Leaderboard

I finished the miniseries today. It's made me retroactively think a lot less of the movie. It's got a lot more depth which is pretty obvious since it's four times longer. There are some story bits that I'm glad aren't included in the movie though. The musical sections feel a bit more natural. They are still dancing, singing production numbers, but they feel more organic. No one is a particularly gifted dancer or lip syncher. So, that's remained consistent. Bob Hoskins gives a much better performance than Steve Martin. Partly, it's because the movie gives him more nuance to his character but it's more grounded. Hoskins still plays a bit of a dreamer but Martin feels goofy in comparison.

Amy Nicholson just tweeted that Pennies is her tied #1 favorite film of all-time

Wait. This movie takes place over five days? I must have missed that because I thought it was a couple weeks. She gets dumped, starts a relationship with Chip and meets a new guy on Christmas in five days? We're basically going through all this movie for a rebound relationship.

I have been learning a lot about the Nutcracker because I have started watching “On Pointe” a docu series on Disney+ about ballet students in NYC who are training for the NYC Ballet and/or the little ones that get to be part of the Nutcracker ballet in 2019. In the story the girl main character is named Marie. I was surprised when I read a bad translation of it, because I always thought her name was Clara (because of the ballet). But in above series, they dance the Balanchine (a choreographer who I never heard of but they talk a lot about in the show since he founded ABA) version of the Nutcracker and the girl is called Marie. Does anyone know which ballet version they were dancing in the clips? I assume the classical Russian but I know nothing about ballet.

For all you Beatles-loving lads and ladies, here is a wonderful, seasonally appropriate piece from the great Alex Ross... https://www.instagram.com/p/CI1jyP1lOWj/?igshid=wlqkpa1rstuw

re: the ice skating Danica McKellar, star of numerous of these Christmas movies herself, posted a behind-the-scenes of them filming her ice skating scenes because she does not know how to ice skate. https://www.instagram.com/p/CITIr48nB9P/

Nutcracker dolls originate from late-17th century Germany, particularly the Ore Mountains. Decorative nutcracker dolls began being popularized outside of Europe after the Second World War, when numerous American soldiers stationed in Germany came home to the United States with German nutcrackers as souvenirs. The Nutcracker ballet was originally produced in 1892 with a score by Tchaikovsky. It became popular in North America during the 1960s. The ballet's protagonist, Clara, shares her name with the aunt in Nutty Christmas (Conchata Ferrel who also played the aunt in Krampus). When MJH has flashbacks to earlier scenes in the movie, they are not just random time-wasters. She is reflecting on how the specific events of ballet mirror her own recent experiences. ...And souldn't he really have cracked the nuts with his teeth?

I was really annoyed that so many people in the movie kept saying Chip was dressed like a nutcracker. Of course we as an audience recognize that he's a nutcracker come to life, but why would anyone in this town think he was dressed like anything other than a soldier of some sort? The style of nutcracker they keep referencing is wearing a soldier's uniform- the only thing that makes it obviously a nutcracker is the weird mouth. If Chip had some ridiculous Jaws-from-Moonraker type thing going on, I could see it, but as-is he's just a dude dressed up like a Coldstream Guard.

I remember reading a paper once about how we should be more aware of the fact that it's so acceptable to perpetuate "cat-hating" tropes and jokes when cats are, at the same time, often associated with women/feminitiy. Then I thought there might be a similar pattern with coffee versus tea jokes. Then I thought about the association of tea with Asian cultures and wondered if there's a correlation with the unfortunate stereoptypes regarding the emasculation of the Asian male. Then I remembered the time I sprialed into several minutes of private thoughts about grammatical punctuation when I read on a T-shirt: "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" and had to remind myself that I do overthink a lot of things. I will say that Americans are very much obsessed with refrigeration. After moving from California to live overseas for over a decade, it's weird if I **don't** purchase milk purchased in a box from the shelf, and I've never had to worry about keeping eggs in the fridge. The answer to it is the American food industrial complex, of course For more rabbit-hole falling, coffee doesn't actually dehydrate you since that's not technically what a "diareutic" means. I wish they would have talked about the ice skating scene more. Yes, it's obviously plastic, but it's equally obvious that the actors were not wearing skates at all, right? Was this because the actors can't skate? Because there's some union rules about stunt people? Were the Lifetime producers following some kind of checklist? I mean, maybe it's not a "Bad Scene" at all, becuase it's actually pretty impressive that the cinematographer framed everything just right, that the editors chose just the right cuts, and the actors, well, they did their best.