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The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "A Christmas Story"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 20:30:00 GMT

A strange concatenation of circumstances hit me today -- it's Christmas Day 2008 at 9:45 AM as I write this. One was obvious, and one was tenuous, but both had a deep impact in my consideration of this, the last film I watched several weeks ago for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon and the last Christmas film I'll be posting about this year. The first was the discovery that a friend of mine, who hosts an excellent radio show in Chicago on the nexus of politics and popular culture, recently presented a special Christmas episode in which the central question was: has A Christmas Story replaced It's a Wonderful Life as America's most beloved Christmas movie?

On the surface, it's a pretty strange question. As often as it's shown -- and that's pretty damned often -- Bob Clark's endlessly re-watchable, terrifically funny tale of a young boy's Midwestern holiday misadventures in the late 1940s has never had the cultural ubiquity that Frank Capra's classic had during the years it was out of copyright. It can hardly be called contemporary anymore; it was made 25 years ago (as celebrated in a deluxe new DVD release that's highly recommended by this writer) and was set only a few years after It's a Wonderful Life. And the older film is a genuine four-star cinematic acheivment, directed by one of the towering talents of the Golden Age of Hollywood, made for a significant amount of money and starring some of the greatest screen stars of the day.

A Christmas Story, on the other hand, was directed by the guy best known for doing Porky's and who went on to direct tripe like Turk-182 and Super-Babies: Baby Geniuses 2. His previous holiday movie was the notorious Christmas horror flick Black Christmas. His stars were a seasoned TV pro, a veteran character actress, an untested child star, and two other kids who went on to have no career and a career as a porn star, respectively, with not a superstar in the mix. It didn't come close to delivering any message, any social meaning or psychological boosts of the sort that Capra's film was designed to instill. And, unlike the endlessly parodied and riffed-upon It's a Wonderful Life, it seemed to have little impact outside of its own: it was a singular thing, a ding an sich which could only be contemplated as itself.

And yet, if pressed, I'd agree: A Christmas Story really has supplanted It's a Wonderful Life as the go-to Christmas movie, very likely because of its singularity and uniqueness. Because it's been so endlessly parodied, the Capra film is hard to contemplate on its own, while Bob Clark's film is almost spoof-proof by design. For many, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed will always occuply some other role in their minds, but Peter Billingsley will be little Ralphie Parker for all eternity. Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon are so completely pitch-perfect in their roles that they will occupy them forever. And A Christmas Story's lack of ambition -- its small-scale determinance to do nothing but tell its simple story, so wonderfully crafted by Jean Shepherd, leaves it no chance to be bloated or hokey, simply funny and warm without cease.

The second, and more distant, event that influenced my writing of this entry was the death of Harold Pinter. What the news of the demise of a cerebral British playwright has to do with my appreciation of A Christmas Story might not be immediately apparent, but it's not as strange as it seems: Pinter not only pioneered the dysfunctional family drama which resonates so in the film, but he also was an early adopter of the comedy of discomfort and humiliation, with his use of the famed "Pinter pause" and the constant black comedy that can be wrought from embarrassment. Shepherd, writing in 1966 -- around the same time Pinter was doing much of his best work -- understood that sort of comedy perfectly: although his end result is heartwarming rather than soul-searing, almost all the laughs in A Christmas Story come from failure, despair, humiliation, defeat, and disappointment. It even culminates with Billingsley learning that most Pinterian of lessons: you can get what you want and still not be happy, whether what you want is a family or a Red Ryder BB gun.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An unquenchable 12 drummers drumming. There's simply no better holiday viewing to be had. Merry Christmas, readers -- and thanks for your support, as always.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: Bad Santa

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Okay, so there's a new Uwe Boll movie coming out. Big deal, says we. Sure, we're curious about how the Teutonic uber-hack managed to get Dave Foley to star in his new film (Postal, opening in limited release today). And sure, we're even more curious about how he got Dave Foley to do a nude scene. And yes, we must admit that there is something oddly compelling about a filmmaker so universally reviled that a chewing gum manufacturer has helped sponsor a petition to get him to stop directing movies, and who is himself so adamant that he is a cinematical genius that he has challenged his critics to meet him in the boxing ring. But however rotten this German-come-lately may be -- and he's plenty rotten -- for us here at the Screengrab, there is only one true heir to the crappy moviemaking throne vacated by Ed Wood, and that man's name is Albert Pyun. The Hack From Hawaii -- who directed his first film in 1982, only four years after Ed Wood's death -- has been responsible for over forty films and direct-to-video releases, at least one of which has already turned up on movie janitor Scott Von Doviak's "Unwatchable" list. Both in his ridiculously prolific output and his utter lack of talent and shame, Albert Pyun leaves Uwe Boll in the dust. So instead of trying to find a theater willing to screen Postal this weekend, why not settle down for a film festival with our man Big Al? To help you in this terrifying endeavor, we've assembled a list of five of Pyun's best works -- and we use the word "best" in the loosest possible application to which the word has ever been put.

THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982)

Albert Pyun's first screen credit -- as both director and writer -- is a real doozy that sets the tone for his innumerable too-cheap-to-be-camp movies to come. A standard-issue steel-and-spells epic ripped straight out of Albert's Friday night dorm room Dungeons & Dragons games, The Sword and the Sorcerer cost about nine dollars to make, with a script too dull for TV and special effects that would have seemed hokey in 1972. The real treat here is the cavalcade of has-beens populating the cast: there's well-past-his-prime teen idol George Maharis, his suntan decaying before our very eyes; future Murphy Brown fixture Joe Regalbuto; hulking, self-serious Night Court golem Richard Moll; coked-out Nina Van Pallandt, a million miles from The Long Goodbye; unreconstructed manimal Simon McCorkindale; and, in the lead, none other than Matt Houston star Lee Horsley! Sadly, this collection of fourth-stringers would be the hottest cast Pyun would ever work with. It would be all downhill from here.

CAPTAIN AMERICA (1990)

Oh, sure, everyone wants to see superhero movies now. But we can remember a time when the mere whiff of a mask or cowl was the kiss of death at the box office, largely because of grade-Z capesploitation movies like this. Never before have the adventures of America's living legend, super-soldier Steve Rogers, seemed so completely perfunctory; even Matt Salinger, whose career wouldn't exactly reach to the stratosphere after this dud, doesn't seem to be any happier about being Captain America than we are about having to watch him be Captain America. Still, he's at least better than nonentity Scott Paulin, hamming it up beyond belief as the supervillainous Nazi the Red Skull, while industry vets like Ronny Cox and Darren McGavin stand around sheepishly trying not to look embarrassed. Captain America rides his tricked-out motorbike around a lot, says "shucks" and "gee whiz", and the audience hits pause on the remote control to see if there are any uppers left in the medicine cabinet to get them through the longest 97 minutes of their lives.

KICKBOXER 2: THE ROAD BACK (1991)

Our own movie janitor Scott Von Doviak has already been forced to contend with one of Albert Pyun's cinematic abortions in the form of Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor. But not only is that not one of Albert Pyun's worst movies, it's arguably not even Albert Pyun's worst movie with the word "kickboxer" in the title. That dubious honor may just belong to Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, featuring hand-carved dingaling Sasha Mitchell as a man hoping to follow in his brother's footsteps in the highly lucrative career of kicking people in the face. Featuring some of the worst dialogue in the history of kickboxing films, Kickboxer 2 manages the astonishing trick of not only featuring both Peter Boyle and Brian Austin Green, but making you feel sorry for both of them. It's an agonizing wait between kickboxing scenes, but the bits of plot and dialogue are so abysmal you'll begin praying for another kickfight to break out. The movie's tagline was "Put up, shut up, or die!", but sadly, Pyun did none of those things.

BRAIN SMASHER...A LOVE STORY (1994)

By the time this movie rolled around, Albert Pyun had truly found his metier: cheap, exploitative direct-to-video releases timed to take the slightest possible advantage of the flavor of the moment. Or, in this case, the flavor of many, many moments ago. It's a testament to Pyun's impenetrable thickness as an auteur that he decided the moment was right to write and direct an action movie built around the antics of faux-goombah Andrew Dice Clay some three years after the Dice-Man's star had already begun quite seriously to wane. Plodding along in a nebulous phantom zone between sincerity and irony, this half-joking action flick was clearly made by someone who understood neither sincerity nor irony, and the result is an enervating mess that isn't even gleefully offensive, the one quality Dice Clay's standup had going for it; it's just dull. Still, you have to give it up: as much as you might hate this movie -- and you'll hate it, a lot -- you gotta love that title.

URBAN MENACE (1999)

The staggeringly bad Urban Menace was not the first abysmal hip-hop action/horror flick that Albert Pyun would make. It was also not the last. But it was, without question, the absolute worst. The closest thing in Pyun's bloated catalog, in both technique and spirit, to the godawful films of Ed Wood, Urban Menace stars Snoop Doggy Dogg's highly unconvincing stunt double in a movie that knows how bad it sucks and simply doesn't give a shit. The majority of its running time features the stars running around aimlessly in an abandonded warehouse; the script probably took less time to write than the movie takes to watch; and the best thing you can say about the acting is that, in the case of rapper Fat Joe, at least his lines are delivered with such mush-mouthed incompetence that it spares you from having to hear any more of the terrible dialogue. (The film, amazingly, claims four different scriptwriters. Which one of the four will own up to "We got a whole army of motherfuckers and we can still get punished by this skinny guy psycho?")