A couple of months ago, we complained about how Hollywood was trying to stretch the holiday season by releasing a Christmas movie before Halloween (“Surviving Christmas”).
Had we foreseen the studios’ almost willfully perverse response, we might have kept quiet.
Now that the holiday season — the traditional time to hope for peace on earth — is upon us, what kinds of movies are popping up in our multiplexes? Do you really want to know?
Well, there are a couple of movies concerned with child molesting (“Bad Religion,” already in theaters, and the upcoming “The Woodsman”). Two others examine euthanasia (“The Sea Inside” and “Million Dollar Baby”). “Hotel Rwanda” takes on that holiday perennial, genocide.
If that’s not enough to get you in the holiday spirit, then “Closer” presents cruel sexual manipulations; “Imaginary Heroes” and “A Love Song for Bobby Long” romanticize family dissolution, unexpected deaths and substance abuse; “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” looks at madness and corruption; and “The Merchant of Venice” venerates the evergreen subjects of anti-Semitism and the unbreakable cycles of cruelty.
Even obesity, that bane of adolescence, is probed — in “Fat Albert.”
Most of these films are hitting theaters now because Hollywood’s holiday agenda is decidedly at odds with the rest of the country’s — while we just want to celebrate goodwill toward one another, the movie studios seek to celebrate good direction and even greater performances, most of which apparently can only be found in really depressing movies, for the awards season.
We feel your pain, and so we’ve made a couple of lists and checked them twice: movies that will make you feel good and movies that will flat-out make you laugh. In addition to current releases, we’ve included classic DVDs that will make your holiday merry and bright.
Feel-good films
“The Incredibles” (in theaters) and “Iron Giant” (Warner Home Video; $19.96). Pretty much everyone has seen Brad Bird’s mega-hit “The Incredibles,” so check out his previous film, which is every bit as clever and resonant yet somehow failed to click in its theatrical release. Set in the Cold War paranoia of the ’50s, it concerns a giant robot (Vin Diesel has never been better!) who befriends a fatherless boy but is relentlessly pursued by the military. Bird gets audiences into the mind of a seemingly blank machine more than you’d think possible: Robots are people too.
“Sideways” (in theaters). Alexander Payne’s brilliantly acted, hilarious but melancholy movie about a memorable jaunt through California wine country offers a hopeful conclusion and has steamrolled through the year-end awards. Essentially, it’s about how we respond (or fail to) when life doesn’t turn out the way we expected. Even its bleaker moments are exhilarating when we realize we’re in the loving, capable hands of a master filmmaker.
“The Aviator” (now in theaters). Martin Scorsese’s virtuosic skills render history’s most famous obsessive-compulsive disorder patient, Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio), as a jaunty, nervy, charismatic lady-killer and visionary of the highest order. All it takes to be an enduring success, it seems, is knowing when to end your story.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” (Universal, scandalously out of print but available at Amazon.com). One of the finest, most humane dramas ever made stars Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, a widower teaching his children decency by example, in defending a black laborer wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Featuring Robert Duvall’s screen debut as pitiable outcast Boo Radley.
“City Lights” (Warner Home Video; $29.95). Probably Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece, this silent comedy concerns the Little Tramp’s efforts to help a young blind woman while befriending a blackout drunk. The final shot remains one of the most memorably ambiguous, yet heart-clutching, moments in all of film.
“The Princess Bride” (MGM/UA; $19.98). One of the most effortlessly charming movies of the last two decades, both a rousing swashbuckler and a clever parody of swashbucklers, an eloquent romance and an entertaining sendup of love stories. Cary Elwes and Robin Wright are destined to find love, but it takes an awful lot of eccentric characters to get them there.
“Almost Famous” (Universal; $14.99. “Bootleg Cut” available for $34.99). Cameron Crowe’s semiautobiographical account of his days as a teenage rock journalist has it all — a crazed mentor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a buffoonishly charismatic rock star (Billy Crudup), a mom (Frances McDormand) whose tough love is awfully soft and the sweetest, most romanticized groupie ever imagined (Kate Hudson).
“When We Were Kings” (Universal Video; $19.98). This Oscar-winning documentary about the trouble-plagued “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman incisively celebrates everything that was great about one of the sporting world’s truest heroes, Ali.
“Fanny and Alexander” (Criterion Collection, five-disc set: $59.95; two-disc set: $29.95). Ingmar Bergman’s final film is based on his own childhood, about how two youngsters who have lost their father turn to their own imaginations to survive the difficulties of their lives when their mother remarries, to a stern clergyman. Magical, theatrical set pieces abound. Available in its theatrical release or the expanded mini-series shown on Swedish television.
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“Ed Wood” (Buena Vista Home Video; $29.99). Tim Burton transforms the life of the unrelenting loser and awful filmmaker into the stuff of magic. Johnny Depp portrayed Wood as an eternally optimistic, “Let’s-put-on-a-show!” kind of guy, while Martin Landau won an Oscar for his hilarious turn as bitter junkie Bela Lugosi.
Comedies
“Ocean’s Twelve” (in theaters). Not as effortlessly entertaining as the 2001 Rat Pack remake, but still plenty smooth; this cast is more offhandedly amusing than most movie casts that are trying full-bore to be funny. Heists, feints and double-crosses, but what clicks is the blithe clique’s cool winking at what slight nonsense this whole enterprise truly is.
“The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” (in theaters). What better way to school the kids in Dadaism than this aggressively silly incarnation of Nickelodeon’s cable sensation about an intensely stupid sponge whose pants are, indeed, square? Warning: Gratuitous David Hasselhoff appearance.
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (Columbia TriStar; $29.95). Arthurian legend and many cheesy movie cliches are sent up brilliantly in what may be the funniest movie of the last 30 years. What’s amazing is the number of ways the Pythons enter into gags. Soon to become a Broadway musical — cringe or salivate as you deem appropriate.
“Duck Soup” (part of the Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection, Universal Home Video; $59.98). Generally considered the gang’s finest moment, it’s a surreal satire in which Groucho becomes leader of Freedonia and immediately goes to war — after all, he’s already paid the deposit on the battlefield. Even my 11-year-old stepdaughter enjoyed it, amazed to discover one of her favorite “I Love Lucy” scenes was actually created here (the inspired Groucho mirror sequence). The other movies in this set (“The Cocoanuts,” “Animal Crackers,” “Monkey Business,” “Horse Feathers”) are no slouches, either.
“Some Like It Hot” (MGM/UA; $19.98). After witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis elude the mob by joining an all-girl band in this Billy Wilder classic. They pursue fellow bandmate Marilyn Monroe, while Joe E. Brown pursues Lemmon.
“The Philadelphia Story” (Warner Bros.; $19.97). One of Hollywood’s greatest romantic comedies finds impossibly spoiled Katharine Hepburn planning to remarry, muckraking reporter Jimmy Stewart (in his Oscar-winning role) falling in love and genial ex-husband Cary Grant saving the day. Why can’t they write dialogue this snappy today?
“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (MGM/UA; out of print but available at Amazon.com). Ingenious farce about women coping with sundry unreliable lovers and/or terrorists. Carmen Maura stars as an unhinged actress best known for a detergent commercial. She plays the mother of a serial killer. Her married paramour has ditched her — and hers aren’t even the worst problems suffered in Pedro Almodovar’s overstuffed (and Oscar-nominated) confection.
“Flirting With Disaster” (Miramax Home Entertainment; $19.99). Tea Leoni is dividing critics with her current performance in “Spanglish,” and Ben Stiller’s “Meet the Fockers” is also finding fans and foes alike. See her at her most hilariously neurotic and him at his most deliriously beleaguered in this breathlessly funny farce about a young man’s catastrophic search for his birth parents.
“The Big Lebowski'” (Universal Video; $14.98). The Coen brothers’ follow-up to Oscar winner “Fargo” alienated mainstream audiences, but for the right sensibility, it’s pure comic gold. Jeff Bridges plays a stoner who happens to share a name with someone who actually has the wherewithal to get into deep trouble. This seriously interrupts his bowling schedule but hooks him up with an erotic performance artist (Julianne Moore). Fiercely random, relentlessly silly — and Saddam Hussein has a cameo! (OK, so it’s a look-alike.)
“Underground” (New Yorker Video; $29.95). A half-century of Yugoslavian history is compressed in this surreal satire for more adventurous tastes boasting wild music, wilder manic plotting and the construction of lots and lots of weapons of mass destruction.