Christmas Fall and Winter Movie Roundup!

namcopacxmasUsually at the end of summer, I’ll write a blog about the movies I saw during the past few months, as I see a lot of movies during that time. It’s pretty rare for me to see a bunch of movies any other time of the year, but this Fall and Winter I did.  So I decided to write a little blog about what I saw, just for fun.  I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but just in case something slips out, you’ve been warned!

Rifftrax: Miami Connection

My favorite TV show of all time is Mystery Science Theater 3000. They would show old movies while a guy and two robot puppets would make fun of the movie via silhouettes at the bottom of the screen.  The show’s not on anymore, but some of the people who worked on MST3K do something very similar called Rifftrax.  It’s like MST3K without the robot puppets on the bottom of the screen.  While I do miss those puppets, Rifftrax is still pretty funny and sometimes they do live performances that are simulcast to theaters around the country. You pay more for that, which I don’t like, but it’s still worth it most of the time.  In the Fall they did a movie called Miami Connection that I went to see, and it was full of 80’s cheese.  This was also about the time that ninjas were popular in the 80’s, so the movie was full of that, too.  If you ever wondered where video games like Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and Ninja Gaiden got their ideas, this was one of them!  In the movie, a group of friends who practice martial arts and also play in an awful rock band fight drug lords protected by a group of ninjas.  I wish my brother Jeff could’ve watched it, too, as he likes 80’s cheesy movies, and he wasn’t even BORN in the 80’s!  Someone must’ve had an influence on him, you think?

Rifftrax: Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny

In December I saw another Rifftrax screening of three Christmas shorts and a feature film. The theme of all these were how WEIRD and BIZARRE you could get!  In the first short, from the 1930’s, Santa Claus tells kids about Monkey Santa, who gives gifts to all the good monkeys.  They then show monkeys dressed up like people doing things, which I guess was entertaining back then.  The next short, which was done in the 60’s, was a Christmas poem about a girl and her mouse, cat, dog, and dragon named Custard.  The actors were kids dressed in crappy costumes.  In the story, a pirate breaks in and tries to rob the place, but Custard eats him all up and opens up his Christmas present early: a cage for him to sleep in.  The next short, also from around the 60’s and 70’s, tells the story of one of Santa’s workshops and a costumed wolf and skunk who work there, and they look like something out of Five Nights at Freddy’s.

The main feature was also done in the 70’s, and is about Santa getting stuck on a Florida beach. Kids come and bring livestock to try and pull his sleigh out of the sand, but it doesn’t work.  Santa then tells the children a story about Jack and the Beanstalk, which has crappy props and takes up most of the movie.  And finally, the kids get a rabbit mascot, called the Ice Cream Bunny, from a nearby theme park to come with a car to drive Santa away.  And that’s it.  Normally I hate to blame drugs on things people make that are a little strange.  But in this instance, I’m sure drugs were involved in at least one of the films!  It was just too weird to feel like Christmas!

The Peanuts Movie

Despite being computer animated, I think they really got the feel of the classic animated Peanuts specials, and I really liked it. Heck, I even liked the Peanuts Movie better than The Good Dinosaur, and it’s pretty rare for me to rate anything above Pixar.  But then, Peanuts were really popular in the 70’s and 80’s when I was a kid.  Actually, newspaper comic strips in general seemed more popular back then.  Do kids even read comic strips anymore?  At any rate, the Peanuts Movie is just a nice, wholesome G-rated film with good messages that you can take the whole family to see, and there are not a lot of movies like that anymore.

The Good Dinosaur

Just because I liked the Peanuts movie more, it doesn’t mean I didn’t like The Good Dinosaur. It was still a good movie.  I liked how creative they were about the whole ‘asteroid missing the Earth that killed the dinosaurs’ thing, and depicting dinosaurs as farmers and ranchers.  The problems I had with the movie was that half of it felt like The Land Before Time, and the other half was full of typical Disney stereotypes in terms of plot and events.  I also didn’t care much for the short that preceded the film, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it again with some of my Indian friends to see if they felt the short treated their beliefs with dignity and respect.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

OK, so first of all, I want to say that I’m going to try and write about the new movie and not have any spoilers. The only things I’ll mention are things you can already see in the trailers. So are we cool? Cool.

But first a bit of background. Star Wars first came out in the late 70’s and early 80’s when I was a little kid, and it was really big for me back then.  Definitely a large part of my childhood.  That was one of the few toy lines I got into as a kid.  But I’m still not a HUGE Star Wars nut.  I don’t play any of the games outside of LEGO Star Wars and I don’t read any of the books or any of the side stuff.  I just enjoy the movies and remembering having fun with them as a kid.  I think the reason why the first three movies worked so well was because of timing, since there weren’t any movies out at the time that were quite like that.  They also kept things simple.  I think that’s why the newer set of three movies (Episode 1, 2, and 3) weren’t as good because there were already movies out like that, so it didn’t have the timing like the original did.  And they mucked up the plots with useless political trade blockade senate stuff that nobody wanted to know about anyway.  Actually I don’t think the first 3 Episodes are THAT bad, but they certainly aren’t as memorable to me.  But at the end of the day, most of the Star Wars movies are just fun science fiction flicks you can take nearly the whole family to see, and that’s all I’ve really viewed them as.  I guess some would say that I’m not a TRUE Star Wars fan because I like characters that everyone else hates.  Yes, that means my favorite characters are the Ewoks, and I don’t really even mind Jar Jar Binks that much.  But then, I do tend to like annoying characters, and those ones certainly were annoying!

So what do I think of The Force Awakens? Well, they played it safe with this one, and it worked!  Why fix what isn’t broken?  They kept things simple like the first three movies, and there wasn’t a slow or dull point in the two and a half hours, which is an amazing feat.  So they are on the right track to reclaiming Star Wars’ former glory.  Normally when I see a movie, even one I really like, I don’t go see it a second time in a theater.  But I’d be willing to see The Force Awakens in a theater again, that’s how good it was.  And if you watch the movie with ‘little kid’ eyes, (or even marketing eyes), so many things in that movie would make cool toys!  You can probably guess who my favorite character was.  Yup, that’s right, the little rolling droid named BB-8 or B-88 or whatever.  Is it just me, or did anyone else want to sing ‘Na naaa, na na na na naaaa, Katamari Damacyyyy” whenever that little guy was rolling around?  I came up with a name for him myself: Katamar-2 D2.  My favorite vehicle was also in the trailers.  You remember that little floating motorbike thing that one of the characters was driving about in the desert?  I liked that one because it looked like a Fudgesicle.  Fudge…sicle…cycle…Fudgecycle.  So in short, it’s a good movie.

I won’t say anything more about the movie, but I will talk about the theater we went to see it in. My family and I went to see it opening night at one of those theaters where they serve you food as you watch the movie.  But this one was really nice and the seats even reclined and you could put your feet up, and the food was decent, too.  They even had Star Wars themed menu items, so you know I had to get those.  The one I got was called The Dark Sliders, and they were little fancy sandwiches with pork and brie and prosciutto cheese.  They also had the Jabba the Hut Dog and Bagels & Lox.  I don’t get why bagels and salmon was Star Wars themed, but then, I never even heard of bagels & lox until after I graduated college because I’m from the South and bagels aren’t as big down here as they are up north.  They also had some Star Wars drinks, too.  The Skywalker and Vader-ade were colored blue and red, respectively.  And they even put a blue or red glow stick in the drink, like a lightsaber!  There was also a non-alcoholic beverage for kids called Padowan Punch, but nobody ordered that one so I don’t know what it was like.  And that was the movie!  I had a lot of fun.

In the comments section, let me know what movies you’ve seen lately, too! That’s all for now! Later!  And Merry Christmas!  –Cary

Discussion Area - Leave a Comment




Tired of typing this out each time? Register as a subscriber!