12 Days of Movies to watch before Christmas

And to get through the holidays, my true love gave to me
my own soundproof media room with these movies...

Oh yay. Christmas is here, again. Time for some of us to just hunker down in our sound-proof bunkers and avoid all things Christmasy as the festive season springs upon the land, with people wishing for world peace and Iphones and big screen TVs and pretending to care about why Christmas isn't celebrated in other parts of the world. Why not try to ease the pressures of Christmas by partaking in some of your neighbourhood's finest greenery and cruise Netflix or internet website lists for movie recommendations? And here you are!

So here's my Christmas gift to you, whatculture reader. After all, who better to take classic movie recommendations than from a perfect stranger? And I'm nearly as perfect as they come. These aren't even necessarily classic movies; they're just a sneaky way to tie in a movie list with a Christmas/December type theme. Plus it gives you something to discuss with your mates if you are holed up at the Winchester.

So here are movies i may have seen. Or not. So because i am a dad and watching complete movies that don't have talking animals in them is a thing of the past, i just re-watched the trailers to summarize them and because it's that year of the month that includes Christmas, they all have a number from the 12 days of Christmas in them.  Reason enough.

12 Monkeys

I remember parts of this one. Brad Pitt goes full retard in Terry Gilliam's most commercially successful feature film starring Bruce Willis playing Bruce Willis as a time travelling emo-type guy who goes back in time to give Brad Pitt career advice and either stop or start some kind of world wide plague. You never actually see the 12 monkeys, which at the time I remember pissed me off a little bit. I had no kids at the time so i was able to watch all of it. The movie poster looks like it's maybe about a Terminator-like robot and something's happening to the right of the frame but we can't see it. It's a good time travel movie if you are into that sort of mind twisting.

The trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15s4Y9ffW_o

It starts off in true Terry Gilliam set piece style, a low-budget astronaut appears in cellophane, which must be Bruce Willis. Then he's in a mental asylum in 1996, and someone mentions the word future, so you know it's about time travel. There's a lot of talk about what's real and what's not while jumping from Gilliam world to some snow-covered city. There's a bear and an elephant and some cops burst into a room with guns drawn and Bruce Willis gets more and more confused then he's holding a gun and says "I just want to do my part and get us back on top of the planet" in a not-tough but still Bruce Willis tough voice. In true Gilliam style this trailer made me think 'what the hell is going on?' just like when i find myself changing a stinky diaper at 4 in the morning.  


Last Minute Substitution: 12 Angry Men - 12 Men in a room. One man leaves. A verbal Royal Rumble that is considered a veritable classic and one still on my 'to be seen list'.


Ocean's 11

Another guy's movie in theory but featuring so much man candy it's okay to throw this at the mother of your children when she's wondering why you don't take her out anymore. It features a bunch of George Clooney's friends, including a non-retard Brad Pitt dress up in cool Las Vegas suits and teaming up to rob the guy you've seen in a lot of other things but you can't name one, like most of the other guys in the movie. There's a lot of standing around looking cool, and Julia Roberts, which your girlfriend/wife will also appreciate. The poster looks like a line up for every woman's speed dating fantasy. Even Julia Roberts is there, behind the bad guy but ahead of eight other men so at least she has that going for her.

The Trailer 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_bzUIbE5jo

George Clooney gets out of jail after sticking it to his parole board by asking them how much they make per year (burn, social justice system!). Clooney is quickly seen to be an overachiever, but probably not a good one because he was in jail after all. However, he's Clooney and he has balls; he tells his best friend Brad that he wants to rob 3 casinos for $150 million.They need 10 guys (or else the title wouldn't work) but it looks like they already have a few million dollars with all their fancy toys and gadgets they plan on using shown through the trailer. Julia comes in looking pissed off and Matt Damon is also in it, dressed like Linus from Charlie Brown. There's a little man jumping around and i am guessing what is supposed to be some tongue-in-cheek humour, like when Brad Pitt dons a Clark Kent disguise and asks 'did someone call for a doctor?'.  George ends it with 'you are either in or you are out'. Which is exactly what she said.

Last Minute Substitution 11:14 - five stories all 'crash' into each other. Starring Henry Thomas (that kid from ET) and Colin Hanks (Tom's kid) it's interesting because on the imdb box it totally doesn't mention them, instead going with Patrick Swayze and Barbara Hershey, which are both names that mean nothing if you are more familiar with Colin and Henry.


10 Things I Hate About You

I saw this because someone said i should which is how i used to choose most of my movies before babies came along. I don't remember anything about it. From the poster it appears to have a lot of young people in rock star poses, so there probably is a lot of teenage-talking angst about what they want to be when they grow up, how tough school is and why X doesn't like me. A young Heath Ledger is in it, pre-Brokeback Mountain fame so he's like the James Dean character from Rebel Without A Cause, I'm guessing. The title does sound like it's something an ungrateful teenager would say to their hard-working father when he forbids them to leave the house at 11 pm to go 'hang out' with friends.

The Trailer  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmjzCZr0Jw

Ok, so it is a high school flick as i thought it was; there's the kid from 3rd rock (JGH or whatever he's called now), that angry looking girl who was going to be the next Julia Roberts,  the teen princess who i assume is passed out in a trash bin somewhere and Heath Ledger, sounding Australian and a bit dickish.  For some reason that makes no sense to the overall script it looks like No Doubt is stranded on top of a building singing that Cheap Trick song. Boy wants to date Cute Girl but Cute Girl can't date unless her Bad Girl sister dates so Boy gets other Bad Boy to win Bad Girl's affections and i assume everyone lives happily ever after.  Except for Heath, who dies as the Joker and in real life while JGH goes on to become Robin and a Hollywood heartthrob.

Last Minute Substitution; How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days - Starring Mathew McConaghy doing his patented Mathew McConaghy thing and Kate Hudson doing Drew Barrymore's thing with a script that probably shouts ROM-COM from the opening minute.


Plan 9 from Outer Space  

I saw this because i went to film school and it helps to see what you can do when you have nothing but the willingness and desire to do what you need to do, whatever it takes. Of course, I saw it in the nineties when anything was possible, thanks 9/11. It helps that Johnny Depp and Tim Burton teamed together to immortalize the director, Ed Wood, who is often regarded as 'the worst director in history', which is, if you know your cinema (or read Claire Simpson's lists) isn't possible.  I made a movie once and it was pretty crappy but i don't see Tim Burton knocking on my door wanting to make a movie about me. Ed Wood, the legend, to me seemed like the first film geek/Quentin Tarantino of low budget sci-fi, and in doing so became insanely cooler. I don't remember very much about it - it reminded me a bit of Amazon Women From the Moon perhaps. There's a vampire girl in it and a couple of cops standing around. And some aliens, but human aliens. No biggie. Once I saw The Dark Knight Returns I realized Plan 9 had less plot holes so it has that going for it.

The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBoT0LJ0mgM

Wow. This trailer rocks it from the opening line: 'It is safe to say that the grandchildren of some of the people in this theater will not be born on Earth'. How's that for completely and utterly overly optimistically thinking what the future had in store for us fifty-plus years ago? There's that zombie vampire girl in a spooky cemetery, an explosion, a dead body going past some cops; all in the first 10 seconds. This shit looks to be the bomb. Then a lot of words appear on screen with Bela Lugosi in big letters and what appears to be the bomb now is looking more like a real bomb. The spacemen can't work their space guns, the cop seems to want to shoot people in the groin and the zombies (all two of them) can't seem to walk any faster than my daughter when she was '9' months old.

Last Minute Substitution; Lots to choose from. The Whole 9 Yards, District 9, Nine, 9 1/2 Weeks, Another 9 1/2 Weeks, but why not try The Nines? Ryan Reynolds is in it, playing Gary, an actor who plays a cop on television, uses too much lighter fluid when he burns his ex-girlfriend's things, then he drinks and drives, uses crack, and crashes his car, all in that order. Then it gets weird. You had me at Reynolds smokes crack...



8 Men Out

I remember it's about baseball and a team from Chicago that conspired to throw the World Series back in the early 1920's because, well, winning isn't everything and they sure weren't getting paid to win.  Unlike today where most make the equivalent of a small African nation back then they were gettting paid jack shit and the mob paid a lot better. That's all i know. From the title and my knowledge of baseball, someone is obviously innocent but calling it 8 Men Out and 1 Snitch probably didn't market America's other other other national past time correctly (after the NFL, dabbling in foreign politics and eating).  The poster doesn't really help me. Apparently it's a national scandal, but then again, what isn't in America?

The Trailer

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSHQw85pvek

Ok, I was pretty close. It's about the Chicago White Sox, set in 1919. John Cusack is in it, so you know it's going to be sappy and he's going to be the innocent one. It's also about baseball, so you know it's not action-packed although a guy gets slapped and there's gun in it. It is about America after all.  Dickish owner, cuz it's about sports. No latinos, which is because it's 1919 and this was before baseballs were introduced to the Dominican Republic.    

Last Minute Substitution; Eight Below. In honor of Paul Walker, kick it old school with this one from before the Fast and The Furious Franchise with this Disneyfied version of the much more powerful 'Antarctica'. Warning - you are probably going to cry at some point if you love either Paul Walker or dogs.




se7en

I must have a bit of a man crush on Brad Pitt. This is his third movie on my list. Here he plays the yet to be grizzled young rookie cop teaming up with the grizzled old cop, Morgan Freeman playing Donald Glover. If you haven't seen it, it's a must. This was an intense movie, from the opening murder scene. I didn't know the 7 deadly sins so it was a bit of lesson in Catholicism and this was the first David Fincher movie i remember. He is Tim Burton to Brad Pitt's Johnny Depp, who would go on and direct Pitt again in Fight Club and something else. For some reason i remember that Pitt and his wife Gwyneth Palthrow lived beside the railroad tracks.

The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmZbLbPv6Fs

The trailer makes it seem like an over-hyped episode of Criminal Minds on steroids. There's a few guns, because...America.  Pitt looks beat up through most of the trailer, as if it's a prequel to Fight Club. Gwyneth hates 'this town' and Pitt does a lot of running around, getting shot at and falling off things. Freeman lists off the seven deadly sins too fast for anyone not religious to remember and there is that single ominous tone playing throughout and that announcer's voice that makes everything sound either way too important or way too stupid.

Last Minute Substitution; The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Because, you know, Silver Vampires are so second-class. Plus eight was too many Golden Vampires, six too few. But seven, seven is just enough Golden Vampires to make this qualify for this list.


6 Million Dollar Man 

Given the limited choices of movies with a 6 in them, i will have to stick with a nostalgic favourite from childhood.  It's hard to explain to you young folk now but at one time six million dollars was considered an insanely amount of money and if you had that much money you could make a man into a part robot with super ability to appear to be running fast while actually running superslow or throwing things. Or just looking. Today, there are nearly 50 hockey players that make more than $6 million a year and the only one who may be part robot is Zdeno Chara.  Frig, even a Mexican from Alaska named Scott Gomez was apparently worth over $7 million. There's a golfer named Tiger Woods who made $75 million in 2011. The seventies really undervalued cyborgs... I remember his name was Steve Austin (not the wrestler).  He was an astronaut who crash landed, but they rebuilt him. There was another guy named Oscar who was his boss. Together they fought crime or something. In it's most memorable episode for me and a host of others, he fought Big Foot.

The Trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlcuiDUVyVQ

Well, it's a tv series, but i found one that flashes back to what made it so awesome; the pulsing music, the strange 'bionic' sound whenever he used one of his robot parts; Big Foot. Plus at .55 I'm pretty sure that's an eternally young Sandra Bullock.

Last Minute Substitution; 6 Plots. Quick what to you do if you are an Australian filmmaker and only have enough funding to make one movie yet have 6 ideas you think are excellent? Boom! Problem Solved. Or was it?



Slaughter house 5

This is a movie of the book that film directors like to strategically place in shots to show via cinematic short cut that a character is smarter than they look. The novel itself is a famous one by Kurt Vonnegut and it's a messed up story of a man split between at least two dimensions; one as a zoo specimen in an alien world and another as Kilgore Trout, who may or may not have been in World War 2. The poster doesn't really help, other than making it look like it's cold and probably set in World War 2. Apparently this movie is a classic, which you can say of anything made in the seventies.


The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvlZtlBfCi0

it looks like someone squished together 3 or 4 different movie trailers for this one and it reminds me of a Stanley Kubrick film, or basically any other film done in the early 70's and it's by far the longest trailer I've seen, clocking in at over 4 minutes. There's Nazis being Nazis, explosions, talk of aliens, someone gets shot cuz you know, America. A naked boy gets thrown in a pool. There's a few brief seconds that remind me of Pink Floyd's the Wall. It appears to be a story about a boy named Billy. At the end of the clip young Billy is running through the snow. I don't know why. I have a headache. Interesting fact; the director was George Hill, who would go on to direct the greatest sports movie of all time, Slapshot.  I did not know that.

Last Minute Substitution; Fast Five. Let's go with another more famous Paul Walker 'vehicle', his buddy action flick franchise with Vin Diesel. Not to be confused with Kung Fu Panda; Secrets of the Furious Five which has no car racing in it.

I am Number 4  

I don't know anything at all about this one, but it became my default pick when i found out the other options were Fantastic Four, Four Christmases, and Four Rooms all of which were lame for their own reasons. If you took the best parts out of all three of those, it would probably make for a decent sitcom. I'd rather chance watching something that might be okay, despite the glowing blue power fists in the movie poster, which makes me think it's some sort of X-man rip-off.




The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP6zhpST3Ro

Well, after the trailer, it still looks like an X-Man rip off. The first 30 seconds is all the exposition you need about the other three so this guy is #4 (in case we didn't get that) and there's still an awful lot of film time to sit through. He's a loner, doing what all loners do, hanging at the beach and getting hit on by hot chicks. Then a merman or something attacks him so he has to leave and so he heads to Heartland America, where he apparently finds one of those high schools where everyone looks in their mid-twenties. The bad guys still find him, he goes around using his superpowers to defeat them and find others with superpowers where i would be quite shocked to find that they don't defeat the bad guys (who are obviously bad because they have tattooed heads and trenchcoats).

Last Minute Substitution; Four Lions. Yeah, British cinema Represent! A comedic look at internal terrorism, this will be sure to spice up the old xenophobic rants of your neighbours as they call in to report you on suspicion of terrorist activities if you dare to play this with the volume too high.  

Three Amigos   

At one time, these were three of the biggest names in comedy.  Chevy Chase aka Fletch aka Clark Griswold aka Pierce who's ego was still small enough to share screen time with other comedians plays Dusty Bottoms.  Steve Martin aka The Jerk aka The Man with Two Brains plays a fellow washed up silent movie star named Lucky Day and Martin Short aka that cute little annoying guy from SCTV as Ned Nederlander. This was the comedy apex, hot on the heals of GhostBusters where it was proven that although two comedians are good, three are better. Plus, it was written and produced by Steve Martin. A classic. I don't even need a trailer for this one so instead here's My Little Buttercup

Bonus clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5T8FJ7TldU

Last Minute Substitution; uh...now we are getting into the dreaded sequel to the sequel of a great movie territory which gives you a lot of sucky movies to choose from. So instead, let's go full cowboy; 3:10 To Yuma as both Russell Crowe and Christian Bale have yet to make an appearance this Christmas season.   

The Two Towers   If I could only have one LOTR movie it would have to be the 2nd installment, in my opinion the best sequel since  Empire Strikes Back and also luckily happens to fit the article's theme I remember the giant trees, the battle of Helm's Deep, and Gollum having a conversation with himself, which at the time i think was a groundbreaking way to portray split personalities and has since been copied many times. It was a great movie that really lead nowhere, but had it's own stories within it.     

The Trailer

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wek5UClasY8

Hellz yeah! Makes me want to sit through the entire 12 hour trilogy again. Time and pop culture have now made it look like a condensed version of Game of Thrones, only with actual fighting and great CGI and intense melodramatic soundtrack. It's got it all, if all you want elves, orcs, catapults, sweeping pans of New Zealand countryside and Aragon opening those giant doors to maximum effect. A great way to spend an evening forgetting Christmas is just around the corner.  

Last Minute Substitution; Miss Congeniality 2, Armed and Fabulous.  In the world of sequels to good movies there are a lot of great ones, most famous being Terminator 2 but let's assume for the moment that you are getting pretty tired of all the testosterone I've thrown at you. Instead, so close to Christmas why not just relax with a real no-brainer starring the previously mentioned Sandra Bullock, looking as young then as she did way back then. Complete brain candy with some eye candy for both sexes with Bullock and a younger version of Ron Swanson. 

And finally, what to watch on Christmas Eve? How about...

Year One

Let's celebrate all things Jewish with this Micheal Cera/Jack Black bit of comedic stupidity directed by the legendary Harold Ramis. Cera was all over the place after Arrested Development ended it's glorious initial run. He looked to be a shoe-in for every role that involved a 'mopy, expressionless young character' but instead, he lost out in that closer than expected race to Social Network's Jesse Eisenberg. Yet despite the Jesse doppelganger tag, Cera has starred in three great comedies to underappreciated or not yet acknowledged critical acclaim, Arrested Development, this one and then went on to nearly extinguish his movie career in the cult-classic (yes, it will be) Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Year One is a basic fish out of water story but good for a few Old Testament laughs, especially if you have questions about circumcision, what happened after Cain killed Abel and the difference between Sodom and Gomorrah. Lots of cameos by other semi-famous funny people as well.

The Trailer;  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qHWVW52XDI

Man, a lot of great one-liners i didn't remember. Maybe because I was pretty stoned, but not like the way they refer to it in the film. Cera plays George Michael at his finest, while Jack Black manages to still come across as your creepy single uncle you don't want to hang out with but kind of do. It has the feel of the Life Of Brian, but earlier because it's more mocking The Old Testament as opposed to the New. So technically, this is year one of the Jewish calendar, not the Gregorian-Christian one we base our lives around now.

Last Minute Substitution; The One. Just pretend this is the true story of Christmas, Jet Li is the real Jesus Christ and let your mind explode with all that could have been if they made this into a Christmas martial arts movie because really...there isn't one.

That's it; 12 classic and not-so-classic movies to help get you through the Christmas season. Hope it helps.