Film – Contrarium

Merry Christmas!

December 25, 2025 - By Tom

When I was a child, we didn’t have snow for Christmas. In fact, it was usually very hot, since I grew up in the Southern Hemisphere with December 25th falling on one of the hottest days of the year. One time it got to 42 degrees Celsius. Luckily we had a small swimming pool at our house.

My earliest memories from Christmas are from Argentina, in the house where we lived at the time. I remember mostly eating a lot and seeing a lot of family members I wouldn’t see for the rest of the year. Uncles, cousins, aunts. I don’t really remember any gifts I may have received at that time, or whether I liked them or not. But I remember the good moments filled with food and family.

I don’t know if I saw any religious significance in it at that time, or perhaps I was too young to think about it. But my parents used to put up a small Nativity scene, as it’s traditional in Argentina (my parents still do it, although on a smaller scale), so the Christian imagery wasn’t completely absent. Also, in Argentina, as in Spain, they used to celebrate Reyes too (Epiphany or the visit of the three Wise Kings) on January 6th, and I remember putting straw and a bowl of water by the door for the camels.

I don’t remember any particular Christmas tree, although I suppose we put them up. I have a vague remembrance of a general green-and-red decoration. I don’t even remember if Santa Claus came or not, or if anyone dressed like him. I think that the three Wise Kings were more important in Argentina back then, and Santa Claus only took over the holiday season later. But I remember spending time with family.

Was Christmas less commercial back then? I just rewatched “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, Charles Schulz’s masterpiece, and apparently the commercialization of Christmas was a concern already back in 1965, years before I was even born. And yet, I don’t remember it in my childhood being so much about receiving lots of gifts or buying a lot of stuff as it was about meeting with relatives, even distant ones that I hardly met otherwise.

Even as I grew up, it remained like that, and that’s why I always liked Christmas. For several years it was still possible in Christmas to meet with parents, siblings and other family members, even with everyone living in a different part of the world. This year is an exception. This year everyone is even farther away than usual, so, we’ll have to do with Skype. (No, sorry, Microsoft killed Skype. It will have to be some other similar video call service.)

I wish I had something deep or important to say. But I really don’t. I just wanted to note down a few random memories and to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

In the last few days, I made a short animation which was supposed to be a parody of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” — originally it would include a visit of the three ghosts to Mr. Scrooge — but, without time or resources, I had to simplify it a lot. I am not even sure the story makes sense now. But it is what it is. A call for world peace, I suppose, as naive as that sounds in this day and age.

Merry Christmas!

Film

A few recent movies

January 15, 2024 - By Tom

Sometimes I’m not completely sure if “they don’t make movies like they used to” or I am just getting old and grumpy. Probably a combination of both.

Yesterday I started watching “Everything Everywhere at the Same Time”, or however it’s called — you know what I’m talking about, as it won the previous Oscar and was on the top of the list at the BBC, NYT and many film magazines as “the best film of 2022”.

Well, I guess that’s why I don’t trust the NYT or BBC. I couldn’t stand more than 30 minutes of it.

The film was just too stupid and obnoxious. Plus, the overcomplicated but stupid plot wasn’t helped by having it explained by characters speaking English with a Chinese accent.

So I switched to Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast”, and the best I can say about it is that at least I could finish it.

But… Meh.

I mean, it’s not a completely bad film, I suppose it is well-done, but… Just a bit too mawkish, sentimental and fake to me, not to mention simplistic.

Yes, it’s supposed to be one of those “the complicated world of the adults as seen through the point of view of a child“ (as if we hadn’t seen tons of films like that), but the problem is that it’s not a real child, it’s a screenwriter’s view of a child. Children don’t talk like that. Hell, old people don’t talk like the grandfather and grandmother either. Sometimes artificiality can work too, but I don’t think it does in this case.

More on the technical side, the black-and-white cinematography is not even remarkable, just bland… And I love black and whit movies, except when they’re done for no other reason than to be “artsy” or “nostalgic”. (In this case, I think it was done just to copy “Roma”).

In terms of art direction… The street doesn’t seem authentic, but more like a backlot of a studio, which I suppose is what it was. Everybody is just too perfect, too good-looking, too good. Is that really how working-class Northern Ireland back in the 1960s looked like?

I don’t know, but I’d guess than in a real working-class neighbourhood of the time grandpa would be a raging alcoholic beating granny, the mom would be more of a whiny bitch and the father a gambler, the streets wouldn’t be so clean and shiny and riots wouldn’t be choreographed like in a musical. (For a more realistic example of real working-class life, see Bresson’s “Mouchette”)

And, finally, there’s the usual forced diversity with a black cop, an Indian shopkeeper, some sort of mixed-race teacher and a couple of Asian children… Sure, they are only background characters, you barely see them with the corner of your eye, but perhaps it’s even more insidious like this, like an attempt to get you to accept diversity through “subliminal conditioning”. Unless there is now a clause in the contracts for all Hollywood movies that you just have to hire at least some non-white characters in every film?

Regarding the historical point, I thought the following commenters from IMBD were right in their assessment of how the movie treated the issue of the “troubles”:

Kenneth Branagh does not claim that his family actively opposed vigilante violence or that they took risks to defend Catholic neighbors– which would have made for a compelling narrative of valor and self-sacrifice. Instead, we see that his father didn’t want his family conscripted into a Protestant mob (good on him) and sought a better life for all of them ‘across the water.’ Sincere congrats to them, but I’m not sure I detect either heroism or a valid movie premise here, and I certainly don’t detect any sophisticated or nuanced political/social commentary about the troubles.

And:

Second, and more seriously, the film maker is reducing a messy, tangled political morass into a Hollywood Western morality play as if the radical Protestants were Pure Evil and the moderate Protestants were, well, Gary Cooper (And, by the way, where are the friggin Catholics in this film? It’s like making a movie about the French and Indian War and leaving out the Indians).

Indeed — if, like me, you’re not Irish but you were expecting to learn more about the “troubles” in Ireland in the 1960s, this is not the right film for you.

So, any good movie recommendation? Well, I would recommend Bresson’s “Mouchette”, which I loved and will write more about later, but that’s from 1967. But I did watch and liked the recent Miyazaki movie, “The Boy and the Heron”. Sure, it is not as good as “Chihiro’s Journey” (aka “Spirited Away”) or “Ponyo” (I love this one, even though I think many don’t), and it has a slightly overcomplicated plot and some esoteric stuff which will probably fly over the head of all children and most adults, but it still has that old Miyazaki magic. So that’s my recommendation for you.