James Proclaims!

I’ve been doing this annual festive film countdown for a fair few years now, and so committed have I become to making sure I have 24 entries ready to go for December, that I write a lot of the posts well in advance of publishing them. Indeed I am now several years ahead of myself in terms of my annual Advent calendar, which is why I manage to seemingly blog relentlessly through December while being a fairly unreliable blogger for most of the rest of the year.

Writing the posts so far in advance means that often I might see a good Christmas(ish) movie that has only just been released, and it won’t actually make it onto my blog that year. Which seems like a shame.

This year I have managed to catch three new movies that deserve to be included in my festive countdown, so I have bumped the three entries I had already written to a future version of this annual folly, in order to be able to include some 2024 releases on the 2024 iteration of The James Proclaims Advent Calendar of Christmas(ish) Films.

The first of these movies is the new Netflix thriller Carry-On

To a UK national like me, any movie with the title Carry-On will naturally conjure up images of Sid James and Barbara Windsor enjoying some saucy innuendos in the best of the British music hall traditions.

But in the 2024 movie Carry-On there is no sign of Kenneth Williams and no bawdy seaside humour to be found.

The movie does have a British connection, thanks to the Welsh heritage of the lead actor Tarron Eggerton, but Carry-On is nothing to do with the beloved British comedy franchise of yesteryear, and is, instead, a fairly decent effort at recapturing the spirit of the quintessential Christmas(ish) movie Die Hard. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to compare it to Die Hard 2, given that the action takes place in an airport on Christmas Eve.

Carry-On is not as good as Die Hard but that’s mainly because very few films are.

Carry On is a very decent action flic though and far better than most of the Die Hard sequels. Jason Bateman is particularly effective, playing against type, as a pretty sinister and competent bad guy.

For a straight-to-Netflix movie Carry-On is surprisingly good and in a different era, it would certainly have been deserving of a lengthy run on the big screen.

There are already rumours of a sequel, and while that may be a double-edged sword for the legacy of the original movie, Carry-On definitely deserves to be a multi-movie franchise. As long as they don’t call the second movie Carry-On Camping…

Score for Christmasishness

It’s set on Christmas Eve. The busy airport is symptomatic of the fact it is Christmas Eve. Like many an action movie set at Christmas, the story could probably work at a different time of year, but it makes more sense for it to be set at Christmas than not. It’s certainly as Christmas(ish) as the first two Die Hard movies. Which makes it pretty Christmas(ish) in my book.