Six Fun Movies to Watch During the Holiday Season

A few years ago, I made a similar post, which will give you several more recommendations. These movies aren't themed for the winter holidays, but they're fun to watch on a cold night with a warm drink, like hot apple cider with rum, and they're (mostly) family-friendly. (Yes, even The Maltese Falcon can be fun for the whole family... why not.)

Title: Cinderella (1997)
Director: Robert Iscove
Language: English
Rating: G

This is a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical adaptation of Cinderella, set in a pretty Disney version of a European town. The stepmother's house looks like it's made of stained glass and melted crayons. I like how vivid all the colors are in this one, including the lush blues and purples of the ballroom scene.

The cast is vibrant. Whitney Houston plays the fairy godmother, Bernadette Peters is the stepmother, Whoopi Goldberg is the queen (an opinionated lady who makes squeaking noises of dismay), and Jason Alexander (best known as George Costanza on Seinfeld) is a royal servant with an Italian-ish accent and a song-and-dance number about the upcoming ball.

Paolo Montalban is cute as the prince, and Brandy Norwood plays a lovely, fragile-looking, and sometimes vacant-looking Cinderella. I like how, even before the prince finds her at the end, she decides to leave home, knowing that she deserves a better life than the one she has with her stepmother and stepsisters.

Title: How to Steal a Million (1966)
Director: William Wyler
Language: English and some French
Rating: Not rated

This movie has the absurdity of a screwball comedy. The leads, Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole, associate under highly improbable circumstances and look beautiful while doing so. (O'Toole is so damn charming here. Reminds me a little of Peter Wimsey - intelligent, doesn't appear to take much seriously, but is more serious than he appears.)

Anyway, Hepburn plays Nicole, the daughter of an art forger who passes himself off as an art collector. He's a Wizard of Oz type of scoundrel. One thing leads to another, and Nicole realizes that to keep her father's crimes from being discovered, she'll have to steal a statue he loaned to a museum. Simon (Peter O'Toole's character) arrives on the scene as a burglar who may be able to help her. Or so she thinks.

Three Short Stories About Revenge

Title: Casting the Runes
Author: M.R. James (Montague Rhodes James)
Where I Read It: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

This is an entertaining, creepy, and fairly straightforward story about revenge after academic rejection. A scholar turns down a paper about alchemy and subsequently gets marked for death by the paper's author, a deeply unpleasant man named Mr. Karswell. Karswell enjoys toying with his victim and encouraging dread and despair. (At one point, the victim, reaching for a watch, instead touches "a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and... not the mouth of a human being." I like that – we don't know what mouth it is, but it definitely isn't a human mouth.)

Title: The Method
Author: Janet Fitch
Where I Read It: Los Angeles Noir

"The Method" has a well-written first-person narrator, Holly, who's a struggling actress. She meets a charismatic older guy who becomes her lover and also wants her to gain access to the decrepit mansion of an old actress. The reason he gives her is that some of older woman's possessions are valuable as memorabilia. But the story takes a darker turn, as the narrator realizes certain things about her new lover and the old actress. I liked the details about the mansion, and the way the story evokes the feeling of being faded and used up. A kind of solidarity develops between the two women, and the ending is intense and grim.

Title: The Victim
Author: P.D. James (Phyllis Dorothy James)
Where I Read It: Sleep No More

A man kills his ex-wife's second husband. I especially liked the descriptions of the route the murderer takes to commit his crime and the griminess of the home he lives in. The story is a good study of obsessiveness; obsessive people can be readily manipulated, especially if they're lovelorn.

Week in Seven Words #384

china
The town is charming and delicate. There's a sheltered dock with a gazebo, and a street with shops displaying quaint, insubstantial things. Only the vehicles seem out of place: heavy, expensive cars and a bus that wheezes to a stop to take us away.

chrome
A dazzling set of motorcycles outside a convenience store. Some of the riders head inside, others stretch out on a grassy slope that leads down to the trees.

consequence
They stand at opposite ends of a coppery pool and play catch. If the ball lands in the water, the game will end.

feathered
A bird drops backwards from a branch, then twirls midair and rockets off.

glade
The dirt track ends at a clearing steeped in early evening light. Logs and flat rocks are scattered around it, as if at nightfall creatures will emerge from the trees to take their seats and hold an assembly.

meter
When hiking a familiar route, he brings a book for the gentler sections. This time it's a collection of Emily Dickinson's poetry. Another time it was short stories by Chekhov.

talus
Sometimes the path is made up of wood planks or smooth dirt. Other times, it's a jumble of rocks and roots that jerk my ankles in different directions.

Week in Seven Words #363

alchemy
As evening closes in, the tower of the High Bridge looks like the home of a mage. A light gleams inside it, eerie and suggestive.

chewed
Over sweetened almonds, we talk about embittering life events.

disk
A blank, bright field, and at the far end, two kids throwing a frisbee that they never catch.

geometrical
Long walks through the city are full of interesting shapes. Some buildings look like a wedge of pie, narrowing where two streets split in an acute angle. Metallic semicircles shine from the side of a substation. Buildings march along the river in cubes and rectangular prisms.

lunar
There's a free class on Photoshop, which I'm not familiar with, though I figure it may prove useful at some point. I'm the only one who shows up. The instructor looks as awkward as I feel, but we get past that quickly enough, and twenty minutes later I'm pasting a giant baby onto the surface of the moon.

relief
He crouches by the side of a tennis court and buries his face in the dog's neck. It's the happiest moment of his day so far.

whisk
The evergreen sapling looks like a glowing gold feather duster in the forest.

Six movies that fit the holiday season

Title: Home for the Holidays (1995)
Director: Jodie Foster
Language: English
Rating: PG-13

In spite of its premise - woman visits her bonkers family for Thanksgiving - the movie isn't a standard, sitcom-like holiday comedy. The main character, Claudia (Holly Hunter), reconnects with some of her family, runs up against resentment and anger, and falls in love with her brother's guest, Leo (Dylan McDermott) - but these developments don't feel contrived. The actors inhabit the movie naturally, as if they aren't putting on a performance.

I like the exploration of the family, the ways in which they're close or have fractured. Claudia and her brother, Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.), cling to each other as the unconventional children, while their sister, Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson), is perpetually on the outside and profoundly unhappy; she's married, has two kids, helps her aging parents, and so one would think she'd be comfortably settled at the heart of her family, but she seethes with stress and joylessness, pushing people away while also living with unnamed betrayals (including self-betrayal).

Among the older actors, like Anne Bancroft and Geraldine Chaplin, there are also strong performances, especially Chaplin's heartbreaking, eccentric character, also a family outsider. The filmmakers don't let the movie get melodramatic, though. There's restraint to the anger and pain, and there's plenty of light-heartedness and some moments that made me laugh. Though Claudia's life is in a bit of an upheaval, she has good things going for her; she's smart and fierce, and has a close relationship with her teenaged daughter, Kitt (Claire Danes). Not all is right in the world, but there's enough that's good.

Title: I Remember Mama (1948)
Director: George Stevens
Language: English and some Norwegian
Rating: Unrated

The movie centers on the matriarch of a Norwegian immigrant family living in San Francisco in the early 20th century. She's played by Irene Dunne as practical, devoted, steadfast, and sharp, her influence present in everyone's lives - such as when her older daughter, Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes), has dreams of becoming a writer.

I Remember Mama is warm but not cloying. It's spiced with enough humor and character complexity to keep it from becoming too sentimental.

Week in Seven Words #287

arcana
He's hunched in the shadows with a book spread open on his palm. It's only a textbook, but he looks like a conjurer.

belying
"I love my job," he says, with a dejected expression.

enliven
They've turned the broken corners of the porch into a garden. Missing boards are where flowers nestle now. Plants obscure the splintered railings. A rainbow windsock trails against the chipped paint.

flora
Beneath the stains of black mold, there's a pattern of flowers. On each colorful tile, a different flower: foxglove, pansy, rose.

ingestion
The blue-gray water and settling clouds swallow the sun.

objective
What do you want to be when you grow up? "A nice man," he says. "I'm going to be a very nice man."

willfully
One of her ways of trying to get me to change is to say, "No, you can't be like this." Maybe if she waves her hands in a complicated pattern, the spell will take effect.

13 More Short Stories for Friday the 13th

Like I said the first time I posted a Friday the 13th short story round-up, I don't believe in the superstition of the day. But I'd like to share stories I've read that have some combination of dread, distorted thoughts, strange phenomena and/or horror.

Title: A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or the Devil’s Ninth Question
Author: Andy Duncan
Where I Read It: Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008
This coming of age story, set in the 19th century American South, reads like the set-up to a novel, or maybe a computer game; but it feels complete too. The main character, Pearleen Sunday, was dumped as a baby on the doorstep of an unscholarly museum. It's run by a man who likes to use magic tricks, sex, tall tales, and eye-catching visuals to draw a crowd. As she's growing up, Pearleen has a variety of chores, like working the diorama of the infernal regions - a huge moving strip of canvas that depicts all kinds of hellish torture to museum visitors. But whenever she stands behind it, cranking it into motion, Pearleen sees different images from what appears to be another world.

One day, a visiting magician, Farethewell, needs a last-minute replacement for a young female assistant in his magic show. When he asks Pearleen to step in, and she sees the humiliation in store for her, she flees and leaps into the back of the diorama, which leads her to the ghost-filled mansion of an old widow, Mrs. Winchester. And though she isn't in the infernal regions as depicted by the diorama, Pearleen will still meet the devil's son-in-law.

Pearleen chooses between a coming of age experience that would turn her into a sex object and one where she discovers where she might belong and what her powers could be. It's an odd adventure and hints at more to come.

Tree-magicians and waterbirds

Since childhood I've enjoyed anthropomorphizing trees. Actually I enjoy anthropomorphizing creatures and objects in general, but for trees I have a special fondness. They've got so much character, and in the winter especially when they're stripped of concealment their striking nature emerges.

Sometimes I see them as spell casters. Like this one, gathering his powers, assuming the pose in which he will unleash his magic:



The gnarled fingers touch the lake



Which then becomes a place where ducks can paddle through the architecture



And sea gulls can strut across moonscapes




(Central Park, NYC, late December '09.)