Review: Happiest Season

Man, this blog sure does exist, doesn’t it?

I apologize for the lengthy delay between content this month.  I actually had a lot more content planned for this month than I initially planned.  But then reality hit.

I suffered a work related injury to my right hand that required stitches on my fingers.  I closed a door on it by accident and I am still recovering from increased numbness in my index finger especially.  It has made typing out these posts even more difficult than I could have possibly imagined.  Someday soon I’ll get full feeling back and typing out these posts will become second nature to me again.  But for now, you guys will just have to bear with me as I attempt to get accustomed to my slightly altered normal when it comes to writing.  Thank you for your patience for those of you who are still following me.

So yeah, with all the negativity this year has brought onto us, I want to talk about something that this world badly needs now more than ever before.  Christmas.

To those of you who don’t know me, I love Christmas.  This is my favorite holiday just like it is many others.  And I know that a lot of my followers don’t actually know me in real life, but believe me when I say, when it comes to going out for Christmas, I go ALL OUT.  I overdecorate.  I wear basically a new Christmas sweater every day.  I tend to purchase too many gifts for my friends and family.  I love spreading holiday cheer.  That’s why I’m going to attempt to give this blog some specialty Christmas content.  Before my injury, I was planning some best/worst Christmas film lists and a ranking of Christmas songs.  I’m still planning on doing so and will try my hardest to follow through with some of this content or just save what I can’t follow through with for next holiday season.  Along with my traditional best/worst of 2020 lists.

So let’s start this holiday season off right by reviewing the latest Christmas movie sent straight to streaming due to the pandemic, "Happiest Season".  And I’m just going to get straight to it.  This is the best holiday movie I’ve seen in many and I do mean many years.  One that I hope becomes a new holiday classic.  For more than just how it handles its subject matter with the LGBT community.  But because how it does so smartly.  It doesn’t get heavy handed about its subject matter.  It normalizes it to the point that this could be just a standard romantic comedy played by anybody.  And I don’t mean that insultingly.  It’s because they make these characters out to be real people or at the very least reality adjacent.  I found myself reacting alongside these characters along the way due to such emotional investment.

If it isn’t obvious already, the acting in this is phenomenal.  Not a single actor or actress that I wouldn’t recommend.  Daniel Levy and Mary Holland constantly had me laughing throughout the entire movie.  Daniel Levy playing the comedic sidekick who had a recurring gag about tracking people….as well as asking about fish (slight spoiler but doesn’t tell the whole story for the joke to be fully effective).  Mary Holland being the youngest and most neglected of the three sisters.  Her faux happiness made me laugh a lot.  Aubrey Plaza playing against her usual comedic roles made me realize she has untapped depth in the drama genre.  Mackenzie Davis, who really shines in the third act more so than the rest of the movie, as we get to better understand why she was hiding her identity secret and being the way she was through 70% of the movie.  

But the best actress of the entire film is Kristen Stewart.  If you asked me ten years ago that Kristen Stewart would become one of my favorite actors/actresses working today, I would have laughed that off just like we all would have with the Twilight fad.  Which I’m so glad her and Robert Pattinson are thriving after being a laughingstock.  Both are in my personal top ten to twenty favorite actors/actresses working today.  And this is a tour de force for why people need to stop sleeping on Kristen Stewart.  She kills this role and makes it one of my personal favorite performances she has ever done.  They made the right choice by making her most of the focus of this relationship because she is the one who puts the humanity in it.

As for the director, Clea DuVall.  Who I recognized immediately from 1998 teenage sci-fi horror film The Faculty.  This woman is a director on the rise after this movie.  Like I mentioned earlier, she handles this movie so perfectly.  Because if you removed the light-hearted and feel good vibes this movie does give off, it’s actually a very depressing movie.  I’m not going to go into too much more spoilers but there are seriously depressing topics in this movie about acceptance, coming out, death, mental/emotional manipulation just to name a few of the hard topics that come into play.  It takes real talent to make a holiday rom-com that genuinely makes the audience feel good after sitting through and DuVall nails it.  It reminds a lot of another great recent LGBT movie Love, Simon.  And just like Love, Simon; I also love this movie.

There are so many elements that make me forgiving of my only complaint and that is the usual rom-com tropes are here.  Expensive things break when people want them handled with care.  There is a predictable climatic catfight amongst the family (slightly funnier than normal due to the comedy working mind you).  Also some predictable message moments like Kristen Stewart being told to come out of the closet by the mother.  But you know what?  Just because there are rehashed tropes and predictable messages doesn’t make a movie bad.  It’s a matter of how they are handled and here they are all handled well.

This is just a feel good movie in a year where we all could afford to feel good because the world around us is shit.  And this put a smile on my face when I badly needed it.

 

Final Grade: A+

 

Stream it on Hulu now.  We all could use some serotonin right now and this movie provides it in spades.

 

Thanks everybody for reading.  Next up are some more holiday treats as well as the beginning of the 2020 list season once Billboard publishes their 2020 year end list for music.  As well as me posting some shorter film reviews for some of the films I sat through this year that I didn’t really have enough content full length film review content for.  It truly is tough to write film reviews for films that don’t give me enough material to work with at times.

Until next time, stay safe out there.  Please.

Review: Enola Holmes

 Let’s talk about feminist think pieces because that’s what my main takeaway was from the movie I will be reviewing.

We are living in a timeline where the general public has grown tired of toxic masculinity.  Hell, we are on the verge of removing a toxic man from the White House.  Take as much time as you want to celebrate that victory before moving on.

 

Anyway, I feel like a majority of our society is tired of gender stereotypes.  And while we have made gradual improvements over the past decade in terms of educational, professional, and interpersonal outcomes and opportunities for women that are equal to those of men, we still have a ways to go in terms of women having a lot of the same rights as men.  This is coming from someone who is a white male, but I’ve thought my whole life that there shouldn’t be a difference when it comes to any sort of social norms and equality.  Women should have the same rights and opportunities as men.  Plain and simple.

And you know what has been a great outlet for feminist think pieces?  The entertainment industry.  Where there have been many movies, television shows, etc. centered around strong female role models.  Then of course there is also the #MeToo movement, where we are purging Hollywood of the toxic males who have held positions of powers for years in the entertainment business.  So yeah, I’d say the past decade has been gradually improving the world for females.  We still have a long way to go in terms of making up for hundreds of years of many forms of injustice, but I can only look at the future with hope that we can make it right.

 

So what does any of this have to do with the movie I’m talking about today in Enola Holmes?  Well Enola Holmes is immediately introduced as a strong female character raised by her strong independent mother, while also being the kid sister of famous detective brothers Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes.  And the plot point of the movie is that her mother goes missing so Enola goes on a journey to discover her mother’s whereabouts while also finding out who she really is as a person along the way.  Easy enough set-up for a female-led teen movie, right?

Well here’s the thing.  I think this movie is not the feminist think-piece those involved wanted this movie to be.  No offense to anyone who thinks otherwise because if anyone finds this movie empowering, then who am I to tell you, otherwise?  After all, we are all entitled to our own opinions.  But to me, I was left wanting more shown when it comes to strong character moments rather than being told that our characters are strong and independent women.

When I think of powerful feminine moments from movies in recent memory, I think of Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road taking down a whole fleet by herself.  I think of Wonder Woman entering No Man’s Land to take on German soldiers.  I think of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games movies owning her surroundings and constantly proving herself as a threat to The Capitol.  Just to name a few examples off the top of my head.  And you know what these filmmakers did right?  They SHOWED us these iconic moments instead of telling us what they were doing.

And honestly, that’s Enola Holmes main flaw to a fault to me.  Having Enola constantly breaking the fourth wall to describe a lot of key moments as they came.  If it was a couple times, then it wouldn’t have been as big of a problem for me.  I like fourth wall breaking.  But it was like she was trying more so to be Deadpool with all the subtle winks and explaining to the audience what she was thinking about during so many key moments.  And once you make that connection, it was super hard to ignore the obvious comparisons.

It’s not just the Deadpool comparisons that don’t make this movie’s message work for me either.  So many times throughout the movie, random characters kept saying “times are changing” and “there is a movement coming”.  Obviously key points towards this movie’s feminist message.  But as I stated a few paragraphs ago, it is one thing for the movie to think it has a feminist message.  You can say your piece has a message, but it is another thing entirely to show and I can’t think of a single iconic feminist moment in Enola Holmes that made me think “FUCK YEAH!”  Sure there were moments that had Enola Holmes kicking ass, but I didn’t think for a single minute that she was an empowering character while doing so.  If anything, I felt like she was a lighter version of Sherlock Holmes.  And I’m not referring to the same Sherlock Holmes in this movie, I mean the Robert Downey Jr films as well as the Benedict Cumberbatch BBC miniseries.  Not once did I feel like Enola Holmes was her own standalone character.

That’s not saying this movie was bad.  I still had a good time watching it.  Despite being obnoxious at points, I thought Millie Bobby Brown was good with what she was given.  Not her fault her character was flat.  I also thought Henry Cavill was even better as Sherlock Holmes.  I would definitely like to see his own version of the character in a series of some sort.  And despite being in the movie for barely ten minutes, Helena Bonham Carter is always a welcoming presence.

Also, the action sequences did have me at the edge of my seat throughout.  There is this one sequence on a train that you all probably saw from the trailers.  It is much better than the trailers made it out to be including a few cool stunts here and there that I can’t say I’ve seen before.  This was a well filmed movie in general.

But I can’t shake off how mismanaged this movie’s message was.  It just sat with me throughout the movie’s long runtime.  It’s over two hours.  Definitely felt longer.  I just kept waiting and waiting for that one moment that really stood out for me when it came to displaying its message instead of saying it.  That was my main takeaway from this otherwise perfectly fine movie.  I still recommend it because what else is there to really watch right now?

 

Final Grade: B

 

Really wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did, but like I said, I wish it gave Enola Holmes more of an identity.  Anyway, thank you all for reading as always.  Got another movie review in the works as well as another music retrospective.  Hope to have both out this month, we shall see.  My plate just got more added to it at work, so we shall see.  But until next time, thank you guys and stay safe out there!