SLUG Magazine Presents: 31 Days of Secondhand Givings

Season’s greetings, my fellow readers! It’s the time for peace on Earth (if we’re not reduced to pieces first), goodwill towards men (yeah right, okay…) and a holiday-appropriate collection of hand-me-down media. As the winter rolls in with its blistering winds of cold, gather around the radiant glow of the box set and don your gay apparel, you little freaks, for a festive installment of Secondhand Screenings! 

Christmas at Pee-wee’s Playhouse
Director: Wayne Orr, Paul Reubens
Pee Wee Pictures
Released: 12.21.1988

Shamelessly enough, I always fall victim to a good Christmas special. The unsystematic appearances of “remember them” cameos, the mise-en-scène of festive jolliness, a few merry old-time songs throughout the runtime — whatever it is, I eat that snickerdoodle shit up! One Christmas special in particular that eases the soul into Yuletide delight is Christmas at Pee-wee’s Playhouse. 

The zany manchild himself (and I mean that in the best way possible) Pee-wee Herman begins setting up for his holiday party after sending a mile-long wishlist to Santa Claus. Through a chaotic mix of ‘80s celebrity appearances and the bizarre antics the playhouse attracts, Herman must make a selfless act that will change the course of the holiday itself. Of course, you’ll have the regular playhouse loiterers like Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne, The Matrix) and Reba the Mail Lady (the only grounded-in-reality voice of reason), but where else would you find Magic Johnson, Grace Jones, Joan Rivers and even a prime-time Cher share the the same magic screen??

Those who grew up watching this fever dream of a children’s show, or rented each season from Hollywood Video like yours truly, remember the bright colors and eccentric cast of characters. The hallucinogenic program was like traveling through an antique store while overdosing on gas station boner pills. It had all the workings of holiday pudding pie to hypnotize the audience: stop motion animation, drawstring puppetry, a few adult innuendos to catch your parents off guard and just enough Christmas charm to hold the mantle as a holiday classic. —Alton Barnhart

Santa Claus: The Movie
Director: Jeannot Szwarc
Santa Claus Productions Ltd
Released: 11.27.1985

40 years after its release, Santa Claus: The Movie remains one of the most ambitious yet bewildering holiday films ever mounted — a lavish, earnest and entirely too overarching and brazenly commercial attempt to craft the definitive Santa Claus origin story while also functioning as a mammoth ’80s blockbuster in the Superman vein. Time has been both kind and cruel to it, and that paradox is exactly what makes the movie fascinating to revisit in 2025.

The film’s opening act is still its strongest: a mythic, almost storybook rendering of how a humble toymaker (a warm and gentle David Huddleston, The Big Lebowski) becomes the legendary figure. Director Jeannot Szwarc (Jaws 2, Somewhere In Time) leans into a glowing, handcrafted look — giant candy-colored sets, practical-effects sleigh flights and Dudley Moore’s genuinely sweet performance as Patch the elf.  But the film’s second half is where the movie unravels, where it shifts to 1980s New York and pits Santa against John Lithgow’s gleefully villainous toy tycoon B.Z. It’s big, noisy and so overloaded with product placement that it starts to collapse in on itself. Lithgow, who took the role only after Harrison Ford turned it down, is none too fond of it, and even when I jokingly mentioned it to him at Sundance this year — at barely 5’4, I felt like and elf standing next to the 6’4 acting giant — he changed the subject as quickly as possible. The performance is still fun, however, and when viewed through the lens of today, the tonal whiplash plays less like a failure and more like an artifact of a decade that threw everything at the screen without hesitation.

Santa Claus: The Movie may not be a great film, but at 40 years old, it has settled into something more enduring: a nostalgic, slightly oddball holiday comfort watch whose sincerity outweighs its flaws, and for it’s an annual tradition that’s as sweet as a little puce candy and as comforting as a Coke and a Happy Meal. —Patrick Gibbs

Tangerine
Director: Sean Baker
Freestyle Picture Company, Cre Film, Duplass Brothers Production
Released: 04.10.2015

Now I don’t know about you, but nothing says “the most wonderful time of the year” and hollies my jollies like a good old-fashioned Christmas Eve hunt for a drug-dealing pimp who’s cheated on his fiance. That’s right, readers — I’m here to open a Die Hard-esque debate on whether or not Sean Baker’s 2015 sleeper hit, Tangerine, is technically a Christmas film. In my humble Senior Staff Writer opinion (which I will prove to you in this review), it is. 

Tangerine follows transgender sex worker Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), newly released from jail, as she meets up with her BFF and fellow trans sex worker Alexandra (Mya Taylor, Stage Mother). In this sugary sweet (they meet up at a Donut Time) reunion, Alexandra informs Sin-Dee that her boo  thang has been out gallivanting with a white “fish” (slang for a cisgender woman) during her incarceration. She thus leads Sin-Dee on a goose chase throughout the streets of LA, where we meet a charming little group of misfit side characters. This includes a chaser Romanian taxi driver named Razmik, who is fond of Ms. Sin-Dee, and is particularly fond of keeping his attraction to sex workers like Sin-Dee a secret from his wife and her overbearing mother. 

I am the bigger person and I will admit I didn’t understand the hype, nor necessarily trust Baker’s authenticity, when I first saw his films Anora and The Florida Project. Though after watching Tangerine and becoming engrossed in the shot-on-shot-on-iPhone-5s world, I can say with certainty that that I understand now. I imagine it’s how audiences felt watching Harmony Korine’s Kids for the first time. Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch (The Florida Project, Starlet) created a wonderfully heartfelt story that captures the true meaning of the Christmas spirit through a queer lens. I could go on, but I’ll let the film do the talking for itself! Give yourself the gift of experiencing Tangerine this holiday season! —Yonni Uribe

Krisha
Director: Trey Edward Shults
Hoody Boy Productions, A24
Released: 03.16.2015

Norman Rockwell had a vision of an American family on Thanksgiving, enshrined in his painting “Freedom from Want” and subsequently burned into our social retinas after appearing on the walls of grandmothers’ kitchens and cookie tins at the same time every year for almost a century. Krisha serves as an alternate interpretation to this lofty image. In what was Trey Edward Shults’ directorial debut, Shults paints his own family portrait, telling an autobiographical story about a real kind of Thanksgiving (warts and all) using real family members as actors in several roles.

Shults wrote, edited and acted as himself for the film, while his estranged mother Krisha is played by Shults’ real-life aunt, Krisha Fairchild. Shults’ fluid camerawork follows the nervous, aged and frizzy-haired hippie as she re-emerges into a family that’s hesitant to accept her back. She proceeds trying to make amends with the son she left with her sister, Robyn (played by her real sister and Shults’ other real-life aunt, Robyn Fairchild), a decade earlier, but the façade of holiday-imposed niceties is palpably thin. It nearly shatters entirely when Krisha’s own mother, played by the actress’ real mother, doesn’t recognize her. An anxiety-inducing score takes up residence seemingly in Krisha’s brain, heightening the tension as the camera stays on her, warped-angle shots indicating her declining mental state. One dropped turkey later, the family’s attempt at reunion begins to deteriorate badly, leaving you with a growing feeling of futility.

Krisha isn’t a horror, but it hits home in a way that’s probably unsettling for some people. Shults was certainly affected enough to make the film at all, and in doing so he masterfully captured the fragility of the modern family at the simultaneously most celebratory and most potentially isolating time of year there is. —Kyle Forbush

Stay patient, my friends! More Secondhand Screening reviews will be coming soon…

Read more Secondhand Screenings:
SLUG Magazine Presents: 31 Nights of Secondhand Screenings
The Saltiest Pseudo-Saints of Secondhand Screenings