Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Well, folks. ‘Tis the season in the lands of the streaming services, and the yearly inundation of dodgy holiday films have landed. Netflix, in particular, seems to have doubled down on the genre. What started with an unexpected hit in The Christmas Prince—a franchise due to get its third film in three years come December—is now bolstered with in-house movies made on the cheap and newly acquired made-for-TV fare all about the Christmas romance

My partner and I aren’t the biggest fan of Christmas, but we do love a trashy film and that love isn’t limited to action and sci-fi projects. We’ve made ourself a list of unwatched Christmas trash and checked it twice, then fired up the ol’ Netflix viewer to make our way through the sixteen holiday films on our radar this year.

Here’s some quick capsule reviews of the stuff we’ve watched thus far.

THE KNIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

The Christmas Prince may be the franchise that started it all on Netflix, but last year saw the streaming service launch Vanessa Hudgens as a franchise player in the Xmas romance space with The Princess Switch. There’s a sequel to that film coming in 2020, but this year Hudgens is back with a time-travel romance that sees a medieval English knight transported to modern-day Ohio in order to fall in love with a high school science teacher and learn a valuable lesson about knightly virtues.

It’s not a particularly ambitious script, but that’s not the point of a film like this one. What’s impressive is the level of care that’s brought to pretty much everything else given the budget and lack of innovation in the major beats. I’m obsessed with the set and costume design of this film, which is so coordinated that subtly eliminates any sense of reality by virtue of everything matching perfectly. It’s set the tone perfectly, because reality has no place here on any level.

Then, of course, there’s the acting. Hudgens has already proven that she’s a dab hand at these kind of roles—The Princess Switch largely rests on her playing to a similarly absurd premise—and she delivers here. Josh Whitehouse’s Sir Cole is more of a surprise, but manages a level of charm that carries the film through some of its absurd beats and narrative revelations. He manages a kind of Heath-Ledger-minus-the-intensity vibe (or, possibly, a Heath-Ledger-On-Home-And-Away vibe, but I don’t remember that era well enough).

Basically, this is Grade-A trash. As my friend Adam would say, this is a qualified recommendation—f you don’t grove on the trash aesthetic, you’re going to hate it. If you do, it’s great. Four out of Five chocolate meads.

SANTA GIRL

Santa’s daughter runs off to college so she can experience the “real world” before going through with her arranged marriage to the son of Jack Frost. While there, she’s a fish out of water who develops feelings for one of her fellow fish-out-of-water classmates, which unleashes shenanigans as Jack Frost and other supernatural beings get involved to try and manipulate the situation.

I’m intrigued by the supernatural world set up here—a place where holidays and mythical beings are essentially private corporations that are engaged in a constant give-and-take as they barter for influence. Casting Barry Bostwick as a hard-assed corporate Santa desperate to hold onto his influence is a great choice, as he’s both effectively goofy and able to sell the idea that this version of Santa—lean and off cookies for his own health–is a natural reaction to the loss of Mrs Clause.

It’s a sweet film with some surprisingly ambitious world-building. Three and a half junk-food breakfasts out of five.

MERRY KISSMASS

The writer behind 2015’s Merry Kissmass, Joany Kane, seems to have carved out a niche with made-for-TV christmas romances. Her first nine writing credits all revolve around the theme of Xmas and kissing, and they make up at least half her credits overall.

What’s intriguing about Merry Kissmass is how it handles the crafting of a romance story where the main protagonist, Kayla, is engaged to someone who is not her happily ever after for the first part of the film. It’s a big thing to work around, and the movie does it by making really, really sure that her fiance Carlton is an awful person who utterly deserves what’s coming. This is coupled with a series of tropes that are all about making sure that the HEA guy, Dustin, is the obvious choice (and I give the movie bonus points for its deployment of puppies in the service of this).

Two hunks covered in puppies out of five.

LET IT SNOW

Adapted from a novel cowritten by multiple A-List young adult authors (Maureen McHugh, John Green, Lauren Myracle) and featuring an ensemble cast of great actors, this feels like a movie that should be a bigger deal than it is. It’s the first film of the season where my partner and I truly diverge in our opinions—she really enjoyed it (largely because it has Joan Cusack being whacky), while I felt like it overstayed it’s welcome and could have had a storyline or two pared back.

If The Knight Before Christmas feels like a movie where everyone involved is working to a level beyond the ambitions of the script, this is a film where the collective competence of everyone involves largely exposes the lack of a strong, beating heart at the centre. Never quite bad enough to be make you turn off, never quite good enough to make you feel like it’s going to be worth the time invested. It suffers an awful lot from the central protagonists who unify the film being a lot less interesting than the small-town-girl/rock star pairing who provide the second narrative spine—-if you swapped the pairings, this would have been stronger.

Joan Cusack is phenomenal, though. As are some of the supporting players, particularly Jacob Batalon and Liv Hewson, who make an awful lot out of the very little the script gives them. Two stolen kegs of beer out of five, although it’s three and a half tinfoil hats out of five every time Hewson or Cusack are on the screen.

1.

Here is a morning thought for a Friday: the glory of the internet is that there’s always someone who hasn’t seen Rob Cantor’s Shia LaBeouf. And there’s always someone who has forgotten the song and needs to see it again.

Being the one to rectify either situation is a gift that keeps on giving. Go forth and be that person.

2.

And here’s a challenge for your Friday: what can Rob Cantor’s 3 minute clip offer you as a creative person (regardless of how that creativity manifests). Yesterday I logged a quote from a recent Garth Nix in-conversation I attended: we are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read. This applies to three-minute clips as well as great works of literature and non-fiction.

These days I run through a list from Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative designed to help capture creative sparks and insights.

ARE THERE ANY PATTERNS YOU’RE EXPERIENCING THAT ARE SIMILAR TO SOMETHING YOU’RE WORKING ON?

One project I’m kicking around at the moment is a year-long research-and-report series based around being more satisfied with my writing. Not necessarily being more successful with my writing in purely monetary terms, but hitting the end of 2020 and feeling like I’m pushing towards something instead of treading water. I found my way back to this clip as part of that, thinking about the works of art that really resonate with me and get me excited about creative possibilities. Cantor’s work is part of an emerging pattern: B-Grade ideas treated with po-faced seriousness, an appreciation for small absurdities in the genre, writing everything from a different perspective so you’re forced to re-examine the familiar.

At the same time, the project I’m noodling with the moment is a straight-up crime novel. No supernatural elements, no magic and no SF. Just a downright nasty thug doing bad things to bad people. Despite this, it’s not a book that’s grounded in realism—I wanted a very stylized feel to it. Realism heightened to the point of absurdity, then filtered through genre tropes. So I look at little patterns in Cantor’s song—the sheer pleasure of whispering Shia LaBeauf’s name and the way it lures you into the moment; the constant escalation from band, to orchestra, to dancers, to children’s choir, to acrobats, and the way the structure constantly mirrors and pushes the increasing absurdity of the story to the point where “but you can do jui-jitsu” feels like a natural progression.

You can’t do that in the same way when writing fiction, but the general idea of it seems like it could be replicated in some way.

WHAT DO YOU FIND SURPRISING ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE EXPERIENCING?

Two words: production values. Doing weird, gimmicky songs on the internet is nothing new and Cantor’s work had already gone viral two years before the clip appeared. That he doubled-down and produced this amazing, bizarre clip is just magical—one of the few things that has ever gone viral where I’m really blown away by the production and effort that went into it.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE EXPERINCING AND WHY?

• The fusing of “high art” forms like dance, choir, and an orchestra with an ostensibly low-art aesthetic of a goofy horror movie plot. Also, my god, the production values on a three-minute Youtube thing is incredible. There’s an intent here that’s often missing when people do this kind of thing, a real seriousness and gravitas that elevates the goofiness of the concept.
• The dedicated seriousness of everyone involved. They don’t treat it as a joke and therefore elevate this to the level of parody within the story, so you’re able make those decisions for yourself as a viewer. There’s an ideology of trusting the reader here that I appreciate.
• The Shia LaBeouf guest spot at the end. Always fun to see someone willing to go along with a joke, but it also really nails the dedication and willingness to go all-out on production values.

WHAT DO YOU DISLIKE ABOUT WHAT YOUR EXPERIENCING?

• The second “Shia LaBeauf” not really being whispered by the violinist. There is so much impact in the first one, and the kid’s repetition of “quiet, quiet,” that gets lost when the name is said in a low voice instead.
• The little details that get lost. I missed the blindfolded mohawked dancer in the final stages of the song because the clip had gone all maximalist and drowned us in detail. It’s only today, after about fifty repetitions of this clip, that I finally noticed something going on int he background.

I picked up a copy of William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2001, a shiny trade paperback find in a second-hand bookstore. The latest in a long line of Gibson books that started with my long-since read-to-death paperback of Burning Chrome that I acquired in high-school after our IT teacher showed us a documentary on cyberpunk.

I purchased Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, brand-new in 2005. At the time I was reading Murakami a lot, was just starting to write my own short fiction in earnest, and taught classes in both Murakami and short story writing to university classes.

I made a special trip into the city to buy Brandon Sanderson’s Alloy of Law from the inestimable Pulp Fiction Booksellers. I’d never read Sanderson before, but the reviews tempted me with its promise of a traditional European fantasy setting progressed to the point where it effectively contained a Wild West.

I made a similar trip to acquire Elizabeth Bear’s Blood and Iron, the first of her novels picked up after falling hard for her short fiction collection, The Chains That You Refuse, and the Jenny Casey trilogy.’

These are all stories about how the books first found their way to my shelf, where their value was clear and situational. I picked up the Gibson because it was part of a series I hadn’t yet finished, the Murakami because I was a fan of his work and was grappling with the short story form. The Sanderson’s value lay in the idea’s potential, and my interest in seeing it executed. Buying a new Elizabeth Bear book was a celebration of an author whose work excited me, and a chance to be part of an ongoing conversation about her work going on in genre circles at the tie.

That’s how they found their way to my shelf. Four books, all in trade paperback, taking up ten centimeters of shelf space in an apartment where space is at a premium. So why keep these books? Why grant them this shelf space, rather than getting rid of them and reclaiming the physical space for something else?

There are those who say you don’t get rid of books for any reason. A book, once acquired, is a thing to love forever. I went through that phase myself as a younger man, dutifully carting books from share-house to share-house, my bookshelves gradually expanding as I lived in larger places.

Part of the logic here lies in the value of a library—anyone walking into your house and seeing the metric buttload of books will automatically know you’re a reader. As statements of identity go, shelves full of physical books is a pretty big statement.

It also has a lot to do with access. In the days before online bookstores and the Dark Lord Jeff’s giant river of commerce, the idea of picking up a backlist title was a relatively weird and unlikely thing. Books came out and sat on the shelves for a month, then disappeared into the ether. Part of the reason my copy of All Tomorrow’s Parties is second-hand lies in the fact that I missed the window when it was first released and had to scour the local book exchanges for a copy.

Today, I could pick up an ebook copy for $12. I could order a smaller paperback that takes up half the space for not much more than that. Is the space that book takes up over the years worth more or less than the cash it would take to replace it, given the minimal effort required?

And so the book math changes, because the marketplace in which I bought them has been superseded. There are physical books where the math is easy—books by friends, books that are beautiful objects in and of themselves, books that I love so much that the physical copy brings me joy that an ebook never would.

And then there are books like these, which I kept out of habit. Books that interested me enough that I knew I might want to revisit them or study them for a future project, and because it’s easy to make a shelf full of trade paperbacks look nice if you have enough of them. Books whose primary value wasn’t just story, but predicated on other factors that are no longer in play.

Books who have served their purpose in my life, and may well serve a purpose again, but the math no longer supports keeping a copy just in case. If the strongest value lies in the content, not the physical container, it’s easier to reacquire a copy as the need arises.