I decided chronistic should be in use as an antonym for anachronistic. Die Hard is intensely chronistic. It’s so 1988, it couldn’t have existed at any other time without dramatic differences.

A year later and the Berlin Wall fell — deeply relevant in regards to attitudes towards German characters.

Three years later, Rodney King faced police brutality; in the movie, a prominent Black police character has been working the desk beat, so to speak, for killing a child. Attitudes would shift.

Thirteen years later and terrorism is synonymous with 9/11, Al Qaida, etc. The fight up and down a tower would be different.

Witty, clever John McClane is also in conversation with earlier action heroes, meaning he wouldn’t have been the same at an earlier date. I mean, literally, he couldn’t have been the same – he was originally intended to be played by Frank Sinatra. But he also fundamentally inverts certain stoic hero tropes.

The technology in the movie – the novelty of early touch screens; Argylle’s car phone – is just so darn 1988.

Attitudes toward California and hero cops is perhaps a bit more timeless in America (or at least not as narrow). Demonizing the federal level police while lionizing local police is interesting. But the way McClane just laughed off a man kissing him as being gross gay California stuff (homophobic, but not violently so, very good-natured) is also a microcosm.

Of course this is probably my favorite Christmas movie, warts and all. It might be the very best example of traditional screenwriting. It’s executed like clockwork. Everything matters. Causal chains are incredible.

Alan Rickman is the most delicious villain. I wouldn’t have been mad if he won.

My sibling and I watch this every Christmas season. It’s a holiday essential. This year was the first time my teenager watched with us, and they didn’t say they especially liked it, but they were RIVETED. Die Hard is extremely not-boring. The one thing my teen said they liked was the intensity of the gay-ass vibes between McClane and Gruber (very much my child). You could write entire essays just about McClane and Gruber as foils, but if I tried to do it, it would quickly devolve into naughty fanfic, so I shall resist.

(image credit: 20th Century Fox)

I went through a phase where I became a male revue connoisseur. In my defense, going to male revues is a great way to see a lot of hot women dressed up for a night out, drunk and having a great time. I developed a hierarchy of male revue quality, from least to best: Thunder from Down Under, Chippendales, and Magic Mike in Vegas.

The thing about Thunder and Chipp is that these aren’t really interesting shows at all, period. A bunch of beefcakes wear costumes and take their shirts off and dispassionately thrust. They can’t really dance. (Bear in mind this opinion is from around 2017 and may no longer reflect reality.) It’s pretty well sexless, all things considered. At least Magic Mike has a narrative, the guys can dance, and there’s some excitement to it.

If I were to place the revue in The Merry Gentleman in those rankings, I’d put it dead last. The dudes barely dance, much like Thunder, but there are fewer of them, and they seem to be having even less fun. Or am I having no fun because I’m not drunk among a bunch of hot middle aged women?

There’s never any sense of fun in this, period. The romance is also not very romancey. The male lead is kinda wounded because…his girl left him to go back to the city. And the female lead wants to maybe…go back to the city. He is SO HURT and BETRAYED. She chooses to stay so he won’t be all hurt. That’s…kind of the whole thing.

It feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t actually understand how romances work. It’s not really enough for two ostensibly attractive people to coexist until they decide to Be Together. Not all conflicts are created equally. This genuinely would have benefited from being a lot more tropey and formulaic!

I won’t be revisiting this one on future Christmases. If I want to be bored watching shirtless men, I can just swipe TikTok for a few hours. At least they have some energy.

What Women Want was one of the three biggest movies of the year 2000, so it’s to be expected that I watched it a lot with my mum when it hit DVD. I used to really enjoy it! I stopped watching it when we learned Mel Gibson’s a trash fire of a human, and it’s skirted my romcom-watching periods since.

I’ve got a lotta work to do at my desk and Netflix is trying to push Hallmark romances on me, so I went for something familiar, easy, and old. What Women Want. I was prepared to loathe it. “This definitely aged badly,” I thought resentfully as I hit play.

Resentfully, I give it three stars because that’s all I can abide giving it. But I still pretty much enjoyed it.

This turns out to be one of those Stealth Queer movies I clung to in adolescence because of insufficient queer representation in media. Although it has extremely limited, binary ideas of what it is to be a Man and a Woman – and the whole movie hinges on “sociopath learns women are human” – the way that the main character moves through his understanding of gender is extremely queer.

At one point, he actually wishes aloud that he were a woman. If you hang out with trans people much, you’ll already know “I wish I were a woman” is enough to be a woman. Like…that’s it. If you want to be a woman, you can be. Gender is a social construct with different meanings at different times in different cultures with no basis in biology. Once you decide you want to be A Gender, you can Be The Gender.

Somehow this old romcom with Mel Gibson helped form my identity as a nonbinary afab. I always saw myself as a stereotypical masculine force, swaggering and aggressively sexual, but I also wanted to look like a hot woman. I was born into a rather blobby androgynous body. I look worse than Mel Gibson in pantyhose. Somehow Mel Gibson in pantyhose is getting pretty close to my personal visualization of my gender: someone who isn’t female enough messing around incompetently with the set dressing of femininity.

All the sexism in the movie – of which benevolent sexism upholding a specific form of femininity is narratively approved – still feels like the kind of silly genderfuckery that I just happen to love. I’d like to see a drag remake.

What Women Want is also interesting if you think about how neatly it fits into capitalism. It struck me how much studios must love movies about ad agencies because they get to do a lot of sponsored material in the movie. Half of this thing is a Nike ad appealing to third wave feminism. I’m gonna have to make a playlist of romcoms with different perspectives on American capitalism at this point – the way romcoms show success in capitalism as a failing (Pretty Woman), how capitalist success demands distancing from femininity (Kate & Leopold), and the inevitability of small business being crushed by corporations (You’ve Got Mail).

I’m glad I ended up appreciating this movie, warts and all. It’s easy to ignore all the crappy stuff when it gives me warm buzzy gender feelings. Now I’m going back to not watching Gibson movies anymore.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

We are so back, baby! Merry Christmas!

Normally I’ve watched about a thousand more Christmas movies and romcoms by this time of year. It’s nearly American Thanksgiving! But I watched Two Weeks Notice and was extremely lukewarm, then tried to watch another Lacey Chabert romcom (something Scottish Christmasy) and got bored out of finishing it. The struggle is real, y’all.

Thank you to Netflix for another marvelous Christmas miracle!

Hot Frosty is what it sounds like: Frosty the Snowman, except he’s a hot guy. Dustin Milligan plays an amazing himbo. For his sake, I hope the movie took two days to film. I can’t remember the last time I saw a beefcake as dehydrated as this one. It was funny how they were trying to get him to look sweaty when he looked like he’d had nothing but a couple sips of water for the duration of filming. The striations, y’all! Frosty is three layers of spray tan away from a physique competition. Somehow, even though he must have had nigh zero energy, he was an incredibly cute and charming example of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope.

I like 00s/10s sitcoms, so the appearance of Joe Lo Truglio (aka Charles Boyle from Brooklyn 99) and Craig Robinson (Doug Judy/B99 and Darryl Philbin/The Office) would have made the whole thing watchable if the main couple wasn’t. Honestly, every romcom should just grab a couple comedians and let them mess around on set for our entertainment. These two are evergreen.

Speaking of evergreen, does Lacey Chabert ever stop working? Although Lindsay Lohan has definitely earned a Holiday Romcom Queen crown of her own, she’ll never be able to touch Lacey’s intimidating IMDB page. Thirty Hallmark romcoms! I watched her being warm and sweet in this movie and had to wonder how many random guys she’s “fallen in love with” over the course of her career. What a dream.

I mention in my review for Two Weeks’ Notice that romcoms can be formulaic without being rote. Hot Frosty is a great example of this. It hits all the normal marks you expect, but it does it with joy and energy. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. It’s silly and fun. All the frisky older ladies cracked me up. Is that so much to ask for?

Five stars for another great Christmas romcom doing all we want and nothing we don’t.

(image credit: Netflix)

My spooky season starts in August every year. Halloween is my favorite aesthetic, I’m low-key goth anyway, and I never run out of horror movies to watch.

I’ve already been watching so many movies.

I used to be easy to scare: basically, if it had ghosts, I was terrified. This still works on me a little bit — I struggle in particular with the suspense leading up to a ghost reveal — but for the most part, nothing scares me anymore.

Being afraid isn’t the only emotional experience you can have with horror, though. There’s sad horror, like The Sixth Sense and Martyrs, and there’s exciting gory horror like Saw. You can experience dread and nostalgia and anger and a genuine self-questioning depression.

Yet there’s one movie that nails fear in a way that nothing else does — a primal fright that makes me feel small and helpless like when I was a child, unsafe in your own home, and where nothing is the way it seems.

That movie, of course, is Coraline.

It’s a classic setup: a young girl and her family move to a house away from the life she used to know. It’s an old, scary sort of house, where she lives in close company with total strangers. Her stressed, busy parents don’t have time for her.

When she explores, she finds herself in — essentially — the most horrible portal fantasy you can imagine. She has to overcome fable-like trials in order to save herself, her family, and her friends.

This story is familiar. You’ve read it in a lot of fairy tales and coming-of-age stories about that weird, difficult time in a kid’s life where they shed the last trappings of young childhood and start hurtling toward adulthood.

That familiarity is why it’s so effective, in part: we all read stories like this as a kid, and it takes you right back to childhood to read them again. More than that, growing up is a universal experience, and the metaphors at hand are terribly effective.

I was already a proper adult when Coraline came out, but I’m still not immune. Being a child was a scary experience. Far worse than being an adult, where my problems are much bigger, more tangible, and higher stakes. Childhood is a time of being very small with very little control. When your parents aren’t friendly, there’s nowhere safe to go.

There’s so much more to Coraline than its flawless execution of ancient tropes, though. It’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. The stop-motion animation is incredible. The art direction is unmatched. The eerie, lovely score matches the beauty-terror of the rest of the movie.

Coraline also pulls no punches. It knows kids can handle the worst of the worst, and at times, it savagely attacks with imagery that still chills me.

It might be a movie made for young people, but it’s great at any age. If you let it take you on the journey, you might find it’s one of the genuinely scariest movies you’ve ever seen.

(image credit: Focus Features)

Paranormal Activity 2 is a really clever follow-up to its predecessor. In the first one, we met a couple being tormented by a demon; the second is actually a prequel that helps establish and contextualize the first one. These aren’t expensive movies, so I’d have expected the execution to feel cheap. It’s not! It’s really nice to see Katie again. Micah is there too. I wasn’t thrilled to see him again, but his presence did emphasize the extremely distinct characterization relative to the dude in the new family.

Yet again, we have one of the sisters (Kristi instead of Katie this time) with a demon hanging around, and the demon is only slightly eviller than her husband. It’s a solid formula! PA2 demonstrates that the makers of PA1 understood what made the first one work. They don’t mess around getting back to business.

While Micah’s obsession with his handheld camcorder was the entire excuse for having the first movie’s “found footage,” the second has home security cameras indoors and out as a reaction to a robbery. So we don’t need a dreadful personality like Micah’s again in order to make sure we have footage of every moment — although handheld cameras are also used, so it still gets to feel intimate and immediate.

The explanation for the demon’s origin is lightly handled. I expect the third movie will get more into the reason a demon goes after Kristi and Katie, but they provide sufficient explanation for the demon’s existence within the context of PA2 as well. Research from teen stepdaughter shows that demons can be summoned to give power and success to men in exchange for their firstborn son. Classy! Dad is a tasteless crapsack.

The crapsackiness of Dad is a throughline here. He doesn’t really believe Kristi at any point. When his daughter gets involved, he becomes more rageful. Gaslight, gatekeep, get attacked by demon! And he makes the biggest crapsack of all crapsack decisions to help set up PA1 as well. It’s extremely satisfying from a narrative standpoint.

The slow build is very similar to the first movie, and it gets very exciting in a similar way too. The most obvious demon influences feel a lot more high budget. I won’t spoil you — it’s fun to be surprised! They get a little carried away with the shaky camera and night vision, like they aspired to be as good as Rec, but I’ll forgive them. I’d badly emulate Rec too.

One jumpscare in this movie actually worked on me.

All in all, it’s extremely fun to watch and yell at it with your family. The Paranormal Activity movies just do such a good job establishing their goals and meeting the goalposts. It’s quite a flashback to the year 2006 in terms of fashion and home design, too.

If you’re like me, and worried about the safety of the baby and dog: Baby is menaced but never in much danger, and dog gets injured off-screen but does survive. I was not bothered by the baby and dog elements of the horror. Truly, this is a great horror flick to watch with the family. We’re looking forward to the next one.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)