So This Is Christmas Leftovers: Kent Edition

In prior years, when we'd do the XMas Advent Calendar, I would go a little overboard in preparing.  I would sit down sometime in late-October or early-November and scroll through all the upcoming Hallmark, Lifetime and other channel Hallmarkies looking for the intriguing or different ones based off the cast list and one short paragraph descriptions.  It wound up being a lot.  I would start watching Hallmarkies in November and keep watching them, certainly seeing more than the allotted 12 I'd need for the Advent Calendar.  I overdid it last year, and it was like gorging on something to the point of barfing, I became a little averse to them this year.  I made a plan for the Advent Calendar, a list of 12 movies or specials with a couple alternates.  I mostly adhered to it, but a couple of things I watched didn't pan out as something worth writing about.  Like the "Christmas At Sandringham" special on CBC Gem, which I was going to do as my follow-up to A Royal Corgi Christmas.  For some reason, in my head, I thought this was going to be the actual Queen (RIP) taking the viewer through a tour of her Christmas house at Sandringham.  I don't know why I would think such a thing. This was a talking heads "tour" of Christmas with the house of Windsor family of Royals (by the tenor of such things this was made just before Harry and Meghan flipped the family the bird and fucked off to California) led by former caterers and employees, Royal watchers and comedians.  Having recently blitzed the latest season of the Crown, it did put a few things into context, but it also reaffirmed the excesses of the Royal family (a staff of 200 required to put on a Christmas dinner for one family of 25 people? Fuck off).

Netflix's Murderville returns with the special Who Killed Santa: A Murderville Murder Mystery was a more drawn-out episode of the series, with not just one celebrity "rookie detective" accompanying Will Arnett's bumbling senior detective Terry Seattle, but two, in the form of Jason Bateman, and Maya Rudolph.  Rudolph joins part way through the affair, which seems unfair, given that part of the point is the celebrity is supposed to figure out who the murderer is based on the clues presented to them.  Bringing out a third, surprise celebrity rookie detective late in the third act just before it's time to pick which of the suspects is the murderer makes for some pretty funny twists, but it also like the Murderville team saying they're already kind of bored with the premise they've established for the show.  That there's no honest guess that Rudolph or celeb #3 could make means their selections are, yes, rediculous but as valid as the chance they've been given.  Sean Hayes, Kurt Braunholer, and Eliza Coupe also guest star as suspects and murder victims.  It has some exceptionally funny moments, and, frankly I think this episode might be funnier than any of the previous, but I wonder if the formula has already run out of gas.

Speaking of Will Arnett, a 3-part Lego Masters holiday special was a bit of a bust.  Four returning competitors from the past 3 seasons of Lego Masters are paired up with four small-c celebrities (certainly not of the Jason Bateman/Maya Rudolph caliber) with little Lego-building experience to compete in three builds for a charity win. It really highlights how the competition/elimination format of Lego Masters is a necessary part of the show's appeal.  I just wasn't into this, fast forwarding to the judging of the builds.  Perhaps the Lego Builders were teaching the celebrities some tips and tricks about Lego building but I couldn't be bothered to find out.

The podcast How Did This Get Made did an episode on Mar Vista's The 12 Pups of Christmas (2019, d. Michael Feifer - CBC Gem), an off-brand Hallmarkie that is, in the parlance of HDTGM, bonkers.  It starts with Erin, a New York pet therapist (the third pet therapist I've seen in a Hallmarkie this season, and the second from a Mar Vista picture) learning, on her wedding day the day after Thanksgiving, that her fiancee has been sleeping with her best friend, then leaving to her new job in San Francisco which she had already accepted before the wedding fell apart.  The company is a "tech startup" working in designing tracking collars, but they've been at it for a year and the thing is still a brick. She meets the boss, who's a bit prickly, and he charges her with helping find homes for the 12 puppies who were left behind after a photo shoot. Erin is settled into her new, fully furnished apartment, which is in a house where, like, half the company lives. They insist they're like a family, and it feels cult-ish, but Erin is into it.  Her and the boss start spending time together giving away puppies, and Erin (a pet-therapist, remember) revolutionizes the company with her various ideas. Things get intriguing when Erin's former best friend turns up on her doorstep begging forgiveness, and the worm turns even more when boss-man insists Erin go with him to present to the primary investor...in New York, where they fall in love (or, rather, he falls in love and she seems to go along with it) and then her ex turns up in the hotel lobby and he and the boss man get into a fist fight (yes, actual violence in a Hallmarkie).  And that's just a minuscule offering of the absurdities this film has to offer.  Lead actor Charlotte Sullivan is the lynchpin of this film's appeal.  At first her sleepy-eyed, monotonal performance seems way too subdued to draw us into caring about Erin's journey much at all (she seems so disaffected by everything) but at a certain point it becomes readily apparent that there's a sublimely savvy comedic performance, dryer-than-dry, happening here, and unfortunately nobody else is working on her same level. The rest of the cast are operating on the level of a genuine Hallmarkie, whereas Sullivan is basically subverting the whole production, with Erin being a satire of the conventional Hallmarkie lead.  Don't get me wrong, this is not a good movie, but it's ridiculously entertaining.  Honestly, I'd probably watch it again.

And finally, there's Adult Swim Yule Log (2022, d. Casper Kelly - Cartoon Network), which begins like your stereotypical fireplace image of burning wood, crackling away, with an instrumental recording of "Good King Wenceslas" playing over top.  But, are those the sounds of a car driving up in the background? Car doors slamming shut? The sounds of the cabin door opening, the music turns off, legs and bags and a vacuum cleaner step into frame and then out again.  The vacuum cleaner becomes the soundtrack over the crackling fire.  A phone call.  A knock at the door.  Hillbillies.  Murder.  Cleanup...and then, time to go, as more people arrive.  A couple, one who adjusts the camera's lens to a wider shot of the room, as they talk, and he sets up a proposal, while, in the foreground the Hillbilly murder is seen peeking out from behind a door reflected in the distorted shape of a metal vase.  A knock at the door.  The sheriff's department. They're warning of murderer on the loose, and then extinguish the fire warning that the log on the fire came from a cursed tree, once used for lynching. After they leave, the couple argue, anxieties risen.  Weird glimpses into other times pass across the screen.  But they're once again interrupted by a knock at the door.  A quartet of stoners arrive.  The place has been double booked.  Ooops.  They're true-crime podcasters, there to explore the many murders, curses, hauntings, and alien abductions that have happened in the area. Awkward chitter chatter but an agreement is made for the night, rooms assigned, and everyone splits up.  One goes off to shower, and we're left with static shot of the room and the unlit fire....which reignites itself, and the flame shoots out of the hearth towards the camera.  Raimi cam starts trailing throughout the (very, very nice) cabin, up the stairs, into the bathroom, through the shower curtain, and bashes in the head of the stoner showering.  And that's the first 20-ish minutes of the 91-minute horror movie from Adult Swim regular Casper Kelly (Too Many Cooks).  It's an exceptionally bizarre film that refuses to play by the rules, introducing no less than five different threats to the cottagers, taking time-traveling diversions into the fireplace, and just going way overboard in sometimes gross, sometimes scary, sometimes delightful, sometimes puzzling ways.  As a whole it's not boring, but I also don't know if it's an entirely successful production.  Given the static shot of the opening 20 minutes, the fake-out fireplace channel set-up, and the Hillbilly murderers, and then the layers upon layers of exposition and peculiarities introduced and generational traumas invoked, it's really hard to invest in the couple that are, ostensibly, the leads of the film (Andrea Liang and Justin Miles are both very likeable performers, however).  I had only heard a one line synopsis for this, a fireplace channel that becomes a horror movie, but for the first half I kept thinking that this would possibly have been better as a conceptually artistic horror movie (basically a radio play) where the lens never leaves the fireplace and we just hear everything that happens.  Of course Kelly's ambitions were much larger, and the second half of the film is a very weird smorgasbord that just keeps piling on top of itself in an admirable tour de force of craziness, absurdity and horror.  Best approached as a viewing exercise rather than as straight cinematic entertainment.  Mike Geier, aka Puddles Pity Party, sings the wonderfully operatic theme song that closes the film.