I’ll admit I’d rather walk on burning coals than suffer a marathon of Lifetime/Hallmark-type holiday movies. But the genre hasn’t all been bad—Christmas-themed films have occasionally earned their climactic waterfall of happy tears, if only by laying on thick the suffering it took to get there (as in perennial It’s A Wonderful Life, a not-so-merry story for most of its 130 minutes) or stressing the dysfunctional-family stress the season tends to bring out (an excellent example is Arnaud Desplechin’s 2008 French seriocomedy A Christmas Tale, which has some of the funniest, most well-deserved slaps in screen history).
Of course family can be a curse and/or blessing at any time of the year, however you define the term. Some upsides and downsides are probed in several new films—plus a couple revived oldies specifically tied to Xmas.
Family Game
Not to be confused with a well-regarded Japanese satire of the same name from 40 years ago, this drama from Quebecois writer-director Rafael Ouellet, which was originally called Arsenault & Fils, is about the kind of family identity one longs to escape. At least that’s the case for bearish, good-hearted Adam (Guillaume Cyr), who’d be happy just to labor at the auto garage—but that business is merely a cover for the Arsenaults’ real trade as game poachers, an illegal profession they’ve practiced for generations. Now they’re the last clan in rural Temiscouata to keep hunting out of season and otherwise violating the law. With the authorities closing in, it’s the time to go legit, before it’s too late.
Unfortunately, Adam’s father (Luc Picard) and grandfather (Julien Poulin), among others, are too accustomed to the easy money of selling contraband moose meat and such. Worse still, younger brother Anthony (Pierre-Pau Alain) is a determinedly criminal, volatile ne’er-do-well whose misdeeds hardly stop at poaching. The siblings are distracted by the arrival of Emilie (Karine Vanasse), whom one approaches with shy friendliness, the other with leers, insults, and stalking. Ostensibly here to work at the local radio station, she actually has a different, secretive mission—and strings along both young men to fulfill its purpose.
With its air of impending betrayal and tragedy, this is to a point like a rural French-language version of Donnie Brasco, one of the great (if most underappreciated) US mob movies. But Ouellet has some tricks up his sleeve—the narrative doesn’t ultimately go where you’ve been expecting. There are further surprises en route, like a hallucinatory sequence where Anthony and Emilie do shrooms in the woods. Getting belated, low-key Stateside distribution (it opened in Canada mid-2022), Family Game is both juicy and nuanced, a crime saga that leaves an unusually poignant aftertaste. Dark Star Pictures releases it to digital platforms and DVD on Tues/12.
Our Son
More likely to attract viewers’ attention is this new US drama from Bill Oliver, whose prior feature Jonathan (also co-written with Peter Nickowitz) was an intriguing and subtle spin on the dual-identity narrative. Subtlety is not the strong point to this somewhat disappointing sophomore feature, however. Billy Porter and Luke Evans play Gabriel and Nicky, a gay Manhattan couple raising 8-year-old Owen (Christopher Woodley), whose conception and birth they arranged via surrogacy.
But while Gabe is OK with having given up his hopes of an acting career to be a doting, full-time parent, publisher Nicky is a driven workaholic who neglects his husband and seems almost coldly indifferent to their child. Nonetheless, he’s very bitter when Gabe announces he wants a divorce, enough so that a custody battle ensues—though Nicky isn’t much of a father, and Owen would certainly prefer to be with his other dad.
Eventually this somewhat resembles a gay Kramer vs. Kramer, as circumstances force Nicky to step up his parenting game, and become a better person in the bargain. But while competently crafted, Our Son is a maudlin, simplistic stacked deck, with Evans stuck playing a stereotypically selfish, tone-deaf white guppie, while Porter—a formidable musical performer, but rather hard to take as a dramatic actor here—is all loving saintliness. They and various supporting players (including Robin Weigert, Andrew Rannells, and Phylicia Rashad) frequently recite labored explanatory dialogue that feels like it was vetted through a non-profit advocacy PR firm. The slick results will resonate for some, but they felt artificial to me. Vertical releases Our Son to On Demand platforms Fri/15.
Immediate Family
An entirely different kind of “chosen family” is the subject of this new documentary from the makers of 2008’s The Wrecking Crew, which was about the jazz-trained session musicians who played on an astonishing number of rock and pop Top 40 hits in the 1960s. By the end of that decade, however, it was becoming uncool for acts to have anonymous veterans do the “real” playing on their records. Music was now supposed to be organic, “pure,” with stars of the emerging singer-songwriter vogue like James Taylor and Carole King insisting on utilizing instrumentalists they had ongoing collaborative relationships with.
Four of those musicians—Danny Kortchmar, Leland Sklar, Russ Kunkel, and Waddy Wachtel—became fabled figures themselves, contributing to so many major recordings and becoming such familiar tour personnel (for Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and others) that they developed their own fan base. It also helped that in the 1970s major labels began listing the players for studio albums on their back covers, so every fan of mainstream Me Decade releases became familiar with their names. A half century later, the four are still working together.
You may be surprised by some of the projects they contributed to over the years, which extend way beyond vintage granola rock to 80s synth pop and much more recent hits. Evidently they’ve always gotten along just fine, which may be one reason why Immediate Family (also the name of their current concert unit) comes off a bit blander than The Wrecking Crew did. Nonetheless, it goes down very easily, abetted by myriad performance clips, some animation, and interviews with a starry roster including Don Henley, Lyle Lovett, Peter Asher, Phil Collins, Lou Adler, Stevie Nicks, David Crosby, Neil Young, Keith Richards, et al. The doc plays a single night at theaters nationwide on Tues/12, then releases to On Demand platforms Fri/15.
Holiday Horrors: Killer aliens, Murder Santa, the wages of sin
Three lurid revivals will spike your eggnog but good. An atypically dark-haired Dolph Lundgren is actually not the towering platinum-haired killer immigrant (that role is played by Matthew Hues) in the 1990 Terminator knockoff variously known as Dark Angel and I Come in Peace. Instead, he’s a cranky Houston cop put through the wringer when that burg gets terrorized not just by “yuppie criminals” known as The White Boys, but an unstoppable humanoid space alien who drains human victims of their brain fluid (as a party drug for the folks back home!), and is itself being chased by a good space alien (Jay Bilas).
Craig R. Baxley’s film has no original ideas, but it is energetic and well-produced, pouring on the stunt-filled action setpieces like an inevitable car chase through a mall during peak Xmas shopping season. It plays Alamo Drafthouse’s “Weird Wednesday” on Wed/13 (more info here).
The same venue’s “Terror Tuesday” on Dec. 19 (more info here) brings the preceding year’s Dial Code Santa Claus aka Deadly Game saka Game Over aka 3615 Code Pere Noel, which—you guessed it—was France’s answer to such bad-taste US Santa slashers as Silent Night, Deadly Night and Christmas Evil. Actually, it’s considerably more interesting, however, as Rene Manzor’s film starts out like a gauzily shot, brightly colored family film, then gets much nastier than you’re expecting.
Mullet-haired rich brat Thomas (Alain Lalanne), only child to a department store magnate (Brigitte Fossey), has been allowed to turn their mansion into a playground of fantasy sets, hidden passages, and trap doors. When mom fires one psychotic Santa (Patrick Floersheim) in her employ, he decides to take his revenge on Junior—who is, admittedly, a formidable foe. Once Home Alone came out, Manzor accused its makers of ripping off his general concept. But this is a much darker film, which you’ll realize when upon first arriving, Santa gets an unfriendly greeting from Thomas’ dog… which he stabs to death.
Not especially tied to any holiday, but quite the naughty treat to stuff your stocking with nonetheless, is Emilio Fernandez’s 1951 Victims of Sin, a newly restored classic from the “golden age” of Mexican cinema. Mixing noir, musical and weepy melodrama, it has swivel-hipped, point-nosed Cuban emigre Ninon Seville (one of the medium’s least convincing blondes) as Violeta, a cabaret dancer whose adoption of a baby found in a garbage can stirs all kinds of trouble in the criminal underworld she’s a reluctant part of. A zesty star who refused Hollywood offers, Seville flourished for a time in just this kind of hothouse soap opera, and Victimas del pecado is arguably her finest hour. It plays BAMPFA (more info here) in Berkeley on Thurs/14 (and again on Jan. 24), plus the Roxie on Sat/16 (more info here) and the Smith Rafael Film Center (more info here) this Sun/17.
