Home Alone [RSC Film Club 24]

[LimeGreenLegend 4,277]

It's time to get festive at the film club with a double bill of Christmassy goodness.  First up, our traditional Christmas film, nominated by @Squirrel, the film that made Macaulay Culkin a superstar, Home Alone.

 

Written by the king of 80s teen comedy, John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) and directed by Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire, the first two Harry Potter films) Home Alone stars Culkin as Kevin, an 8 year old who is inadvertently left home alone when his family fly off to France for the holidays.  Not only does he have to take responsibility for himself for the first time in his life, he also has to protect his home from opportunistic thieves The Wet Bandits (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern).  With a supporting cast that also includes Catherine O'Hara and John Candy, this is a classic Christmas comedy that I'm sure we've all seen before, but won't mind revisiting.  It's been a couple of decades since I've seen it, and can't wait to take another trip to the McCallister home.  Just watch your step.

keep the change you filthy animal

[Con 5,719]

Obviously been in the room with this playing 1,000s of times. I was not a huge fan of this movie the first time I saw it but I guess I should watch it with the spirit it’s intended and the system of disbelief required to truly enjoy it. 

[Spinnaker1981 974]

It was a very funny movie 20 years ago... now it is so outdated it hurts...

 

[Sinister 2,583]

Movie is worth watching for the ALWAYS GREAT, John Candy. I miss that guy.

His entire scene was Improvised and everyone had a hard time keeping a straight face. He was paid less than 500 bucks for his efforts and he always felt bitter about it.

 

[djw180 6,980]

This is on Channel 5 (UK) on Saturday, 8:20 pm.

[Sinister 2,583]

If you have Disney+ this is on there  

[Squirrel 5,180]

3 hours ago, djw180 said:

This is on Channel 5 (UK) on Saturday, 8:20 pm.

Do people still watch broadcast tv?

[djw180 6,980]

3 hours ago, Squirrel said:

Do people still watch broadcast tv?

Not when it's broadcast (unless it's sport) but I certainly record things.

[djw180 6,980]

Home Alone.

I have said many times in the past I generally hate films with children as the central characters, because most child actors can not act. For me they don't come much worse than this film. I have never seen it before and never wanted too. It was as bad as I feared it might be. So of course I am not the best person to judge this, but I really struggle to see what anyone above the age of 10 would find entertaining about most of this film.

Had this not been for film club, and assuming I had somehow been persuaded to try and watch it for another reason, I would have turned it off in the first 10 minutes. Those opening scenes with all Kevin's awful siblings and cousins are almost unbearable. It doesn't get any better once the rest of the family have left because the film takes every opportunity to give us his trademark hands-on-face screech. Even my wife, who likes what I consider kid's films, found that too much and wanted to turn it off.

The last half hour or so is much better; from when he meets the neighbour they think is a serial killer in church. We get some good slapstick comedy as the incompetent thieves try to break into the house and fall into Kevin's traps. But I can't give it much credit for this as ordinarily I wouldn't have got this far due to how unappealing the first hour was. The great John Candy didn't add anything for me as he just wasn't in it enough. I can't help thinking how much better it would have been had it been Macauly Culkin left home with John Candy, as a forgotten uncle or something like that.

2/10

[LimeGreenLegend 4,277]

Home Alone

dir. Chris Columbus/1990/1h43m

Like @djw180, I'm not a huge fan of films with children playing the lead role/s, especially in films that are aimed primarily at children.  There are films for adults with children playing the leads that have been brilliant, I've recently loved the film Rocks by Sarah Gavron and highly recommend that.  However, I found so much to enjoy in this film that even Macaulay Culkin's often bad performance won't stop me from watching this again next Christmas.

Saying that, there are still several scenes where I think his acting is great.  I liked his frustration with his family at the start of the film, and can really empathise with him being stuck in such a loud and busy house.  I got a big laugh from the line "when I grow up and get married I'm living alone!"  That's paid off when he wakes up in an empty house and we see his initial delight at having his wish granted and he lets off all his steam by running around screaming.  He is also really good in his scenes with Old Man Marley (Roberts Blossom), who is fantastic in this film.  Honestly, this subplot has more heart than Kevin's reunion with his awful family, and when he reunites with his own family at the end, that's what got the tears flowing for me.  I also like how Kevin actually has a character arc, and grows as a person throughout the course of the film, which is more than most films like this have.  He starts off as a useless kid who can't be trusted to pack his own suitcase and who is scared of everything; the boiler in the basement, and the first time Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) try to break in he runs and hides under his parents bed, to a responsible and pro-active badass.  

The rest of the performances range from brilliant to fine.  The stand-outs for me are Pesci and Stern as the Wet Bandits.  They play this whole film like the Elmer Fudd to Kevin's Bugs Bunny.  It was brilliant casting to get Pesci to play the bad guy in a kids film because the dude is just pure terrifying.  He's about 85 now and he still scares me.  Stern is just a plain goof in this film.  Every great comedy double act needs to have the dumb and dumber factor, where one guy is dumb but thinks he's smart, and a guy who's just dumb, and Stern is fantastic at playing the dumb guy.  He also gives one of the great screams of film history in this when Kevin places Buzz's (Devin Ratray) tarantula on his face.  That cracked me up so much I had to watch it ten times in a row.  Catherine O'Hara is always great, though it's a shame she didn't get to flex her comedy chops more in this, like she did in Beetlejuice from a couple of years prior.  Gerry Bamman as Uncle Frank was probably my favourite minor character.  He is such an *sshole and I love it.  He also has some really funny lines, "if it makes you feel any better, I forgot my reading glasses."  And of course there is the late great John Candy.  He doesn't really add much to the plot as he's basically a deus ex machina, but the man had charisma for days, and his totally improvised role as Gus Polinski, polka king of the mid-west, bought a smile to my face for the few minutes he was on screen.

I won't go over the plot because everyone knows Home Alone, so I'll focus more on the script, and I think it is so well structured.  Everything in this film is setting up something for later.  There is not an ounce of fat on this thing.  Even something like the scene where Kevin has set up some dummies and a cardboard cut out of Michael Jordan to make it look like a party is going on.  In any other kids film this is just something that would happen out of nowhere, but here it was set up right at the start of the film.  The first time Kevin goes down into the basement we see a load of sewing machines and the dummies, which are presumably used for dress making.  The Jordan cut out we see in Buzz's room, along with his tarantula, which is also paid off later in the film.  This is just what you get when John Hughes writes a script.  I'm not a huge fan of his teen dramas for which he is most famous, but I can't deny that the man was a hugely talented writer.  He also seems to have been on a Christmas kick at the time, because the film he wrote before Home Alone was 1989's National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.  While we can give credit to Hughes for the tightness of the script, and the comedy and slapstick elements, we have to move over to the director, Chris Columbus for the film's heart.  The entire subplot with Old Man Marley was added by him to bring some heart to the film, and while you can accuse him of being overly sentimental, you can't deny that it leaves you with a warm feeling inside, as seen in some of his other films like Mrs. Doubtfire.  

Maybe the most surprising delight for me in this film was John Williams's score.  While it's not as iconic as his Star Wars or Superman, or Jaws, or Indiana Jones, or E.T, or Jurassic Park, or his Harry Potter scores (this guy's pretty good) this is still a really good one that seems to be overlooked when talking about his work.  I love the main theme and how mischievous and sneaky it sounds, perfectly fitting the character of Kevin and the feeling of the film as a whole.  The staccato plucked strings and twinkly feeling make it stand out among his other works.  I also like the incorporation of classical Christmas music like Carol of the Bells, and swinging 50's Christmas songs into the soundtrack.  It's Christmassy without being cliche.  

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected, and it really got me in the Christmas spirit.  It was like a mug of hot chocolate for the eyes.  There are things I don't like, like the fourth-wall breaking where Culkin just gurns into the camera, and the direction was very workmanlike, nothing special to note, but at least it doesn't have Trump in it 😄 7.5/10

[Spinnaker1981 974]

3 hours ago, LimeGreenLegend said:

 

Maybe the most surprising delight for me in this film was John Williams's score.  While it's not as iconic as his Star Wars or Superman, or Jaws, or Indiana Jones, or E.T, or Jurassic Park, or his Harry Potter scores (this guy's pretty good) this is still a really good one that seems to be overlooked when talking about his work. 

Or “Close encounters of the 3rd degree”, or “fiddler in the roof”, or “Schindler’s list”, or “Stargate”, or... 

This guy has composed most of the really iconic songs in the movie industry! He only has 5 Oscars... and I say “only” because he actually lost the other 46! times he was nominated, being beaten in nominations only by Walt Disney!! 
 

And they say Vangelis is great!! 😂😂

Edited December 27, 2020 by Spinnaker1981