Mara Wilson | Cinema Parrot Disco

I knew what had happened to most of these “Christmas movie kids” but there are a few interesting facts in this NME article HERE.

I figured I should mention Jake Lloyd as I hear there’s some new Star Wars movie coming out this week (which, by the way, I will try to review here on Thursday afternoon if I can stay awake long enough to write something about it!). The Phantom Menace was disappointing but, to be fair, I have to say that Jingle All The Way was far worse. I don’t think I ever even bothered to watch that all the way through. Well, the last any of us heard of Jake Lloyd was when he was arrested for reckless driving this year. Hopefully he can sort his life out – it’s a shame how fame ruins the lives of so many child stars.

It’s surprising that Nicholas Hoult has ended up being one of the more successful “Christmas movie kids” (he was in About A Boy. was that a Christmas movie?? I clearly don’t remember it now). You can’t top being in Mad Max: Fury Road! Peter Billingsley (from A Christmas Story) is strangely attractive now & we all know Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone!) went a bit weird but I loved this little tidbit: “He rarely acts these days, but recently took to the stage in his pizza themed Velvet Underground cover band, The Pizza Underground.” Ha! Seriously? Do they do a song called “I’m Waiting For The Pizza Delivery Man“?

Well, you can also read about Juliette Lewis, Johnny Galecki, Taylor Momsen (from The Grinch – probably my most hated movie of all time), Corey Feldman, Kieran Culkin, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Olivia Olson, Mara Wilson, Eric Lloyd, and Daryl Christopher Sabara HERE.

Oh – and I have to quickly mention this: Apparently, these life-sized Victorian dolls are roaming around London to promote some new Derren Brown attraction opening in Thorpe Park. Egads! NO THANK YOU!!!! Creepy as hell.

This review for the John Hughes Blogathon comes from Abbi of Where The Wild Things Are. This is her second review after Sixteen Candles. Thanks for the reviews, Abbi! Let’s see what she thinks of Miracle On 34th Street. 🙂

Miracle on 34th Street (1994)

I have to start off this review by saying it’s fricking weird to watch a Christmas movie in March. It feels completely weird and wrong and probably has somewhat skewed my experience of this remake of the 1940’s classic, which I have unfortunately not seen.

Anyway… Dorey Walker (Elizabeth Perkins) is a very practical woman who works for a big New York department store, which is under threat from some local Poundland type stores that want to take over. What Coles has over the discount stores is its history and its Thanksgiving parade leading up to Christmas… which would of course be a disaster without Santa.

On the day of the parade the Santa Dorey has hired makes a bit of a tit of himself and it’s left to a passer-by who calls himself Kris Kringle (Richard Attenborough) to step in and save the day. He’s so good that Dorey convinces him to take over as Coles’ full time Santa.

In the meantime Dorey is being courted by a handsome lawyer named Bryan Bedford (Dylan McDemott), who gets on fabulously well with her six year old daughter, Susan (Mara Wilson). Dorey is nervous to commit though.

Influenced by her pragmatic mother, precocious Susan doesn’t believe in Santa… although when she meets Kris, she starts to change her mind. Could he really be the man himself?

Mara Wilson is utterly adorable as Susan and it’s hard not to completely fall in love with her. She just seems so utterly natural and unaffected. Attenborough is also thoroughly charming as Kringle but it’s kind of hard to really get attached to the rest of the characters. At the same time I struggled with why Dorey was stalling so hard with Bryan. He seems like the nicest man on earth. Possibly if she had more of a backstory explaining why she was so sceptical of him it might have worked better.

I get the feeling that if I were fully on board with the Christmas spirit I would have been able to let myself just get carried along with the whole thing but on a particularly warm March day it just seemed like a bit of a stale Panetone, which went on and on and on. I think on the heels of Home Alone Hughes decided it was time to become the king of the festive classic but by this stage of his career he had lost his mojo a bit and it’s not a patch on his awesome teen movies, where he really is the king.
2/5