Past seven days

A variety of movies this week on DVD, but still got to see some new movies in theatres.  This holiday weekend I hope to catch a re-release of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the new Muppets film.  Nostalgia rules!

Hugo
Ladies in Retirement
Matinee
Mr. Nobody
The Descendants
The Dominici Affair
The Hour (BBC)
The Spirit
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

Lady on a Train

Here's another old movie that takes place during the Christmas holidays.  It is based on a novel by Leslie Charteris, noted for being the author of the Simon Templar aka The Saint stories.  Lady on a Train stars actress/snger Deanna Durbin in one of her adult roles.  During Christmastime, Durbin is a train passenger Nikki, and while her train is stopped, she looks inside a building and sees a murder. She tries to convince the police what she saw was real, but they don't because she reads a lot of crime novels and they think she's making it up. It is a typical amateur detective movie.  She decides to investigate on her own, finds out who the dead man is, sneaks into his house, and--being mistaken for his mistress, a nightclub singer--is told she inherits his estate.

Nikki tries to get a mystery writer (David Bruce) to help her. Ralph Bellamy plays the nice nephew of the dead man who could care less about the money. There's also another ne'er do well nephew and a disapproving aunt. At the same time Nikki's trying to evade another member of the family who is after some evidence.

Every now and again she breaks into song (Night and Day by Cole Porter is the one I remember from watching this on TV years ago), even taking time for a costume change and new hairstyle even though the bad guys are still after her.

The film is more screwball comedy than murder mystery. It even has Edward Everett Horton, who played Fred Astaire's comical second fiddle in a lot of the early Astaire & Rogers films. William Frawley has a small part as a desk sergeant at the police station.

It manages to keep you guessing who the murder is and the contrivances are not too major--modern romantic comedies are just as fluffy. This is a light comedy with some good singing by Durbin.

Felicidades

Many Christmas stories deal with loneliness, with characters finding it difficult to come to terms with their life situations. In Felicidades, a film from Argentina, several unrelated people on Christmas Eve try to reach their goals of connecting with certain people in their lives.

Four Christmases

I think it's pretty hard to make a bad holiday movie. At the most it might be too sappy or sentimental but usually inoffensive, something you could leave playing on the TV while baking the holiday cookies. Four Christmases seems to go out of its way to show some really offensive people, I suppose in an attempt to show how the main characters played by Vince Vaughan and Reese Witherspoon have legitimate reasons for abandoning their respective families during the holiday season.

Brad and Kate (Vaughan and Witherspoon, who also were some of the co-producers of this film), both of divorced parents, lie to their families that they cannot join them for the Christmas holidays due to job commitments. They actually have an exotic vacation planned for themselves. But when they are seen on TV during a news segment about airports being snowed in, their families insist they visit all four of them at their respective homes.

We see the broad comedic hijinks that take place at each of the homes, filled with precocious and bullying kids, and parents (Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight) who insist on having things their own way, of course making it a pretty miserable four visits for the couple. Along the way, Brad and Kate learn things about each other that at first damage their relationship then bring them closer.

This is mostly a broad comedy, with nothing too new in the way of jokes. Out of all the actors, Vince Vaughan was actually not bad, I always think of him as an SOB but he made Brad pretty likeable. But that was contrasted to the rest of the characters. Some the actors playing parents, Duvall and Spacek, had such bad roles that I don't know why they didn't insist on some rewriting. Steenburgen played a pretty common role for herself, a "cougar." Voight, as the last visited parent, of course had the emotional heart that Brad and Kate were supposed to relate to.

The kid characters were monstrous, vulgar and ill-mannered, these are not the types of child actors' careers that turn into the Lindsay Lohans of tomorrow. Brad's family had a violent and foulmouthed kid who was into cage fighting (like the rest of the men in the family) and Kate had a niece who taunted another aunt, basicaly a mean girl in the making.

With the families being such bad characters, the film really needed to show how each of the four families had a heart or soul for the audience to sympathize with, and to make Brad and Kate realize that even with their families' flaws, they are "Family" that one cannot abandon or disown. I didn't find this at all in the story, or it wasn't done realistically enough for me to care (even if it is just a comedy). As expected, there is a happy ending. I did laugh a couple times, when the brother and his wife were playing a board game. But there was little holiday joy in this movie.

Past seven days

A couple of fun events this past week.  The 50th Anniversay screening of West Side Story that was sponsored by Turner Movie Classics cable channel, an entity that continues to revitalize old movies for a new audience.  Also, The Artist, getting a lot of Oscar buzz.

A Town Called Panic
Backyard
Clash of the Titans
The Artist
The Music Never Stopped
Tower Heist
West Side Story