Upward and onward, faithful Shot-scateers! At the tail end of of a year full of firsts for our venerable online film journal, Reverse Shot is proud to announce the christening of our very own vanity DVD label, through which we will make available to the public a wide range of out-of-print and unjustifiably-overlooked buried treasures of the arthouse. And it is with great pride that we announce the maiden release of RS DVD:
Available for the first time on DVD, the entire 13-episode run of Mr. Smith, the groundbreaking NBC sitcom that cast a jaundiced, Orwellian wit on Reagan-era backroom politics, following the adventures of the titular “Mr. Smith”: Cha-Cha, a talking orangutan with an IQ of 256 who arrives in Washington as a no-nonsense political advisor (played with close-to-the-vest, deadpan charmby Every Which Way But Loose‘s incorrigible, raspberry-blowing “CJ”).
Included are all of the now-legendary episodes that galvanized the nation for three months in 1983, including “Mr. Smith Plays Cyrano,” “Mr. Smith Rescues Bobo,” and the censor-baiting, double-entendre-laden “Mr. Smith Gets Physical.” Discs include cast bios, a stills gallery, commentary by voice-of-Cha-Cha Ed Weinberger and writers Stan Daniels and David Lloyd, and specially-commissioned essays by Manny Farber, Anne Coulter, Joan Didion, and Dave Barry.
Okay, so with sneak previews and top tens and advance screenings and all that year-end jazz, whenever I retreat back home to spend the holidays with my family, there’s basically nothing left to go see. So I usually end up ensconing myself in joyous Christmas movies. As with every year, this consists of the superlative 1983 George C. Scott A Christmas Carol, Kubrick’s uncannily soul-cleansing Eyes Wide Shut, and of course that weirdo Canadian production from 1985 that came out under the Disney banner called One Magic Christmas which starred Mary Steenburgen as an impoverished, pissy mom struggling to make ends meet for the holidays who has to endure, in the days leading up to Jesus’s birthday, the shooting death of her husband in a botched bank robbery and the kidnapping and drowning of her two kids in the lake….don’t worry, Santa Claus makes it all okay.
This is some sick twisted shit, though, with their rotting ghosts, gun blasts, and masked orgies, so, if I’m looking for purity, it can be found no further than in the wondrous innocence of Jim Henson’s fucking fantastic 1978 shot-on-video HBO perennial Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, which runs a close second to A Charlie Brown Christmas as the all-time least materialistic and jaded Christmas special for kids. Po-dunk, impoverished tub-thumpin’ river rats competing in a Christmas day talent show, Ma and Emmett Otter just want to win the cash to buy each other something real special: the snag is that Ma has to hock her dead (snake-oil salesman) husband’s tool chest, which her son needs to do odd jobs to make cash, to buy a dress to wear to the competition; and her wee son Emmett has to put a hole in his ma’s washtub to make a wash-tub bass to form his jug-band to win the competition. A delicate retread of The Gift of the Magi adorned with almost nonstop lovely folk-tinged music by Muppet composer extraordinaire and general freakazoid Paul Williams, Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas just glides along as lightly and unpretentiously as the very visible strings hoisting up the cast of fabric puppets as they trot along a glorious bayou backdrop.
Now I’m not one to judge other parents, not being a parent myself, but this is the sort of stuff kids should be watching. Bereft of the incessant, empty pop-culture referencing that has completely demolished children’s entertainment, and imbued with the sort of values I would like to pass on to my children, Jim Henson’s special, like all of his work, haunts me to this day. You can keep your Madagascar and your effing Chicken Little, studio assholes; and anyone who takes their kids to see King Kong better be prepared to have a nice loooong chat about racial stereotyping afterwards…at least we’ll always have Emmett Otter to keep returning to.
Well, it’s now Christmas Eve, the war on Christmas (wholly manufactured by lamebrain right-wing pundits with too much time and a sinking administration on their hands—hiya Bill and John!) is nearly over, and I’m snug with laptop and eggnog well within reach of the glow from my in-laws’ Christmas tree, done up in candy canes, red ribbons and starfish. All’s quiet on Boston’s North Shore.
We here at Reverseblog want to thank everyone for reading us in our inaugural year, especially those who took the time to write in and call us morons, idiots, turks, and all the rest. We also want to send a very special thanks to our friends at indieWIRE for graciously offering to host our scattered musings. In the next few weeks we’ll be publishing our thoughts on the best and worst films of 2005 with indieWIRE, followed by our usual in-depth coverage on Reverse Shot itself, so please stay tuned.
Given the season, we’re all feeling a little misty-eyed and generous, and as the Reverseblog is well-known for pointing out instances of disagreement with other critics, we thought that now might be a nice time to dole out some well-deserved praise. So, thank you Manohla Dargis for your thoughtful, considered writings on Munich and The New World in The New York Times. Calling your articles “reviews” would be to do them a disservice since their overall thrust seems not to just proclaim these films “good” or “bad” but to publicly wrestle with their various conceptual and aesthetic strands in the hopes that if the breadth of intellectual inquest in these films can be foregrounded, that they might somehow rise above all the lazy editorializing, pithy commentary, and hyperbole.
I have not seen Munich yet, but your words have only left me even more eager. And as for The New World, which many of us here hold quite dear, hopefully your shot across the bow of its detractors will help spark the dialogue the film seeks, and keep it from landing in the dustbins of 2005. Thank you Manohla, and Happy Holidays.
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