log of Ecstasy beforehand. Yes, an actual log of it. But, this movie’s enjoyable. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s got all the stuff you kind of want to see if you like Christmas films, and it’s got Kurt Russell doing mostly whatever he feels like doing. Grab some eggnog, put some bourbon in it, turn the fire on, and watch it.
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The Joker On The Sofa 