I’m Dreaming of a Celluloid Christmas

Christmas movies are as much a part of my holiday traditions as parties and presents, candy and carols. I love films in every genre, but certain Christmas movies are among my favorite films of all time—I’m talking stranded-on-a-deserted-island favorite.

If I did find myself on an island this yuletide season, these are the movies I’d want with me.

“It’s A Wonderful Life” ranks among my favorite movies of all-time, perhaps even tied for first place with “Casablanca”, and the only film that comes anywhere close to moving me as much as it does is “Keys of the Kingdom.”

George Bailey has so many problems he’s thinking about ending it all on Christmas. A film so dark it’d be noir if not for the happy ending, there’s far more to “It’s A Wonderful Life” than most viewers imagine.

George Bailey is me, he is you, and he reminds us all that our little lives can make a big difference in the lives of others. George Bailey teaches us what the wonderful writer Frederick Buechner says so eloquently: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, feel your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Richard Curtis is a revelation. I’ve loved his work since I first saw “Four Weddings and a Funeral” by myself in a small theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when it first came out. A few years later, when I saw “Notting Hill,” I knew I would be a fan of everything he wrote, and as powerful as “The Girl in the Café” is, I believe “Love Actually” to be his best film so far.

“Love Actually,” an extremely entertaining film, is also, by turns, poignant and heartbreaking. It, better than any other modern movie, and perhaps any movie in history, captures the magic of Christmas, using the dizzying effects of romantic love as a metaphor for its gentle madness.

Crime movies don’t get much darker or more comedic than the neo noel noir, “The Ice Harvest.”

In icebound Wichita Falls, Kansas, Christmas Eve is as dark, depressing, and desperate a night as any of the year, and Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) is trying to escape it, leave town with two million dollars of mob boss Bill Guerrard’s money. Can he escape Wichita Falls? Can any of us?

Though all performances are strong, it’s Cusack’s embodiment of Arglist that sets the film apart. His ability to make the small-time, small-town, lawyer a likable everyman trying to break out of his quiet life of desperation gives the film its charming and redeeming qualities.

“The Ice Harvest” is dark, quirky, and blackly comedic, but it also has some poignant moments of existential meditation, erudite contemplations of the elusiveness of the spirit of the season, and stinging satire on the hypocrisy of Christmas.

“As Wichita Falls, so falls Wichita Falls” is written and spoken repeatedly throughout the film like a lost line of poetry or a riff of jazz, and it says it all. It’s about existentialism, karma—something made far more obvious in the alternate ending included on the DVD.

Two of the things most associated with Christmas—family and home—are brilliantly captured in “The Family Stone.” A dramaedy about the only thing crazier than Christmas—family, the perfectly cast film makes me wish I were a member of the Stone family. As much about life and death, loss and love, as anything else, Christmas provides a prison-like cauldron to heat up the explosive elements and dynamics of all families, but none more than those of the Stone family.

“The Holiday” starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet is a well written and wildly romantic holiday movie, sentimental without being overly sappy. The story revolves around two disillusioned women, one from England, the other from the US, who switch lives and find what they’ve been missing. Like the season in which it’s set, the movie is magic.

This holiday season, give yourself the gift of great movies. Travel with George Bailey on his dark journey, Charlie Arglist on his even darker one, spend some time with the Stone family, careful to give and receive the gift of love, not knowing which Christmas will be your last, and fall in love all over again as you realize, as Kate and Cameron do, that at Christmas love is actually all around.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good Movie Night!

The Reader, The Read-to

I love to read.

I also love being read to.

Many of the books I “read” are actually read to me by professionals. Rarely am I without my ipod and the thousands of unabridged audio books it and Audible.com give me access to.

I realize most people view the ipod as a portable music and movie device, but it’s as a book that it really excels. Thanks to Apple and Audible I’m able to read hundreds more books each year than I would otherwise—listening to them while I drive, work, workout, lie in bed sleeplessly. Confucius said there are three ways to learn wisdom—reflection, which is noblest; imitation, which is easiest; and experience, which is bitterest—but if he’d have lived today, I’m pretty sure he’d have added a fourth, audio books on the ipod, which is coolest.

My most recent reading—or rather, being read to—experience was Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader,” and what a moving experience it was.

It’s a resonate story—made no less so because I could see where it was headed from the very beginning (one of the many hazzards of being a professional storyteller)—read with saturnine appropriateness by Campbell Scott.

I chose to read “The Reader” at this time because I plan to see the adaptation starring the remarkable, beautiful, talented Kate Winslet later this month when it’s released, and I wanted to read the book before I saw the film. But as was the case with “Brokeback Mountain,” I was so satisfied by the book, I no longer have a strong desire to see the movie (I’ve read “Brokeback Mountain several times and have yet to see the adaptation)—except this time, with respect to Heath and Jake, I’ll see “The Reader” in order to see Kate, whose role is reported to have saved Mirage Enterprises a lot of money on wardrobe.

The story of “The Reader” is a simple one, a love story of sorts filled with eroticism, secrets, horror, and compassion—all of which unfold against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers even more shameful than murder.

Because “The Reader” is an intimate story told in the first person by a male protagonist, I identified with Michael, even, at moments, became him, but because I was being read to, I also became Hanna. I had the experience of simultaneously being the reader and the read to, which was paradoxical, powerful, profound.

“The Reader” has my highest recommendation. Read it—or have it read to you—as soon as you can. Its elegance, resonance, profundity will stay with you long after the reader—you or Campbell Scot—reads the final work.