Seen in December

We're at the center of the Earth gents, so it's shirts off!

There was a time when I formulated and curated a Christmas watch list, but these days are busier and more prone to finding a moment to sneak in a little screen time. That seems odd given just how much down time there was when I was more prone to being in a prone position, but here's what I saw in the darkest hours of the year.

Elves away!

Prep & Landing: Snowball Protocol
Disney+
The latest in the series of Pixar/Disney Christmas animated shorts with elves Wayne (Dave Foley) and Lanny (Derek Richardson), and their misadventures. The stories revolve around Santa's helpers depicted as paramilitary strike forces, and each Christmas being a memorable campaign. In the context of ICE raids, that doesn't sound so great. The other part of the stories are centred on Wayne's anxiety about getting a promotion and the office politics of Santa's workshop. In other words, it's a very American take on the Santa mythos. 

Dames, not damsels.

Down Cemetery Road S01
Apple TV+
For those of you waiting for the next installment of Nick Herron's Slow Horses, don't worry, Mr. Herron has another reprobate character in his canon of murder mysteries set in Oxford, England. Instead of an exiled MI5 agent, our protagonist is Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson), a private detective more accustomed to tracking down cheating husbands than uncovering a government conspiracy. A gas explosion in a house without a gas hookup, a missing girl, and the murder of her husband set Boehm and an Oxford art restorer, Sarah (Ruth Wilson), on a perilous path that leads to a remote, abandoned military base in Northern Scotland. Like Slow Horses, the plotting and pace are crisp, the dialogue is sharp and funny, and the characters are flawed and human. If you enjoy Slow Horses, you'll enjoy this.

Go with God, or at least have a clever detective to help.

Wake Up Dead Man, a Knives Out Mystery
Netflix
Like other Knives Out mysteries, this film is a clockwork of curiosities that combines the eccentricities of a Hercule Poirot detective with the complications and characters of a Ms. Marple story. The film is packed with so many notable and recognizable faces you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a SAG convention, but that's all part of the fun. Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc is in fine form, as is newcomer (to American audiences), Josh O'Connor as Father Jud, the worried young priest struggling with a past guilt and present dilemma. Buckle up, it's a bumpy ride.

The New Yorker at 100
Netflix
Judd Apatow is well known to audiences as the director and funnyman of some of the most successful comedies in the last 20 years, but he is also an accomplished archiver of comedy history. This side gig has, I think, contributed to him becoming a talented documentary film director, as he shows with this behind-the-scenes view of one of the few remaining successful American magazines, The New Yorker. The New Yorker is a hybrid that is hard to duplicate. It has serious investigative journalism that few still fund about politics, war, and the economy. It is a compendium of art reviews, fiction, humour, and, of course, cartoons. This documentary traverses the magazine's history, the power of its own myth-making, and its place in American culture. Are they "élitist m*therf*ckers"? Yes, but for all the right reasons and proudly so.

That Christmas
Netflix
The data gatherers and algorithm analysts at Netflix have successfully identified Christmas as an optimal time for enjoying heartwarming animated films. The Venn diagram must also include snow, diverse families facing challenges, small children in peril, a grumpy adult who shows they aren't grumpy at all, a cast of English actors, and no matter how relevant, an appearance by Santa. While not as successful as other Netflix Christmas films like Klaus or A Boy Called Christmas, this film does tick all the boxes and is a fairly enjoyable and entertaining Yuletide yarn. It is curious that these British towns see quite so much snow at Christmas. This film is set in Sussex, which hasn't seen a major snowfall since the 60s, but I guess with climate change, anything is possible and does make for a more Christmasy setting.

Samurai with laser katanas.

Star Wars: Visions S03
Disney+
Another iteration of the animated anthology series set around unrelated Jedi tales. This season returns to assigning each episode to a different Japanese anime studio. Some episodes are more experimental than others, but none are longer than 20 minutes and provide a much wider view of the Star Wars universe than the Skywalker clan has over the nine feature films. I enjoyed this season, that I affectionately referred to as space cartoons. Thus, if you're a fan of Star Wars, samurai, space, or cartoons, then there's plenty to enjoy.

Not Ocean's 11, or even Ocean's One.

The Mastermind
Mubi
The latest film from American auteur Kelly Reichardt. If none of those words appeal to you, words like "American", "auteur", or "Kelly Reichardt," then you can pass on this one. The story is about an art school dropout, married with two kids, struggling to get by when a not-so-well-thought-through plan to steal paintings from a local museum occurs to him as easy money. This is not your regular art heist but is more of your art house cinema art heist. Reichardt is known to make character-driven stories that are just enough of a slice of someone's life to see a small piece of their soul. She does so very quietly, in a very still and nuanced manner. If you're expecting Ocean's 11, you will be disappointed, but if you're familiar with Reichardt's other films such as Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek's Cutoff, or First Cow, you'll find an examination of a fallen man, desperate to be anything but.

Scorsese at home.

Mr. Scorsese
Apple TV+
A five-part documentary series about the life and work of eminent American director Martin Scorsese. It's informative and isn't a typical celebrity hagiography. Scorsese is a gifted, intelligent, and thoughtful director but also human and flawed. The documentary is by accomplished screenwriter Rebecca Miller and she interviews not only Scorsese's famous collaborators (Paul Schrader, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodie Foster), peers (Brian De Palma, Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas), but also childhood friends who may have been the inspiration for various characters in his films. Scorsese's career is long enough to deserve a retrospective, but I wonder if this series wasn't part of a package with Apple TV when they bought his last film, Killers of the Flower Moon. Fun fact:the series reveals Jodie Foster was left to promote Taxi Driver on her own at Cannes when she was 14 due to her comfort speaking French and the fact that the adults like Scorsese were riddled with anxiety and hiding out in their hotel rooms.

Logan's Run
Kanopy
Classic 70s sci-fi in the vein of Soylent Green, Silent Running, or THX-1138 that I decided to rewatch after seeing someone post about inconsistencies in the film. I really didn't notice any egregious inconsistencies. The film is set in the 23rd century, and humans live in what appears to be a giant shopping mall in a world of plenty and excessive pleasure. The catch is you must submit to a voluntary renewal (read "death") ceremony when you turn 30 years old. If you decide life begins at 30 and decide to pass on “renewal”, you are dubbed a "Runner" and will be chased and executed by a police force called "Sandmen". Perhaps it was the overwhelmingly distressing news of ICE raids that made this film feel new again? Whatever the reason, it is still highly watchable and recommended.

Runaway
NFB
Another lively Cordell Barker animated short (creator The Cat Came Back and Strange Invaders), about a wandering cow and a runaway train. A fun-filled nine minutes.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
Disney+
I've never read the Jules Verne novel, but the vivid technicolor look of this Disney movie always fascinated me. With James Mason as Scottish professor Sir Oliver Lindenbrook, the vivacious Arlene Dahl as Carla Göteberg, and inexplicably, Pat Boone as one of Lindenbrook's students (pointless songs inserted into the film were said to appease Boone), we follow the explorers into a cave that begins in Iceland and continues to the "center of the Earth," where they find the sunken city of Atlantis and another vent hole that leads out of a volcano in Italy. Many imaginative and highly improbable discoveries are found along the way. In a strange way, I love the evocative but naive spirit of movies from this period, and they do remind me of the kind of affectation that Wes Anderson now brings to the screen.