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By Jesse Hassenger
Ask anyone to name a New Year’s Eve movie and chances are they’ll come up with either a wonderful movie with just one incredibly memorable New Year’s Eve scene or a horrible movie centered around the holiday itself. That’s all well and good, but if you want a post-Christmas movie that helps keep the Christmas spirit alive without necessarily reminding you of the other holidays that just ended, you won’t want to pass up Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread. Harry Met Sally or Diner (or anyway, you don’t want to use New Year’s as an excuse to watch or rewatch either of them). And rest assured: you never want to throw away two hundred cigarettes on New Year’s Eve. There may not be many smart New Year’s movies, but there is a solid organization of smart New Year’s movies from the last century. Instead of subjecting yourself to cacophonous musical performances (or an ensemble comedy via Garry Marshall), consider ringing in the new year by traveling back in time through this mix of classics and curiosities in which the holiday plays a central role. If you want to stay home on New Year’s Eve (or want to watch something from your couch the next day), one of these is worth it.
The Thin Man, the first mystery comedy starring married semi-detectives Nick and Norah Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy), is set during the Christmas season and is one of the most charming aspects of the sequel (the first of five starring Powell and Loy), is that we are heading straight into the New Year; I wish more Christmas entertainment had compatibility to follow this trajectory. Now, is After the Thin Man as smart as the original? No, this is not the case. It’s one of those series where the first one is the one that everyone loves the most, and rightly so. But it’s also one of those series where the opportunity to spend more time with its main characters as they banter, argue, and solve more mysteries is welcome and festive depending on the season; Basically, Nick and Norah are throwing a mystery New Year’s Eve party that you don’t have to leave. Unfortunately, the series abandons its Christmas progression after this episode; Perhaps later sequels would look better if they headed straight for Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, etc.
Although the name refers to Johnny Case (Cary Grant)’s plans to take a well-deserved vacation after years of hard work, much of the most important action in this classic romantic comedy-drama directed by George Cukor takes place on New Year’s Eve. Over the course of the evening, Johnny becomes increasingly drawn to Linda (Katharine Hepburn), his fiancée’s free-spirited older sister, and none other than the lavish engagement party thrown by his business-minded father-to-be. Both the tact and the undeniable chemistry of Grant and Hepburn, Holiday is necessarily a New Year’s solution film, with the encouraging twist that Johnny seeks to fulfill a promise of passion, freedom, and leisure, rather than being held to exacting standards. -improvement.
As a recent Criterion Channel series illustrated, there are plenty of noirs and noir-adjacent thrillers set around Christmas. There are fewer that revolve around New Year’s Eve—and fewer still that use the holiday as an excuse for a thematically resonant fantastical do-over. Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) literally jumps the gun on the new year, as the movie opens with her standing over her slain husband with a smoking pistol in her hand. (Regrets, she has a few.) But on the morning of January 1st, she wakes up a full year earlier—husband alive, mistakes unmade, second chance magically granted. The movie follows her attempts to steer her life away from murder, raising questions about fate, the universe, and whether we’re doomed to repeat our worst impulses. For extra metatexual zing, Leslie’s character is an actress – but when dealing with what feels like fate, aren’t we all?
Look, let’s face it: the Soderbergh-Clooney edition of Ocean’s 11 is better. Much better; one of the most productive of its kind. But the Rat Pack edition starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. (among others) is the one that places their heist on New Year’s Eve, which is certainly an encouraging idea. Best of all is the arc of that first crack. In this curtain, no doubt, it’s coded for the New Year: you start looking for familiar faces, you start to get bored, and you wonder if you haven’t arrived too soon as the party develops into its early stages. Get more excited and involved once the clock gets closer and everything starts to feel more alive, and feel a little blues afterwards when the night is reduced to a long preparation with a modestly fun finish.
Did you know that there was a sequel to George Lucas’ seminal 1973 film, American Graffiti, and that it’s named after a second volume of the film’s soundtrack? While not as wonderful as the original (which basically means it’s not one of the most productive films of the 1970s), More American Graffiti offers a cleverly crafted solution to the continuation of an overarching story of a night full of events. Instead of bringing together all the characters who, as the last moments of the previous film indicated, were unlikely to ever find themselves in the same position at the same time, the sequel features four other plots, each taking a position new. New Year’s Eve Successive new year. 1964, 1965, 1966 and 1967, interspersed but easily readable thanks to the other characters and styles of each period. The way the story is divided into a dark war farce, a semi-miserable domestic drama, and a chronicle of youth culture perfectly captures the divergent (and, yes, often disappointing) paths the characters find themselves on. Of course, the movie has to be set on New Year’s Eve; Once adults, the characters can no longer depend on the school years and the rituals that accompany them to mark the passage of time. With a more diffuse design, American Graffiti probably won’t be as sturdy as its predecessor, but as a Christmas-themed follow-up, it’s a desirable experience.
The post-Halloween slasher boom provided two New Year’s-themed horror movies in 1980. Terror Train is the more traditional entry: Masked killer, young people getting offed at a prodigious rate, Jamie Lee Curtis, with the bonus of a Agatha Christie-ish gimmick: most of the action takes place on a moving train. But there was a better train-themed New Year’s movie coming down the track. 1980’s quickie oddity New Year’s Evil—which started shooting in mid-October and came out in time for the titular holiday two months later!—wins the token holiday-themed slasher spot. Though the killer eventually, halfheartedly dons a creepy mask (a caricature of Stan Laurel, no less!), much of the movie is an unusual hybrid of ridiculous-gimmick slasher (a killer picks off victims one by one, timed to New Year’s celebrations across time zones), and serial-killer thriller, where we see the guy’s face from the jump. The de facto final girl is a glamorous DJ (Roz Kelly) hosting a live countdown show all evening, ringing in the year from coast to coast as bands described by the movie as “punk” and “new wave” play. (The two real-life bands on display, Shadow and Made in Japan, are more pop-metal and power-pop, respectively.) The live footage and accompanying neon lighting gives this 86-minute movie an extra jolt of novelty; it’s not exactly terrifying, but it’s entertaining perverse and has genuine holiday atmosphere, giving a Dick Clark-style TV broadcast a menacing, purgatorial feel that now doubles as a time capsule. Also and relatedly, the theme song by Shadow rips.
He’s not as wise as the early Ghostbusters; The cast feels thankfully worn out, rather than enthusiastically inspired, the story slowly restarts before bringing the organization together, and the tone is more geared toward the unexpected number of enthusiastic young people that the first film has captured. That last detail also makes this sequel a wise New Year’s choice for families, especially since the plot revolves around a river of pink slime under New York City that feeds off bad vibes and negativity. Is it a bit vulgar for the Ghostbusters to gather dyspeptic citizens to their cause by animating the Statue of Liberty with “positively charged” slime and using it as a vehicle to engender emotions of unity?No, it’s incredibly vulgar. But it’s also a crazy and fun option for the natural hell that other people have to go through watching the ball drop in Times Square.
What lesser New Year’s Eve movies like New Year’s Eve and 200 Cigarettes get wrong is their understandable insistence on packing as much one-crazy-night action as possible into 24 hours or so; what Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan gets right is how the whole last week of the year, when schools are often out and offices often closed, can feel like a melancholy culmination of something, even if we’re not exactly sure what. That’s especially true for young people on some kind of in-between break, and Stillman’s film is one of the great young-people-on-break movies (an admittedly niche subgenre), wherein a group of mostly upper-class college-aged friends attend deb balls and after-parties during (but not necessarily of) the holiday season. They pontificate and posture as befits their social status, while possibly starting to realize an inkling of the world outside that youthful bubble, and the myriad opportunities for failure and disappointment that await there. Like Stillman’s terrific Last Days of Disco, it’s about existing in a season of parties and starting to see the end of it on the horizon.
Peter’s Friends is necessarily a British Big Chill where the reunion takes place on a New Year’s weekend rather than being forced through tragedy: there’s a touch of the tragic in this dramedy co-written by comedian Rita Rudner (who also has a secondary role). as a prominent outdoor wife of the semi-separated friends organization). It’s easy to see why this is less of a zeitgeist than Big Chill at the time; The latter’s 15-year gap between school in 1968 and their reunion in 1983 proves much more eventful than Peter’s journey in 1982, when the friends work together in a kind of unbearable work group, until his adulthood in 1992. (the short super-familiar soundtrack is at least less moldy today than some of the ones the Big Chill needle drops). What makes the film memorable and an engaging evocation of the holiday is the way director Kenneth Branagh (who also plays one of the friends) captures the simultaneous camaraderie and resentment of old friends, especially those who have talent for the dramatic. In between is a beautifully understated performance from Stephen Fry as Peter, a privileged young man who has come to a crossroads probably by accident, for reasons that become clearer as the film progresses. If you’re missing your old school friends in the New Year, Peter’s Friends can offer substitutes, or perhaps remind you just how much of a headache those organizational dynamics can be.
One of director Kathryn Bigelow’s most productive features (and, in its initial release, her sleepiest), Strange Days is set in the waning days of 1999, building a turn-of-the-millennium tension that’s become more understated. textual the real movies of 1999. ; perhaps the year 2000 shook real-life nerves enough to make filmmakers take a step back. Strange Days, co-written by James Cameron, actually doesn’t back down, at least for most of its runtime: It resorts to police brutality and digitally augmented life in a way that feels like it’s punching a bunch of stills. hot in ’95, and have reappeared decades later. Dirty Bag Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) sells illegal memory recordings designed to allow people to experience each other’s revelries, with all the sleaze, excitement, violence and sadness that entails; It’s like a scary fix for Instagram FOMO that someone at Facebook is probably running to recreate right now. When it turns out that one of Lenny’s memory disks contains evidence of a murder, he and his old friend Mace (Angela Bassett) become embroiled in a dangerous conspiracy. If you tend to revel in the passing of some other year as if you’re on the brink of disaster, Strange Days is edgy and paranoid enough to give you a solution, but not so bleak (maybe even, in the end). , a little too comfortable) to fry your brain.
What was once a massive sadness, as only “Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up to Pulp Fiction” could cause, time has revealed that Four Rooms is an asymmetrical novelty, also known as an anthology film, a format that gets a bad rap for its incapacity. to produce flawless gems. But the ideal is obviously not what the eclectic Four Rooms is after, as it features a quartet of entertaining stories set in the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, all involving overworked green hunter Ted (Tim Roth). Allison Anders, Alexander Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino all try to torture the deficient Ted, and while the effects are asymmetrical, the segments are snappy and funny enough that he values it all as an excursion into other people’s free time. Rodriguez’s “The Misbehavers” slapstick segment obviously foreshadowed his Spy Kids series, and Tarantino’s “The Man from Hollywood,” a riff on an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, is the ultimate post-fame hangover in the pre-dawn hours.
Noah Baumbach would not include this film on this list. Noah Baumbach would, in all likelihood, prefer that this film not exist; was made with time and money left over from his second film, Mr. Jealousy, and according to the filmmaker, it literally didn’t end well: a failed experiment that was released to the home video market with Baumbach’s call removed from writing under a pseudonym . and directing credits (although, interestingly, he’s still credited as an actor; yes, like Tarantino, he appears here in his own movie, and it’s a lot of fun). But you shouldn’t pay attention to Noah Baumbach on this specific topic, as Highball is right up there with Mistress America and Kicking and Screaming as one of his funniest films, a more purely comedic brilliance in its generally sharp explorations of social subtleties and the dynamics of dating. All of this doesn’t really take place in the New Year; is the final segment of a triptych of party sequences with the same organization of friends (including the Metropolitan’s Chris Eigeman!) crammed into the same Brooklyn apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween party, and the New Year’s event, with a variety of declining quotes. and flowing both at parties and off-screen between them. The Birthday Party is mostly an elegantly crafted cringe comedy, based around the presence of Felix (Carlos Jacott), a jerk whom Travis (Christopher Reed) considers his most productive friend in an inexplicable and familiar way. The funniest, with plenty of costume-based hijinks (including Baumbach accidentally dressing up as Hitler). But the strange, uncomfortable soul of the film is the New Year’s segment, where the characters’ remorse and confusion literally take shape.
Anyway, aren’t holidays like New Year’s Eve just social constructs?If you want to apply a deconstructionist technique to the holidays, consider Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi mystery Snowpiercer, which (like the non-classic New Year’s Eve Terror Train) more commonly takes position in a moving exercise. After some other glacial apocalypse, the remaining humans are crammed together (or, if you’re rich, comfortably spaced) in a big 16-kilometer exercise, which circles the icy globe in an endless loop. To celebrate their adventure around the planet, exercise passengers count down to New Year’s Eve each time they pass over an iconic bridge, which is more than the typical 365-day calendar, but when the entire planet is covered in ice and snow, what’s the difference?If you need to chase away your pessimism with the slightest glimmer of hope about the dawn of a new year, while acknowledging how arbitrary that express marker can be, just hop on the Snowpiercer exercise.
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