Seasonal Films

With the Holiday Season about to give way to the Lunar New Year, I find myself putting away the cards I received and the stack of movies (DVDs) I watch between Xmas Eve and the day after Russian Xmas.

The movies I watch during this time are not Xmas-themed, per se, but those I associate with the season, films that were on TV when I was little and my parents were partying in the living room.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) is one of these films, as are David Lean's 1960s films. A more recent "Xmas film" is Die Hard (1988), which I never saw when it was released, but, like many of us, have come to appreciate as a seasonal film.

Die Hard has a scene in it that only this year brought to mind the monolith scenes in Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968). As one of the German terrorists enters a room looking for the Bruce Willis character, we see a low horizontal form; maybe a table or a storage unit or a packing crate, but a form nonetheless. Wills is hiding in this form, but we don't know for sure that he is. The uncertainty is of interest to me. It allows me to concentrate on the structure of this form.