Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Spirited/A Christmas Story Christmas

Those of you with giant, carb-forward meals ahead of you might feel too bloated to do anything other than scrunch under the blankets on the couch or comfy chair and surf the streams, hoping for a little holiday inspiration as Uncle Chuck and Aunt Lorraine gird their loins for the Annual No-Harm-No-Foul Black Friday Rugby Scrum and Fun Run at the East Haverbrook Mall. Have no fear, gentle reader. We at the N.T.A.B. have just the soothing balm for your jangled pre-Christmas nerves.

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Spirited (Apple+)

Will Ferrell heads a team of ghosts whose sole job in the afterlife is staging Christmas interventions for terrible people in an attempt to get them to be better people with the time they have left. But after so many years of fixing Karens, Ferrell is looking for a bigger fish to land, and he gets his chance when he’s introduced to the unredeemable Ryan Reynolds.

I’m on the record as being fundamentally against musicals, and I don’t care that they are an original American art form. Brigadoon (weirdly, also on Apple+) does a great job of both lifting up and gently criticizing musicals when they are done by the book. There are exceptions, of course; I’m not a monster. But they are just that: exceptions, and not the rule.

Now, having said that, let me tell you this: I absolutely loved Spirited. It was a jaw-dropping delight from start to finish. I mean, it was fantastic—right up to and including the musical numbers, which were really well-written, well-choreographed, and well-sung. I loved almost every one of the songs, and the one I was “eh” on was in no way a deal breaker—in fact, it had the best dance sequence in the movie.

You have to watch this. Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell are great together. Inspired chemistry. Both of them got to showcase their singing, and who knew Reynolds could carry a tune? Wow. It’s obvious they worked like hell on the dancing, too, because they do not embarrass themselves. Best of all, there is a twist in the middle that I did not see coming and it blew me away. I am nearly positive that, even if you get to it before the turn, you’ll still think, “Okay, that’s a cool idea.”

I’ve long been a defender of Will Ferrell, even as I have been extremely slow to warm up to Ryan Reynolds. This is easily the best thing Ferrell has done in years, a substantial role that is both funny and poignant. He gets to do a bit of his man-child schtick, and it may be the last time we see it, but it’s really restrained here. And Reynolds kills it. This is the kind of character he always plays anyway, but oh man, is he unlikeable—easily as smarmy as Aaron Eckhardt in Thank You for Smoking, but all of his charm is very nearly weaponized, so much so that he’s able to hold his own against the whole of the Celestial Hosts.

Spirited pulls off the Christmas movie hat-trick: It’s got a good, groin-punch cry-worthy moment or two, it delivers the “spirit of Christmas” message in the most measured, not at all phony way I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s both fun and funny, with great music for a kicker. Best update of A Christmas Carol since Scrooged. Bonus: the meta-commentary is perfect. I will watch this at least two more times before December 24th, and this goes into the annual rotation, top five with a bullet.

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A Christmas Story Christmas (HBO Max)

The year is 1973 and Ralph Parker, now a grown man with a wife and two kids of his own, has come full circle to become the man of the house. But even as the Parker family awaits the arrival of the grandparents in Chicago for a Big City Christmas, Ralph gets some news that brings him back home to re-connect with his past in some unsurprising ways.

This is, for me, sacred territory. Gene Shepherd and his wonderful essays which were folded into the classic stew that is A Christmas Story are touchstones for Generation X, which is funny because it’s about a Baby Boomer kid, but I’m going to gently suggest that one of the components of Generation X’s formative years was the borrowed nostalgia of what we were all told was either “a simpler time” or “a better time.”

Be that as it may, a big part of what makes Ralphie’s fevered odyssey to secure the Red Ryder BB Gun isn’t the payoff, but rather it’s the reminiscences of the narrator as he recalls his parents, his kid brother and the love they shared, that they showed, but maybe couldn’t ever say. Shit like that will wipe a latchkey kid out quicker than a family-sized bag of Totino’s pizza bites.

Previous attempts to recreate that Je ne sais quoi of the first film have always come off as more of a cash grab or worse, a cashing in of goodwill that the original generated. It’s a bit of a shame that the other attempts exist at all, because A Christmas Story Christmas manages to get right every single thing that the others got wrong.

That’s not to say that the film is perfect. There are call backs, some of which are subtle, buried in the language of the film, and some of which telegraph themselves with semaphore flags and klaxons blaring (you can spot them in the trailer). This is inevitable, but at least the people making the in-jokes are the ones who came up with them oh so many years ago. That much provenance—the original Ralphie, Flick, and Schwartz! is enough to carry the day.

There’s a lot of bittersweet moments in the movie, thanks to a judicious amount of footage and audio from the original film, but I’m not so sure it’s not just to show us how freaking exact in every detail the set design was. It’s uncanny, I’m not kidding.

The absence of Darren McGavin looms large here—I mean, he died twenty years ago, but damned if they don’t make the loss feel fresh and raw. Billingsley provides the narration as his adult self, wisely deciding to adopt Jean Shepherd’s rhythms and cadences rather than attempt a straight imitation, and the results are better than I thought they would be.

I found myself ugly crying at the ending, in a really satisfying, cathartic way. A Christmas Story Christmas borrows some of the emotional core from the original movie, but it makes its own points and ends up relying on my nostalgia and the nostalgia culled from Generation X, from the seventies, when I was a kid and all of this stuff mattered to me, and I took it all for granted because I was just a kid. I would be interested to see if the Millennials look at this movie in the same way that we view the original twenty years from now. If you ever had a kind word in your heart for the first movie, this true sequel completes the feedback loop—well and truly.