Happy Hollidaze
Dec. 4th, 2005 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lurkittyThe holiday season is here and it's time to pull out the DVDs. There are standard holiday movies I must watch every year. I thought I'd let you in on my list and spend some time on a post on each one telling you why I find it essential to watch it.
To start, here's the list in must watch order. I've linked to IMDb so you know which version I'm referring to:
1. Scrooge
2.Holiday Inn
3.White Christmas
4.The Bishop's Wife
5.It's a Wonderful Life
It would be best to start at the top with number 1, so I'll start with #2 instead.
Holiday Inn is Bing and Fred at their best. It's all about the singing and the dancing and the rivalry over a girl (never mind what she thinks). This is the movie where Irving Berlin introduced White Christmas. One of my favorite Astaire dances is his solo with firecrackers (I know, you can see the placed lines of charges going off, but the timing....)
The blackface number...well...yes. It is appalling by today's standards.
But underscoring it all, and making it timely, is the war. This is a wartime, feel-good musical. It even has a war bond plea stuck smack in the middle. Bing singing it loudly to remind us those troops are out there winning our freedom.
I wonder if it made more sense to audiences back then than it does now. Our boys were in Europe fighting Nazi's for our freedom. Just like our soldiers are in Iraq right now fighting for our...huh? I'd have a better chance of buying that if we were still as free now as we were in 1942.
Consider the fact that although we were very much at war with a very powerful enemy, we didn't feel the need at that time to curtail our own civil rights (well, okay, except for that really awful thing we did rounding up Japanese-American citizens). The case of Deborah Davis comes up this week for arraignment in Colorado. What was her crime? She refused to show ID on demand while riding a public bus as it passed through a Federal Building complex. The day before her case is heard, oral arguments will begin in the case of Gilmore vs. Gonzales, a challenge to the secret directives that require us to show ID at airports when flying within (or without) the US.
But, one may argue, the Nazis didn't attack us on our own soil. Neither did the Iraqis.
To start, here's the list in must watch order. I've linked to IMDb so you know which version I'm referring to:
1. Scrooge
2.Holiday Inn
3.White Christmas
4.The Bishop's Wife
5.It's a Wonderful Life
It would be best to start at the top with number 1, so I'll start with #2 instead.
Holiday Inn is Bing and Fred at their best. It's all about the singing and the dancing and the rivalry over a girl (never mind what she thinks). This is the movie where Irving Berlin introduced White Christmas. One of my favorite Astaire dances is his solo with firecrackers (I know, you can see the placed lines of charges going off, but the timing....)
The blackface number...well...yes. It is appalling by today's standards.
But underscoring it all, and making it timely, is the war. This is a wartime, feel-good musical. It even has a war bond plea stuck smack in the middle. Bing singing it loudly to remind us those troops are out there winning our freedom.
I wonder if it made more sense to audiences back then than it does now. Our boys were in Europe fighting Nazi's for our freedom. Just like our soldiers are in Iraq right now fighting for our...huh? I'd have a better chance of buying that if we were still as free now as we were in 1942.
Consider the fact that although we were very much at war with a very powerful enemy, we didn't feel the need at that time to curtail our own civil rights (well, okay, except for that really awful thing we did rounding up Japanese-American citizens). The case of Deborah Davis comes up this week for arraignment in Colorado. What was her crime? She refused to show ID on demand while riding a public bus as it passed through a Federal Building complex. The day before her case is heard, oral arguments will begin in the case of Gilmore vs. Gonzales, a challenge to the secret directives that require us to show ID at airports when flying within (or without) the US.
But, one may argue, the Nazis didn't attack us on our own soil. Neither did the Iraqis.
