Christmas - Both Term Life star Jon Favreau and director Peter Billingsly have their place firmly set in Christmas movie watching season. Their roles are reversed: Billingsly starred in what is unquestionably one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time, A Christmas Story, and Favreau directed the contemporary hit and destined classic, Elf.
A Christmas Story is one of the Holy Canon of Holiday films. Like It’s A Wonderful Life, How The Grinch Stole Christmas (animated) or Die Hard, A Christmas Story is required viewing every year. Every. Year. Four of the short stories from Jean Shepard’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash ("Duel in the Snow", "The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message", "My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art", and "Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil") would be the basis for the film.
It is a glimpse into another time and era of the American family; the indifferent father and the doting mother. Peter Billingsly would play the title role of Ralphie, a young boy in Hohman, Indiana. There are flights of fancy as Ralphie day dreams and his imagination runs wild. There is the buildup and anticipation of Christmas as we wait to see if Ralphie got his coveted Red Rider BB gun with the compass in the stock.
I have so much more to say about A Christmas Story than I do about Favreau’s Elf. Though Elf is already over ten years old A Christmas Story hold more favor because it landed smack in the middle of my childhood. But Elf had quickly joined the annual holiday broadcast schedule soon after it’s release. Will Ferrell was finally freeing himself of his SNL past and striking out on his own, taking the lead in Favreau’s throwback to Christmas classics. So much of a throwback Favreau even included a touch of stop animation like the old Rankin/Bass shows from the 60s.
But not only does Elf have all the funnies but also a lot of the fuzzies. It does have a tremendous heart for family and remembering what the holidays are all about.
Swingers - Back in the mid-90s there was a resurgence of lounge culture and a lot of mainstream success. Entire collections of CDs were devoted to different movements within it - lounge, rockabilly and big band - I know, I bought them. Also, because of Doug Liman’s Swingers I also wore bowling shirts and experimented with Dewer’s on the rocks. Swingers starred Vince Vaughan, Jon Favreau and one of the 90’s soon to be It-Girls Heather Graham and it was bro’ing down decades before we put that label on it.
The story of young actors trying to make it Hollywood and on the social scene provides some comedy gold. Vaughan’s Trent Walker was the blueprint for the cockiness, arrogance and false bravado that Vaughan would portray in nearly every role in his career. The heart of the film though is Favreau’s Mike Peters, the stand up comedian who cannot get over his last love and gets shut down because of the type of car that he drives. This is the film for Nice Guys, showing we still got a shot at this.
And you get to watch the guys make Wayne Gretzky’s head bleed.
Side Note - Swingers was a reunion of sorts for Vaughan and Favreau after the feel-good football movie, Rudy, from 1993. As I am less of a sports nut and more of a culture watching nut this is why I lean towards Liman’s film.
Aliens - If Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien is one of the greatest science fiction horror films of all time then James Cameron’s attempt at ‘Turning it up to Eleven’, 1986’s Aliens, is one of the greatest science fiction action films of all time. And one Bill Paxton, as space marine Private Hudson, the loud mouthed braggart and non-filtered provider of exposition of the film.
Somehow surviving throughout most of the film Hudson brought the audience up to speed on ‘current events’ in case we had our eyes closed during the intense action scenes. He would eventually find a pair and go down fighting in the group’s final stand. And while Hollywood looks to fill in as many Heroine gaps as it can in a response to cries for gender equality in the industry one only has to look back far enough to see that when they got it right, as with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, it was very, very right. They just needed to do it more often.
The Alien franchise would struggle afterwards under the direction of visionary directors like David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet before really crapping the bed. When you think of it, the Terminator franchise also did a similar head first dive into the shallow end after Cameron made Judgement Day.
Mr. Holland’s Opus - We are going to go back 21 years for a glimpse at an early role for Terrence Howard, probably better known right now for his role in the television show Empire. In 1996 Howard was 27 year old high school student Louis Russ in the dramedy Mr. Holland’s Opus. Likely the film was trying to bank on the success of another mult-era dramedy like Forrest Gump it follows a similar structure. We follow a character through their lifetime and frame it against the current events of the day to give it context.
Richard Dreyfuss plays Glenn Holland, a teacher who aspires to write his own musical numbers, who takes on a teaching job to care for his family. We follow him through the decades, meeting a number of his students along the way, including Terrence Howard.
Howard shows up during the time that America was at war in Vietnam and when the Hollands make a grave discovery about their newborn son. This era alone makes up for a size-able chunk of the story of the film. Howard is a star player for the school’s football team but his academics are nowhere near as good as his passing skills. Jay Thomas’ character Coach Bill Meister pleads with Holland to take Russ on as student to help raise his grades. Turns out Russ has no rhythm either so Holland works with him on that while Coach Meister works with marching band on their marching. It would appear that no one in this town any coordination to speak of.
There is victory and tragedy in this chapter of the film. Russ finds his rhythm and there is joy felt when we seem his beaming face during a parade through town. The Hollands will make their discovery about their son at this moment and we learn of the fate of Russ after he leaves high school. Mr. Holland’s Opus is a good movie with plenty of moments that will tug at your heartstrings, proving you have one.
You also get to see William H. Macy, Olympia Dukakis and, I didn’t know this until now, Damon Whitaker, son of THAT Whitaker. Go figure. The things you learn a couple decades later.
Gremlins - Character actor Jonathan Banks (left) just has one of those faces. And with over 150 acting credits to his name how do you pick even one?!? Well, I will start with his role as Deputy Brent in Joe Dante’s Gremlins from 1984. Hell. 32 years ago!
When Amblin was at its peak it was turning out the hits left, right and center. They were also making films that kind of bordered on family friendly but didn’t. We all wanted to see Gremlins when it came out, it was just a matter of finding out whose parents were cool enough to load us into the back of the station wagon and take us to the mall to see it.
Have you ever heard someone lament for the days when things were made by hand? Gremlins is such a movie that was made by hands. Seeing Spike and Gizmo and their floppy and fuzzy antics on screen will seem so crude now but they at least were something that you could reach out and hold on to. They used puppets in the production after tests with a monkey in a suit proved to be chaotic. Special Effects Supervisor Robert MacDonald was 71 years old when he worked on Gremlins. It would be one of the last films he ever worked on. He won Oscars in the 60s for Ben Hur and The Longest Day. How many horror comedies can say they had an Oscar winner on their crew?
The idea of seeing a Gremlins movie today with computer animated gremlins en masse makes me shudder.
Jonathan Banks is an everywhere kind of actor. There are so many films that he has appeared in from that same era that I could recommend as well. Airplane. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and Beverly Hills Cop just to name a few.
