The other day, I was sick, sick, sick! I took some Nighttime Medicine on the same night our alarms decided to announce that they needed new batteries by shrieking their "Oh sh*t, you're gonna die" alarms like crazy at around Midnight. Fun times. I woke up looking, feeling, and smelling like this:
As you might imagine, I had me some fantastic festive fever dreams that night. Allow me to share them with you:
Oh, wait, that's the teaser trailer for 2010's "The Nutcracker 3D", which can now be found under the title "The Nutcracker: Saturnalia Ascending The Untold Story" on various streaming services. It is actually *less* insane than I'd been led to believe but it is still really something else. I mean, who doesn't need a holiday movie in their life where this happens:
Incidentally, I still long for "Bioshock: Christmas Edition".
* - It's Mr. B-Sharp!?
* - Most of these costumes are pretty cool. The Lion and Raggedy Anne, on the other hand, are tragedies.
* - Santa begs for the Fairy to change the characters back into toys because they might get broken or fall in love. "You weren't made for living!" Have some existential horror for Christmas!
* - So. Turns out the idea of having a magical toy spy on your kids for Santa to make sure they're being good around Christmas isn't a new thing. (This does not make it okay.)
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Art of the Day!
An oldie, but a goodie. Consider it a "stay tuned"...
This year's Obligatory Thanksgiving Weekend Holiday Film is something called "Nutcracker 3D". I first heard about it via my Holiday Movie Preview issue of Entertainment Weekly, and I assumed that it was going to be essentially exactly what it sounded like: a taping of the Nutcracker ballet but in (sigh) THREE-EFFIN'-D!!!
How wrong I was.
Gaze upon what "Alice in Wonderland" hath wrought, and shudder when you realize we are going to see more - a lot more - of these. (Nightmare Fuel warning, depending on whether it's creepy wooden doll-puppets or creepy made-up animal-people that scare you. Also, people of a certain age will have horrible Large Marge flashbacks.)
Now, at first, I was going to be all like, "This holiday season, give your family nightmares!" But then I thought about it and realized that this isn't the first Nightmare Fuel-errific film adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffman's The Nutcracker, nor is it the strangest.
Let's get the Nightmare Fuel out of the way. Back in the 1980's, the Pacific Northwest Ballet allowed our old friend Maurice Sendak to put his own spin on the Nutcracker ballet. The result was filmed by Carroll Ballard (better known for outdoorsy epics like "The Black Stallion" and "Never Cry Wolf"), and released to theaters as "Nutcracker: The Motion Picture". Now, for those of you who thought "Where the Wild Things Are" was too psychological and/or weird for children, I invite you to enjoy the most normal scene from "Nutcracker". (Why did you turn Uncle Drosselmeier into a creepy uncle, Maurice? Why? )
On the surface, Mark Morris' "The Hard Nut" seems like it would be stranger than Maurice Sendak's version -- but it turns out it's actually one of the better adaptations of Hoffman's original, printed-page Nutcracker. It's still very weird; check out Charles Burns' character designs.After all this, "The Nutcracker Prince" is going to look really dull. Ah well.Now, I wanted to finish this post with something special, but sadly all footage of one particular "Nutcracker" adaptation has been pulled from the internet (except for this one Spanish scene and this one English scene. Go figure.) It's a version that is available on DVD, even though it's very obscure, and for whatever reason I loved it as a child. It's "The Care Bears Nutcracker Suite". And yeah, it's weirder than you'd expect.----Sketch of the Day! Got something ambitious planned for Thanksgiving morning's post. We'll just have to see if I can pull it off...
