Christmas celluloid
Holiday movie offerings careen between stupidity and splendor

Four Christmases

by Judith Reynolds

Shameless. Exploitative. Somebody’s rattling our cage and our cash register, and we know why. It’s the holidays. Hollywood must think we’ll spend money on anything. Why else perpetrate such monstrosities as “Four Christmases,” “Nothing Like the Holidays,” a distinctly frantic “Marley and Me,” not to mention a spate of other bad-behavior flicks.

There’s plenty of product. Like last year, fantasy more or less balances blood and gore. Remember “Enchanted” and “No Country for Old Men?” This happy holiday season we have more than our share of stupid, sugary holiday comedies and Armageddon. If we’re to distract ourselves from a sinking economy in the general malaise of holiday madness, the movies function as a cynical compass. Here are a few tidbits – good and bad:

• “Four Christmases.” In the beginning, when Brad (Vince Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) play fantasy pick-up, you know you’re in for a snide romantic comedy. And you get what you pay for.

This ditzy flick takes a bead on affluent young adults who live high by any materialistic standards. It’s a given that they can play but won’t commit. They hate their parents and concoct incredible lies about socially responsible holiday jaunts to avoid family gatherings. Once the premise is set, their flight to Fiji is cancelled and they have to face four sets of relatives in one day. Divorce, of course, is rampant in them thar San Francisco hills.

Between chapters of the simple, four-part scheme, Brad and Kate ruminate about life as a couple. Eek, they even discuss the future – marriage, family, maturity! Ooooo.

As visits to one monstrous household after another unfold, nasty bits crawl out from under various carpets – childhood secrets, embarrassing class differences, and disturbing connections. The movie stumbles to a near stop as the voice of reason gets a few words – father John Voight speaks. But the predictable and terminally cute ending is a total sellout. If you can stomach Vaughn playing a glib, gabby, narcissist, his only role to date, you can lap up the syrupy ending. Too sweet for me.

• “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” The much anticipated remake of the famous 1951 film of the same title has a number of problems, but it’s welcome anyway. During the Cold War, DESS was the most cherished sci-fi movie of its time. Now the Robert Wise film is considered a classic. Based on a short story, “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates, the original tapped into deep fears and offered a calming message at the end. Set in Washington D.C., it was shot in black-and-white and combined intense realism with fantasy – the essence of sci-fi credibility.

Keanu Reeves in 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'

The plot is basically the same in both films: A flying saucer lands in the United States with horrific consequences. In the ’50s, the space ship landed near the Washington Monument at a time when fear of alien invasion merged with our paranoia over arch enemy - the Soviet Union. The 2008 version takes place in New York City. The threat is still global extinction, but this time it’s impending environmental disaster. In an almost comic twist, the President and his Veep are in so-called undisclosed locations. The Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates for heaven’s sake) takes charge. But in both cases, we’re our own worst enemies, and kindly creatures from other planets have decided to intervene – big time.

The problem with the new version involves more than plot changes. If anything, the environmental story has its own logic and works. Casting is another matter. A sullen, poker-faced Keanu Reeves tries his best not to impersonate the warm and humanistic performance of Michael Rennie as Klaatu the alien. In fairness, the 2008 version is darker and more menacing than the original, so maybe a cold plate of Klaatu is in order. On the other hand, Jennifer Connolly infuses glowing coals into her interpretation of Helen Benson. She’s now a Princeton astro-biologist, not the maternal boarding house keeper played by Ur-mother Patricia Neal. The British actor-comedian John Cleese downplays Dr. Barnhardt, the smartest man in America, as a dutiful genius, but he’s far away from the wild-haired Sam Jaffe. Jaffe gave us a mad, marvelous Einstein look-alike in the original. Picky, picky.

Revel in the comparisons or sit back and enjoy the new version? Do the latter, if only for the special effects and well-crafted tension. Director Scott Derrickson and writer David Scarpa know how to set fear and paranoia in motion to drive scenes forward. They also know how to mix the right amounts of realism and fantasy in the best Orson Welles laboratory of science fiction.

• “Australia.” If you haven’t seen this big, luscious melodrama, do. It is what it is. Baz Luhrmann, the wild man of Australian filmmaking, goes over the top on a regular basis. Who would have expected anything different here?

Lurhmann wrote and directed the film. In telling a sweeping saga of multi-cultural life in the World War II era, he’s piled one cliché on another. From Lady Sarah Ashley’s crisp arrival in Darwin (Nicole Kidman in high heels and higher British superiority) to the Drover’s cartoonish masculinity (who else but Hugh Jackman?), the characters play out their determined roles to a predictable conclusion. A charming young storyteller, Nullah (Brandon Walters) provides an inner light. “Australia” may be a poor man’s “Out of Africa,” but it’s old-fashioned, epic filmmaking. It won’t win any Oscars, but who cares?

With the Oscar season upon us, there will be more serious films ahead. But first, we have to suffer through more of the bad-behavior flick. After “Bad Santa” I had hoped we were done with the cynical genre that celebrates infantile American contrariness. But opening Christmas Day you can see a frantic, bad-dog version of “Marley and Me.” In early January the nasty, mean-girl flick “Bride Wars” opens with more to come. All this to fill then-adolescent fantasies of doing whatever you want and laughing about it.

Please, somebody bring “Frost/Nixon” to town. Now there’s a story about somebody who did whatever he wanted, American style, and thought he could get away with it. And he was a grownup. •