24 Days of Christmas- Merry Christmas, Here’s Some AIDS Installment

As a regular movie, Rent doesn't exactly have classic status. With Chris Columbus’ stagey direction and lack of personal voice, Rent isn’t even a particularly good adaptation of the Broadway musical from which it’s based. The actors are all too old for their parts. The film lacks cinematic urgency. And the once-cutting-edge play about a group of New York bohemians turns into a surprisingly conventional piece of “we should all love each other” fluff. But as a Christmas movie, Rent is kind of great.

The story of a make-shift family’s heartbreak and hope is exactly the kind of crap that Christmas movies were made for. The momentary triumphs, abject horror, and desperate yearning for meaning in a world that can seem heartless and cold are the most moving tropes that I have experienced throughout this whole experiment. And this particular group of ragtag misfits, compiled of society’s castoffs, is profound in their devotion to the idea of their family.

During the non-Yule Tide part of the year, I find Rent’s politics incredibly frustrating even as I find the songs obscenely catchy. But during Christmas time, I think that tenants SHOULD be allowed to stay in their apartments rent-free and with ample provisions in terms of electricity. There’s a very traditional sense of “goodwill towards men” that Rent embodies, despite its seemingly fringe setting, that fits in perfectly with the pantheon of It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. If Angel, dressed up as lady stripper Santa, singing a song about murdering a dog and giving money to people, isn’t the Christmas-iest thing you see this year, then I don’t know how to talk to you.

Rent tells the story of 7 friends in late 1980s New York, ravaged by AIDS, poverty and drug abuse. Along the way, it touches on love, friendship and loss. The movie adaptation is occasionally given to histrionics, and it definitely loses a lot of the original play's kinetic energy, but that cast and the emotions remain strong (although this movie is the one that made me hate Idina Menzel for about two years). And belief in the idea of love as transcending the seasons that a life goes through, while cliché, is particularly moving when accompanied by so many varied depictions of what love means.

Random Observations: 
• Doing a 99% Watch on a film that's whole premise is about a group of un and under-employed young kids unable to pay their rent and being pushed out of their homes by an uncaring real estate magnet is a little absurd; but suffice it to say that from the opening number of “Rent” and the immediate appearance of Taye Diggs saying “get your ass off the Range Rover,” to the huge protest about homeless rights, this movie is more socialist than the Muppets.

• My mom’s summary of Rent: “Christmas Eves are the bookends, held together by heroin and Aids… Merry Christmas.”

• The movie’s take on love: you can find it if you’re gay (Angel and Tom), if you’re a lesbian (Maureen and Joanne), if you have AIDS (Roger and Mimi), but not if you're a heterosexual white dude with no discernable medical history.

• Why do musical characters all think that Santa Fe is the promise land?

Why the Twi-hate?

by Rachael Nisenkier

I did not see the new Twilight movie at midnight. But I would have.

Here’s the thing. I get your point, hypothetical Twilight-hater. I don’t think that Bella and Edward have a particularly healthy relationship (in fact, I could and have written pages and pages on the anti-empowerment message the books so often embody). I don’t think the writing’s particularly good. The movies are essentially hours-long excuses to make Robert Pattinson look moodily gorgeous and Taylor Lautner take off his shirt. And the plot of Breaking Dawn could be the stupidest yet, with Bella losing her virginity, in a way that’s guaranteed to make even sex-positive feminists squeamish, before growing mystically pregnant. But my question remains… why do we hate on Twilight so much?

March 23rd: Be There

by Kelly Bedard 

The official Hunger Games trailer hit the world like a flaming District 12 tribute today after Josh Hutcherson (who plays fan favourite Peeta Mellark) introduced it on Good Morning America.

The superb, pulse-pounding teaser kicks off with the serene Jennifer Lawrence as heroine Katniss Everdeen meeting her tried and true best friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) in the woods for their daily hunt. It's as peaceful a scene as Katniss ever enjoys and the sense of foreboding in Gale's pleas for them to run away together gives just the right sense of unease. Then we're on to the grey-tinted Reaping and Elizabeth Banks' frothily icky take on Effie Trinket, Lawrence's screams, the face of her terrified young sister Prim. The rest is a flash- the train, the prep team, Cinna's designs, Haymitch's training, Caesar's interviews and that crucial scene on the roof when Peeta first shows us who he is. 

Exclusive: Amy Acker talks Joss Whedon's Top Secret "Much Ado"

photo by Elsa Guillet-Chapuis

by Kelly Bedard

Two days ago my facebook wall started lighting up with friends reporting the latest impossibly exciting story to reach well-rounded geek ears: that TV god/brilliant writer Joss Whedon had used his vacation time post-Avengers to adapt and shoot a new version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. I immediately dismissed the possibility- clearly someone was playing a trick on me. There's no way one of my favourite cultural icons could have cast a squad of my favourite actors to produce a film version of one of my favourite plays ever written; there was no way it was true. But by the time the story hit EW.com yesterday there was no denying it- this thing was real.

Back in 2010, our fellow My Entertainment World branch, My TV featured an exclusive interview with My TV Award nominee Amy Acker. Now, Whedon's newly minted Beatrice (Much Ado's word savvy leading lady) has graciously agreed to answer a handful of my giddiest questions about the film, the exceptional cast, working with Joss and the super quick and top-secret 12 day shoot that ended on Sunday.

Everybody Cut Footloose!

by Kelly Bedard

The opening scene of the new Footloose is toe-tapping great and followed by the excellent addition of the game-changing car crash that sets the no-dancing law in motion. The last scene is even better- it had me on a glitter high and dancing in my seat. The iconic montage of Willard learning to dance to the tune of "Let's Hear it For the Boy" is expertly copied almost frame-for-frame but given tiny modern tweaks and played with wonderful comic panache by Miles Teller. If they'd screwed up any of those three things (2 iconic, 1 tone-setting), the film would have had failure written all over it. As it is, a 70% mediocre film gets such a big boost from the excellence of that crucial 30%.

The Help: from page to screen

Editor's Note: 
The Help is one of the biggest films of the summer. But the beautiful movie isn't one of those adaptations that lives a separate life from its source material. The movie is directed by the childhood best friend of the author and based on her book inspired by her childhood about a woman who writes a book inspired by her love of the woman who raised her. It's not a movie you can take out of context. Katheryn Stockett took a lot of heat just for writing The Help (a strange notion in context of the heat her character Skeeter and her subjects Minnie and Abilene get for writing the book "The Help" within the book The Help) and to think of Tate Taylor's film as somehow unburdened by that history takes away a lot of what makes The Help special. As such, senior contributing author Rachael Nisenkier (an author for both My Cinema and My Bookshelf) has written her film review as a companion piece to her previously published book review. You'll find both pieces here, published together in our efforts to capture all that The Help is.