Holiday Films – It’s a Bugs Life – 7/1/20

“It’s a Bug’s life’, the weekly post when I tell you what films we’ve watched both on our film Sundays and other parts of the week (I will talk about TV shows elsewhere). Please if you haven’t read the introduction page to this series go take a look that’s where you’ll learn the history of our sorely missed Bug.”

There are no spoilers for the films listed

Due to the Christmas period BAFTD was on it’s Christmas break, this is a round up of all the films we watched from that period. The layout and format will be slightly different from normal weeks as there is a lot more films than normal. This post covers the period from week ending 17th December (remember Bug’s life posts go from Tuesday to Tuesday) and finish on the 7th January 2020. The full list of the films watched is at the end of the post. In total that is 32 films over 22 days (well it was Christmas), that included watching one film twice (The Rise of Skywalker). It is for obvious reasons I wont talk about all films watched as I don’t want this post to go on forever.

Let us start with the Christmas themed films that we watched. This includes Gremlins (1984) which is a Christmas film even though it was released in June, it has the DNA of Christmas running right through it, sometimes you forget how dark in tone the film is always worth a re-watch no matter the time of year.

We watched some of the the usual suspects but we also found some new (well to us) Christmas films. For the first time we watched Christmas with the Kranks (2004). As a lover of Tim Allen in Home Improvement and Galaxy quest I was looking forward to this film. It ended up being a bit weird in a few ways, It could have been a great exploration of consumerism and peer pressure but the film didn’t have the confidence to pull this off which meant that part of the film ended up failing for me. It ended up feeling like two different films, the last 45 minutes of the film though traditional Christmas fair was the part that worked best because it felt like they knew what they wanted to do. I read a great review after I watched it that put forward the idea that film was about escaping religious Cults which made me laugh.

Keeping with the Tim Allen shenanigans we entered the world of The Santa Clause (1994), The Santa Clause 2 (2002) then The Santa Clause 3 (2016). I really enjoy these films and always have. The first two films are the strongest, the third one is still enjoyable but I don’t feel it has as much charm as the previous films. I find when there is such a gap in a sequel (14 years between 2 and 3) they can struggle to get the same feeling.

A final film we dragged out of the vault was Scrooged (1988), Bill Murray post Ghostbusters being Bill Murray is well worth watching. I had not seen this for years and forgot how good it was. If you’re looking for a good Christmas film and not seen it I highly recommend it. There were a few of our usual suspects missing off our Christmas films this year, no Christmas Vacation, Die Hard or Krampus but we only have so much time.

Now onto to some of the films we premiered over Christmas the first film being Men in Black international (2019). I had stumbled across the DVD in a charity shop which for such a new film was quite a shock. I had heard a few negative things about the film but we both enjoyed it and felt it was a good edition to the Franchise. I think it may have suffered on release due to the amount of big films that were released at the same time.

The next one was John Wick Chapter 3 (2019), now what’s not to love about the John Wick franchise some exquisitely choreographed fight scenes, Keanu Reeves being Keanu Reeves and an action franchise that cares for Dogs. The only Negative I can think of is they need to be careful and introduce knew ideas as these great set pieces can only support the franchise for a while before we as an audience require something more to get our teeth into.

My big premiere was of course The Rise of Skywalker (2019) that I took a very rare visit to the cinema to see it. I will say it’s all I wanted from a conclusion to those films. I loved it so much I went to see it again before it left our cinema. The last film I saw multiple times at the cinema was Return of the Jedi in 1983. If you want to read about my personal feelings and what the Star Wars films mean to me read my Christmas Intermission (No Spoilers).

The final Premiere film we watched was Fighting with my Family (2019) an enjoyable film about a family who want to fight in the WWE, as someone who doesn’t ‘Get’ wrestling it was still a fun film. My only complaint is the poster and all advertising material imply that Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) plays a major part in the film when in fact he is probably in the film for less than a couple of minutes.

I’ll leave my roundup of the Holiday period here and you can see the complete list of films below. Have a good week and we’ll see what unfolds in our viewing.

Watchlist