My Favorite Things This Week #99
The Friday High 5: 'Skeleton Crew' Is an Absolute Delight, and Also Here Are 4 Christmas Movies to Consider
Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High 5. 🙏🏻I had very low expectations going into Skeleton Crew, the newest Star Wars series on Disney+.
For one, the show is predominantly about a group of kids, and I have unknowingly— and without my consent—become an old. Part of that process (I’m resisting the urge to call it maturation, because hello) has meant exposure to other things, non-Star Wars things, some of which are actually better than my beloved space saga. I’m simply no longer the boy I was, who could love something just because it took place in a faraway galaxy with talking frog-men and effeminate British robots. These days, I need it to be good.
That’s proven to be a high bar.
My typical enthusiasm for new Star Wars has become couched by wariness. I’m never gonna stop touching this particular stove, but these days I reflexively wince before doing so. What a joy then to discover Skeleton Crew is really really good.
Everyone is making the obvious comparisons to Goonies and 80s era Spielberg. That vibe is definitely there. I personally kept thinking about the commercial where the kid pretends to be Darth Vader, which also goes down in suburbia and has the added element of a kid trying to use the Force. I was beyond delighted when two of the Skeleton Crew kids start a mock lightsaber fight while waiting for the school bus. Never has Star Wars been more relatable.
It’s a subtle thing but hints at so much worldbuilding. (Also: kids in Star Wars have action figures and make pew-pew noises before crashing them together.) The kids’ home planet is just full of interesting nuggets. Everything looks familiar but different, like Earth 100 years in the future. These Star Wars kids have the same problems ours do—homework, unrequited crushes, deadbeat dads. Just like home. In fact, the school of it all reminds me more of Spider-Man: Homecoming than anything Spielberg. And for good reason—Skeleton Crew showrunner Jon Watts directed the Spider-Man trilogy.
Skeleton Crew is easily the most unique Star Wars I can remember. It’s super approachable and just so fun and light. Yes, that’s the right word—light. You can’t tell a Star War without thinking about 40+ years of story baggage, but Skeleton Crew jettisons most of that in favor of character, setting, plot. It’s so simple, and yet so profound.
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It’s December so Christmas movies are the soup du jour. My desire to watch seasonal movies far outstrips the number of good options, which is why I willingly watch objectively bad movies.
Here’s this week’s menu, all of which are currently streaming on Netflix:
The Merry Gentlemen (2024)
A festive Magic Mike because what Christmas has been missing all along is male strippers. It’s PG so don’t expect to see any Yule logs.
I don’t know what the high and low end of the hunky Christmas movie genre is—someone else please bear that cross—but I can say The Merry Gentlemen is no Hot Frosty, which itself is a poor man’s The Knight Before Christmas.
The Merry Gentlemen falls under the wide umbrella of sorta-cute and kinda-fun. The whole time you’re watching, you’re cognizant that there are better uses of your time. So you keep watching for a payoff that never fully materializes.
My favorite part is Alex P. Keaton’s dad cheering on the half naked men dancing to save his business. You could make an analogy about the rich exploiting the working man, but this isn’t that kind of movie. Though I’d love to see one where a Musk-analogue has to rely on pro bono strippers to save his livelihood, and in the process discovers something that looks like a soul. Anyway, just happy to see an old face from my childhood again.
The male lead of The Merry Gentlemen looks vaguely familiar in a “2000s era CW hunk who’s now 20 years older” kinda way. He headlined a bunch of Walmart commercials over Thanksgiving weekend, a development my sister-in-law couldn’t quite accept or believe; having now seen The Merry Gentlemen, it makes perfect sense to me.
Our Little Secret (2024)
Another year, another Lindsay Lohan Netflix Christmas flick. Our Little Secret is a clear step-up from Falling for Christmas, the 2022 film where Lohan rediscovers the magic of Christmas by losing her memory. These movies, I tell ya. Hokey doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Our Little Secret also involves finding something that’s been lost. Lohan and her male co-star are childhood friends who level up into a romantic relationship, and then break-up for reasons not fully explored or explained but occur to give the movie its inciting incident. This leads into shenanigans when Lohan and her one-true-love unknowingly end up dating a brother and sister, which they discover at Christmas. And then keep a secret (per the movie’s title) for dumb plot reasons. Apart from all that, this movie is actually pretty good when graded on the Christmas movie curve.
Our Little Secret embraces a Christmas movie tradition that looks cool in movies but has never happened to anyone in the history of the world. I’m referring to the trope where everyone arrives at their Christmas destination many days before the holiday and then there’s a communal effort to get ready. The tree lot scene, which segues into the decorating montage. The making cookies scene. The shopping scene. It’s all so artificial—who shows up at Christmas without gifts? In what world can you buy a decent tree 2 days before Christmas?—but I love it so much. Even Christmas Vacation, one of my favorite holiday movies, hits all these high notes. It’s a cheap trick, plot-wise, but damn effective.
Our Little Secret is a fun movie that never manages to cross over into legit funny. I don’t think I laughed once, and I laugh at everything. But I enjoyed watching this one.
Christmas Island (2023)
Netflix recently (and briefly) acquired the rights to 10 Hallmark Christmas movies through the end of December. I can only assume it was one of those package deals you accept because of the implied value of more when you only really care about one or two things.
For example: today I received an email offering me the entire 9-film American Pie filmography for $20. My thoughts, in order were: 1) They made 9 of these things? when? how? is Stiffler in all of them?; and, 2) I only really care about the first 2 but I’d maybe watch the throw-ins eventually, if I got bored enough. But seriously: They squeezed 9 movies out of a joke about humping an apple pie? Never let anyone tell you creativity is dead in Hollywood.
Christmas Island is American Pie 9 in this example. It must’ve ended up on Netflix not because it was special—unless bland and boring is a selling point—but simply because it was part of a package deal that included the Good Shit, i.e. movies headlined by Lacey Chabert. (Good being subjective and having a softer definition when it comes to Hallmark.)
The plot involves a pilot who has leveled up to chartering one-percenters around the globe. Vaguely bad weather forces her to land on—wait for it—Christmas Island. They’re furloughed for 4 or 5 days because the storm is like, super bad, certainly the most bad. Blizzard of the century stuff.
Here’s how you know this movie was shot in California: Twice the pilot checks her weather app and is aghast to see the temperature’s in the high 30s. Like 37 and 39. My wife and I looked at each other and laughed. It was the only laugh this movie earned, and not for the right reasons. (For my non-U.S. friends—water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.) Even better: The exterior scenes were shot during bright, sunny days. Not a cloud in the sky. Where is this accursed storm they speak of?
There’s reconciliation and love and an appearance by Charmaine from Virgin River, who my wife and I are convinced was pregnant during filming (IYKYK). Unintentional laughs aside, one of the worst Christmas movies I’ve ever seen.
A Merry Scottish Christmas (2023)
Another Hallmark Christmas movie joint, which is the exact opposite of a Spike Lee joint by any measure or metric (or color). If the Hallmark Christmas movie sub-genre has a unifying message, it’s this: White people problems are not really problems at all. They’re quaint, sometimes zany situations that can be solved by being very earnest.
That’s obviously not true, but it’s interesting that this is Hallmark’s worldview.
A Merry Scottish Christmas is about a pair of siblings who discover they are descendants of a Scottish royal bloodline, with a castle and all that implies. And then they have to decide if they want to return to their boring lives in America or live in Scotland as a literal duke and duchess.
See? Not really problems in the traditional sense.
This is a Lacey Chabert Hallmark movie, which is to say, not half bad. She does so many of these Hallmark Christmas movies I have to assume she shoots them year-round. You gotta wonder what that does to one’s psyche. Does she break into hives at the sight of gingerbread? I’m being flippant because that’s what I do, but also serious. I have to imagine some of the old Christmas magic would get lost when you’re being paid to shoot movies about fake Christmas magic.
Here’s what’s special about A Merry Scottish Christmas—it unites Chabert with Scott Wolf, who played her older brother on Party of Five. It’s great seeing them on-screen together again. What are Neve Campbell and Matthew Fox doing these days? Because that’s the obvious sequel to this film.
Your Turn!
Okay, enough about me already. I’d love to know about you!
Have you watched Skeleton Crew? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
What’s the worst Christmas movie you’ve ever seen? Maybe I’ll watch it. :D
On a scale of 1-10, how unfair is it that Scott Wolf still looks so good?
In prison, every year, no matter where I was, they made it a point to show us "It's A Wonderful Life". I have grown to hate that movie with the heat of a thousand suns.
One year, the chapel did a Christmas movie festival of sorts, and we watched some pretty dubious Christmas movies, including a hilariously terrible one with Terrence Howard and Charlie Murphy, the name of which escapes me. But the absolute worse (and, in retrospect, I realize I am just piling on) was "Surviving Christmas", which was such a hateful, obnoxious and poorly-made piece of Christian pandering. It really is barely a movie -- after like 55 minutes of Christmas propaganda (which is really hard to pull off, I think, since even the most cynical Christmaspoitation has a hint of the season's glee within), they really try to lard up the runtime with montages and dance sequences that mean absolutely nothing.
In my nightmares, I still recall Kirk Cameron yelling, "Let's feeeeeeeeast!" as if it was a common phrase everyone used regularly.
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The Merry Gentlemen was terrible!! 😂😂