Cinematical Seven: Dramas with Inappropriate Christmas Settings

Movies ordered at Christmastime hit been a long tradition; who can baulk every that great imagery, lights, snow, Santa Claus, Christmastime trees, wrapped presents, candy, stockings, etc.? (It modify looks beatific in black-and-white.) But for every It's a Wonderful Life, there hit been another movies with decidedly darker dealings, sometimes ordered directly in oppositeness with the gleaming pass season.

1. 'R Xmas (2001)
Combine the words "Abel Ferrara" and "Christmas" in the aforementioned sentence and you're bound to come up with a heartwarming pass tale same this one. A well-to-do wealthy Latin American couple (Lillo Brancato Jr. and Drea de Matteo) spends the days before Christmastime disagreeable to agency down the hottest newborn chick for their daughter (Lisa Valens) as substantially as packaging and commerce a shipment of heroin. They're meet your typical, bright New royalty family, until the economise is kidnapped. Ice-T plays the kidnapper. 'R Xmas is rattling poorly regarded in the United States -- mainly thanks to shoddy distribution, both theatrically and on DVD -- but it's digit of Ferrara's prizewinning films.

2. Morvern Callar (2002)
Poor Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) wakes up to encounter a departed swain low her tree (he committed suicide). She opens every her presents from him, takes the money from his wallet, goes to a party, comes home and signs her name to a manuscript he completed. She then takes a agency activate looking for "someplace beautiful." That's the Stygian prototypal to Lynne Ramsay's genre film, but though it stays Stygian and death-obsessed for whatever time, it's finally meet a tiny bit hopeful.

3. Far from Heaven (2002)
Todd Haynes gives us Christmastime in 1950s suburbia, pretty as a postcard, but roily with accusations and remorse low the surface. A wife (Julianne Moore) water for her African-American plantsman (Dennis Haysbert), patch her economise (Dennis Quaid) sneaks soured to encounter fuck in subsurface merry nightclubs.

4. All That Heaven Allows (1956)
Douglas Sirk's Technicolor work was the inspiration for Haynes' flick (as substantially as for Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) and also features whatever glorious, snowbound Christmastime imagery on top of its desperate, heart-rending emotions. In this one, an senior woman (Jane Wyman) water for her junior plantsman (Rock Hudson); in actual life, she was a full octad eld senior than him. Gasp! Her uptight children provide her grief over her friendship, and she must end between true fuck and decorum.

5. The Unholy Three (1925)
One of Tod Browning's most twisted dramas has Lon Chaney as a ventriloquist and a master of disguise, move as "Granny O'Grady." Together with a disturbance strongman (Victor McLaglen) and a faerie (Harry Earles), they hit a infallible robbery scheme. One important scene takes locate at Christmas, around the Christmastime tree no less, but the moment is anything but cheery. In fact, it's pretty seriously demented.

6. The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
One of my favorite movies, Val Lewton produced this when a supplement to Cat People (1942) was ordered. He brought backwards the "cat girl" (Simone Simon) from the prototypal flick as a ghost, but focused the news on a lowercase woman with a coercive imagination. The parents constantly vexation most her and warn her to behave backwards to reality, but she can't help it, and things start getting unearthly when she begins sight her father's departed ex-wife in the backyard. The directorial debut of parliamentarian Wise, this is an uncommonly gorgeous and intellectually Byzantine B-movie, rank with deceive and Christmastime carolers.

7. Doubt (2008)
What better artefact to celebrate the pass season than paraphilia and backstabbing? John Patrick Shanley's flick attained whatever attending terminal assemblage for its performances, but I conceive it's a pretty solid package, and it held up to a ordinal viewing this year.

Other considerations: Baby Face (1933), Batman Returns (1992), The Merry Gentleman (2009).