Nuptial planning, Bronx-Italian style, including tacky, rainbow-colored bridesmaid gowns, tawdry wedding halls that serve mashed potatoes dyed to match the color of the gowns, opinionated friends, interfering relatives, and a bride and groom who are swept along with the idea of marriage as something you ought to do, and so convince themselves that they want to do it. Ron Eldard’s groom is hopelessly immature and unromantic; Annabella Sciorra’s bride ignores the fact that her marriage is doomed before it starts (she can’t help it—she’s too busy wiping fingerprints off her back). You’ll probably find this movie a lot funnier if you’ve witnessed this type of New Yawk behavior up close; otherwise, it may all just seem completely crazy.
Tag Archives: New York City
Pieces of April (2003)
Black sheep April (Katie Holmes, in her pre-Tom Cruise paparazzi days) tries to put together a Thanksgiving dinner for her suburban family in her teeny, rundown NYC apartment but her broken oven sends her on a desperate journey through the apartment building to find a neighbor willing to cook it for her. Meanwhile, her family sets out for the big city, along the way revealing their dysfunction with each other and with April. Sounds like a black comedy but Patricia Clarkson touches the perfect notes of pathos as April’s cancer-ridden mother. At this point in her career, Katie Holmes still showed so much promise. If you either have a black sheep in your family or are the black sheep, this movie may remind you of your own Thanksgiving past.
King Kong (1933)
Growing up a New Yorker in the TV never-never land of the 1960s and ’70s, Thanksgiving meant one thing: giant apes. For some obscure reason, a local broadcast station (back when we had local broadcast stations) would always air, year after year, King Kong, Son of Kong, and Mighty Joe Young from noon to dinnertime. In some households it was the Dallas Cowboys; in others it was the Macy’s parade. But in certain homes, the day was filled with images of black-and-white hand-animated gorillas rampaging through the respective jungles of Skull Island and midtown Manhattan. In 1933, the then-brand-new Empire State Building instantly acquired a legendary aura for millions worldwide who had never been to New York, and we came to believe—in our movie culture’s subconscious, at least—that the Third Avenue El disappeared because the famed subway actually was decimated by Kong. This counterprogramming against football and floats was so consistent that watching these flicks became an ersatz annual tradition for everyone we knew. Why outsized, stop-motion simians? Whatever you say. Somehow today it makes sense, if for no other reason than because Thanksgiving, to kids, is often little more than a big meal. So, on a day that’s dependably gray, cold, and somewhat dull, we were treated to grainy Depression-era urban camaraderie, holy-smokes wisecracker Robert Armstrong, foggy islandscapes, vertiginous cliffs (stalked by pterodactyls!), and horrific images of gargantuan chaos—escapism defined, and best seen on the living room rug with a good November rain rasping outside. Annual traditions certainly tend to be asinine and arbitrary in America, and there’s no reason this one shouldn’t catch on again. The loud, exhausting 2005 remake might suffice in some households, since it as nearly as long as all three films combined.
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Although not as badly wallpapered over December television as It’s a Wonderful Life, nor anywhere as threatening, this is arguably the most beloved of all Christmas movies. Maureen O’Hara and eight-year-old Natalie Wood arch their eyebrows over a department store Santa’s claim to being the real Kris Kringle, and a courtroom battle over his sanity makes believers out of us all. You’ll get more than just a holiday heartwarming; this movie serves up a hearty dish of late-1940s New York City nostalgia, since the story centers around Macy’s Department Store (which still takes up an entire city block after most of its competitors have vanished, and which still hosts a certain Thanksgiving Day parade). Has any era in our lifetimes signaled a sense of holiday community as potently as the postwar years? (It’s in those years that most classic Christmas songs were popularized.) The film is so powerfully familiar you probably can’t believe Edmund Gwenn or John Payne in anything else, but try nevertheless to remain dry-eyed as Gwenn, at the head of a crowded “meet Santa” line of shoppers, sings a song in Dutch to a war orphan. Caution for family viewing: if your kids still set out milk and cookies on Christmas Eve, their world might be upended by the suggestion that believing in Santa Claus could land you in Bellevue.
Falling in Love (1984)
This is Christmas in New York City in the 1980s, where you can meet your soul mate in a shopping bag mix-up at Rizzoli, potentially the toniest of all the Manhattan bookstores, rich with wood trim, elaborate architecture, and holiday shoppers in designer businesswear. The lovers, a low-key Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, find mutual attraction almost immediately, but they’re each married to someone else. Within the year, they flirt with an affair, try, fail, surrender to the fact of it, hem and haw—nobody easily finishes a sentence in this movie—and another Christmas comes around. It’s no Brief Encounter, for sure, but the actors are cooking on all burners, and the holidays-in-Manhattan feel is everywhere.
Elf (2003)
Christmas sappiness plus flat-out contemporary yucks, with Will Ferrell making himself a bankable star as a human raised as a North Pole elf who ends up, in Miracle on 34th Street and Big fashion, in contemporary New York City—which here isn’t all that different from the old New York of our Christmas movie memories, down to Ferrell’s employment at Gimbel’s (the scenes were shot, it seems, in the survivor of the department store giants, Macy’s). An unexpected surprise is Zooey Deschanel crooning “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in a voice rich enough to rival the original Esther Williams version.
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