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Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas, Streaming, The Worx

A bit of old and new presides at Valley Cinemas this holiday. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is held over, joined by Daddy’s Home, this month’s Will Ferrell enterprise. The comedy stars Ferrell as a step-dad sincerely trying to get along with the kids, whose primacy is threatened by the children’s rambunctious real father (Mark Wahlberg). If this sounds like a story you’ve never seen before or one that only Mr. Ferrell can provide artistic justice, by all means …

At at the Glasgow City-County Library (408 3rd Ave S, 406, 228-2731) just in time for the Christian holiday is Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (1954) with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. Basically, it’s a service musical-comedy, with Crosby and Kaye seeking to help their beleaguered ex-General (Dean Jagger) make a go of his Vermont ski lodge while Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney spruce up the place. The film culminates in business-saving snow, and another rendition of the title song. Bear in mind, though, that “White Christmas” was introduced in Holiday Inn, a Crosby-Astaire musical comedy from 1942. This post-war jaunt was a belated attempt to highlight the song with a decade’s worth of WWII sentimentality, Jagger representing the advent of Ike.

For drier humor, there is The Complete Jeeves & Wooster, which gathers all the episodes from the early 1990s featuring the confused aristocrat (played by Hugh Laurie) and his bacon-saving butler (Stephen Fry). Based on the voluminous stories by P. G. Wodehouse, the films like the stories embody economy of statement. If you like the series, return for the books.

Bad news for The Worx, the video shop at 700 1/2 1st Ave N (406-228-4474). The best of the week’s DVD releases is the weak Pan, a simultaneously busy and inert “origin story” for J. M. Barrie’s famous boy who never grew up. Here we meet his mom (Amanda Seyfried), his Dickensian life in an orphanage – or maybe it’s Harry Potter influenced – and his eventual arrival in Neverland, to battle Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) with new pal Captain Hook. Like a vegan Christmas feast, none of it sticks, and it’s sad to think of all the misguided labor that went into it.

For some Christmassy Christian sentiment, there is the low-budget War Room. Take the title literally. Though commonly used in connection with combat strategy, here the phrase signifies a cleaned out closet where women “go to war” for their husbands by praying to God. With His intervention, a cohesion and future of a family, led by the devil-corrupted Tony and his wife-follower Liz, is saved.

Last week, Netflix began streaming a new, 10-part true crime documentary series made in the spirit of The Jinx, The Thin Blue Line, and other recent, lengthy and detailed crime stories. Making a Murderer is a riveting account of the complicated fate of one Steve Avery, the learning disabled scion of a junk yard empire in Wisconsin, near Green Bay, who spent 18 years in prison for a rape that later DNA testing proved he didn’t commit (the real culprit was apprehended), only to end up back in the slammer for an even more shocking crime. The whys and wherefores make for suspense more pressing and dispiriting because it’s all real. As your admiration for Avery’s skilled attorneys rises, one’s dread and contempt for a passel of local police and judicial functionaries rises, combatting that natural inclination we all have – inculcated by decades of CBS cop shows – to assume that police don’t act contrary to their social mandate. The 10-part series stops, but doesn’t end, and apparently there is much more to report. It’s difficult to resist reaching for the Wikipedia and spoiling the surprises, twists, and turns.

 

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