A look at the last 70 years of Christmas TV and film

In the build-up to Christmas, many things become part of the seasonal fabric – music, decorations and loathsome clichés – but none generates excitement quite like watching an old Christmas film or waiting for the special of your favourite television comedy. Owing to the lack of Christmas films in cinemas this winter, there is no better time to peruse the very best offerings from the past.

                British comedies have a strong tradition of producing fantastic Christmas specials. The first mention must go to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, whose The Office and Extras specials are standalone masterpieces. Both are funny, bittersweet, satirical, and their portrayals of festivities are sharp reflections of real life. In The Office’s two-part special, David Brent has recently lost his position as boss of Slough paper merchant Wernham Hogg. Brent is unable to quite let go of his old life, and he returns to the office Christmas party in the show’s climax. Gervais and Merchant show their almost unparalleled talents for depicting human life as we watch the employees unwind from their unfulfilling jobs. The party soundtrack achieves the perfect blend of nostalgia, emotion, comic tackiness and Christmas spirit. The Extras special is equally emotional. Andy Millman has finally climbed his way toward the top of the showbiz ladder, but success is not as he imagined it, and he has estranged his friends along the way. Fame becomes like a drug, and Millman agrees to appear on Big Brother – which Gervais and Merchant parody excellently – where he pours his heart out over the regrets he has about the way he has led the past few months of his life. The single episode almost acts as the payoff for the entire series.

                British sitcom Only Fools and Horses released a string of Christmas specials, many of which attained viewing figures in excess of 20 million. As a comedy, Only Fools and Horses can be hit-and miss, but the heart which kept the 22 year series beating is something universally relatable. One of the series’ more emotional moments comes in the 1996 Christmas special Modern Men, in which brothers Del Boy and Rodney are trapped in a lift following Rodney’s wife’s miscarriage. It is testament to John Sullivan’s ability as a writer that the line between comedy and tragedy is so frequently and considerately toed.

                The British certainly hit the right note when it comes to Christmas television, but Hollywood has spawned dozens of fantastic Christmas films, several of the most popular of which were released during the Golden Age. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is a heart-warming, life-affirming piece which stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a man who sees how life would be in his town had he never existed. Miracle on 34^th Street, released a year later, is an equally uplifting film about a department store Santa Claus who claims to be the real thing. Despite the apparent corniness of some major films from this era, they contain timeless messages about the nature of good will, a very important theme within Christmas stories.

                Although many recent Christmas movie attempts have been ghastly, there have been some fantastic offerings over the past couple of decades. Home Alone is a common inter-generational favourite, and for good reason: Macaulay Culkin is one of a rare breed of child actors who can lead a film without making it trite and cringe-worthy. Music is a particularly vital component of Christmas films, and John Williams’ Oscar-nominated score is fantastic, giving the film a magical edge. The sequel is equally entertaining, but parts three and four are simply atrocious spin-offs. Elf is another strong Christmas comedy, a markedly rare thing in the 21^st century. Robert Zemeckis’ take on the greatest Christmas story ever, A Christmas Carol, was unfairly criticised on its 2009 release, but the film is a good animated adaption which succeeds in telling the story to a modern generation.

                If sentimentality isn’t your thing, there are also plenty of thrillers and action films with just a hint of Christmas spirit. Die Hard has become a cult Christmas favourite, and even American Psycho has a Christmas party scene which serves as light relief from the disturbing scenes throughout the rest of the film.

Actors on the other side of the camera

It is almost a cliché that an actor who reaches a certain level of recognition declares that he, or she, would eventually like to try their hand at directing. With recent releases Argo and Corolianus notable for their A-list directors, Ben Affleck and Ralph Fiennes respectively, the question surrounding actors’ adaptability to directing has resurfaced. But how many of those who venture to the other side of the camera find success?

            Most would agree that Ben Affleck’s acting performances have been a mixed bag: despite strong work in Good Will Hunting and Hollywoodland, most of his on-screen outings have left something to be desired. Daredevil was the most forgettable superhero film in recent memory, with the exception of the abominable Catwoman. However, Affleck’s work behind the camera has garnered a huge amount of attention, particularly his recent release Argo.  Affleck announced himself as a screenwriter in 1997 following years of fruitless background acting work. His work in Good Will Hunting, for which he shared acting and writing credits with friend Matt Damon, earned him an Oscar for best screenplay. Through his more recent work in Gone Baby Gone and The Town, Ben Affleck has proven his natural knack for capturing drama and grit on camera, and he is one of very few actors to have cultivated a fanbase as a director. Affleck has hinted that Argo may be among the last films in which he acts and directs: “The focus that you have to put in as an actor just takes away from the bandwidth of your concentration (as a director)”.

Bryan Cranston and Ben Affleck in Argo

            In some ways the opposite of Ben Affleck, who became simultaneously prominent as an actor and a writer, is Clint Eastwood. Eastwood had long been known as ‘the man with no name’, a tough, silent character from Sergio Leone’s legendary westerns, but shed this image as he began to direct emotionally challenging films.  Clint Eastwood has since been prolific in his output of good work, and still surprises audiences and critics with his ability to tackle genre after genre.

            Ben Affleck and Clint Eastwood share a love for their medium and, most importantly, an ability to learn. Affleck talks passionately in interviews about what he gains artistically from working with legendary directors such as Terrence Malick and Gus Van Sant. Having the opportunity to spend weeks or months on end with such talented artists is clearly beneficial, but being a well-known actor certainly does not give one a ‘free pass’ to become a top Hollywood director. From the perspective of the studios, the involvement of a famous actor in production does not necessarily sell tickets. Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut Coriolanus was received positively by critics but performed slowly at the box office, and George Clooney’s Leatherheads netted Universal Studios a loss. Any success that actors have in directing is merited.

            Many actors’ careers in front of the camera have been forgotten in favour of their more illustrious directorial achievements. The likes of Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin are quite rightly recognised for their tremendous contributions to filmmaking in the first half of the 20^th century, but both started out in showbusiness as actors. More recently, Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner each enjoyed spells as award-winning directors who commanded very high budgets. Costner’s Dances With Wolves and Gibson’s Braveheart were both Oscar winners in the 90s, somehow beating Goodfellas and Heat respectively. Kevin Costner’s directing career took a turn for the worse as he troubled studios with a string of bombs: Waterworld had to rely on video sales for a profit, while The Postman was one of the worst box office disasters in cinema history, returning $18 million on an $80 million budget.

                                             Overrated: Braveheart

            Many actors’ recent directorial ventures have performed particularly well in awards season. Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur earned him a BAFTA for best new director, and The Ides of March was nominated for an Oscar. With ever-fascinating Andy Serkis assisting Peter Jackson as second unit director for The Hobbit, it appears that the landscape for aspiring actor-directors is far from bleak.

2012 - a change in direction for the action film?

When I say that the Bourne films are the most influential films of the 21st century, I can't help but expect people to rise up, call me out for it and throw in the film 'There Will Be Blood' in their counterargument, which makes me consider what people really mean when they say 'influential'. One thing that's become apparent to me is that there are people out there who confuse the influence of a film for the quality of it. I for one love the Bourne films but I'm aware that there are many people who don't, people who would naturally get annoyed when I refer to the importance of these films over modern cinema. The fact is, for better or for worse, basically every single action thriller, and there have been quite a few in the last decade, has been influenced in one way or another by the Bourne Identity and it's two sequels. It's left its mark on the Bond franchise. It's given rise to a multitude of shaky-cam based thrillers, one of the more recent ones being Safe House. Even veteran directors like Michael Mann have produced films of a vastly different caliber since the first Bourne came out in 2002, going from frankly surreal 80's thrillers like Manhunter and rather slow burn, character based dramas such as Heat (1995) and The Insider (1999) to fast moving actioners, some fantastic (Collateral) and some deeply flawed (Miami Vice).

However, despite the amount of similar films that have been produced since, none have done the shaky camera, brutal fight and gritty chase actioner as well as the Bourne films, and only now do directors seem to be realising this. To see this, look no further than the recent Bond: Skyfall. Quantum of Solace adopted a strongly Bourne influenced narrative and style, with fast edits and a more harrowing style of action, and generally failed as a result, moving too quickly and offering no ideas that haven't been seen before (what with a rooftop chase that was almost definitely recycled from The Bourne Ultimatum). Naturally, then, Skyfall moved in the other direction, creating a more slow paced film, impressive on all standards including character and acting, the former of which Quantum lacked. It had a range of different action scenes rather than the same old street chase that turns into a brutal, down-to-earth and fast moving fight. But there's more to Skyfall than just a rejection of what Quantum of Solace did. Take, for example, the scene in Shanghai, particularly Bond's night-time drive. It looks and feels almost identical to a very different, very brilliant recent thriller that no one saw coming (well, we did): Drive. One of very few recent thrillers that felt totally uninfluenced in any way by Bourne style action. Director Sam Mendes takes a long time to absorb the audience in a motorway drenched in blue light and sets the action of the scene itself inside an empty building where the lights are constantly changing colour. What's more, immersing the audience in the look, feel and colours of this location seems to have been the priority of Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins - the result is highly refreshing and original, and definitely bears resemblance to Drive. There's also the fact that both use the same ALEXA digital camera. But with Drive, it's proven itself as a worthy tool in capturing light and colour above everything else, which is part of what made Drive the best film of 2011.

So is this style, which Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive seems to have pioneered, the new direction for action films generally? Maybe so. Admittedly, the aesthetics of Drive and Skyfall are particularly unique, given that Drive was strongly influenced by the aesthetics of 80s cinema while Skyfall had master cinematographer Roger Deakins working on it. But there's definitely a recurring theme in recent thrillers, a theme which Drive and Skyfall come under the bracket of. While the sustained, on-the-run atmosphere of Bourne is what made it what it is, the best recent thrillers and actioners have abandoned this style while the less impressive ones have attempted to stick to it. The Dark Knight Rises, Looper and Skyfall - among the best films of 2012 and definitely the best action films of the year - all contain a narrative which does not maintain a certain atmosphere, and all feature a drastic change of atmosphere at some point. The Dark Knight Rises goes from being a slow, brooding film which in the first half focuses on the consequences of being Batman on Bruce Wayne to an operatic, intense epic. Looper has a noirish feel in it's first half, with a dark city that feels controlled by the criminals and corrupt and a morally dubious hero that kills for money and abuses drugs, but becomes a western towards the end, setting itself in the country and focusing on the protagonist's attempt at redemption. Skyfall sets it's entire third act in the UK, and the climax within an abandoned Scottish house, despite the fact that the beginning took us to Istanbul and the middle took us to Shanghai and Macau. 2012 is, admittedly, not the first year to see action films adopt this kind of style. No Country For Old Men, in 2007, went from painfully tense cat-and-mouse thrills involving a stolen case of money and a silenced shotgun to a bleak story about inescapable death. Inception, in 2010, had a half hour long climax which intercut between three very different action set pieces - a gritty car chase through rainy city streets, an alpine battle and Joseph Gordon Levitt wearing a pinstripe suit and waistcoat, fighting in zero gravity within a hotel. 2012, however, is the first year that has fully established this new form of action film. Why do I say that? Well, the action films of 2012 that have attempted to imitate the Bourne formula - basically Safe House and The Bourne Legacy - were generally the weaker blockbusters made this year. The most exciting parts of Safe House were nothing we hadn't really seen before, while Legacy seemed to be going in a good direction during the scenes between Jeremy Renner and Oscar Isaac, promising a new concept with some of the same mystery that made the first three unique, but descended into a remake of the Tangier scene in Ultimatum during it's climax.  

But for this new breed of thrillers including Drive and Skyfall, what else is new? Just an observation, but white posters. I'm going to use a few films I've already mentioned to exemplify this. Here you go:

Even the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises had a white motif:

So there. Expect to see more of white posters in the future.

Another thing that films seem to want now is an element of cool. Bourne revolutionised the action genre by introducing a hero who was not slick or out-of-this-world, but the way in which audiences have responded to recent films suggests that more stylish heroes are coming back into fashion: of course, Drive demonstrates this better than any other film - don't tell me you didn't want to get a) driving gloves b) a satin jacket or c) a supply of toothpicks after seeing the film. But Bond, however, has also gone back to his more sleek roots in Skyfall. He adjusts his cuff in the middle of an action scene. He wears a more flamboyant midnight blue tuxedo. He uses a cutthroat razor.

There's no saying what the future holds for these kinds of films because of course, no one knows what's going to be the future of the film industry. But with directors now queuing up to work with the likes of Gosling, Levitt and Hardy, who have all recently reminded us of old school Hollywood cool in their recent films, and brutal/darker actioners such as Refn's Drive and Nolan's Batman trilogy influencing a multitude of new directors, it seems safe to say that the QoS/Skyfall Bond analogy could describe the future of blockbusters - we're going to see less of the grounded hero in immensely dramatised circumstances, and more of the cool, out of this world character dealing with very relevant and terrifying situations. And if there's one other lesson here, it's that you should never underestimate the Bourne trilogy.

New 'Django Unchained' Trailer

This definitely doesn't disappoint in my view. The performances alone from Foxx, DiCaprio and Waltz can't really be faulted much here whereas in the previous trailer they weren't quite shown to their full quality. And, of course, there's a Jonah Hill cameo, an actor who I earlier today discovered Marion Cotillard has a fixation with during her BFI London Film Festival interview. But Tarantino is the master here and he doesn't waste a second in trying to prove it. 'The 'D' is silent' and 'adult supervision required' are sure to be quoted when the film is released, perfect examples of Tarantino's humourously postmodern but not self-parodying or self-conscious writing style if anyone really cares about looking into them that much. It's already guaranteed to be one of his most well filmed works, adopting western filming styles that suggest he really has done his homework when making the film to produce something totally genuine. But it's Tarantino, we guessed that that would be the case when the film would first be announced.

New 'Killing Them Softly' Poster

Thoughts? The main criticism to be made of this is that it gives the film the appearance of an actioner, while early sources are saying that it most certainly is not. However, it's good to see some of the reviews compiled as well as images that actually set the tone of the film (it's unlikely not to have a political subtext, what with the US flag with the colour drained in the background of the poster and a tagline 'In America you're on your own'). 

'The Dark Knight Rises' 2 Minute Nokia Trailer

Well this is a welcome surprise - a whole new 2 minute trailer for Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight Rises'. Each trailer so far, even the TV spots, have delivered something new and interesting, and this one doesn't dissappoint in this aspect. The music alone is worth the price of a cinema ticket and each new clip or line of dialogue adds something new to the equation - an endless amount of things are suggested by one of Bruce Wayne's new lines around halfway through, and we finally get to appreciate how terrifying the confrontation between Tom Hardy's Bane and Christian Bale's Batman could be. A lot of intense action has been revealed in the previous trailers though the actual set pieces are very well established in this particular trailer, from a fight in sewers to a stylised Batpod chase. But of course, we don't want to spoil any of this because this trailer is a very good watch.