30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

Emilie (Ewa Froling) is the most conflicted character in the story; she marries the bishop for love, is tragically mistaken about what kind of man he is, thinks she can protect her children, and cannot. Her visit to Helena is heartbreaking. The marriage of Gustav (Jarl Kulle) and Alma (Mona Malm) is open enough to permit an extraordinary scene in which Gustav discusses his affair with his wife and Emilie, and they all try to decide what would be best for the maid. The bishop (Jan Malmsjo) is a tragic and evil man, strict because he is fearful and insecure, cruel because he cannot stop himself, in agony because, he confesses to Emilie, he thought everyone admired him, and he realizes he is hated.

This is a long film, at 188 minutes plus an intermission. But the version Bergman prefers is longer still, the 312-minute version he made for Swedish television. Both are available on a Criterion DVD, which includes Bergman’s feature-length documentary on the making of the film. To see the film in a theater is the way to first come to it, because the colors and shadows are so rich and the sounds so enveloping.

At the end, I was subdued and yet exhilarated; something had happened to me that was outside language, that was spiritual, that incorporated Bergman’s mysticism; one of his characters suggests that our lives flow into each other’s, that even a pebble is an idea of God, that there is a level just out of view where everything really happens.

Note: When Sight and Sound, the British film magazine, asked the world’s directors and critics to select the best films of the last twenty-five years, Fanny and Alexander was third, after Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull.

Gremlins

PG, 106 m., 1984

Zach Galligan (Billy Peltzer), Phoebe Cates (Kate Beringer), Hoyt Axton (Randall Peltzer), Frances Lee McCain (Lynn Peltzer). Directed by Joe Dante. Produced by Michael Finnell, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by Chris Columbus.

Gremlins is a confrontation between Norman Rockwell’s vision of Christmas and Hollywood’s vision of the blood-sucking monkeys of voodoo island. It’s fun. On the one hand, you have an idyllic American small town, with Burger Kings and Sears stores clustered merrily around the village square, and on the other hand you have a plague of reprehensible little beasties who behave like a rodent road company of Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang in The Wild One.

The whole movie is a sly series of send-ups, inspired by movie scenes so basic they reside permanently in our subconscious. The opening scene, for example, involves a visit to your basic Mysterious Little Shop in Chinatown, where, as we all know, the ordinary rules of the visible universe cease to operate and magic is a reality. Later on, after a kid’s father buys him a cute little gremlin in Chinatown, we have a new version of your basic Puppy for Christmas Scene. Then there are such basic movie characters as the Zany Inventor, the Blustering Sheriff, the Clean-Cut Kid, the Cute Girlfriend, and, of course, the Old Bag.

The first half of the movie is the best. That’s when we meet the little gremlins, which are unbearably cute and look like a cross between a Pekingese, Yoda from Empire, the Ewoks from Jedi, and kittens. They have impossibly big eyes, they’re cuddly and friendly, and they would make ideal pets except for the fact that they hate bright lights, should not be allowed to get wet, and must never be fed after midnight. Well, of course, it’s always after midnight; that’s the tip-off that this isn’t a retread of E.T. but comes from an older tradition, the fairy tale or magic story. And in the second half of the movie, after the gremlins have gotten wet, been fed after midnight, etc., they turn into truly hateful creatures that look like the monster in Alien.

The movie exploits every trick in the monster-movie book. We have scenes where monsters pop up in the foreground, and others where they stalk us in the background, and others when they drop into the frame and scare the Shinola out of everybody. And the movie itself turns nasty, especially in a scene involving a monster that gets slammed in a microwave oven, and another one where a wide-eyed teenage girl (Phoebe Cates) explains why she hates Christmas. Her story is in the great tradition of 1950s sick jokes, and as for the microwave scene, I had a queasy feeling that before long we’d be reading newspaper stories about kids who went home and tried the same thing with the family cat.