Xmas, Oops! -- I Mean Holiday Movies

(With A Something For The Li’l Ones Out On Break)

"The Preacher's Wife" with Denzel and Whitney Is Becoming A Perennial Holiday Treat

"Bad Santa", "Ice Harvest" Are At Other End Of Christmas Cinema Spectrum

• The Preacher's Wife

• Bad Santa

• The Family Stone

• Chronicles Of Narnia

• Reindeer Games

• Ice Harvest

Cinema Views often puts together helpful lists for the occasion, which can be special days such as Sweetest Day when we had the multi-part Black Love capsules and for Halloween when we did the Halloween Horror series of African Descended scary films on the Black hand side.

Christmas isn't quite there yet, but we have combed about and came up with something we think you'll like and can use when you head to the video store or movie theatre. This small list is just a start. There are other holiday themed movies that will be added, and with the vacations and school breaks there will be plenty of opportunities to catch up on your viewing. Click on http://Blackwebportal.com/wire as we update these holiday film listings over the next few days.

-- BAD SANTA -- "Bad Santa" is about a career criminal and wastrel who is fading fast, with a wrapped around story about his job ripping off the malls fat holiday receipts with his dwarf accomplice, the real brains behind the operation and quite upset with his partner's off game.

Bernie Mac is the security head who knows something isn't quite right with those two, or the brickhouse White girlfriend of the dwarf who plays a Santa elf, with the curly toe shoes, green hat, tights and all. Bernard McCullough of Chicago doesn't get as much screen time as the makers of the film would have you believe, despite the packaging or posters, just so you know.

This is a brutal and violent heist flick with Bernie Mack and Billy Bob Thornton, who makes it a point of playing criminals these days. Then again, he started out with movies like the released killer in "Sling Blade," and in the Arkansas-based "One False Move" as a stone drug house robber and killer with Michael Beach. He's also listed below in another holiday film of an offbeat nature in "Ice Harvest" which is still in the theatres.

Here BBT is the drunken boozy played-out department store Santa in a film that by no means should be family watching, especially the newly released "Badder Santa!" This one has the scenes put back in that were cut to get a theatrical "R" rating, such as Santa's stripper girlfriend.

In "The Apostle" the aptly named Billy Bob plays a racist Redneck who tried to bulldoze an integrated church led by fugitive Robert Duval. In "Levity" another of the little films that you should see, Thornton became the protégé of street preacher and social center operator Morgan Freeman, and selects a Goody-Girl Gone Bad Kirsten Dunst ("Bring It On", "Interview With The Vampire", "Spider Man") as his second.

-- THE FAMILY STONE -- A family gathering during the holidays is this ensemble film of some of the brightest rising young White stars today. Rachel McAdams is in it, she who made me a fan in one week with her "Red Eye" thriller and comedy "Wedding Crashers."

The holidays are hopping at the easygoing Stone house when a son brings his intended home for the family to see, and an ambitious Queen Bee with an itch has it in for her. Sarah Jessica Parker from Cable TVs "Sex and the City" is the anal-retentive fiancée of Dermot Mulroney. His parents are played by Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson; with siblings Adams; Claire Danes; Ty Giordano and Luke Wilson, the brother of Owen, her romantic interest in "Wedding Crashers."

We know the formula and how these things work out, but sometimes the makers of films throw in a twist or two. I freely admit they got me with "Forces of Nature" with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck.

It just might be with a concession to diversity and modernity. Brian White is the lone Black man and a Gay partner of Thad Stone, played by Giordano. Somehow I knew when I saw the poster that he wasn't with one of the daughters. They wish there were as many Homosexual Black men in this world. Keep dreaming. Only in the movies.

-- ICE HARVEST -- Christmas is only this film's continual backdrop in an after the fact heist flick which has more to do with the personal interactions among a bunch of untrustworthy people in the seamy underbelly of Wichita, Kansas.

Billy Bob Thornton has A Simple Plan, and needs mob lawyer John Cusack to carry it off. Their $2 million comes pretty easy, but now they have to get outta Dodge, or rather Wichita with their lives and the loot.

"Ice Harvest" is loaded with lots and lots of adult dialog, the kind that you have to have spent at least three decades on this planet to even begin to understand. Stuff about Trophy Wives and gold diggers, the emptiness when the days seem to be all the same and you fear this is it, and all that will be. And you have to decide to strike out, or accept it until you die.

Connie Nielsen gets to show off more of her sexiness than she has since walking around in light robes in "The Gladiator." She's played astronauts ("Mission To Mars") and military with John Travolta in "The General's Daughter" from the novel by Nelson DeMille. Here she's the femme fatale owner of a seedy strip club on the outskirts of town which are favourites of Our Hero. Cusack is still trying to get with her, and the holidays and family is getting to him, aside from the fact that he's ducking a mob contract killer who's been asking for him all over town.

"He works for my now former employer" Cusack tells the nonplused Thornton. "What is he doing here in Wichita?"

"He deals in pain. He makes people's elbows and knees bend the other way. Now here he is in Wichita, going around to all the places I go and asking everyone about me. What's he doing down here? Now, tonight and on Christmas Day? This concerns me," Cusack says with lawyerly understatement.

Cusack has played criminals before in films such as "The Grifters" and a hit man in "Grosse Point Blank" with his sister Joan ("Addams Family", "In and Out.") Much like me and his sister Joan, Cusack is a proud Midwesterner and booster who has a theatrical troupe in his native Chicago. He produced "Ice Harvest" and although the film says Wichita its really Waukegan Illinois, about 25 miles north of Chicago. Looking at the dried out and snowy cornfields it could pass for Kansas and no one would know. But this explained why there were so many strip clubs shown, which probably surprised the Wichitanians, or -ites. As falls Wichita, so falls Wichita Falls, as the jazz song says.

-- REINDEER GAMES -- Ben Affleck and Clarence Williams III are in this violent heist flick with Charlize Theron and Gary Sinise that is similar to "Bad Santa" in that the holidays are used as a ploy to rip off a casino near a popular mall in Michigan.

(I like it when they make movies about my part of the country. I long tired of the films that seem to always be based in Los Angeles of New York, and I'm starting to get irked at all the ones in Chicago too! And Toronto Canada, but they don't say that's where they are. They just truck in some Black people from Detroit, find some trash and some alleys and pretend its an American city.)

Ben Affleck is just a guy just out of jail on his way to spend Christmas day back home with his family and gets caught up when the heisters come calling at the casino he's at. This is one of the few times of the year when nobody much minds men wearing disguises, and they're going to use the season as their reason to hit the casino and empty the vault.

"Reindeer Games" isn't as adept as using the casino structure as well as Sinise's and Nicholas Cage's film of a few years ago. Here when they say its a casino you're taking their word for it.

Clarence Williams III plays a cold-hearted thug who was greased up and with a three day old growth of beard to cap off the effect. When he catches the newly escaped Affleck whom they no longer need and plan on killing Williams just says of his luck "God... is good." He is singularly unconflicted about his criminality.

Again this is not a family film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a good enough romp and there will be copies of it at the video store.

FOR THE KIDDIES, ON VACATION

-- CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE -- There has been no Christmas in the land of Narnia since the White Witch has taken over. Then when four children travel through a portal in a wardrobe closet and the snow start to melt they are fulfilling a prophecy:

Two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve are transformed from sheltered wartime evacuees from a besieged WWII London to sword fighting and arrow-slinging, knife-throwing warriors! A great film for kids, but with no people of colour. Even in England they have plenty, so what's the dealio?

But every kid or those who once were will thrill when the little ones grow into their powers and reach inside themselves for the qualities they must have for the success of their quest: faith, trust, honour, steadfastness and duty. You won't find a better film out now for the wee ones.

-- SNOW DAY -- Chris ____ ("There's Something About Mary", "Cabin Boy") is a snowplow operator who threatens to ruin a kids most favourite winter gift, a snow day from school!

"The Preacher's Wife"

By Kevin J. Walker, Film Critic

I said back when it first came out that this movie would be an annual Christmas season classic.

Wholesome, free of bad language and almost all gunplay, "The Preacher's Wife" is a sweet and involving movie for the holidays, and unlike "Soul Food" (with its scenes of stand-up sex against the wall and up on the sink!) is something the entire family can sit down together and watch.

Denzel Washington stars in this remake of a 1940s film as an angel sent down to assist the overworked pastor who is on the verge of losing his church and possibly his wife who is tired of the work, her inattentive husband, and a bunch of other things.

Courtney Vance is the pastor, in a rare comedy. He is suspicious of this newcomer, who sports fashionable clothes. "What kind of angel dresses like you do?"

"The kind of angel who wants to look good." And that was that. It put me in the mind of an old Harry Belafonte short telefilm "The Angel Levine" from a short story by a Jewish author about a man who is presented by a Black man who says he's his guardian angel. But he hangs out in dark bars and drinks during the afternoon, and with a beaten up hat he doesn't look the part. If anyone knew how one was supposed to look! Which is Dudley tells the Rev.

One of my favourite scenes that shows a greater sensitivity to people of faith is when a dialog free sequence shows the reverend attending to his flock, visiting the terminally ill in hospitals, and delivering meals to shut-ins; meanwhile his wife sings her heart out in a nightclub he was too busy to attend with her. This illustrates the stresses they are having; she gave up a promising career as a singer to be a Preacher's Wife, he feels a greater calling to his responsibilities as a pastor but is neglecting his duties as a husband and feels she's being selfish to want more. He really needed some help of the divine sort. Enter Denzel's Dudley.

Whitney gets to sing in the movie as the choir director and teamed with the Georgia Mass Choir, shot on location. She does more than gospel too, in a number in a club with her old collaborator played by Lionel Ritchie. To see her clear eyes sparkle and that voice that thrilled in so many records only underscores how far she's fallen. But Whitney's comeback is going to be The Bomb, just you watch. Have some faith.

Before Houston started to self-destruct (and no, we're not going to pile on and blame hubby Bobby Brown for that; maybe he's the only one keeping her afloat and alive) she played such wholesome roles, as the sort-of smart girlfriend in "Waiting To Exhale" and the threatened, stalked performer in the interracial romance "The Bodyguard" with Kevin Costner.

Here she is the wife of a pastor of a struggling inner city church, whose dwindling population is being tempted with becoming Buppified and moving out to Hollyhock Lane to a huge new megachurch to be constructed . The late Gregory Hines is the ambitious developer and church board member who is trying to get the congregation to see how they must modernize with the times, a move that is opposed by the reverend, who sees the church as the glue that holds the community together.

"What's going to happen to this neighborhood if we leave?" he asks the board, which is starting to get headaches from the smell of money they'll be getting. And the bigger parking spaces. And a new building, with changing rooms for the choir, who'll have a proper auditorium!

The point of being an Academy award winner is in the little things when talent shines through. When Dudley the angel uses his powers to fix Whitney's son's toy ambulance, the boy exults at all the flashing lights, siren sounds and other abilities it now has. "Wow -- it never did all that before!"

The worried look in Denzel's eyes as he claps his hand down and stops the racing vehicle when he realizes he has overstepped and possibly revealed a bit of his powers is precious!

"The Preacher's Wife" starts to get involved when Dudley realizes that he is conflicted because he realizes he wants the wife for himself! But like "King Kong" he can't have her, and frustration is the only certainty.

Next: More Christmas and/or Holiday Films

kevin j. walker

walkernet @ gmail dotcom