Holly Jolly Christmas Day: Vintage funny business — all-occasion Saint Nicks

Gerry Gersten for Playboy, December 1966.

12 Days of Highly Tolerable Holiday Movies: Twelve Monkeys

The Freedom For Animals association on Second Avenue is the secret headquarters of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can’t do anymore, I have to go now. Have a Merry Christmas!

12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995). All-time favorite film, all-time favorite director.

In a future world devastated by disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that wiped out most of the human population on the planet.

(the imdb)

So as I said, this is my favorite movie of all time, in any genre — all other comers are just vying for second — and I screencapped the everloving Gilliamic crap out of it last week.

Filled with glee that this qualified as a holiday picture, I innocently thought, “Surely everyone who ever planned to see this film has seen it by now, so it’s okay for me to put up all my pictures.”

But if the internet has taught me anything in the past year on this here thought experiment, it is above all else that it is possible for people to get mad at you for anything, so, at a certain point, this post will have a jump/cut. You will be able to click and be taken to a standalone page with only this entry, so that those sensitive surfers who I think must actually go searching pop culture blogs specifically for spoilers will not be able to yell at me for said spoilers. I’ll also be able to prove why this is a holiday movie.

That point is now. Click below to go to the full-page entry, with trivia, analysis, lines, and tons more pictures.

“I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going [to Ogo], I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?” Click here if you qualify for bunny slippers at the monkeyhouse. (Be honest.)

edit: I took the jump out. Screw the small minority of spoiler-haters. Sorry, guys. Rail away if you must.

Still with me? Great!

Telephone call? Telephone call? That’s — that’s communication with the outside world. Doctor’s discretion. Uh-uh. Look, if all of these nuts could just … make phone calls, they could spread insanity! Oozing through telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all those poor, sane people — infecting them! Wackos everywhere: plague of madness.

Hence the agony of foreknowledge combined with the impotence to do anything about it. …

Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment. In this context, wouldn’t you agree that “Chicken Little” represents the sane vision and that homo sapiens‘ motto, “Let’s go shopping!” is the cry of the true lunatic?

(That last was Dr. “Actual Bad Guy” Peters. He says it to Kathryn after her lecture when he’s getting his book signed.)

The lion James sees at the beginning is echoed by the camel perched on the top of the hotel in 1996. The image also shows up in a frame of a statue of a lion atop a stone as they search for Goines, and by the giraffes running across the overpass in Philadelphia many frames down.

No detail is too small to be necessary to the mise en scene of this film. Kathryn watches this Woody Woodpecker cartoon as she waits for James to get back in 1996 to the Oasis hotel. In the asylum in 1990, the movie on the television in the background as Goines rants is the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business.

I get it! This is your old plan, right?

Plan? What are you talking about?

Remember? We were in the dayroom, watching television, and you were all upset about the–the — desecration of the planet, and you said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a germ, or a virus, that could wipe out mankind and leave the plants and animals just as they are?” You do remember that, don’t you?

Bulishit! You’re fucking with my head!

And that’s when I told you my father was this famous virologist and you said, “Hey, he could make a germ and we could steal it!”

Listen, you dumb fuck! The thing mutates — We live underground! The world belongs to the — the fucking dogs and cats. We’re like moles or worms. All we want to do is study the original!

Chris Meloni of Law & Order: SVU in a lovely little dickish part, a totally Terry Gilliam character: an individual given all the facts who refuses to acknowledge the possibility that the truth suggested by those facts could possibly be. Gilliam thrives on the absurd, and I think throws these Doubting Thomases in to the works to demonstrate how ugly a reception his credulous character constructions would receive in the world we all agree to be “real.”

Women will want to get to know you.

For me this is the creepiest Scientist line in the film. Even in the future, when the plague has driven everyone underground, a guy who considers himself “hep” will try to use the allure of poontang to bring a poor guy down. So unfair and underselling for the Cole character, like that is a carrot that can be held out before him in the face of what he’s endured.

Until I was screencapping, I never really noticed how much screen time the so-called “Apocalypse Nut” and true villain, David Morse playing Dr. Peters, Jeffrey’s father Dr. Goines’ lab tech, is given.

When I was institutionalized, my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of “mental health.” I was interrogated, I was x-rayed, I was examined thoroughly.

Then they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, ten years, which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to — to determine everything I was going to do in that period.

So you see, she knew I was going to lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history, before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I’m ever going to do before I know it myself. How’s that?

Who cares what psychiatrists write on walls?

I say this when a Thing matters and we are trying to diminish it.

Hey! Is that the police? I’m in here, I’m an innocent victim! I was attacked. By a coked-out whore and some fucked-up dentist!

I love how deranged Kathryn is in this scene, screaming at James to get Wallace’s wallet before they skedaddle. “We need cash!” But moments before, so tender when she touches his scalp with her curiously ugly hands. Madeline Stowe is the bomb.

Oh, hey, what’s a holiday movie? This is! Besides taking place during the Christmas season, we got some straight-up Santa action goin’ right here. Hope you can handle how very “holiday” this movie is.

James! James! It’s okay. We’re insane! We’re crazy! It’s a carpet cleaning company —

A carpet cleaning company?

No scientists — no people from the future! It’s just a carpet cleaning company. They have voice mail; you leave a message telling them when you want your carpet cleaned.

You … you left them a message?

Yeah, I couldn’t resist. I said, “The Freedom For Animals Association on 2nd Avenue is the —”

“— ‘is the secret headquarters of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can’t do anymore, I have to go now. Have a Merry Christmas.'”

I’m not crazy.

I think I’ve seen this movie before. When I was a kid. It was on TV.

The Vertigo moment. This movie’s plot was inspired by Chris Marker’s La jetée, which also, in its turn, refers to the film Vertigo. While in the past, the protagonist of La jetée visits a Museum of Natural History with the blonde object of his affections, who points to the trunk of a cross-sectioned tree, the same way Kim Novak does in Muir Woods in Hitchock’s Vertigo, as shown in this scene from Twelve Monkeys. “Here I was born, and here I died. But it was only a moment for you — you took no notice.” Kathryn wears a blonde wig in this scene.

The lion I referred to further back, part of the recurring theme of wilderness which has been kept in captivity, let loose. Like the camel, like the giraffes, like the lethal virus, like James Cole released from his future underground incarceration to try and make time turn back and stand still.

It’s not just my dream. I was actually here! I remember now. … About a week or two before — before everybody started dying. I think you were here, too. But you — you looked just like you look now.

The exterior shots for the crucial airport scenes were done at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, while the interiors are from the Reading Terminal at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Today, you gotta take in to account your Army-of-the-Twelve-Monkeys factor.

Wh–what? What did you say?

The Twelve Monkeys, honey. … Bunch’a weirdoes let all the animals out of the zoo last night.

This cabbie’s name is Annie Golden. You can also catch her in the soon-to-be-justly-famous I Love You, Phillip Morris.

That’s what they were up to! Freeing the animals!

On the walls — they meant the animals when they said, “We did it.”

Only assholes write on walls.

Excuse me, sir. I’m going to need to have a look at the contents of your bag.

Me?

Biological samples. I have the paperwork right here.

I’m going to have to ask you to open this, sir.

Open it? … Of course.

The curious, diffuse wash that bathes these final scenes was acheived with Fresnel lensed lights. Fresnels, a favorite tool of Gilliam’s, are a beveled lighthouse-and-old-car-headlamp-style lens.

The entire instrument consists of a metal housing, a reflector, a lamp assembly, and a Fresnel lens. Fresnel instruments usually have a convenient way of changing the focal distance between the lamp and the lens. The Fresnel lens produces a very soft-edged beam, so it is often used as a wash light. A holder in front of the lens can hold a colored plastic film (gel) to tint the light or wire screens or frosted plastic to diffuse it. … The Fresnel lens is useful in the making of motion pictures not only because of its ability to focus the beam brighter than a typical lens, but also because the light is a relatively consistent intensity across the entire width of the beam of light.

(the wiki)

I remember reading a review when this film came out which criticized the inconsistency between Cole’s memory of this moment from dream to dream and what happened in actuality. The reviewer said it took away from the original inspirational idea in La jetée, where Marker’s narrator saw himself die as a child but, they felt, moved more definitely toward that moment as events unfolded in the short film. The supplanting of an unseen “Watch it” man in a yellow jacket with first Goines and then Dr. Peters was, the reviewer claimed, too foggy.

Well, excuse me, Mr. Super-brilliant reviewer, but the fogginess is kind of the entire point. The weirdly symmetrical plot of Twelve Monkeys is a cyclical rumination on the subjectivity of memory and identity. Put that in your cool-guy pipe and smoke it. Asshat.

I went to this film probably a few months after its release, when it hit the $2 second-run theater we had in town at that time, and I ended up going back almost every night that week, taking different friends. I remember very clearly that one of my friends said when it was over, “That’s so weird that in the future the insurance lady that sits by the bad guy on the plane is a scientist.”

“Um — I’m pretty sure she’s from the future in that scene.” Like, maybe it’s too late for Philly, but she’s going to stop Peters from going to San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, et al. She says she is in insurance. Right? I mean, we’ve seen her in 2035, looking exactly the same, a highly placed physicist. I sincerely doubt that in 1996 she was an insurance agent who planned to survive the plague and not age.

Is this even up for debate? I’m serious, does someone have an alternate interpretation of that scene?

12 Days of Highly Tolerable Holiday Movies: Elf

Actually, I tolerate this movie at a rate of only medium, rather than “highly,” but I picked it over Gremlins because I had more to say about it, I’d seen it more recently, and I had found better screencaps. Plus there is Zooey Deschanel as a blonde. Singing. In the shower.

Elf (Jon Favreau, 2003).

After inadvertently wreaking havoc on the elf community due to his ungainly size, a man raised as an elf at the North Pole is sent to the U.S. in search of his true identity.

(the imdb)

Please answer the phone that way at least once this week. I plan to but, then, I almost always answer the phone weird, so I won’t have that element of surprise that you will. (My new favorite? Ask the person who’s calling you if they’re there instead of saying hello. Example: it comes up on caller I.D. as “Joe Brown.” Answer the phone, “Is Joe there? Can I speak with Joe Brown, please? Mr. Brown? You’re probably wondering why I’ve called …”)

That’s another thing. (sigh) Buddy, you should know that your father — he’s on the Naughty List.

Nooooo!

I remember thinking when this came out how odd it was that Jon Favreau directed it, but Buddy’s father Walter Hobbs, as interpreted by James Caan, is certainly what I would think of as a Favreauvian creation: a nasty, singleminded piece of work who needs the familiar but lonely high ground of distance from others, and congruent distance from the emotions intimacy might entail, above all else.

(Psst, it is Amy Sedaris. Woo-hoo!)

I think we should call security.

Good idea.

I like to whisper too!

Buddy is a nuisance to his own father not only because of his inconvenient bumblings, but also because he is a deviation from the norm. To confront a person who won’t let you push them away is to confront yourself, and people like Walter Hobbs seek to avoid that at all costs. I believe Favreau is a genius at whipping up these mean little slaves to the system, as an actor and as a director.

That said about a keen and critical eye for slaves to the system, the product placement in this film is almost beyond belief. One of the most blatant things I’ve seen since E.T. I do not count the scene in Wayne’s World II because they did that on purpose (albeit they got paid).

Zooey Deschanel: I don’t know about elves. I didn’t think much about elves because I was trying to think about the man in charge, the one that was going to bring me presents. I believed in Santa Claus until I was, like, 14. [I believed] if my parents think I do, then they’ll give me two sets of presents. And if Santa Claus really does exist, then he’ll appreciate my support.

(“Zooey Deschanel talks about Elf.” Rebecca Murray. 2003. About.com)

Make work your favorite. That’s your new “favorite.”

When the threads of this project were spun out of the distaff of Hollywood nothingness in 1993, Jim Carrey was originally attached to star as Buddy the Elf. I truly love the guy but I am pretty glad he didn’t get it. He’s got far too much pathos in his eyes and the film would have flopped. Will Ferrell gives Buddy an unblinking, irascible cheerfulness that you get the sense would not flag in the face of finding himself engulfed in flames, like a grip of Terminator robots grimly marching across the ocean floor in pursuit of John Connor. Oh, hey, marriage-made-in-heaven sequel idea? “Come wit’ me if yoo be-leaf in Santa!”

Now what can I get you for Christmas?

Don’t tell him what you want, he’s a liar.

Let the kid talk.

You disgust me! How can you live with yourself?

Just cool it, Zippy.

You sit on a throne of lies!

See? I told you Zooey Deschanel showers in this movie. She also eats top ramen. Tell a friend.

Yeah, pretty much. Where this film succeeds for me is in its treatment of the redemption of characters peripheral to Buddy the Elf: namely, his father, Walter, and Jovie, his would-be girlfriend. Grating as he is, if Buddy had changed to accept the new world in to which he thrusts himself, it would have been a cheap and deflating transformation à la Enchanted.*

To see people rise above themselves and protect a dumb, innocent guy is at least affirming. Buddy doesn’t have to change, because the world will always have burpy rays of sunshine: we need to change enough to take care of them, to share their optimism and deserve their devotion. I can hang with that.

Extra-tolerable bonus: Buddy’s supervisor at the North Pole is Peter Billingsley, of A Christmas Story. “You’re not a cotton-headed ninny-muggins, Buddy. You’re just … different.” Aw. Super-cool!

*Enchanted had nice music but, really, Giselle goes from being a full-throated maiden of the forest to Chi-ironing her hair and operating a dress shop in Manhattan. Conform, little girl! For all the posturing at positioning a new kind of feminist anti-hero that that script threw at us, in the end, it pandered to the same “princess-demographic” ideals it was purporting to rebel against. But, dang, that Amy Adams is cute as a button, yes?

12 Days of Highly Tolerable Holiday Movies: Scrooged

Scrooged (Richard Donner, 1988).

A cynically selfish TV executive gets haunted by three spirits bearing lessons on Christmas Eve.

(the imdb)

Why, it’s Lee Majors!

Santa, is there a back way out of this place?

Of course there is, Lee, but this is one Santa that’s going out the front door.


Seven o’clock. Psychos seize Santa’s workshop, and only Lee Majors can stop them … The Night The Reindeer Died.”

Mom, where’s Dad? Shouldn’t he have been home by now?

Oh, Wally. If I know your father, he’s out chasing Beaver.

The head street caroler that Frank insults during the production scenes at “IBC” is played by Paul Shaffer. David Sanborn, Larry Carlton, and Miles Davis are the others.

“When I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love, L-U-V.”

It just blows my mind that David Johansen was in the New York Dolls and, like, randomly is this insanely talented Renaissance man. Buster Poindexter, voice work, Oz … and I totally forgive him for “Hot Hot Hot.” He doesn’t like it either. He said on NPR (apparently, I don’t know for certain because I do not like NPR) that the song was “the bane of my existence.”

A choo-choo train?

No, it’s not a choo-choo train. It’s five pounds of veal.

He’s only four years old.

All day long, I listen to people give me excuses why they can’t work… ‘My back hurts,’ ‘my legs ache,’ ‘I’m only four!’ The sooner he learns life isn’t handed to him on a silver platter, the better!

I’ve never liked a girl enough to give her twelve sharp knives before.

Who doesn’t love Karen Allen? Whoever you are, you’re a horrible person. Those shiny eyes, the determined little butt chin, the freckledy hands and toothy smile? The lady’s like Margot Kidder’s classy cousin.

When Carol Kane was beating up on Bill Murray during shooting, she accidentally tore his lip for real. They had to halt production for a couple days ’til his lip was better. Moral of the story is, don’t fuck with Carol Kane. Not ever.

In the future, all ladies will dress like geishas on Designing Women. Unless …

Break a leg, everybody. I feel real weird about tonight.

Psst. It’s Wendy Malick. And one of the friends at their party is Pete from Dharma and Greg. Pass it on.

But all of this is practically an aside, when the true main attraction is —

— Bobcat Goldthwaite as disgruntled ex-employee Elliot Loudermilk. Man, it is a little known fact, but I would leave it all behind without a second glance for Bobcat Goldthwaite. I especially like when he sells his blood. I tried to do that once with plasma, you know, the hard shit, but the snobs at the blood bank turned me down. Said my veins were too small for the needle used in the plasmapheresis process. So I stumbled to the bus and then walked home from my stop carrying my shoes. Lord, how I wish this was a fable.

How’s this for a deal? I hire you back, pay you twice your original salary, and offer you a vice president position. Would you like my office?

I don’t like your office.

Oh, that is so you.

[Elliot] Hello, IBC program room?

This is Rhinelander. Who’s the idiot that put that nut on the air?

Oh, Brice Cummings is the idiot, sir, but he can’t talk to you right now because he’s sort of … tied up. Yeah, uh-huh — oh, in fact, he just said that you were a flatulating butthead.

A butthead?

Mmm. He said he’s never felt this way about a man before, but you really look good in a suit.

In all honesty, the conversion speech at the end is not terribly heartfelt (it’s much easier to believe Bill Murray as the embittered cynic he portrays through the rest of the movie), but we knew it would end cheesey from the get-go and you sign on for the whole package: you have to love it, too. And the rest of the package is highly tolerable.

Daily Batman: Tough on Santa. Tough on crime.

This guy and orphanages. He almost acts like his parents are deaaaaaaaad!!!

Daily Batman: All the Christmases of my life

What this criminal doesn’t know is we’ve secretly replaced his regular superhero with a grudge-bearing, wealthy revenge-freak who will literally go to the ends of the earth to screw you if he is bent out of shape. When he says something like, “I’m going to find out who you are,” he does not plan to forget. Sorry, dude.

Daily Batman: Sock ‘im one for ol’ Santa

via.

Santa is a bloodthirsty punch-monster. I’ve always said that.

Music Moment — The Song Remains the Same: “Blue Christmas,” cover by Nicole Atkins, NSFW pictures by Ellen Von Unwerth feat. Ana Beatriz Barros

One of my favorite holiday songs brought to wonderfully creepy, multi-track resonant life by super-hot fave Nicole “lionface” Atkins.

Nicole Atkins – Blue Christmas

All photos from Ellen Von Unwerth featuring Ana Beatriz Barros. “Merry Me,” V Magazine Iss. #32 (2004).

“Blue Christmas,” music and lyrics by Jay W. Johnson and Billy Hays, 1947. The holiday rock ‘n roll classic was originally recorded by Ernest Tubb, 1948, charted by Elvis Presley in 1957 and again by the Beach Boys in 1964.

I’ll have a blue Christmas without you
I’ll be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree
Won’t be the same dear, if you’re not here with me

And when those blue snowflakes start falling
That’s when those blue memories start calling
You’ll be doing all right with your Christmas of white
But I’ll have a blue, blue Christmas

And when those blue snowflakes start falling
That’s when those blue memories start calling

You’ll be doing all right with your Christmas of white
But I’ll have a blue, blue Christmas

I’ll have a blue, blue *Christmas

* the girl can yodel like Wanda Jackson and Patsy, even. God, I love her.

Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus —

RIP, Queenie. This photograph was taken by Bunny Yeager, who sold it to Hef for use in Playboy, but like the first “centerfold” of Marilyn, was never actually taken under the auspices of the Playmate of the Month title.

— it is Bettie Page! but her eyes are wonky as hayull; why did they not reshoot this picture?

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Daily Batman: The Loneliest Men in the World

Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus —

— on the moooooon!

Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus —

— and it is imperative that you not put Irish Cream in his egg nog.

Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus —

— and he kicks zombie ogre ass using a candy cane throwing dagger and what looks to be some manner of katana.

Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus —

— and he is known to beat on the brat (beat on the brat, beat on the
brat with a baseball bat).