Holiday Movie Drinking Game Guides

by Christopher James

Kate Winslet is ready for some holiday drinking games. Are you?This Christmas is going to be different for a lot of people. One of my favorite Christmas traditions was taking my Mom to the movies at our local movie theater, Lodi Stadium 12. The theater had come a long way from having a bedbug infestation in the early 2010s to now having a bar in the area that used to be the party room and fancy reclining seats (hold the bedbugs). One of my favorite memories was the two of us ordering glass after glass of wine during our sold out showing of Collateral Beauty (it wasn’t sold out for long, people trickled out every 10 minutes). For those of you enjoying a socially distant or virtual Christmas, a holiday movie drinking game may be just what you need in order to get through the holiday.

Without further ado, here are some drinking guides to some Christmas classics…

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Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) and Filipinos at the Oscars

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Coen Brothers’ western epic True Grit, an adaptation of the 1968 novel of the same name. The film stars Oscar nominees Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin. However, at the center of the film is then-13 year old Hailee Steinfeld. She plays Mattie Ross, the strong-willed daughter of a man murdered by a notorious outlaw (Brolin). She then hires Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) to hunt down the outlaw. Steinfeld’s performance received critical acclaim at the time and she became the ninth youngest nominee ever for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars. She was 14 years and 45 days of age at the time of nominations.

Another remarkable record is that she became the first actor of known Filipino descent to be nominated for an acting category at the Oscars (her maternal grandfather Ricardo Domasin was half-Filipino), a fact that was given media attention in the Philippines at the time. She is part of a small group of nine Oscar nominees who are of Filipino descent. Here are the rest...

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Showbiz History: Ralph Fiennes, Waiting to Exhale, and Moment by Moment,

random things that happend on this day, December 22nd, in showbiz history 

1932 The Mummy, the fourth "classic monsters" picture from Universal (following Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, and Frankenstein) and the second to star Boris Karloff ("Karloff the Uncanny"), arrives in theaters. It was only a modest success and received no official sequels but was instead "rebooted" though they weren't using the term back then, with The Mummy's Hand (1940).

1939 Two years after Disney premiered the US's first animated feature, Snow White, another animated feature makes it to movie theaters via Paramount Pictures: David Fleischer's Gullivers Travels...

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Review: Taiwan’s Oscar Submission "A Sun"

By: Patrick Gratton

They say that time is the eternal healer. It picks you up from your bootstraps and licks your wounds. Time is also the eternal grim reaper. It has the power to darken one’s heart, hope and inhibitions.  Chung Mong-Hong’s A Sun, the big winner at last year’s Golden Horse Awards and Taiwan's submission for the 93rd Oscars, is a 150+ minute meditational piece on the effects of time and its role in expanding and tightening the human spirit. 

For a film with such a daunting running time, A Sun begins with a bang! Teenager A-Ho (Wu Chien-to) races with fellow gang member on his motorcycle through the pouring rain to a local restaurant. A-Ho thinks this is a simple shakedown to intimidating a rival of theirs. But the gang amputates the rival's hand with a machete (in the film's goriest moment). A-Ho’s father A-Wan (Chien Yi-wen) advocates for a guilty sentence during his son’s trial. When questioned by his wife about why he’s so apathetic towards their son, A-Wan replies that he’s simply giving him a chance to repent while spending time behind bars...

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Almost There: Emma Thompson in "Love Actually"

by Cláudio Alves

With the holiday season upon us, a festive Almost There entry feels appropriate. Love Actually, Richard Curtis' 2003 mosaic narrative full of Christmastime romance, is one of the few notable examples of holiday movies that vied for Oscar gold. With a cast like that, it's easy to see why. There's also the movie's commercial success and lasting popularity to consider. All that being said, it's with great sorrow that I confess myself a Grinch when it comes to this particular brand of Yuletide cheer. Between sexist tropes and tired romcom mechanisms, the movie comes off more like a lump of coal than a present.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining, and plenty of the movie's actors are up to some excellent work.  Emma Thompson, in particular, delivers one of the best performances of her career. As if acting a Bergman-esque marital drama against a backdrop of Christmas schmaltz, her supporting turn is as disarmingly funny as it is devastating…

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