Music:
Nevermind the heretics who claim Mariah Carey is the Queen of Christmas, a far more deserving candidate for the position is Yorkshire treasure Kate Rusby. Her newest Christmas release, Holly Head , has just dropped and it’s a low key but worthy entry in her yule cannon.
Movies and TV:
Rifftrax Christmas Circus with Whizzo the Clown
More holiday madness from Rifftrax. Madness I say!
The festivities begin with one of the best Christmas shorts the lads have done yet, The Christmas Tree, a truly bizarre treat that combines mimes with Christmas trees to create something more disturbing than festive furries. Classic.
The main course here is a vintage tv kid’s clown host who, through some Luciferian machinations, got a near feature-length version of his DTs inspired “children’s show” made and distributed, no doubt terrifying and confusing handfuls of kids trapped in holiday matinees while their parents shopped.
The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show (2019)
Love Kacey Musgraves, big fan for years, so this should be great. (Of course, I said that about the Bill Murray Christmas thing too so…)
James Corden… no one told me there would be James Corden. I still haven’t forgiven him for Into the Woods (and his unctuous chat show). The only place I want to see James Bloody Corden is in the Gavin and Stacy Christmas special. And this opening “comedy” number only reinforces that. (Sadly this will also turn out to be as funny as it gets, at least intentionally.)
Opening credits show me that Kacey’s only hanging out with the cool kids this Christmas. Well at least they threw some money at it but while they’re going for a riff on cheesy holiday specials of yore it’s generally too smug and hip to really sell it. Hipsters have no heart and have to import soul.
The main thing is the music and that’s mostly solid. Though every duet magnifies the feeling that, compared to her partner, Musgraves looks as if she’s auditioning for her own audio-animatronic figure.
Also, how can an expensive high tech production feel so stilted and claustrophobic?
It looks pretty on 4K UHD but I’ll stick to her Christmas album and leave the unfunnyness to the cool kids.
Richie Rich’s Christmas Wish (1998)
From the director of Assimilate comes a fairly unbearable TV movie that just stole 45 minutes of my life.
It’s greatest crime is the way it wastes Eugene Levy.
Christmas in the Smokies (2015)
A review on Letterboxd actually complained about the movie’s “Jesus indoctrination”. Yeah Jesus in a CHRISTmas movie, what the heck?
If this is audience then no wonder the genre is a low-quality joke. Christmas should be more about the sex lives of entitled future wine moms than this Jesus stuff I guess.
That aside, this is a step above the usual Hallmark quality but only the faith-based aspects elevate it beyond that. You got your noble struggling farm, your cold, and indifferent bank and evil rich developer. Plus country music.
The premise of a country singers' Dance program being number one in the national ratings is unnecessarily ludicrous.
Not terrible but not worth returning to.
Red Skelton’s Christmas Classics
A little Red goes a long way for me but I have to admit that, between the mugging and over the top sentimentality, there’s some clever writing and bits of subversive comedy you might not expect.
