Wait what's her name?

We didn't watch Elf this year. In recent Decemers we've watched it about as often as we haven't watched it, but we had other holiday favorites on the docket in 2022.

However, it's a movie I've seen about seven times, and I had no idea the name of Zooey Deschanel's character until today.

My older son and I were watching the Christmas day basketball game between my Celtics and the Milwaukee Bucks -- the teams with the two best records in the NBA -- and the TDNorth Garden in Boston was doing a trivia game for the crowd that involved guessing the names of characters from beloved Christmas movies.

I started out strong naming Ralphie Parker -- which would have been easy for me even if we hadn't just watched it -- but then the name George Bailey eluded me. I also couldn't provide the name Yukon Cornelius in a timely fashion, and some other misses were combined in there. I finally recovered a bit with John McClane, but then couldn't remember that Tim Allen's character in The Santa Clause was Scott Calvin -- though I did get his alternate character name of Santa. (Duh.)

When Deschanel's character from Elf came up in her familiar Gimbels elf garb, I thought "I should get this."

But then I was all "What the hell is her name?"

Don't you know, it's "Jovie."

Um, no, I did not know.

The number of times her name is spoken in the movie must be very few for me to have never picked up on it before now. Or really, never picked up on it, since it's not like playing along with a trivia game qualifies as "picking up on it." And it's a distinctive name, with a Christmas twist, so I wouldn't forget it like I might if it were Sarah or Jane.

But I also feel like I should have learned it by writing about her character at some point in the past. Deschanel is easily one of my favorite parts of the movie, and if I've never written about her it was not for lack of appreciation. I might have written about her but just referred to her as "Zooey Deschanel's character," because I guess that's how I've always thought of her. She may have lost some luster as a performer as she's been revealed as a bit of a one-trick pony, but Elf was peak Deschanel.

Oh well, it doesn't matter what her name is. It matters what she brings to Elf, which is a ton.

And we had quite the jovial Christmas this year, even without Elf or Zooey Deschanel. One of the best I can remember actually -- great food, great company, great presents. If yours is still going on I hope it's just as good.

(And the Celtics won big, making for a very Merry Christmas in our house indeed ... even if it was Boxing Day.)

No-bit Christmas

With my life in total chaos -- living in a new house, half the things I need in boxes I can't find, and preparing for hosting Christmas -- at least my Letterboxd watchlist is in order. 

I've been regularly consulting the 72 films still sitting in that list, far less than a third of which I will watch prior to finalizing my 2021 rankings next month. I suppose it's been a small symbol of stability in a storm of a week where the emotion and stress levels have run high.

The one thing I do not have much of on that list, though, is Christmas movies. In fact I have only one, and I can't even watch it.

I've been angling for some Christmas-themed viewings this week with the family, whether that's actual holiday movies or movies that have a "Christmas feel," which sometimes just means family friendly blockbusters. There are plenty of those playing in the theater right now, but because we've been focused on moving and preparing to host Christmas, they have been out of my grasp. I imagine we as a family will get to a number of them from December 26th onward.

I've suggested viewings of the first two Tom Holland Spider-Man movies in preparation for the third, which is playing theaters and getting rave reviews. Sticking with the Marvel theme, I've also suggested starting to watch Hawkeye, knowing it's set during the holidays. 

Both of these were shot down and I know both of them are not quite right. For one, I don't know that anyone wants to fill up a busy Christmas week with obligatory Spider-Man viewings. Neither would they do much to advance my personal goal of watching 72 movies from 2021 before the second week of January. Plus I didn't even particularly enjoy the second one. Then with Hawkeye, I imagine you have to devote several episodes before you get to the most solid Christmas material. We should have been watching it from the start, not cramming it in now. 

Plan B -- or maybe Plan C -- was to watch 8-Bit Christmas, an apparently nostalgia-filled new Christmas movie starring Neil Patrick Harris. As the week ground on and my viewings didn't feel the least bit Christmassy -- I tried with Being the Ricardos but it wasn't quite right -- I knew that 8-Bit Christmas would save us. (I say "us" even though I didn't, of course, subject anyone else in my family to Being the Ricardos.)

I had thought it was playing on Netflix. Actually, it's playing on HBOMax. Which, after I recently signed up for Paramount Plus, is about the only streaming service we don't yet have.

There's probably more than one reason we don't have HBOMax -- I don't want to be the guy who subscribes to every streaming service -- but the one that nullifies the others is that it's not available in Australia. So I can't even sign up for it as a desperation move for 8-Bit Christmas.

Now it's Christmas Eve and we have to watch something tonight ... don't we?

Even though I knew this would not be a "typical Christmas" -- we moved less than a week ago -- now that it's actually arriving and not being typical, I'm struggling with it. I'm accustomed to the week leading up to Christmas being paved with holiday-appropriate family viewings, not just whatever episode of Futurama happens to be next in the list as part of our family watch of the series. We still have the week after Christmas of full-on holiday mode, but it's not the same feeling, you know?

Besides, one of the reasons we pushed for a 45-day closing on this house was to spend Christmas in our new house. The inspiration behind that wasn't just to physically occupy this house on Christmas. It was to have some version of a classic Christmas. And while the house looks pretty Christmassy, and the "classic" part is covered by the house dating back to 1970, for me, it's not a full classic Christmas without some Christmas viewing.

The poster above points us to a possible solution, though it would not be a new one. 8-Bit Christmas is advertised as from the studio that brought us Elf, and in truth, Elf may be the thing that saves us. It'll be the third time the kids have seen it, but the first since 2018, which was the first since 2015. Maybe we're building a family tradition of watching Elf every three years. I'd be fine with that.

And when Buddy's father, Walter, finally finds it in his heart to start singing, and provides the necessary final boost to lift Santa's sleigh into the sky, maybe that's when my classic Christmas will finally kick in.

I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. 

Merry Christmas, from our elves to yours

Christmas 2003

A lot of increasingly tedious energy has been expended this holiday season on a Christmas movie turning 30 years old. The debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not has raged like never before, with stranger permutations than ever before, and an almost troll-like insistence on pushing this argument well past its breaking point. (In the interest of chiming in with my two cents: Die Hard was released in the summer and was not intended as a Christmas movie, but has subsequently become one.)

A little less has been put toward two Christmas movies turning 15, both of which have come into my life or will be coming into my life in the next two days.

Given the dearth of holiday classics released in the 21st century, what are the odds that two of them would have come out in 2003?

Those movies are of course Love Actually and Elf. Some people hate the former while others love it dearly; most people seem to have at least a limited fondness for the latter. There seems little argument, though, that they are the two most prominent 21st century entries on the list of popular holiday films, and they both came out in the same year.

They also happen to be the last movie I saw in the theater with my then-girlfriend, who was my most serious relationship prior to meeting my wife, and the movie I saw on the weekend we broke up, the seeing of which contributed to one of our final arguments. Considering that I spent the better part of the next year regretting our break-up, you'd think I'd sentimentalize the one I saw with her (Love Actually) while cursing the one I chose to see with my friends instead of spending that afternoon with her (Elf). Yet the critic in me rises above my viewing circumstances and names Elf one of my top 100 movies of all time, while relegating Love Actually to a spot somewhere south of mediocre on my Flickchart (it currently ranks 3023 out of 4778). Though to be fair, I saw it only that one time all the way through.

Of course, neither of these movies was actually part of my Christmas season per se in 2003. I saw them on November 15th and 22nd, respectively, and my girlfriend and I were broken up before Thanksgiving. And besides, that's all really more of an aside than what I came to talk about here today.

We'll be watching Elf on Christmas Eve this year, a second viewing for my older son and a first for my younger. They actually started to watch it one Saturday morning a few weeks ago before I went and yanked the remote control out of their hands. It was too special to waste on a Saturday morning. If they want to watch it in that context on subsequent viewings, fine, but the first one needs to be with us and a bowl of popcorn on the night before Santa brings them their presents. My older son was only five when we watched it in 2015, so this probably qualifies as something of a first viewing for him as well. The younger one turns five just a week after Christmas.

I had no plans to have Love Actually play any role in my holiday season, until I went out running this morning and they were discussing the public's love-it-or-hate-it relationship to this movie on The Slate Culture Gabfest. The discussion became animated enough that it took up nearly 30 minutes of my nearly 38-minute run. They didn't mention that the movie was turning 15 but I suspect that was the reason for the discussion. (Check that; they said that the movie was "only 15 years old" in decrying its retrograde gender politics.) While three of those discussing it were decidedly anti-, those being the regular hosts (Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner), they did bring in former Slate editor David Plotts to defend its glorious schmaltz. (And he's not the only one -- someone in my Flickcharters group on Facebook, whose opinions about movies I respect, has it ranked as her #1 movie of all time.)

More than take a position on these movies myself, since I think I've indicated my feelings so far, I really just want to muse about the unusual congruence of holiday-related cinematic magic that year. Because you know what? Those weren't the only two Christmas movies released that year.

If we go back to Flickchart, and this time look at the global lists rather than my own, the next TWO 21st century Christmas movies appearing on their global "Holiday Film" chart are both from 2003. Now I should say, this chart is a bit problematic as it also includes films from other holidays (Planes, Trains and Automobiles) and films whose holiday connection is a bit slight (Batman Returns) -- not to mention having Die Hard as its #1 film (to answer the previous debate). What can you say, the site attracts some genre enthusiasts.

But that doesn't change the naked fact that after Love Actually (#16) and Elf (#19) on this chart, the next 21st century film is a Satoshi Kon 2003 anime, Tokyo Godfathers (#22), followed by Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa (#31), also from 2003. Even setting aside the fact that Tokyo Godfathers (which takes place on Christmas Eve) is probably ranked higher as a result of the biases of this particular user base, that's fairly astonishing.

You have to go down to 39th on this list before you finally get another 21st century movie, Christian Carion's 2005 film Joyeux Noel (which is actually quite good, so good on the Flickchart community for recognizing that). That's followed by #42 The Holiday (2006) and #44 Rare Exports (2010).

So what was it that caused us to need -- and to be able to produce -- such enduring Christmas escapism in 2003? I could try to posit some kind of theory based on my own political biases, like we needed some good comfort food to get us out of the fetal positions we'd adopted when George Bush became president, or perhaps to heal from 9/11. But the former implies that these movies appeal disproportionately to liberals, which is obviously not the case -- the lone admitted conservative on the Gabfest panel, David Plotts, was the one who defended Love Actually. And as for 9/11, well, the need for comforting art does not necessarily engender the ability to produce it.

It could be just one of those things where Hollywood is sharing a head space around a particular time, like there being two asteroid movies made at the same time, or two Truman Capote movies, or two remakes of The Jungle Book. However, none of the four movies above appear to have much in common with each other, though I haven't seen Tokyo Godfathers. In fact, one of them (Bad Santa) doesn't even try to tug at your heartstrings, as it's fairly rancid as Christmas movies go.

I'm wondering if part of the key to the endurance of Love Actually and Elf in particular is that no one has tried to make a sequel. That's rare at a time when Hollywood picks any and all IP clean of all its potential profits. Hollywood may have done that slightly less in 2003, but they're making up for it now, and in fact, those 2003 movies would probably be prime targets. In fact, Bad Santa itself got a sequel in 2016, and it was total shit. Let's hope that's a lesson to its 2003 brethren, which so far have not been touched.

So I'm looking forward to my Elf viewing, and having written this, feel like I should probably give Love Actually another chance to win my heart.

Then again, hearing the Slate folks tear apart some of its more problematic elements cured me of most of my desire for a revisit.

The gateway drug to grown-up movies

Twenty fifteen has been a year of transition -- or at least, hoped-for transition -- for my five-year-old son, when it comes to the movies.

As he's gingerly taken the first few steps into live action, he's also recoiled in horror. Pan was obviously a mistake, but even the dog and penguin movie Oddball presented difficulties for him -- first in terms of boredom, then actual fear. Meanwhile, Inside Out and Hotel Transylvania 2 continued to prove his love for movies ... the right movies, that is. Taken in total, the year provided ample evidence that he wasn't ready for Star Wars: The Force Awakens -- superfluous evidence, as we had pretty much ruled it out even before any of the live-action mishaps of September.

Those were all theatrical screenings. Maybe we needed to try something at home instead. And maybe it needed to be a Christmas movie about a hilarious, oversized elf.

I got the inspiration to try Jon Favreau's Elf, which I consider to be in the holy triumvirate of Christmas movies (along with A Christmas Story and It's a Wonderful Life), maybe a month ago, though it could have been as long as a year ago. In fact, I remember people talking on Facebook last Christmas about showing Elf to their kids, and even asking them if age four was too young for it. At the time they told me probably not. I couldn't remember myself, because even though it's in my top 100 films of all time and I own it, it has shockingly been more than a decade since I've seen it. (I've probably seen parts since then, but not the whole thing.)

About a month ago I convinced my wife that "our son" (to use the phrase overused by Han and Leia) was ready for Elf, and that December 23rd would be the perfect time to do it. It'd be exciting for him because he could stay up past his bedtime to watch it out on the couch with Mummy and Daddy, he could eat that candy cane he'd been asking about all week, and if he didn't like it, all he had to do was go to bed. There would be no leaving the theater, no crying, no wasted money. Plus, staying up later on the 23rd would probably make him fall asleep earlier on the 24th, or so the thinking went. (We'll find out tonight for sure.)

Well, I'm pleased to say it was a total hit. Helped along by his father's encouraging laughter -- genuine laughter, but probably a tad more than I would have otherwise provided -- he instantly got how funny and endearing Will Ferrell was as the title character. And the rest pretty much went smoothly, with only a few hiccups that I'll get to in a minute.

Simply put, I was astonished by how well this movie is constructed to cater to the interests and attention spans of children. Even live-action movies that are more directly aimed at children -- such as Stuart Little and The Smurfs 2, which we've tried and sort of half-finished at home -- have a lot more dead spots, where a child's attention might wander. Not Elf. It is action-packed from the start, and never releases you from the grasp of its charm.

I did worry at the very start. The movie begins with the soft, folksy, almost intentionally boring rhythms of a Bob Newhart narration, and for a moment I thought a) the whole narrative structure they were going for might be over my son's head, and b) Newhart himself might turn him off. But he made it through that, which really is only about a minute of screen time before the action proper begins.

It certainly helps lay the groundwork that the entire first 20 minutes (or so) take place at the North Pole. This goes a long way toward telling a child "this movie is for you, and it exists in a world you love and are familiar with." So even when the action shifts (permanently, my son was sort of disappointed to eventually learn) to New York City, the memory of this being a North Pole adventure is still intact. Certain movies would have hurried to get us to New York, but Elf knows that showing us the world Buddy knows is key to us appreciating the world Buddy doesn't know, and seeing that world through his eyes.

Then of course there are the great touches of Buddy talking to the Rankin-Bass characters, the woodland creatures and the debonair snowman. My son hasn't seen Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer -- the next oversight I must work to correct -- but he obviously knew that kind of thing was aimed at someone his age. When the narwhal surfaces to wish goodbye to Buddy, I leaped at the opportunity, knowing that there's a narwhal in one of my son's favorite shows, Octonauts. He didn't instantly remember the name of that mammal, but a smile crept across his face when I reminded him of it.

He laughed at Buddy's long walk south -- "That's a long way to walk!" -- and joined us in the laughter over Buddy obliviously getting hit by a taxi, trying the revolving doors for the first time and taking his first steps onto an escalator, which turn into that long lunge forward that makes the best use of Ferrell's elongated body. I couldn't help but think of my son in that scene, both literally, when he tried his first escalator (something my two-year-old is currently grappling with), and figuratively, as the whole movie of Elf was kind of like a metaphorical escalator for him.

No, I'm not entirely sure all the laughter he produced was involuntary, or if some of it was social laughter to show us that he got the same jokes we did. But it kept him engaged, and that was the important part.

I had a worry early on when there was talk of whether Santa was real or not. Even the possibility that Santa was not real was not something I wanted him to think about. Fortunately, this movie's position is that Santa is absolutely, 100% real, so the lack of belief in him is a characteristic ascribed only to those on the naughty list. There's also that part where Artie Lange plays the department store Santa, and his beard is pulled off, revealing an imposter. My son did have a few comments about that, but they did not lead to the conclusion that all the Santas he's seen in various shopping malls have been imposters. (Not one that he voiced, anyway.)

He did get bored at exactly one point, and it's funny how easy it would have been to predict. It's that scene when James Caan's boss, played by Michael Lerner, visits him in his office and makes threats about the security of his job if he doesn't meet a certain deadline. A totally necessary scene for advancing the plot that probably lasts about 90 seconds. Yet this was enough time for my son to ask how much time was remaining in the movie, and my wife to get irritated and tell him that if he wasn't enjoying it he could just go to sleep. This was the only time that I feared we wouldn't complete Elf, and the fear proved short-lived as Buddy returned front and center in the next scene.

This is an astonishingly tight script. At about the 50-minute mark, my wife told my son that there was an hour left, and I worried that if that were really true, we certainly might lose him. But not long after that the movie starts moving in high gear toward its conclusion and wraps up in a neat and tidy 90 minutes, bringing a tear to my eye in several spots, as it always does. The fact that there is zero fat in this script makes it even funnier that my son's primary complaint about the movie was that it was "a bit long."

And being up until 9:15 meant that there were no bedtime shenanigans. No sooner had the movie ended than he disappeared to the bedroom and was not heard from again. Leaving his parents free to provide ample evidence of there being no Santa, by building the "pirate fortress" that Santa is going to bring him later on tonight.

So my hope is that Elf is what was needed to get my son over the hump, to make the next movie with no animated characters just that much easier for him to swallow. With a distant eye on the long-term goal -- being absolutely sure he's ready to go to the movies with me for Star Wars: Episode VIII in May of 2017.

A Swell evening

I don't usually write about music on my movie blog, but there's always a way to work it into the theme if you're clever.

Actually, last night didn't require too much cleverness. Last night I saw a musical celebration of my love for the movie Once, and, to a (far) lesser extent, my love for the movie Elf.

My wife is into her eighth month of pregnancy, but she's also known for her ambitiousness -- which in some cases comes back to bite her. Fortunately, last night wasn't one of those cases, though it certainly was ambitious: A Sunday night trip to the Hollywood Bowl to see The Swell Season, She & Him and The Bird and the Bee. It was a special surprise for me, a last hurrah before this kind of thing will start requiring a babysitter. We amassed a picnic of pita chips, hummus, feta and sundried tomato spread, port salut cheese and crackers, olives, tangelos and open-face sandwiches of ham and avocado. At the Hollywood Bowl, you can picnic anywhere -- from grassy parks around the perimeter, to parks inside, to picnic tables inside, even at your seats. Usually there's alcohol involved, and they're fine with BYO on that front, too.

With the picnic experience beforehand, sometimes it doesn't really matter who you see -- it's just a fun embrace of the Los Angeles summer. And in many of my previous visits to the Bowl, I've seen a band I was only marginally interested in seeing. If those were cherished experiences even without the band being a perfect fit, just imagine what it's like when you see one that is.

If you aren't familiar with The Swell Season -- and the above picture hasn't jogged your memory -- the band basically consists of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the stars of John Carney's film Once. They had at least six other accompanists last night, but wikipedia tells me they're the only formal members of the band.

Like many of you, I loved Once, and bought the soundtrack only days after first seeing it in the summer of 2007. (In fact, on Wednesday, it will have been exactly three years since I saw the film.) I was entranced by Hansard's soaring, passionate voice, and the comparative softness and delicacy of Irglova's, which complemented his so well. I fell in love with their (almost) love story on screen, and was tickled to learn that they were real-life lovers -- even with the somewhat suspect 18-year age difference, of which I wasn't initially aware. The bittersweet story within the film, and the less ambiguous story outside the film, were both living, blossoming entities in my mind, as I continued to listen to that soundtrack until I'd run it ragged. When they won the Oscar the following March, it was another defining moment in my love of the film.

Since then, my wife and I have both been looking for opportunities to see them perform live, since stories of Hansard's on-stage presence were legendary. They seemed to play locally quite regularly, several times a year, but the ticket prices were always in the vicinity of a hundred bucks, so we never pulled the trigger. I actually had one instance where I was dialing into KCRW, the local NPR affiliate that also has a schedule of terrific music shows, to win tickets, but needless to say, I never got through.

The Hollywood Bowl proved to be the opportunity we were waiting for. Since we sat in the nosebleeds, I'm sure they weren't that expensive, plus we got the picnic in as well.

And Glen and Marketa didn't disappoint. Not only did they play a half-dozen songs from the Once soundtrack -- "Lies," "If You Want Me," "Leave," "When Your Mind's Made Up," "Falling Slowly," and as an encore, a personal favorite, "Say It To Me Now" -- but they killed in their other selections, only one or two of which I was familiar with. That's the brilliance of The Swell Season -- unlike many other bands, you don't have to already know their songs in order to be drawn into them. Hansard's charismatic words to the audience, followed by a performance style that ranges between gentle and intense, makes every song interesting. Rarely have I seen someone wail on an acoustic guitar the way Hansard does, yet there's never any doubt that the songs are deeply melodic and beautifully passionate. The Swell Season also did at least two covers, one of a Bruce Springsteen song I was not familiar with, and one of Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic," which is my favorite of his songs. It was an unforgettable version of that song as well -- if you've got Hansard's voice in your head right now, just imagine him during the "I want to rock your gypsy soul" high part of that song.

Did I mention something about the movie Elf?

That's because the band we saw before The Swell Season, She & Him, is a collaboration between actress Zooey Deschanel and musician M. Ward. I actually considered writing about She & Him a couple months ago, as some variation on the wariness I usually feel when actors and actresses try to moonlight as musicians. However, I don't really have any snarkiness reserved for Deschanel on this front. She has a legit voice, and having sat through their set last night, I no longer think she's "just trying to be cool." In fact, I think her band has almost a country western sound to it, her voice sounding like it would have been comfortable on a jukebox jam-packed with Patsy Cline songs. Without having really heard them, I would have assumed they were achingly hip, but I found them to be almost disarmingly cute -- kind of like Deschanel always comes across on screen. This doesn't mean they were exactly my cup of tea, and I did feel the couple beers I'd had starting to make me tired when my mind couldn't attach to a number of songs in a row that didn't seem very distinctive. But I definitely respect what they do, and Deschanel really belted it out on a closing cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You."

Oh yeah, Elf. That was the first time I was really aware that Deschanel could sing, as she has that scene where she's singing in the shower ("Baby It's Cold Outside"), and then the closing scene, where she sings "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" in order to elevate the Christmas spirit of the Central Park crowd, enough to power Santa's sleigh. In fact, I cited Elf as the reason I knew what Deschanel's voice sounded like, as my wife and I were making our way up the hill and wondering which act was currently performing. Not that I'd heard a couple of their songs on the radio, but that I remembered her voice from Elf.

So yeah, we missed The Bird and The Bee during our picnicking. But that's okay. I don't have a cinematic reference point for them anyway.