A Finnish Santa Claus horror movie? Ho ho ho.
Actually there was a bit too much blood and guts for me but it was pretty mental.
Now watching Die Hard as I never have.
I love this movie… one of my favorites for the holidays!
Great movie.
Here are a few films going on my list for 2024:
I’ve seen American Fiction, loved it!
Thanks for the other two, both intriguing for sure. 
The trailers for all these look fantastic…
Oh cool!
Meh, this exact story has been told much better before. Watch Parasite instead.
Yeah, thanks for confirmation of what I’ve gathered so far-- that it’s mean-spirited in not-good ways.
Meanwhile, I recently saw Maestro. Carey Mulligan is as excellent as ever, but I thought she was wasted in a fancy, hollow shell of a confection. The script is awful.
Here’s another movie I watched over the weekend. I’m split on this one. On the one hand, I haven’t had this much fun watching Nick Cage since Adaptation. On the other hand, the ending was quite disappointing. They ratcheted the tension down from 11 to 1 in the blink of an eye.
Well, how’s THAT for a dark Christmas movie. Phew!
If you’re wondering about the British:
Can’t disagree with this. The whole thing felt like a big, showy effort meant to make us go “Wow!”
We have too many teenage daughters living in Europe to possibly have enjoyed this.
But we did enjoy this:
Excellent one here. Can’t believe I missed it earlier!
A bit like . . . Cornish Guy Maddin?
Tonight we watched The Magic Crane 1993
The 80’s and 90’s Hong Kong new wave are in my studied opinion THE BEST FUCKING MOVIES EVER. Pussycat hadn’t seen this one, and I hadn’t seen it in 30 years and that was a blurry bootleg VHS, so I was eager to watch the Blu-ray.
Admittedly the crane puppet doesn’t look any better in 1080p. Anita Mui’s lips in HD, though…
There’s a big meeting of all the Kung Fu schools but it’s really foggy and Tony Leung’s horse runs over a cliff and Anita saves them with her giant crane and he’s totally in love with her. Then Lawrence Ng’s evil school attacks everyone with rubber bats and Anita and the crane save the day again but the masters are all poisoned so Anita and Tony fly the crane to kill Gamera to get his gall bladder to cure the masters but are interrupted by Rosamund Kwan who hates Anita because they’re actually sisters and their dad ditched Rosamund for Anita so they have a flute vs pipa sonic Kung Fu duet battle WHICH IS AWESOME and then things start to get crazy.
The Kung Fu schools fight each other over the gall bladder while Tony heals the secretly injured Anita before Rosamund can attack again but dad swoops in and breaks it up but drops his Kung Fu book which gets torn in half and the evil school General falls into a pit where a legless blind master is chained up who makes him eat half the book which gives him powers while dad fatally injures himself healing the secretly injured Rosamund but he writes a letter in blood for Anita and gives it to the crane WHO CRIES A SINGLE TEAR and the now super powered evil General comes back and kills Lawrence and poisons Rosamond with “Cheerful Drugs” so she’ll die if she doesn’t have sex PRONTO but Tony saves her by fucking her so now he’s in love with HER but she doesn’t want anything to do with him saying “What you left inside my body’d be squeezed out by my Kung fu!”
Then Rosamund pipa vs flute duels Anita again on the cliffs in a tornado but evil General attacks them with a giant bell that destroys their instruments but dad is resurrected by the other half of his Kung Fu book and chooses to save both of them but the General is too powerful to defeat until the crane flies into the bell and breaks it and Anita jabs her flute into the General and inflates him until he explodes.
Five stars
