During A Shiftworker's Christmas In Wales, A Provocative Thought About It's A Wonderful Life

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well I spent the morning/early afternoon of Christmas Day at work. Personally have no problems with that. However on returning to the apartment needed to quickly freshen up and join the rest of the family at brother-in-law's and partner's house who had kindly invited us (amongst others I should stress) to have Christmas dinner there.

(And before any of you query why I, a man who could not call himself Mr Christmas, was happy to go there. The answer's simple. Whatever my belief I wasn't going to spoil the day for daughter, wife and mother)

But during the dinner (which was excellent by the way), as I knew it would, the long day took it's toil and found myself being half asleep at the table. Not completely enough for everyone else to notice, but enough for wife/mother to jolt me up.

The thing though is this. Sometimes in this twilight zone between sleep and the life and soul of whatever party a book lover can have my brain sometimes can have some out of the way thoughts. It did that moment. It concerned the movie It's A Wonderful Life, recently voted Britain's number one Christmas film.

Thing is...breathe in.....it's not really a Christmas film...….and breathe out again.

Now I'm not saying it's not great and of course it's set at Christmas. So it does of course have the trimmings of tinsel. But just like the debate on the original Die Hard it fails when put to one simple test.

Could the story be set at any other time of the year? And the answer is yes.

After all James Stewart is about to commit suicide because of the troubles in his savings business and the person sent to show what life would have been like without him is not Santa, oh no ho ho. It's an angel.

If you think of the film which came I think second in the poll, Love Actually, now that is a Christmas movie. Personally I don't like it. I think of it as a piece of well packaged nothing. But it is cleverly made. The reason probably why the writer set most of it around Christmas is that he knew whether for good or bad it's a time of year when our emotions are heightened as we take stock of the year that's gone and where your life is now.

Sometimes you know my brain works in mysterious ways.

Until the next time.

The Near Midnight Meanderings On A Movie With A Microwave Meal Part 7: Pistol Whipped (2008)

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

It's funny how some of  the movies I'm getting to watch in this random choice for this occasional chat seem connected. After all we have had two James Stewart movies and now we're on our second Steven Seagal.

Here though his presence is dominates the screen as usual. For what we see is fat Steven Seagal. Steven Seagal with a double chin. Other actors in this film are lucky to be noticed for he puts a whole new meaning to the word widescreen.

Now you might accuse me of bring hypocritical. I've never hidden that I'm not exactly slim in the body department either. But I've never been an actor in an action movie. And, more crucially I've never been an fat actor in an action movie beating off bad guys a lot of whom are old enough to be my grandson.

In one fight scene an Asian bad guy attempts to use martial arts to beat Seagal. What does Michelin Man do? He pushes him off with his paunch

Fighting aside Seagal's character is not perfect. Drummed off the police for suspicion of being dirty, divorced, a drunk, a gambler. A bad gambler at that. He has debts. Those debts are taken by a shadowy government department. We know it's shadowy because for a lot of the movie the face of it's boss is in shadows.

To honour his debts Segal has to kill bad guys that justice somehow couldn't reach. There essentially you have the plot. He tails these bad guys. He tails these bad guys with a Range Rover and his stomach. Yet their security guys still don't notice him. Perhaps they should borrow my glasses.

This movie seems to shot through fifty shades of grim grey. I literally mean the colour. Perhaps they couldn't afford, I don't know, lighting.

Oh and one other thing about the so called plot. The big reveal is not a surprise. It was as obvious as the arrival of a carnival from around a corner.

It's such a bad film that I suspect it went straight to  DVD Bargain basement. I did wonder whether if Steven Seagal from Under Siege had played it I'd have liked it better. The answer is no. For whilst it would be still rubbish it just wouldn't be as funny.

Until the next time.

The Near Midnight Meanderings On A Movie With A Microwave Meal Part 4: The Mountain road (1960)

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

So you wait for one James Stewart movie to come along on the TV and then two come in relatively quick succession.

This time he plays an army engineer in China in World war 2, charged with his group with blowing things up to delay the advancing Japanese. Personally I didn't know that the Americans were in China at that time. Doesn't matter either way in relation to this movie. Neither I suppose is the fact that the Communists and anti-communist factions in China fought against Japan. For the most part nuance does not play a part here.

It's also in black and white. Which for me for that time is surprising given that James Stewart is a star. You would have thought that for a film with obviously a lot of explosions in it colour would have been better.

Co-opted into the group is the widow of a Chinese soldier. Presumably there to play "mysterious Chinese woman" which there always seems to be in American films. She is quiet one moment only to surprise the group by speaking English!

There are moments when I wonder whether this movie is quietly racist. It definitely tries to unfurl the star spangled banner. American roads apparently are better than Chinese roads because there are no natural disasters there. What? Ask that to people who's lives were destroyed by forest fires. James Stewart says not to worry as America will come back and build roads. Really?

There is also a scene where the American soldiers are shocked by the Chinese villagers acting feral when presented with stocks of food. Well what did they expect? When you live in a place racked by starvation and war civilisation has to take a back seat.

Commercial Break: There are a series of ads for a Vanquis Credit Card. It's set in a Game of Thrones sort of  medieval world (without dragons) where some people live in castles and others live in huts.

And yet in this world some kind of mysterious knight type figure producing a Vanquis Credit Card or a tablet to illustrate how to get one. Well how exactly in this medieval world was the infrastructure for a Wi-fi and credit card network built?

Also If you live in a hut it would be interesting to see whether Vanquis would accept your application.

Back to the movie.

The biggest problem with The Mountain Road is the lack of tension. In terms of the plot only once was I taken by surprise.

Also this is the second movie I've recently watched where James Stewart (described as "young" by a Chinese general probably about the same age as him) really was unimpressive. It made me wonder whether those films where I liked his performance in were linked by having famous directors. Something I'll be looking at in the next film of his I'd happen to see.

The other surprise was the penultimate scene which gets all reflective. But to be honest it was all too late given what happened before.

Not a movie I'd be seeing again.

Until the next time.

The Near Midnight Meanderings On A Movie With A Microwave Meal Part 2: Night Passage (1957)

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well continuing this relatively new haphazard series of me watching a film in segments after returning home late at night from the evening shift at work we come to this. A 1957 Widescreen western starring James Stewart and Audie Murphy.

In the days when televisions were black and white and (as they were not widescreen - you youngsters really don't know how lucky you are) they could only show a small part of the movie picture films were made like this to be as panoramic and colourful as possible to show the cinema going public what they were missing. This is a good example. If you want to see Panoramic American countryside time and time again then this is the movie for you.

Essentially the plot is this. Trains carrying wages for railway workers building the railroad are being robbed by an armed gang. Stewart a down on his luck ex railroad guy is hired to carry these wages on the latest journey. And when I say down on his luck, he had to eek out a living playing the accordion and singing for next to nothing. James Stewart was an actor of considerable talents. But what this movie revealed was that singing was not one of them.

So when he's offered the job he does it. Not for the money but because "you belong to the railroad and it belongs to you"....yeah right.

Audie Murphy is Stewart's estranged brother and of course part of the train robbing gang. He is, ahem, on the wrong part of the railway tracks. Of course to believe that Stewart and Murphy are brothers even if Murphy describes himself as a "kid brother" really stretches your imagination. It was a good thing when I watched it that I was half asleep.

And the thing is. The biggest and only surprise in this film is that Audie Murphy is actually the better actor than Stewart. He gets to kiss the girl. He gets to say to Elaine Stewart (with blonde hair that seemingly was lacquered to death in the way it defied gravity) "Want to ride with me?" with a straight face (seemingly referring to going on a horse. The answer in either case was no). He is having fun.

Commercial Break time: You know when you're growing old when you remember the man selling the opportunity to reclaim PPI  for Gladstone Brookes when he was younger as well. Boy he's growing old. I remember the first ad for them. It was so rude. Practically calling the viewer an idiot if he/she didn't contact them.

Back to the film.

A word about it's title. There's no journey by railroad or otherwise in the night at all in this film (except in one very low key way). Why it was called Night Passage is beyond me.

Audie Murphy may have been the best thing about this movie (and he was) but he didn't save it. Not an awful picture. Just you felt at the end you could have done something better. As if you've wasted precious moments of your life watching it.

Until the next time.