Ho ho hello, loyal subscribers! Like the reason for the season pushing back that boulder after a three-day nap, What’s Worth Watching is back for the festive season! You know the deal: rather than relying on Andrew “Inventor of Podcasting” Collins to recommend some three-star stinkers for you to watch over this Christmas break, I, a wiser and handsomer man who’s never been closer than 10ft to Richard Herring, will recommend some solid-gold1 five star smashes worthy of your precious turkey-digesting time. Stop trying to get that paper crown to stay on your massive head, bun Maestro, ask your dad which of the five remotes works the Fire stick, and dig in.
Recommendation round-up
Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) 100 minutes
A technicolour tragedy from the greatest filmmakers in British motion picture history2, how have you not seen Back Narcissus already? Like, I don’t wish to judge, especially at Christmas, but at Christmas you tell the truth, I can’t pretend I’m not disappointed. Like The Beguiled set in the Himalayas, it’s a gorgeously-rendered and emotionally-heightened melodrama about repressed nuns3 driven slowly wild by the erotic paintings daubed over the walls of a dilapidated Indian palace they’re establishing a school/hospital in — as well as the physical presence of David Farrar as the hunky caretaker.
Charade (1963, Stanley Donen) 113 minutes
Simultaneously the last great screwball comedy the Hollywood studio system produced, and the best thriller Hitchcock never made, Charade proper lives up to its pedigree of a fading Golden Age. Audrey Hepburn stars as a widow pursued by a cavalcade of shady men after a fortune her recently-deceased husband apparently nicked. Cary Grant and Walter Matthau are amongst the unscrupulous ensemble, in a delightful confection from the director of Singin’ in the Rain.
Review of the season sponsored by Bradfield Brewery Farmers Belgian Blue
Where You’re Meant To Be (2016, Paul Fegan) 76 minutes
As both a solo artist, and the singer/songwriter for miserabilist Scottish indie pop duo the Arab Strap, Aidan Moffat has penned and performed plenty of songs about perversion, heartbreak, and getting fucked — often with dashes of dark humour. It’s a sensibility he shares with a lot of traditional folk songs which, despite what Big Radio 2 may lead you to believe, is full of proper great, often nasty bangers.
In 2016, Moffat undertook a tour of small Scottish venues — many of them clubs and the like where such traditional songs are often performed — to premiere his contemporised rewrites of these old folk tunes. I think they’re grand, but he faces a decidedly mixed response in many places. The narrative thrust of this fly-on-the-wall documentary is the conflict between Moffat and Sheila Stewart, a singer of traditional folk songs from a long line of traveller performers, who objects to his rewrites.
Mostly gentle, Where You’re Meant To Be nonetheless has some serious bite in its assessment of tradition versus modernisation, and the ways in which the gorgeous highland landscapes are juxtaposed with and/or are complemented not only by the hardscrabble existence of many who live there, but the universal struggles depicted in the music. Often hilarious, a bit fighty, genuinely moving, and with a load of bawdy songs: what could be more Christmassy (without being an actual Christmas film)?
Best of the rest
Who Am I This Time? (1982, Jonathan Demme) Christopher Walken’s customary random pauses work great in this, a made-for-TV adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut short story, where he plays an awkward amdram actor who charms Susan Sarandon by adopting the roles of more confident romantic prospects4 (Watch on YouTube)
After Blue (2021, Bertrand Mandico) Not one to watch with the family, unless you have a particularly cool family: a psychedelic, erotic queer phantasia, about an outer space outlaw called Kate Bush;5 kind of a modern-day Barbarella (Watch on Channel 4)
What A Way To Go! (1964, J Lee Thompson) Wacky af black comedy starring Shirley MacLaine as a perpetually-unlucky widow whose husbands — including Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, and Paul Newman — keep dying soon after they wed (Watch on YouTube)
Poitín (1978, Bob Quinn) Crackerjack low budget rural thriller about a moonshiner seeing of a couple of local n’er do wells, and first feature film to be made entirely in Irish to boot! (Watch on Facebook for some reason6)
No chocolate disappointing disguised within here!
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, another of their best, is on iPlayer and I bet you’ve not bloody watched that either, have you
Including Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron!
Like uhhhhhh Stanley Kowalski
No relation; peep her 1979 Christmas special available as a “private remaster” on YouTube if you want a bonus recc, mind
Seemingly the only place you can watch this groundbreaking work of Irish cinema, legitimately or otherwise