For the first time in my life, I have watched It’s A Wonderful Life. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but it’s pretty good. I’m not a big Christmas person, and I always had a vague sense that it was a Christmas movie, so I never looked into it. But this year it occurred to me that everything I had ever picked up about it from popular culture (“When a bell rings an angel gets its wings”, “It’s in your house and his house”, and other things that have been on the Simpsons, mostly) had nothing to do with Christmas. I started wondering if it was a Christmas movie at all.

It is. I don’t think Jesus ever comes up or anything, and the depiction of angels is less in line with the teachings of Christianity than the pop-culture idea that people can become angels after death (which works in the movie’s favour, honestly). If I cared enough to make criteria for what qualifies as a Christmas movie (I do not, I’ll stick to Halloween for that) this would probably squeak by, but only barely so. You could probably remake this with the Christmas-set scenes being New Years Eve or George’s birthday, but I don’t feel strong enough to argue that, so sure, this is a Christmas movie. But, thankfully, it isn’t a movie about how the protagonist has to learn to love Christmas.

I’ve argued that the point of A Christmas Carol isn’t that Ebeneezer Scrooge learns to love Christmas, it’s that he learns to treat people better, which is something that should hopefully apply year-round. Here, George Bailey doesn’t even learn that much, he already believed it from the beginning. George is instead driven to despair by trying to live that way under the constant pressures of capitalism, and almost kills himself. I guess the message here is “don’t kill yourself because the masses might come together to help you” which is potentially less realistic than the angel coming to rescue him from suicide, but whatever. Everyone coming together selflessly to pitch in and help is literally my favourite ending to stories, so I’m on board.

I will say, it coulda been about half an hour shorter. I say that about ANY movie that exceeds two hours, and I don’t know what you could’ve cut (if I watch it again I’ll keep the snips in mind). But I wouldn’t cut the part where we learn what all the men in town do during the WWTwo. All movies should be required to have a montage of the cast going to war. I know a movie with the theme that “everything will turn out okay” is maybe not the place for it, but if they had killed off a character during that bit, it would have greatly appealed to me.

On Saturday I did something I had not done in at least four, maybe five years. I went to a movie that was playing in the actual theatres.

Now, I’ve seen this movie before, thought not since I was in my twenties (though I’ve listened to the album God knows how many times since then), so I was not surprised to love it. I don’t find ranking the things I like to be a meaningful exercise, but if pressed to give my favourite band, there’s a good chance I’d have to say Talking Heads, so even if this weren’t something I had seen before I could have predicted I’d love a movie showing the band perform at their heights. But this post isn’t about how much I loved the movie, this is about a Movie Thought that I thought while watching a movie.

One of the things the movie is famous for is how it starts with just one person on stage and slowly builds up the whole ensemble by adding more for each of the first five or six songs. Somehow this got me to thinking about how a band is a perfect microcosm of humanity. It’s just a group of people who have come together to create something together. The results can be beautiful, but the tensions between the people can tear everything down. But the beautiful things are still happened. In spite of being the front man of Senator Lizard, I don’t generally consider myself to have any real musical ability, but you know what I big into? Cooperation. I sure wish that we, as a species, could band together to build more beautiful things.

Today’s Beekeeper, Ken Oliverti, appeared in a movie called Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare, a horror thriller made back when concerns about killer bees were all the rage. Ken is a member of a family of quite successful Beekeepers, who have been working in the town of Blossom Meadows for generations. They have hives all over the valley with an estimated 25 million bees. Ken doesn’t need to wear a mask or gloves while handling the combs, saying “If you’re comfortable around bees, they’ll be comfortable around you.” The business is so successful that he has to travel the country (including to San Francisco, where he met his fiance Linda) and he’s taken a class about the dangers of killer bees, so you’d think he’d be exactly who you’d want around during a killer bee movie. There’s only one problem: he’s not the protagonist. And any apiarist who isn’t a protagonist is gonna have some problems!

Ken and Linda’s wedding is held outside on the land they own, not very far at all from some of their hives. The music is loud, which disturbs the hives. But, it turns out that several of the hives’ queens have been “Africanized” and the movie tells us that Africanized honey bees gets pissed off way more easily, so of course they immediately attack the wedding. Ken does try to wave get the guests inside, but the real heroic moment at this wedding is when the bride uses her veil as a mask and goes to rescue her soon-to-be step-son Joshua, who has been attacked. That woulda been a real proud moment for a Beekeeper like Ken, if he’d done it. But we’re never told that Linda is a Beekeeper. She’s marrying into the family, sure, but she’s not on the job yet (though I sure hope she got into the family business after the events of the movie).

Still, I could forgive Ken missing a chance to have a cool Beekeeper rescue if he was otherwise impressive. Sure, he’s part of a successful apiarist family, but he failed to even suspect that his own hives were turning on him. And then, when Blossom Meadows was Deadly Invaded by a Killer Bee Nightmare, Ken just took his family out of town. I get it, honestly I do. Josh had been hurt. Getting out of town makes sense. For an ordinary Beekeeper. But not the cool kind Beekeeper we look for around these parts.

Two Honeycombs out of Five. The rating of perfectly ordinary Beekeepers.

I just watched Demon Knight. Movie Thoughts came into my head while I did so, so here they are:

First and foremost, I’ll point out that it was a perfectly serviceable schlock horror experience. I’d recommend it to people who have the exact taste in movies that I do.

But what set my mind a wandering during this movie is something that actually applies less to this movie and more to serious attempts at horror fiction. Demon Knight, being a Tales From the Crypt production, is presented with a framing sequence featuring everyone’s favourite cryptkeeper, the Cryptkeeper. It has that double layer of fiction. The Cryptkeeper is already a fictional character and he is relating to us another story, which is therefore Extra Fictional. You see what I’m saying? I’ll come back to that a few paragraphs from now.

One of the ways that I often disagree with Horror Discussers on the internet is that a percentage of them (it feels like a large percentage, but probably actually isn’t) want to feel like they are scared for themselves while watching the horror movies. I can’t relate to that. I’ve never got that feeling once that I can remember. What I want from horror movies is to care about the characters enough to feel worry that they may not make it through the story. This is something that horror movies often fail.

The people who want to feel scared by horror stories also tend to say they prefer non-supernatural horror, because that way it can be something could really happen. A ghost bear isn’t scary because ghost bears aren’t real, they say. A normal human killer with a knife is scary because one of those might break in and kill me while I’m watching the movie. Well that could happen any time, whether you’re watching a movie or not, so if you want to be scared of that, be scared of it. If I’ve knowingly put a fictional movie on to watch I’m not worried about either the ghost bear or the normal human killer in the movie, because they’re both equally fictional actually. And ghost bears would make for a movie infinitely cooler than a human with a knife.

Anyway, while watching the Cryptkeeper introduce Demon Knight I began to wonder if he, and other similar horror comic hosts, were introduced to allow a sort of distancing from the supernatural elements of the horror stories they presented. You don’t get to pretend the story isn’t fictional when the undead guy making terrible puns tells you right from the start that it’s a story. It’s like a gate that only lets in people who can accept the weird supernatural stuff. If so, good job, Cryptkeeper.

I watched Wind Chill. I had thoughts while I watched it, and here they are:

This is a supernatural horror movie, blah blah, whatever. The main thing I took away here was that I just did not care for the protagonists. Not at all. They were not people I wanted to spend time with.

The story begins when the one woman and the one man meet up to share a car on a trip or something. They bicker a strange amount for two people who ostensibly just met to share this car. I thought that they were supposed to be some former friends who had bad blood between them or something, but nope. That’s just how they are. And it turns out that the man is also basically a stalker. My main feeling while watching was that I didn’t want to be watching them. That can’t be the intended effect.

There’s a frequently occuring trope in horror movies, especially the slasher movies, to have the protagonists be unlikeable jerks so that we are all happy to see them all get murdered. I don’t approve of that line of thought either, though at least I understand their reasoning. They are thinking the point of those films is that thrill of seeing people get slaughtered and if they are unlikeable it is all the better. That is probably true for a large portion of the audience. It isn’t for me, though. What I like about such films is seeing characters I like, or at least am interest in watching, as they try to get through the bad situations. I want to be happy when they succeed and saddened when they fail.

But that’s slasher movies anyway. This isn’t one of those. This is a movie about two people in a car and I don’t like those people and it takes way too long to get to the supernatural stuff. This is sharing a ride with two annoying strangers and it takes to long to get where I’m going.

I admit, the story does try to redeem the characters, have them grow as people and maybe get better, but it all happened long after I cared if they got better. By the time the stuff I wanted started happening, I did not care about how these two reacted to it.

Anyway, that’s it.