You wouldn’t expect much from a short movie about the famous Christmas novelty song, but lo and behold Rankin Bass manage to pull off an impressive feat. “Frosty the Snowman” is a great short fantasy film that knows when to call it quits and is never a cloying over abundance of cute and obnoxious.
A long time ago in a galaxy Far, Far Away, Bea Arthur ran a cantina with her alien pals.
And bandit Han Solo found it in his heart to interrupt his daring exploits to take Chewbacca home to be with his family for Christmas–er–Life Day. Though Chewbacca was explained as being a loner whose only friend was Han in the first film, he found time to bonk Mrs. Chewie and birth some chewbacca babies. So every now and then, I imagine Han has to stay over at his pal’s house, listening as Chewie and his wife argue with one another about taking out the trash, while Han tries to unfold the cot for his awkward sleep over.
Thankfully, time has been kind to “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” mainly because the short truncates the Charles Dickens classic, but still maintains many of its themes and heart. In the end, it never sugarcoats the potential fate of Scrooge McDuck, nor does it deny that Tiny Tim will die eventually because he couldn’t afford to eat and purchase the medicine needed for him. That said, “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” is a classic animated special with your usual Disney Easter Eggs, while also telling the classic story of the Christmas spirit.
I think it’s time for a resurgence of “Generation X” back to television. Back in the nineties FOX Television in the US aired weekly television movies of the genre variety hoping for a big television show to hit the airwaves. One of them was “Generation X.” Suffice it to say, though the announcement was never official, if the hip comic series was a hit television movie, we may have seen a hit television series very soon. Among the myriad problems of the TV movie is what almost all of FOX dramas suffered from: It’s incredibly murky.
Why wasn’t “Iron Man” turned in to a movie or TV Series until five years ago? Watch “EXO Man” to see how horribly a live action Iron Man could have turned out back in the seventies. To make things worse, this is one of those low budget superhero films where it’s almost ninety minutes in length, and we don’t see the actual EXO Man until an hour in to the movie. “EXO Man” is one of the dozens of movie pilots that was aiming to be a superhero television series, and thankfully never developed beyond a movie.
I’m sure National Geographic would love viewers to believe that “American Blackout” is exactly what would happen during a week long black out in America, but while the film itself is an entertaining horror film, it’s played mostly for shock value. Truly, “American Blackout” is fact based, presenting facts about our current emergency preparedness in America, but the narrative plays it to extremes. In either case, “American Blackout” does offer the notion that we’re screwed if we ever had a national catastrophe. Even in 2003 when the entire North American grid went dark, the US Government didn’t change their system, and won’t invest time in fortifying the power grid for the sake of emergencies.
Director John Gulager is not above making entertaining horror films, as we saw with “Feast,” but his offering for the current zombie movie craze ends up being surprisingly conventional and dull. It doesn’t really offer anything new or unique in terms of the zombie movie realm, and to make things worse there are just too many sub-plots. We literally follow almost a dozen characters and their efforts to make it through the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, and beyond their efforts to stay alive, there’s not a lot to them or their personalities.