Here’s the thing about the winter holidays this year: It is absolutely not a wonderful life, so maybe pass on the Jimmy Stewart classic. To get us in the appropriate mood, we asked some local film industry pros to either recommend an under-the-radar holiday film or defend a favorite mainstream flick. Here’s how they responded.
1. Zelda Sparks, director of arts and culture at the JCC, recommends Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas. The documentary by Larry Weinstein explores the Jewish songwriters (think Irving Berlin) who wrote some of our best-known Christmas songs. “Using a Chinese restaurant as a backdrop, Weinstein’s film features rarely seen archival footage, musical performances, and interviews with contemporary writers and performers—even Jackie Mason makes an appearance—as well as connoisseurs of popular music,” Sparks says.
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2. “I’ll forever defend [Nancy Meyers’] The Holiday,” says CeCe O’Neill of the comedy series One Brick Shy. “I’m a bit of an unexpected hopeless romantic, so I relate to pretty much all of the characters’ wants throughout the movie (minus the exes—they suck). Also, I feel like my junior high self hasn’t let go of her crush on Jude Law. I know he’s problematic, but the holidays get me nostalgic.”
3. “In a season generally associated with joyous gatherings and festive gift-giving, my gaze has always turned to the downtrodden and broken-hearted,” says filmmaker Cody Stokes—appropriately summarizing 2020. Stokes’ The Ghost Who Walks, available on Netflix, is set during the holidays. He says, “It’s in the shadow of the season’s joy that I find the most memorable holiday stories are told.” So dig the opening scene from Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s sci-fi fantasy The City of Lost Children, which Stokes calls “a phantasmagoric nightmare pulled straight from the mind of a child. It’s reminiscent of the darker holiday folklore seen in the Northern European Christmas traditions.” You’ll definitely never look at the jolly old elf the same way.
4. Andy Compton is the director behind the award-winning short thriller “Tin Box,” so perhaps it’s fitting that his first pick is Krampus. “Something about watching an entire family be picked off one by one by an array of Christmas toys puts me in the holiday spirit,” he says. “Not sure what that says about me.”
5. Stokes also recommends Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s Smoke, a film based on Auster’s “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story,” which appeared in The New York Times on Christmas Day 1990. “Harvey Keitel recounts a tale about two lonely people making a connection on Christmas,” he says. “In a scene that perfectly captures the beauty and heartbreak of the season, Keitel’s character reminds us that ‘To make up a good story, you have to know how to push all the right buttons.’ This story certainly does.”
6. Another one from Stokes: When William Friedkin’s The French Connection came out, critic Roger Ebert gave it four stars. A thriller about a heroin smuggler? Where’s the mistletoe? The scene in which Gene Hackman, dressed as Santa, interrogates, shall we say, a suspect. “I love the idea that all Santas are broken men hiding behind the suit,” he says. “This scene scratches that itch.”
7. Compton’s all-time favorite is Jingle All the Way. “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s range is on full display,” Compton says, as he “expertly blends comedy with tragedy in his pursuit of a Turbo Man doll for his son.”
8. Abby Dorning from One Brick Shy goes all in for Olive, the Other Reindeer. “It’s about a dog named Olive who mishears the lyrics to ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,’” she says. “She hears ‘Olive the other reindeer’ and thinks it’s her. Basically, One Brick Shy in a Christmas movie.”
9. “Have a merry f—king Christmas with Terry Zwigoff’s scabrously funny Bad Santa,” suggests Cliff Froehlich, executive director of Cinema St. Louis. “The profane pitch-black comedy will bring to mind the work of executive producers and uncredited co-writers Joel and Ethan Coen. Billy Bob Thornton’s seemingly irredeemable Willie, a thief who works as a department store Santa to secure late-night mall access, is awful in the extreme: He makes Scrooge look positively benign.”
10. For Jenna McDonald of One Brick Shy, it’s gotta be National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: “What can I say? I love a good raunchy family holiday movie with a billion one-liners.”
