Month: December 2022

A Very Portly Christmas: Ponty’s Review: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

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It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is one of those films that holds a special place in the hearts of millions, myself among them.  I’ll never forget watching it one Christmas night on the floor of my paternal grandfather’s den, he in his recliner, my cousins and myself on our bellies.  Implausibly, I was allowed to stay and watch it while my parents took my brothers home (we lived probably twenty or thirty minutes away at the time, and my mom loathed the inefficiency of multiple trips anywhere—a thrifty trait I have inherited), and my dad came and picked me up afterwards.  I was happy and utterly exhausted, but I’ll never forget that good old mom made me take a bath anyway, even though I could barely keep my eyes open.

Ask anyone who has seen this film, especially in childhood, and they’ll have a similar story.  Ponty relates his own tale in this wonderful review, and it’s something that contributes to the timeless and heartwarming quality of the flick.  It’s a Wonderful Life is not just a movie, but an experience, something shared across generations, and indelibly linked, for as long as film as a medium exists, to Christmas and family and love.

With that, here is Ponty’s review of 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life:

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TBT^4: Christmas Eve

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Once again, it’s nowhere near Christmas Eve—it’s Christmas Eve Eve Eve this year, and I’m sure the Catholics and High Protestants have some special, esoteric name for 22 December, but I don’t know what it is.  Regardless, I always enjoy looking back at my original “Christmas Eve” post from 2019.

As I wrote at the time:

Christmas Eve is always the most magical, mystical part of Christmas time.  Popular depictions of Jesus’ Birth take place, presumably, on Christmas Eve—the angels bursting into the black, silent night above Bethlehem.  The whole event is supernatural—the Virgin Birth, the Star guiding the way to the manger, the angels appearing to the shepherds and singing.  Tradition has it that even the animals in the manger talked at the moment of Christ’s birth (at exactly midnight, of course).  If the rocks can cry out, singing praises to Him, why not some donkeys?

That scratches the same itch as Halloween for me—another “Eve”—that connection with our Creator, a Being far beyond our comprehension, and a whole other world just beyond our meager vision.  It’s all the more remarkable to consider that that very same God sent His Son as a mere baby to bring a fallen world salvation.  Rather than an aloof, indifferent God, or the disinterested Clockmaker God of the Deists, we have a God who loves us enough that He sent His only Son to die for our sins.

We don’t deserve that, but thank God for it!

With that, here’s “TBT^2: Christmas Eve“:

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Myersvision: A Very Portly Christmas: A Christmas Carol (1951)

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Now it’s Audre’s turn to dive into 1951’s A Christmas Carol.  She does so with her typical childlike wonder, coupled with her deep appreciation for the source material.  I can also relate to fifteen-year old Audre, spending a lazy, hot day reading a book that takes place in cold weather.

From the sounds of the review, it seems Audre might have watched the colorized version, which is on Amazon Prime as Scrooge, its title in England.  Amazon does have the film under its American title (A Christmas Carol) in black and white for you purists out there.  Unlike Audre, I—ever the cheapskate—did manage to find a free version on YouTube, though now I have to wonder if that’s a pirated version—d’oh!  Swashbuckling is cool, but intellectual property theft is not; that said, I imagine any royalties from this film are going to the ungrateful heirs of whoever produced it.  Still, let your conscience be your guide.

With that, here is Audre’s review of A Christmas Carol:

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Open Mic Adventures XVI: “Please Come Home for Christmas”

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I finally got around to writing the detailed review (it’s around 2200 words!) of my school’s Christmas Concert this year.  The full review is over at my SubscribeStar page, and includes the video for this performance and “O Holy Night,” which I wrote about last week.  It was a really stellar performance, and I am super proud of the kids.

This week I’m featuring the video of our grand finale, “Please Come Home for Christmas.”  Most readers will be familiar with the version by The Eagles, which was the version my High School Music Ensemble used as its primary reference.  The song goes back to 1961 and Charles Brown, a blues pianist.

It’s also quite challenging, with a lot of secondary dominant chords and a slightly irregular structure.  For example, sometimes students would hang on the B7 chord for four beats before resolving to E major, which shifted after two beats to a delightful E augmented chord.  Other times, though, the B7 would only play for two beats, followed by E major (or E7), before resolving to the tonic, A major.

A number of my private lessons leading up to the concert involved diving into some of the nuances of the piece in more detail (naturally, quite a few of the students enrolled in High School Music Ensemble also take private lessons with me after school).  The barre chords are challenging for guitarists, and the different ways of playing that fun little E augmented chord also provided some educational mischief.  For my bassists, we worked quite a bit on the various walkdowns, such as the opening A->Amaj.7/G#->A7/G sequence.  That’s not hard to play, but there’s a lot a budding young bassist can do with it.

Regardless, as you’ll hear, this piece brought the house down, and the young man singing it was a hero the rest of the day—I heard him greeted to wild applause and cheers upon arriving to his first period class after the morning concert.  The video here is from the same mother who took the “O Holy Night” video, so if you see her lingering on a particular guitarist/bassist for an extended period of time, that’s why.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: A Very Portly Christmas: A Christmas Carol (1951)

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Now it’s yours portly’s turn to step up to the plate and take a swing at review a timeless Christmas classic, the 1951 adaptation of A Christmas Carol.  Ponty did the film a great service, and I must confess I read his review before viewing the film, which somehow—shamefully!—had slipped through my viewing until this point in my life.

Such is the peril of editing guest contributions:  I have to read them in order to write a pithy introduction and to get them scheduled.  As such, I’ve read Ponty’s review, which has already been published, and Audre‘s review, which will pop this Wednesday, 21 December 2022.  I’ve tried my best to stick to my own thoughts on the film, but Ponty’s review in particular really enhanced my viewing of the film.  He doesn’t spoil anything, but his analysis of some of the scenes is quite insightful.

A Christmas Carol has been on my mind a good bit lately.  Over Thanksgiving I reconnected with a college classmate from a Fiction Workshop class I took my senior year, herself a self-published author.  She has been brainstorming ideas with me about an alternate telling of A Christmas Carol involving Scrooge and restorative, romantic relationship—a God-centered romance that turns the acquisitive, miserly Scrooge into the generous, giddy soul we see at the end of the film.  I won’t reveal more, but it’s a fun project, and in line with her approach to writing.

All digressions aside, I must echo the sentiments of my contributors:  the 1951 version starring Alistair Sim as the sinister Scrooge is one of the most arresting bits of storytelling I’ve ever seen set to film.

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Lazy Sunday CLXXVI: 2022’s Top Three

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It’s still two weeks to New Year’s Day, and while there’s plenty of time for some wayward posts to take off—or some new ones to exceed the three listed here—it’s the last Sunday of the year that isn’t Christmas.  As such, I decided to do the best (in terms of views) posts of 2022 today.

Before getting on to the posts, let me point out that they’re all quite different—and one of them is from our own Ponty/Always a Kid for Today—and the #1 most viewed post of the past year remains a mystery to me.  It’s a good post—I write in earnest humility—but for some reason it will randomly get dozens of views in a day sometimes.

I’m not complaining—I think it’s great!—but the mystery intrigues me.

Well, enough of that!  Here are 2022’s Top Three Posts:

  1. “Driving the Georgia Backroads” (384 views) – I actually wrote this post in 2021, so I suppose it’s technically ineligible for this list… but I’ve already written the lengthy preamble about it and I’d rather not mess around with changing it (remember—it’s Lazy Sunday).  Regardless, it’s about driving the backroads to Athens, Georgia, and all the quaint little communities along the way.
  2. “Monday Morning Movie Review, Guest Contributor Edition: The Purge (2013)” (176 views) – Once Ponty started writing movie reviews for the blog, his shameless whoring of the posts over at The Conservative Woman really brought in the traffic.  He’s also a great writer and reviewer, so that probably has something to do with it, too.
  3. “Alone” (157 views) – True to human nature, we all love tales of woe and misery.  “Alone” was my magnum opus to heartbreak (actually, my magnum opus to heartbreak is my solo EP, Contest Winner EP).  I was at a low point, one from which I clawed myself, but I’m a bit back at square one.  Oops!

Happy Sunday—and Merry Christmas!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Delayed SubscribeStar Saturday Delivered!: Christmas Concert 2022 Review

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

I never got around to writing about the annual school Christmas Concert last Saturday, so subscribers are getting a double dose of SubscribeStar Saturday today.  Despite this past week being exam week—historically full of free time—I was quite busy with a number of things related to closing out a semester of school.  Some Town Council things came up, too, so it was a fairly productive week.

All excuses aside, I’m finally getting around to it.

The short version is as follows:  it was amazing.  The kids performed extremely well.  Some of them gave what I would consider to be career-best performances.  There’s something magical about the stress and excitement and anticipation that bring out the best in students.

It wasn’t without glitches, but those small bits aside, it was fantastic.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

SubscribeStar Saturday: Analyzing Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

One of my shameful holiday pleasures is the cloying, condescending, tone-deaf “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by British New Wave super group Band Aid.  At least, that’s how the tune would be described if it were written today.

At the time, it was a progressive project:  the Ethiopian Civil War and related famine inspired the songwriters, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, to write a song to raise funds for the people there.  That’s actually quite noble, and it’s an enjoyable and fun song.

It also spawned millions of pounds in sells and royalties to help Africans, and sparked the United States to respond with “We Are the World” in 1985 (and, later, a heavy metal variant).

I’m not sure how it was received upon its release in 1984, but many of the lyrics are unintentionally hilarious.  Today the very same progressives who can’t wait to sign on to the latest cringe, woke charity project would call these lyrics Eurocentric or anti-African

My favorite line is “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime.”  Never mind Mount Kilimanjaro, which stays capped in snow year-round.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

A Very Portly Christmas: Ponty’s Review: A Christmas Carol (1951)

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Good old Ponty made a proposal (not an indecent one involving Tina and a million dollars, fortunately) that he, Audre Myers, and myself write reviews of two classic Christmas films, the 1951 adaption of A Christmas Carol and the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life.  I’m dubbing this series A Very Portly Christmas.  Cue the French horns and the sweater vests.

While I imagine we’ll all have quite positive things to say about these time-honored Christmas classics, our hope is that we’ll each see and take something different from the films, and our shades of perspective will reveal to readers previously unseen hues and details.

Or we’ll end up with three remarkably similar reviews and it will make for dull, repetitive reading.  Such are the risks of blogging, eh?  But knowing these two characters, I doubt that will be the case.  All I know is I’ve got to get crackin’ on my homework—It’s a Wonderful Life is over two hours long!

But I digress.  Ponty is kicking us off this Christmas season, and, boy, what a great way to start!  I think you’ll find his review as insightful and engaging as I did.

With that, here is Ponty’s review of 1951’s A Christmas Carol:

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TBT^4: O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting

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It’s another Exam Week, a welcome respite after two weeks of madness.  Proctoring exams is a pain, but it’s the kind of tedious pain that we’re all used to enduring from time to time.  Fortunately, it’s basically two hours of boredom at a time, followed by frantic grading.  The sooner that’s done, the sooner Christmas Break can truly begin.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how pressure creates diamonds.  I was incredibly, almost superhumanly productive in the two weeks after Thanksgiving because I had to be.  I was putting in twelve-to-sixteen-hour days to get everything done, and while I was exhausted, I felt like a champion.

Then this last Saturday I had an endless day before me, and accomplished almost nothing.  Part of that was recovering from the craziness of the week before; part of it was woman problems (the greatest drain on energy and resources); part of it was the lack of anything to do.  I understand why retirees die within six months if they don’t find something productive to do—I was starting to think that all my endeavors meant nothing (maybe they do mean nothing, but as a Christian I know they do; if they didn’t mean anything, it’s all the more reason to keep myself moving so I don’t have time to dwell on The Darkness).

Anyway, that pressure can create Beauty.  All this pressure has had me thinking about Neo’s comment on my post “You’ll Get Everything and Not Like It“: “I always remember that our soldiers in France in 1944 had a saying, ‘The road home goes through Berlin’. Berlin is on all of our ways home.”  That’s the end of a very long and poignant comment, but those two sentences say it all.

With that, here is “TBT^2: O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting“:

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