Film

Because New Year's Eve is a unique movie experience – or at least as unique as you can get from director Garry Marshall and screenwriter Katherine Fugate, who subjected us to Valentine's Day just 20 months ago – a standard movie review feels inappropriate to the task of capturing what it's like to be watching. So, in an effort to convey its ineffable magic, here's a pseudo-live-tweet replication of a preview screening.

I don't want to see Miracle on 34th Street. Ever. Same goes for It's a Wonderful Life, Home Alone, A Christmas Carol and A Christmas Story. I can still handle the Charlie Brown Christmas movies, A Nightmare Before Christmas, Bad Santa, Love Actually, Die Hard, Scrooged and Gremlins, but even those are starting to wear a little thin (except for Die Hard which is eternal like fruit cake). I'm 31 years old and I've been watching these movies every year since I was old enough to form memories and I need to start mixing it up a little before I go insane. This year, I decided to try to dig up some Holiday classics that are a little more under-the-radar, so we can start making new traditions to fit alongside the old. With that in mind, here are seven modern holiday classics to add to your Christmas tradition.

I have to cut Martin Scorsese some slack for his foray into family entertainment. I saw him on The Daily Show the other night and he confessed a couple of reasons as to why he made Hugo. One was because his wife hounded him to make “something that everyone can see” and then his 12-year-old daughter requested it be made in 3-D. Secondly, he wanted to make a love letter to the birth of filmmaking honoring Georges Melies (1902's A Trip to the Moon), the inventor of fantasy and science fiction in cinema, based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 novel The Invention Of Hugo Cabret. So while we get a kids’ fantasy ripe with mystery, we also get a cinematic history lesson. It's a tricky balancing act and Scorsese handles it with panache, delivering a magically imaginative mini-masterpiece that uses 3-D not as a gimmick but rather for wondrous enhancement.
I saw Melies' infamous Trip to the Moon when I was in film school. Ingenious and way ahead of his time, Melies took experimental film to the limits. It's no wonder that Scorsese is fascinated with this brilliant reclusive filmmaker and who better than Scorsese to use wild camera shots and mesmerizing 3-D to tell the story of the man who invented special effects.

The Muppets have a long, deep history, and most people on this Earth today can say that these familiar felt creatures played a part in their upbringing. Even those, like myself, who were too young to have regularly indulged in The Muppet Show when it aired on television, are nevertheless familiar with The Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island and, of course, Jim Henson's Muppet Babies. And just when it seemed like the Muppets had faded out of the pop culture in recent years, Kermit, Missy Piggy and the rest of the crew surge back into relevance in Jason Segel's resurrection of the franchise.
This big screen Muppet reunion features Gary (Segel), a simple man who spends his time with longtime girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) and his brother Walter. The brothers share an obsession with the Muppets, and Walter (weirdly) actually happens to be one. When the trio discovers an evil oil tycoon’s (Chris Cooper) plans to drill for oil under the old, rundown Muppet Theater, they find Kermit and round up the gang to resurrect The Muppet Show
for a telethon to raise money to save the theater.

I would personally like to apologize for the reviews I wrote for both The Twilight Saga: New Moon and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. I don't know what exactly came over me that I would rave on and on about how good both of these films were, but obviously I was under the influence of something. Let's call it Post-Adolescent Vampire Obsession Syndrome (or PAVOS, which coincidentally is Spanish for “turkeys,” and it's what all of us who latched onto this ridiculous series were for having so mindlessly obsessed over it for the past few years).
All I know is that during the height of my Twihard-ed obsession, my 15-year-old self would have seriously kicked my current self's ass. How does one go from making fun of Edward's sparkling skin to giving the last two movies each four out of five stars? I feel as though perhaps my mind melted and my time spent studying and adoring the art of cinema was tossed aside for a teenage vampire love story that throws both feminism and self respect out the window.

There's a lot to be said about Michael Shannon. He is a great actor carving out a niche for himself playing highly troubled individuals. Take Shelter starts with Shannon standing out in motor-oil-thick rain as he blankly stares into space. Right away we know there's trouble brewing. Moving beyond Christopher Walken's “hey I get it, I'm psychotic” manic territory, Shannon, epitome of a tortured soul, lets everything get under his skin.
There are a lot of normal-looking scenes in Take Shelter, but Michael Shannon does not play normal. As a guy named Curtis living with his wife (the excellent Jessica Chastain) in a small, unspecified Ohio town, Curtis is under pressure with a mortgage, a mother in an assisted-living home and a deaf six-year-old daughter. But none of that thwarts his obsession to build a backyard storm shelter to survive the devastating apocalypse he perceives is looming. Storms really are brewing out yonder, but the real storm is in Curtis' brain. He's plagued by nightmares as his mind begins to slide into madness and his devastating downward spiral takes his friends and family along with him. Shelter is an amazing, artistic, somewhat slow moving film that gives us a chance to see a rare hybrid of honesty and suspense.

Despite always earning A’s in my history classes, I usually avoid historically set programming when it comes to my entertainment consumption. I'm just not into it, which is probably why I fell asleep toward the end of The Kings Speech. I do make the exception for American history and well-made biopics.
Leonardo DiCaprio has played a large number of interesting characters and has, without a doubt, some of the best acting chops of any actor in Hollywood. While he has been known to play a pretty boy or two, he truly absorbed the role of John Edgar Hoover in a phenomenal way. Beneath the layers of latex, which he donned to play Hoover in his 70s, DiCaprio transcended time and physical appearance to become the hard-assed director of the FBI. The skill and talent were all DiCaprio, but beneath the makeup and behind the glasses he became nearly unrecognizable as anyone other than J. Edgar Hoover.

I'm probably breaking every rule in the critic handbook here, but I have to recommend Immortals, even though it misses the boat on some things “good” movies should contain. I could moan about subtext and character motivations until the cows come home, but if you've seen the trailer for Immortals, then you know exactly what you're getting into: It's Clash of the Titans (the original) for the 300 crowd. If you're looking for something deeper than that, then I'm sure J. Edgar will top off your “grown-up” movie tank, but if you shell out the dollars for this, then expect to feel like a little kid again.
I think the reason for the lack of subtext and motivation is due to the fact that the story itself is boilerplate hero's journey stuff. Boy leads simple life, Boy's simple life is destroyed by all powerful evil, Boy goes on journey to find mystical artifact to destroy said evil, Boy meets girl who will probably be held hostage by evil, Boy finds artifact and faces his destiny against evil and might possibly win if his heart is pure, his aim is true and his muscles are all greased up and flexed. When the remake of Clash of the Titans tried to pull off the hero's journey it failed because of three main flaws: 1) The hero was Sam Worthington, who is a black hole of charisma, 2) The script was written by people who should have their pencils taken away and 3) It was directed with such a lack of vision and style that it felt like a sad facsimile of something that could be awesome.

We've seen Occupy movements pop up all over the country in response to capitalist America's actions, but they seem to be getting little to no results. At least so far. But Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy and Matthew Broderick may have unveiled a plan to finally show those greedy, bloodsuckers that the little guy means business. The 99 percent represented in Tower Heist by employees at a fictionalized Trump Tower don't get mad, they get even.
Tower Heist follows a group of apartment employees shafted by their richest resident, Arthur Shaw. Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the manager of New York's most pricey apartment complex “The Tower.” After Shaw gets busted for a Madoff-esq scheme, Kovacs learns that because of him, the pension plans of his employees no longer exist. Assuming some sort of responsibility, Kovacs suits up and becomes a modern day Robin Hood in an effort to steal from the rich and give to the poor.

On Prancer… on Donner… on Harold… on Kumar? With Halloween just over and Thanksgiving looming in the wind – bam – we get our first Christmas flick. Here's my advice: prepare for A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas. I think it's genius for the guys who bring stoner humor, lame sex jokes, bodily functions and bad taste to the screen to beat everyone to the holiday punch, and it's in 3-D no less. That said, this movie is amazingly stupid.
I actually liked H&K Go to White Castle, much to my surprise, but I walked out of H&K Escape from Guantanamo because it was that moronic. H&K X-mas isn't as insulting, but ripe with stereotypes; the latest addition to this unlikely franchise boasts an extensive list of bad and unfinished ideas. Many setups fall as flat as a squished pot brownie while others just glide along in wimpiness. Only a few jokes explode with originality. The film seems to be on a visible collision course with mediocrity and predictable Airplane-style humor. I have a hard time relating to comedies where I can see the punch lines coming from a mile away.