Number 90: Santa Claus (1959)
Ah Santa, we’ve all heard about him? Travelling the world in
one night on his sleigh with his flying reindeer, delivering gifts to all the
good boys and girls. The time he fought the Devil. A classic Christmas story.
This Christmas tale comes to us from Mexico. It starts with
Santa and his elves, with ‘elves’ being a euphemism for ‘child labour’. They
are taken from all over the world and we are treated to a variety of folk songs
and nursery rhymes to represent all the nations. The USA being particularly
amusing as they appear to forget the words to ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’.
They get their revenge on Santa by tricking him into
releasing the devil Pitch and…oh, my God he’s attacking with interpretive
dance. The swine!
Pitch’s plan is to make children do bad things, such as
stealing. Santa can do nothing as he cannot leave Lapland until Christmas Eve.
All he can do is watch from his castle with a multitude of machines he can use
to spy on the world’s children, even into their dreams. Santa is a good guy
isn’t he? It’s hard to tell with all his creepy machines and menacing laugh.
He’s very vain too, Jolly Saint Nick really loses it when
one child describes him as ‘old’.
We meet characters from around Santa’s castle, including
Merlin, who give him the abilities to sneak around unseen and a key that
unlocks any door. He goes through a fitness regime so he can get down all the
chimneys. He claims to know ‘every child on earth’ and has a powder he can use
to make them sleep. Again, he is the good guy isn’t he?
They obviously couldn’t afford real reindeer, so there are
weird looking toy ones instead. And there’s only four of them, sorry Rudolph
you didn’t make the cut.
The devil Pitch tries to stop Santa into going into a house
by moving a chimney’s entrance out of position, showing a complete lack of
understanding of how chimney’s work. No problem though, Santa’s got his magic
key remember? Pitch tries various other schemes but Santa always gives him his
comeuppance. One plan involves getting three ‘bad’ children to kidnap Santa,
fundamentally flawed from the start. These children are all on the ‘naughty’
list, so Santa wouldn’t stop for them and he doesn’t.
There are attempts made to show the differences of
celebrating Christmas between the rich and the poor but ultimately it’s about
the values of being good, not just at Christmas but all the year through.
As a child I may have enjoyed it but as a more cynical
adult, it’s all just a bit silly.
Number 89: Theodore Rex (1995)
If you must watch a Whoopi Goldberg movie, watch The Colour Purple. Because if you do you
might forget just how far Goldberg fell afterwards.
The mid 90’s were a particular low point for Goldberg with
one mediocre comedy after another, Theodore
Rex being the absolute bottom of the pit.
This is a world where anthropomorphised dinosaurs live and
work alongside humans. They had been genetically engineered several years
previously for…reasons. The first scene of the titular character puts me in
mind of Howard the Duck. Hmm, not a
good start.
Goldberg, as detective Katie Coltrane, is teamed up with Theodore
Rex to work on a ‘dinocide’ case. As you might expect, Coltrane is not thrilled
about being teamed up with a dinosaur. Not too surprisingly, dinosaurs are not
regarded as equals in this world. Speciesism is alive and well in this
universe.
So anyway, the engineer created the dinosaurs decides he’s
bored of Earth, wants to start over so builds his own version of Noah’s Ark and
plans to bring on a new Ice Age. It’s good to have a dream.
After lots of unfunny jokes, Rex melts Coltrane’s cynical
heart and they start getting along. All your standard clichés are here:
incompetent henchman, the badass sexy henchwoman, a ball-breaking police
captain and an insane master villain. With added dinosaur.
It’s worth noting this came out two years after Jurassic Park, so the producers were
eager to capitalise on the world’s interest in dinosaurs. But once the novelty
of seeing the dinosaurs living with humans wears off, you are left with another
poor kids movie that were so frequent in the 90’s.
There is a nice message in the two leads of overcoming
prejudices and learning we can all get along despite our differences but that’s
not enough to save the movie. I would rather watch The Super Mario Brothers Movie than this and that tells you all you
need to know.
Just one more film Whoopi Goldberg would rather forget.
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