The Christmas TV Strategy Guide 2024 #08

Its on again! Back to Back Biggles! Who would ever have believed it, two days in a row of one of the greatest (quiet at the back) 80s adventure flicks! And its right at the start of the day just to make sure that that BANGER of a song on the soundtrack stays with you all day long. Brilliant!

Its a bit too plodding in parts, but this movie version of Star Trek still holds a lot of joy in it; that first look around the Enterprise is stunning, if a bit long, and seeing that cast back together is a treat. Its still very much Roddenberry’s Trek but its the start of a good run of films that would very quickly get better, as the spoiler at the bottom of the screenshot above hopefully implies

Two absolute romance classics back to back both dealing with the idea of unrequited love in vastly different ways; Brief Encounter is very much the epitome of British stoicism with everything thats not said being whats important. And then a big brash musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet only with New York gangs and knives and dancing. What a treat!

More Sherlock Holmes baby! More of that Basil Rathbone Holmes running around solving crimes and beating the bad guys.

A stone cold Spielberg classic that totally gets the train back on track after the misstep of Hook. Here Spielberg takes the new computer technology, merges it with the tried and test stop motion animation techniques before adding in a whole load of dinosaurs and then basically setting it all on fire. One of the best movie roller coasters out there. The fact that Spielberg was working on the edit of this at the same time as filming Schindler’s List is mind boggling

Just to prove that Alec Baldwin was the best Jack Ryan, here’s Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan in the best of the Jack Ryan films. Maybe this is my love of submarine films talking but none of them really got as good as this, the tension of some of the torpedo sequences is nearly unbearable. A classic!

Sometimes you just want to watch a film about the trials and tribulations of two friends over several decades. This is pretty much the pinnacle of that genre, won’t leave a dry eye in the house

“I want to take his face, off” is probably the best way that a film’s title has been worked into a film. And thats not even the highlight of this John Woo action fest, considering the acting going on with Cage and Travolta swapping roles in the film. Easily Woo’s best US film, hands down

Action fest time! John Wick 3 is a bit long but good lord have they really got the action scenes down to a fine art with this film. The highlight is probably the knife museum but the final shootout is great as well. Then the best of the Transporter films with Statham being as Statham as can be, then a random late 80s horror film to end it off. It has good turns from Julian Sands and Richard E Grant which help cover up a a multiple of sins that the budget can’t, meaning the film just about gets way with its daft premise of time travelling demons and witch hunters

Well, we’ve watched the first two so may as well get the third one watched as well. Its not bad but contains two cinematic crimes; first of all is the re-using of previous film footage as in world CCTV footage, thats a cast iron crime. And second is bringing back Joe Pesci as a comedy sidekick, normally I’d be a fan of a Pesci cameo but here? It nearly brings the whole film crashing down around him. You can wash the taste of that performance out of of your eyes by then watching Bullitt which has one of the very best car chases you’ll ever see

More wartime escapades, this time with a big group of wrong ‘uns forced into a suicide mission to kill off a load of Nazis. Its a fun as that sounds with a cast who go all in on it, including a young Donald Sutherland

More Bruce Lee hi jinks, this time in turn of the twentieth century Shanghai as various baddies need kicking in the face by Bruce. And he does indeed do a lot of kicking. Like, a lot

The first and best of the Naked Gun series, this really is a classic. Nielsen commands the screen fully dead panned as Frank Drebin perfecting the persona he first brought to the screen in Ariplane! Its so funny, so dumb and full of lines you’ll be quoting for the rest of the month, and probably the one after