Over the past few years we have been cultivating holiday themed watching to get us in the right frame of mind for every holiday. We have now amassed a list complete enough to get it into a chronologically arranged table of contents post for all the holidays in the movies posts.
Posts tagged Holidays in Movies
Holidays in the Movies: Father’s Day
This one was hard. We’ve tried some thematic watching for other holidays that don’t have a lot of movie representation, but figuring out what to do for Father’s day stymied us for years. We have a line up for this year that I like to call: It’s So Hard For a Girl to Make Her Daddy Proud.
- Footloose (1984): Ariel has been pushing against the constraints of her father, the Reverend Moore long before Ren arrives in town and starts testing his own boundaries in the town.
- Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985): Janie breaks from her military routine to take a chance on her dreams and audition for Dance TV. Her father doesn’t accept that it will mean her running loose in a new city on her own.
- Dirty Dancing (1987): Baby finds her own summer adventure helping staff at the summer resort, and for the first time falls out of her father’s favor.
And for a little horror diversion: Hellraiser (1987) is a great father and daughter relationship movie as well.
Holidays in the Movies: April 21st
Sometimes movies aren’t just a way of celebrating a holiday, they are a reason to have one: a movie holiday of sorts.
John Carpenter’s 1980 The Fog takes place very plainly on April 21st, so April 21st is the day we watch The Fog to celebrate the anniversary of Antonio Bay.
Holidays in the Movies: Rex Manning Day!
April 8th is Rex Manning Day! Because sometimes movies create holidays of their own. This year, Rex Manning Day just happens to coincide with a solar eclipse. So why not pair a rewatch of Empire Records (1995) with The Awakening (1980).
Holidays in the Movies: Spring Break
We embrace the academic calendar milestones as defining moments in our year, so why haven’t we celebrated spring break with Holidays in the Movies? During our most recent celebration of the start of the school year we noticed that two movies on that list were set during spring; spring breakish even. So we have grabbed them from schools-in and will be doing a spring break watching:
- PCU (1994) – “We’re not gonna protest!” But maybe we should protest this being a school starts movie. This is spring time, near end of term.
- Girl Happy (1965) – seriously, how have we not included an Elvis movie in our watching yet. I may not have talked about our Elvis collection too much here, but it is fully featured in Doomed Moviethon.
- Crocodile (2000) – Tobe Hooper’s direct to video spring break adventure.
- Nightmare beach (1989) – what’s scarier and surer to ruin spring break than a crocodile? A motorcyclist, obviously.
- Where the Boys Are (1960) – despite the tonal shift, which was actually buffered by the sequence of events so as to not be too jarring, this is a lovely film. It is both a girl’s fantasy of spring break and a depressing warning that the danger of spring break is that girls get assaulted. Sex is the only thing boys want.
- Palm Springs Weekend (1963) – with the same initial feeling as Girl Happy and Where the Boys Are, this also echoes the warnings to girls that sex is the only thing boys want.
- Spring Break (1983) – on to a boy’s dream of spring break, 80’s style, where girls are over-sexed objects on giggle juice and don’t even become near to characters until the end, but fun none the less.
We’ve gone on the hunt for more to fill the week, at least until St. Patrick’s Day. If we are lucky, we might get our hands on a few more:
- The Beach Girls (1982)
- Spring Breakdown (2009)
- Malibu Bikini Shop (1986)
Holidays in the Movies: President’s Day
For Holidays in the Movies, no holiday is too little acknowledged for us to celebrate with a movie. The only real challenge is finding the movies that definitely place themselves on a holiday of some kind, especially those that don’t have large cultural celebrations attached. Well, lucky for you I noticed when Coraline’s mother, in the 2009 movie Coraline, said that it was President’s day. So, for President’s day, until I find more, I will watch Coraline.
Of course there are plenty of thematic lists to rely on as well if you want to go that route as we have for Earth Day and the like. If you are feeling the theme you will not be spoiled for choices of movies about presidents.
Holiday’s in the movies: Lunar New Year
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Lunar New Year, based on the lunisolar calendar, is fabulously visible in the multi-cultural city we live in. To mark its passing, the way we do with every holiday, we have identified a couple of movies to help us celebrate:
- Way of the Dragon (1972): Bruce Lee’s only complete directorial film, and Chuck Norris’ debut role will surely put us in the right spirit.
- Fight Back to School III (1993): As Richard says, no excuse is needed to re-watch any Fight Back to School movie.
My favorite Christmas Carol
Much like our Halloween watching, our Christmas watching is such that it is getting its own zine at some point in the near (I hope) future. In lieu of a Holidays in the Movies post for Christmas, I just want to spotlight An American Christmas Carol.
Henry Winkler plays the stingiest man in town in this version of a Christmas Carol. His name is different; but the beats of his story are the same. Though, perhaps he modernizes the cruelty of Scrooge in a way that makes him seem an even worse person. Which makes his redemption even more effective. The acting in this TV movie is comfortable with a few shining moments. Unique is that, instead of being a specter of death, Dorian Harwood’s ghost of Christmas future walks into the scene with costume, music, and demeanor of someone decades ahead of the story line. This too, makes this interpretation very incisive.
Holidays in the Movies: Hanukkah
Weird that we haven’t already covered Hanukkah in our movie watching. This year we will be taking some first steps toward addressing this.
- Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah (1995) : I may have been born just a little too late for lamb chop, but it has the comforting television special feel that I grew up with.
- Hanukkah (2019) : a horror movie unseen by us so far, we shall see.
Holidays in the Movies: Mother’s Day
We haven’t been completely lucky finding acceptable movies that took place on Mother’s Day, so this is another holiday where a thematic selection of movies will come to the rescue. There is a glut of mother themed movies to choose from, and so this year we might:
- Psycho (1960): What’s there to say? Essential.
- Dark Water (2002): I lean toward the Japanese original.
- My Stepmother is an Alien (1988): I haven’t seen this one since I was a kid.
- Serial Mom (1994): Also essential.
Holidays in the Movies: Schools Out
I may have mentioned before how our lives revolve around the academic year, so the end of schools is essentially our beginning of summer, even though it happens in May for us. Early May. In Florida, though, summer may have well been in place for months already, weather wise.
- The Prowler (1981): This is only the first and not the last example that graduation parties are not a good idea.
- Graduation Day (1981): we have many many movies featuring Linnea Quigley.
- House of Sorority Row (1982): I’ve seen enough movies to know not to do pranks, ever.
- Hide and Go Shriek (1988): For their graduation party, a bunch of goofballs decide to hide in a furniture store after closing and party all night. Thankfully, a deranged killer comes after them. Please note: This is not the same movie as The Initiation (1984).
- Can’t Hardly Wait (1997): we revisited this a while ago when indulging in some teen movie nostalgia and have since added it to our shelves.
- The Perfect Score (2004): ages since I’ve seen this.
Holidays in the Movies: Earth Day
For Earth Day, April 22nd, we have a mostly thematic list. I’ve already talked about Aerial America, and it is a great way to be awed by the earth, and disturbed sometimes about what we are doing to it. If you are into apocalyptic futures then Water World (1995) and Mad Max (1979) might offer the right kind of vibe.
So far we have found one movie that specifically calls out Earth Day, and, yes, we will be watching it:
- Easy A (2010): “Don’t forget, tomorrow’s Earth Day.”
Holidays in the Movies: Passover
There are plenty of thematically appropriate and dramatic representations of Passover in the movies. We will be taking a slightly sleepier and round about approach with Phenomena (1985) because sometimes we just need a comforting and familiar horror movie. What? Didn’t know that a European horror movie set in a girls school had anything to do with Passover? It’s easy to miss.
We may also track down “A Rugrats Passover” (1995). I am a sucker for cartoon holiday specials.
Holidays in the Movies: Mardi Gras
- Mardi Gras Massacre (1978) : a serial killer roams the streets of Mardi Gras to make sacrifices to a Peruvian god
- Dracula 2000 (2000) : yes, we have previously lumped this in with our Halloween watching, but we are trying to make it right
- Mardi Gras (1958) : as yet unseen by us musical with Pat Boone
- Interview with a Vampire (1994) : so natural and yet it almost slipped my mind
- Flesh and Fantasy (1943) : provided we can get a hold of it, this occult anthology seems right up our alley at the Schmidt house
- A Woman’s Secret (1992) – Italian thriller with Margeaux Hemingway.
- Hatchet (2006) – gory slasher!
- Death Spa (1988) – gory supernatural thrillery thing. Why does everyone keep going to this place?
Holidays in Movies: Labor Day
Labor Day is one of those holidays for which it is especially difficult to build a comfortable, celebratory, collection of watching. It is very close to the end of summer/back to school celebration, and also lacking in a dearth of movies taking place during or about the holiday.
- 9 to 5 (1980) : this is more thematic than actually aligned with the holiday, but sometimes that is just how things have to be
- Humongous (1982) : labor day weekend vacationers being stalked by a slasher/monster
- Dirty Dancing (1987) : tells the tale of an entire summer adventure, but does actually culminate on Labor Day