Yours portly has finally had some time to watch some movies again, and it really went from famine to feast. I’ve watched several solid flicks lately, including this week’s selection, the French-Canadian psychological thriller Red Rooms (2023).
Yours portly has finally had some time to watch some movies again, and it really went from famine to feast. I’ve watched several solid flicks lately, including this week’s selection, the French-Canadian psychological thriller Red Rooms (2023).
My older brother and I saw Nosferatu (2024) a couple of days after its release, which was on Christmas Day 2024. We attended a 12:30 PM EST showing on Friday, 27 December 2024, and even that early matinee had a very good crowd.
My brother and I had been anticipating the release of this film with an eagerness we rarely experience for movies anymore. I love movies, but there aren’t many films that get me excited to go see them.
Nosferatu promised “a symphony of horror,” according to its tagline (and the subtitle of the 1924 original), and it delivered—in spades.
I’m a huge nerd, which means I love all sorts of oddball things. One of those is stop motion animation.
I suspect that love is a result of nostalgia. I’m just old enough to remember lots of stop motion animation and puppetry still being used in films. There’s also something fascinating about how a good stop motion animator can take figurines and make them do incredible things on camera. The detail and the motions have that trademark jerkiness that, paradoxically, can be incredibly smooth in the hands of a skilled technician.
As such, I decided to dedicate this edition of Lazy Sunday to posts related to stop motion animation:
“Midweek Myers Movie Review: King Kong (1933)” – Audre Myers’s excellent review of the king of classic stop motion animation.
“Monday Morning Movie Review: Puppet Master I-III (1989, 1990, 1991)” – My loving tribute to the corny B-movies that terrified me as a small child.
“Monday Morning Movie Review: The Primevals (2024)” – A recent review that inspired this foray into stop motion animation.
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
I had entirely too much fun with the LEGO® Star Wars™ 2024 Advent Calendar, especially playing with the different little builds in humorous ways.
I pulled some pieces from other sets and made a fun little re-enactment of a famous scene from one of my favorite films, 1985’s Back to the Future:
Last year I wrote about the Puppet Master series, the brainchild of indie filmmaker Charles Band. Band’s Full Moon Entertainment for years produced schlocky, low-budget, but entertaining films that heavily featured miniatures and stop-motion animation. Like many small filmmakers, Band’s company kept budgets low by reusing models and footage in different films, often creating scripts (a la Roger Corman) to fit the props and sets already on-hand.
The guys over at RedLetterMedia did two long episodes on the Puppet Master franchise, and got into some of the details of Band’s approach to filmmaking in those videos:
They did a third video that continued to look at Band’s use of stop-motion techniques and puppetry:
If you’re not enticed at the thought of watching three lengthy videos to understand Band’s films, no worries; suffice it to say that Band was never one to let good (or bad) footage go to waste.
So come—at last!—to today’s film, the first review of 2025: The Primevals (2024).
The Ponty film reviews continue this week, closing out a year of excellent film reviews. We’ve laughed. We’ve cried. We’ve danced.
Today’s review from Ponty features a film that’ll have you doing all three. It’s definitely one of the “modern” classics, even though the flick is nearly forty-years old at this point. It features so many iconic scenes, it makes you wonder why Jennifer Grey ever got that nose job.
With that, here is Ponty’s review of 1987’s Dirty Dancing:
Good old Ponty is always bailing me out when I need it most. Actually, I now have ample time to loaf about and enjoy the fun of Christmas Break, but that’s precisely the time I don’t want to be dreaming up films to review.
Cue Pontifex Maximus with a chestnut roasting over an open fire. That chestnut is a faith-based film based on a story by Max Lucado that is, apparently, good. Finally, Christians are making some good art!
It sounds like a lovely film, and a good antidote to the endless array of cookie-cutter Hallmark films out there.
With that, here is Ponty’s review of 2013’s The Christmas Candle:
Yours portly has had another busy weekend, one full of Christmas cheer. It was very nice to spend time with family and Dr. Girlfriend. Naturally, the blog and the Advent Calendar have fallen by the wayside a bit, but I’ll be getting caught up with both. It’s Exam Week this week, so I have the most free time I’ve had since summer break, so my hope is to work ahead on the blog enough that I don’t need to touch it much until 2025.
Last night Dr. Girlfriend I started watching the 1984 film adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge. We didn’t get to finish, but it’s remarkable to me how well done this version is. It brought to mind the 1951 version, which is an exquisite adaptation in its own right; indeed, it might be the definitive version.
So it is that I thought I’d cast a glance back to my own review of that version from 19 December 2022.
With that, here is “Monday Morning Movie Review: A Very Portly Christmas: A Christmas Carol (1951)“:
What happens when you take the disconnected lifestyle of liberalism of upper middle class elites to its logical conclusion? The answer is the couple at the center of Anything for Jackson (2020), a film in which an affluent couple attempt to bring their grandson back to life through a “reverse-exorcism,” which involves hijacking a young woman’s pregnancy for their own nefarious ends. Naturally, in the process, the bumbling and desperate couple unleash for more sinister forces than they ever intended, with horrifying (and, frequently, grimly hilarious) consequences.
The result is one of the creepiest, funniest, and most original films I’ve seen in some time.
It is rare for a modern film to catch and hold my rapt attention for 97 minutes, especially when I’m driving. But amid my various Thanksgiving travels, I “watched” the 2023 film Nefarious. Thank goodness it’s mostly dialogue, or I would have had a very difficult time of it.
The film is an adaptation of the Steve Deace novel A Nefarious Plot (Amazon Affiliate link; I get a portion of any sales made through that link, at no additional cost to you). Steve Deace is a conservative writer and commentator, and Glenn Beck makes an appearance in the film, so that gives you a sense for the general messaging of the movie.
That said, while Nefarious is a Christian horror movie—which, I would argue, most horror involving the demonic is fundamentally Christian in some way—it is genuinely entertaining, and does not feel like heavy-handed propaganda. Instead, it is an incredibly effective portrayal of the sheer wickedness of demons, and how Satan delights in our sin.