sam elliot Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you are the kind of person who gets a little sick of all the good cheer at this time of year, then you just might be in the mood for a little more "coal in your stocking." That is when the downer Christmas movie gets its chance to shine. Most holiday flicks are all about making you feel good about family and Christmas and all that good stuff, but some films decide to go the other route and make you feel so damn awful about what you're watching that suddenly a burnt turkey and a family fight at the dinner table don't seem so bad.

Here are some of what I think are the most depressing holiday movies. If nothing else, at least they remind us it could always get worse. ...

One Magic Christmas (1985)
This movie is all about the guilt. In a long line of films that are meant to make you feel guilty about all of the overspending and extravagance of the holidays, One Magic Christmas stands out. It follows a poor family with no hope of a Christmas in sight, as the mom (Mary Steenburgen) works too hard and has lost her joy in the season. Sure enough, a Christmas angel (in the creepy form of Harry Dean Stanton) shows her the error of her ways. Throw in the extra plot lines of a kidnapping, a shooting and a drowning, and you have yourself one heck of a depressing Christmas flick.

Thank You for Smoking director Jason Reitman's first feature film premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was featured this year at Sundance. Reitman was in Seattle recently for a screening of his film at the University of Washington, and graciously sat down with me for over an hour in the lobby of his hotel even though he hadn't eaten lunch yet. Reitman strolled into the lobby in casual attire, looking relaxed and confident. We started out joking about the lengthy production notes for the film ("I had to read them like, five times - all 40-something pages, and I was like, do they have to be this long?" Reitman noted), then moved on to discussing what it's like to be a famous director's kid, how he came to make Thank You for Smoking, and what it was like to direct Robert Duvall and William H. Macy.

Cinematical: You wrote in your director’s notes that you fell in love with Nick Naylor from the opening sentence [of the Christopher Buckley novel on which the film is based]. What drew you to that character?

Jason Reitman: Like love at first sight, it’s an emotional reaction. Here’s a guy who knows he’s the devil and he’s fine with it; he’s unapologetic. He’s comfortable with who he is and he has a thick skin. When you live in a world of spin, you understand that everything is spin, and everything is affected by spin from the other side. Nick has to be always calm, he can’t lose his cool. The other side is very emotional - the anti-smoking crowd is very emotionally reactive. Nick gives nothing away, he’s charismatic, he’s perfectly dressed, he’s well-read and charming.

Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking is a wickedly funny political satire that takes a long, smirking, sideways glance at the hypocrisy of spin, both corporate and political. The film, Reitman's feature film debut, was highly anticipated - Reitman, of course, is the son of director Ivan Reitman, and there's nothing like having a famous-director father to plop an ambitious young director squarely in the fishbowl, with everyone waiting for him to either live up to their lofty expectations, or fall flat on his face. No pressure, kid.

The script is based on a book by another famous "kid of", Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley. It's hard to know whether to give more credit to Buckley for the excellent source material or Reitman for the adaptation; taking a 272 page book and condensing it succinctly into a 92 minute film, while retaining both the heart at the center and the sharpness at the edges, is no easy task, but Thank You for Smoking is slick (in a good way) and well-packaged from beginning to end. It rather reminded me of another adaptation about the cigarette biz, 1993's Barbarians at the Gate, which starred James Garner in one of the best performances of his career as H. Ross Johnson.