Christmas film clips

Films you wouldn’t think had a Christmas theme at least indirectly. So we have Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. A concocted newspaper story builds a fake hero in the name of John Doe (Cooper) who threatens to kill himself on Christmas Eve. Capra is at his everyman best, as strong a story as his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and the Christmas favorite It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Then there is Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), starring the other everyman, James Stewart, where our story culminates at Christmas in a classic romantic misunderstanding. Romance also springs eternal at Christmas time in Billy Wilder’s 1960 The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, in this Madison Avenue style comedy-drama about commuting husbands and their metropolitan mistresses. Which leads me to Metropolitan (1990), where the modernist preppie director Whit Stillman finds his haute-bourgeoisie 20-somethings gathered in gowns and tuxes on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to talk as much philosophy as back-stabbing gossip, Christmas jingling in the background.

Have to say that I’m disappointed to find that A Charlie Brown Christmas (Bill Melendez, 1965) will no longer be shown on regular television but migrates next year to Apple TV + - but of course.

Meanwhile Love Actually (Richard Curtis 2003) continues to roll as a modern Christmas classic. I loved it when it first came out but watching it a second time a few years ago felt it had degraded all around – in storylines, characters and humor. Unfortunately, not timeless the way I thought it might be.

Windsorites surely are blessed by the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF). Reading The New York Times Weekend Arts section last Friday, the front-page film review was on Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, which won this year’s WIFF People’s Choice Award. And further into the section was a review of Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, also screened at the festival. These films, folks, are opening only now in New York, but we can brag we saw them two months ago.

Speaking of Love Actually it of course starred well-loved British actor Bill Nighy, who now is in Oliver Hermanus’s Living (photo). I doubt this film will open in Windsor though likely Detroit. The film is based on famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 Ikiru, about a stern civil servant who ends up confronting his health and himself. That film I can watch on the Criterion Channel.