Movies
🍿 I’ve watched still more made-for-TV holiday movies:
- Jingle Bell Run
- Meet Me Next Christmas
- Hot Frosty
Hot Frosty taught me that no matter how built a dude is, no matter how kind he is, if he’s a himbo, I will not find him attractive.
🍿 Watched Christmas on the Ranch.
I like this but he asks her to give up her life in New York and move to his ranch in Ohio before they even kiss. Bold.
🍿 I have watched more Hallmark and Hallmark-style autumnal movies:
- October Kiss
- Haunted Wedding
- You Cast a Spell on Me
The most fun thing with these is recognizing people who had recurring roles on shows you love.
🍿 Watched Autumn at Apple Hill.
🍿 Watched Autumn at Apple Hill.
I wanted made-for-TV Christmas movie vibes without succumbing to the early Christmas fervor, because I adore autumn and Halloween. So I hunted around and found Autumn at Apple Hill, which checks so many boxes for this kind of movie:
✅ adorable small family business
✅ event planning
✅ charming small hometown
✅ workaholic Suit Man
✅ save the place!
✅ neighborhood holiday Halloween party
✅ developers hotel chain
✅ charming hotel
✅ guy she went to high school with
Is it fine art? Nope. Does it get the job done? It sure does.
🍿 Also watched They Live. A very different flavor of Carpenter. Two great tastes that taste great together!
🍿I'm so glad I watched Jim Henson: Idea Man.
I watched the documentary, Jim Henson: Idea Man yesterday. I found it incredibly moving. I re-read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist frequently and just before watching the documentary, I was listening to the audiobook. One of the sections in the book urges you to “climb your own family tree,” picking a creative whose work you admire and learning about the work that influenced them. I often struggle with this part of things, with choosing who has influenced me.
But watching the documentary, I distinctly saw the influence of Henson and his collaborators, especially writer Jerry Juhl and performer/director Frank Oz, on my own artistic and comedic sensibilities. Here’s an example:
This structure, wherein Fozzie gives Kermit instructions that Kermit then follows far too literally, with Kermit increasing in his manic energy and Fozzie increasing in his frustration, is the bedrock of at least 50% or maybe more of my bits as an improv performer. A parallel structure:
Both of these are Henson and Oz, both with Oz as the straight man and Henson as the manic player. I adore this dynamic. So. Jim Henson. That’s the creative tree branch I’ll climb first.
The documentary itself is lovely. If you’re a Henson nerd (as I am), you’ll be delighted that there’s Sam and Friends and advertising footage that I don’t think you can find anywhere else. The narrative thrust is that Henson was a figure not unlike Lin Manuel Miranda’s interpretation of Alexander Hamilton, an artist with incredible drive and the sense that there would never be enough time to do everything he wanted to do, so he had to be doing work all the time. It does a good job honoring the importance of Henson’s work while honestly portraying the cost this had to his family. His son Brian Henson talks about the very different experience of being his son at home versus being his colleague working on Labyrinth.
A lot of the time narratives about Henson talk about the critical failure of Labyrinth destroying his confidence, but this documentary did a great job emphasizing that even in the face of that failure, his work continued: in the years after Labyrinth he created Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller, and The Jim Henson Hour.
Overall, I think the documentary does a good job of showing that Henson was an ambitious artist with an incredible legacy and was, at the same time, just a human. I found it incredibly moving.
Here are a couple of fun links about Henson’s Kermit Car:
🍿 Watched UHF on the big screen today, when I’d only watched it at home before. Early on I seemed to be the only person laughing but maybe people were feeling shy or something because they laughed more as the movie went on. It’s a funny movie every time.
🍿 Watched Yes Day.
This is a super fun family movie! I love it in no small part because of Jennifer Garner and Jenna Ortega but also it’s just super fun.
🍿 Watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. Surprised to find that Sean Penn was my favorite part of the film, but then, Jeff Spicoli is a spiritual big brother to Ted Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esquire, so it makes sense.
🍿 Watched Heartburn.
This one is written by Nora Ephron & directed by Mike Nichols, and it’s mostly very sad.
But the cries it made me cry were mostly happy cries because Meryl Streep’s character clearly loved her kids so much and I love my kid so much, too.
🍿 Watched The Intern.
Another Nancy Meyers film. I really liked this. It made me cry. I think it was a little tricky because it seemed both to critique and support Anne Hathaway’s character’s intensity as an overnight CEO, but I guess that’s a good approach, not moralistic.
🍿 Watched It’s Complicated. Happy to have watched. It seemed to me mostly to be about how a manbaby doesn’t want to contribute to his new family and tries to get his ex-wife to take care of him now that she’s an empty nester and won’t need his help. Spoiler: it doesn’t work.
🍿 Watched Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story.
A fascinating documentary about a fascinating person.
🍿 Watched Hats Off to Christmas.
This is the most paradigmatic Hallmark Christmas movie. It has everything:
- a struggling small business
- a suit guy
- who is going back to his small hometown after life in the big city
- a wheelchair-riding moppet
- who miraculously recovers from the injury that made him need a wheelchair
- a woman being stupid because of a conversation she eavesdropped on
- who is a young widow
- two chaste kisses
- a happy ending
Is it a good movie? No. But is it a laughably bad movie? No. Haylie Duff is incredibly winning and the reason I kept watching. Her chemistry with her costar is non-existent but she’s so cute, I didn’t care.
🍿 Watched Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
My kid’s first time seeing both. Home Alone is, of course, a classic. Home Alone 2 isn’t a revelation but is super fun.
🍿📺🎄 Watched The Christmas Train.
Based on a David Baldacci novel & bringing a bit of star power with Dermot Mulroney, Joan Cusack, and Danny Glover. A journalist runs into an old flame on The Christmas Train. Cute stuff. Almost too high-quality actually, for the vibes I’m looking for.
🍿 Watched Airplane!.
Super fun. I can’t begin to imagine how delightful it must have been for the people who saw it when it was first released.
📺🍿🎄 Watched The Naughty Nine.
This is a heist movie about kids on the naughty list breaking into Santa’s workshop. It honors all the heist tropes and is super fun. Watch with a kid if you can.
📺🍿🎄 Watched Reporting for Christmas.
I really like this one. A hard-hitting Chicago reporter heads to a small town in Iowa to cover the 40th anniversary of the local toy company’s most popular product. Life changes ensue.
Super cute, winning cast.
📺🍿🎄 Watched A Biltmore Christmas.
Mostly for Jonathan Frakes & Robert Picardo 🖖🏻 but I ended up really liking it. There’s a lot of 40s Hollywood glamor. Also, I love Biltmore. I’ve been there only twice but I still love it.
📺🍿🎄 In the movie A Timeless Christmas, I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that a man time-traveled from 1903 to 2020, but asking me to accept that his love interest is a shoe-in for a history faculty job simply by virtue of having a PhD is a bridge too far.
🍿📺🎄 Watched A Christmas Frequency. A radio producer sets her show’s host up on on-air blind dates to save the show from the slump it’s in because the host is no fun after separating from her husband. It’s not a solid movie but I liked it because the cast is adorable.
📺🍿🎄 By the way, time travel is a whole subgenre of holiday made-for-TV movie. See:
- Eve’s Christmas (yes, that IS Amber from Clueless!)
- Back to Christmas (featuring Veronica Mars’s Michael Muhney and 1990s Jan Brady!)
- Christmas Comes Twice (Tamera Mowry!)
- A Timeless Christmas
📺🍿🎄 I was watching Hulu’s A Christmas Frequency and everything was going great but then it shattered my suspension of disbelief by having one guy give another guy an expense report, printed on paper.