Priscilla

“Priscilla” begins with its eponymous character, Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny), sitting at a diner counter, reading a magazine, and sipping a Coke, the camera moving in behind her. She’s at a US Air Force Base in Germany where her father is stationed, but it looks like Priscilla could be anywhere in America, and it looks like Priscilla could be any American girl. Indeed, aside from a few insert shots just before, all of which seem to occur later in the movie’s timeline, we never see the then-14-year-old Priscilla before this moment. She’s just a 14-year-old girl waiting to be molded, or perhaps groomed, evoked in an American military man asking Priscilla if she knows of Elvis, also stationed on the base, and if she’d like to come over to his where he’s living and meet the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. You know the rest of the story, though the way writer/director Sofia Coppola tells it, working from the real-life Priscilla’s book “Elvis & Me,” feels no less fresh and invigorating. It’s a movie seen specifically from Priscilla’s perspective while evoking how she, herself, was not allowed to have any perspective, a nifty trick only Sofia could so affectingly pull.

When Priscilla first meets Elvis (Jacob Elordi) at a party he’s hosting, he is costumed in sweater and slacks to make him look less like a not you-can’t-do-that-on-television rebel than an affable teen dream. And that’s how Coppola evinces it, at least at first, like a teenage fantasy, with images of Priscilla daydreaming at her school desk and walking through school hallways lost in love, or what she thinks is love. In one astonishing shot, Coppola takes advantage of Elordi’s exaggerated height compared to Spaeny by having him lean over her with one hand on the wall of his home, looking for all the world like a boyfriend and girlfriend at her locker. With accompanying pop hits of the era, it’s like Priscilla is swept up in one of those songs, though I kept thinking of a tune not featured, The Ronettes’ “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love?,” alas mellifluous as it is horrifying, Ronnie made to make the eponymous plea on Phil Spector’s behalf.

If it’s no surprise that Presley’s estate refused to grant permission for Elvis’s music given his portrayal, “Priscilla” isn’t really about Elvis’s music, anyway, his ambition and career at once weirdly present but also distant, far away beyond Graceland’s gates where omnipresent screaming girls become a reflection of what Priscilla was, of a dream that came true all wrong. Indeed, “Priscilla” becomes a kind of companion piece to Coppola’s equally great “Marie Antoinette.” Celebrities are nothing if not American royalty, which Sofia’s own “Bling Ring” suggested, and so Priscilla becomes a kind of American queen, Graceland as her Versailles, held in captivity, illustrated in a shot seeing her through a window looking out.

“Marie Antoinette,” though, was an explosion of style and extravagance, mirroring its protagonist. “Priscilla” is the opposite, a stifling of style, and certainly of expression. “Keep the fires burnin’,” Elvis says over the phone to his child bride when he’s on the road, not so much oblivious as keenly aware he’s snuffing out her fire by keeping her locked in his castle. She graduates high school, though to no real effect, is not allowed to have a job, has her fashion tastes impressed upon her by Presley, eventually becomes addicted to pills right alongside him. She settles into a zombified state, evoked in how Coppola and her editor Sarah Flack compose the movie to make it feel as if nothing is happening even as life rushes by. 

“Priscilla” also demonstrates just how much a director can – one might argue, should – sculpt a movie performance as much as the performer. That’s not to discount Spaeny. She comes across carried away in the early scenes by puppy love, evinces a haughtiness when she first moves into Graceland, and shows the emerging cracks, like coming unglued from her husband’s spiritual and philosophical ramblings. Mostly, though, she downplays to great effect, existing within Coppola’s frames, like a vacant fashion model in a vapid spread, hinted at in those brief opening shots of assorted makeup and hairstyle trinkets, costumed and posed just as the man in her life wants. That Priscilla never really has agency isn’t an oversight but the whole point, turning the end into an inversion of the end of “Marie Antoinette,” not escape but liberation, not the end but the beginning.

On the Rocks

“On the Rocks”, in which Laura (Rashida Jones) is pushed by her playboy father Felix (Bill Murray) to investigate her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) possibly having an extra-marital affair, bears all the elements of screwball. What transpires, however, is not frenetic or even laugh-out-loud so much as chilled out, dry, like a deceptively strong martini that leaves you reeling. Sofia Coppola, who wrote and directed, in tandem with editor Sarah Flack, favors long shots and two shots of her two actors, usually drinking cocktails with an air of melancholy in dimly New York hotel bars. This makes great hay of Jones’s unmatched skepticism, pursing her lips and rolling her eyes, taking whatever bit of bluster masquerading as philosophy that Murray’s character emits at any given time and both letting it register and roll right off. In Laura and Felix’s first conversation over lunch, Coppola cuts between a medium shot of Murray and a reverse shot of Laura, quietly underlining the dynamic, how he fills a room at the expense of everyone else and she is forced to navigate his casual sexism, his offhand cruelty. After all, before the film even fades in, we hear Felix in voiceover state “And remember, don’t give your heart to any boys. You are mine until you get married. Then you’re still mine.”  

“On the Rocks” begins on Laura and Dean’s wedding night. Wearing just her skivvies and her veil, she jumps into a pool where Dean lounges, a romantic moment doubling as an emblematic leap of faith. But as the movie flashes forward to the present, her faith is being tested. Not just by Dean, away frequently on business with myriad conspicuous clues that he might be seeing a co-worker on the sly, but in her work as a writer and in her role as a mother of two. Coppola’s prologue before Felix enters the picture, of Laura ferrying her kids to school activities, getting them to bed, not so much talking to another mother (Jenny Slate) as just listening to her vent, trying to find time to write, deftly evinces a life flying by and standing still at once; a simple cut from giving her daughter a bath to boiling noodles brings home motherhood’s strange push/pull between satisfaction and sameness. This tone-setter concludes with Laura sprawled on her bed, echoing the opening shot to Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation”, though less wistful. Laura is just worn out. 

When Felix, shows up, he does not rejuvenate, despite what he may think, but complicates and frustrates and exacerbates. Murray deploys his patented master of ceremonies air to perfectly, comically embody the kind of good cop grandfather to Laura’s bad cop mom, walking right in and catering to his grandchildren’s every whim, making them milkshakes, letting them watch a television program for adults. That sort of here for you now, gone tomorrow vibe dominates his every decision, even as he inserts himself into his daughter’s life, not so much encouraging Laura’s suspicions about Dean as driving them, taking her on a wild ride, evoked in the literal car ride they take on a woefully designed stakeout where, in trying to follow Dean’s taxi, Felix runs a red light in his sports car and gets pulled over.

The scene is “On the Rocks” in capsule. Not only does Felix insert himself into his daughter’s personal dilemma and make it all about him, he charms his way out of a ticket, appealing to the cop’s sense of family (Felix knows his dad), quietly evoking a wealthy white man’s relationship with the police and demonstrating how easy the world is for him, how it bends to his whims even when he makes a mess of a things. But if “On the Rocks” has a breezy air about it, rest assured, Coppola, unlike the police, is not letting him off scot-free. Because Laura isn’t. In a late scene, she confronts him on making a mess of things, a question he dances around, admitting fault in the powerful man’s way, by not quite saying what he did and conspicuously stopping short of saying he’s sorry. It is a dark undercurrent in a movie where the narrative only appears slight upon first glance, not building to any grand revelation or life-changing admission but rather the gradual realization that life already is what you thought it was.

The Beguiled

If Don Siegel’s 1971 film “The Beguiled”, the rare Clint Eastwood foray into erotica, where he lusted after an entire boarding school of girls and they lusted after him was seen from the perspective of its masculine star, then Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” remake turns Siegel’s film inside out, rooting its point of view to the women. It also scrubs away much of the original’s vulgarity and violence for a prim, proper, almost fairytale aesthetic underlining the seminary setting where Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) tutors the young girls in her charge in the ways of being “good Christian women”, which is how the repressive era preferred their women be seen and is consequently the same lens through which Coppola shows us these seven girls. And while Coppola does eventually smear that lens, she never devolves into overheated hysteria like the 1971 film, likely because, as you can almost hear a seemly southern gentleman saying, such hysteria is unbecoming of a lady.

The story turns on eleven year old Amy (Oona Laurence) finding an injured Union soldier, Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), and helping him back to her boarding school so his wounds can be mended. When he asks after the slaves, Amy explains they all left, a fairly conspicuous evasion of the era’s most incendiary sin. Indeed, violence and vulgarity is not all that Coppola scrubs from this version. Though not seeing these women engaged in the no doubt hard work – cleaning, cooking, tilling – that went with maintaining such an opulent residence comes across like a conscious stylistic choice to further underline the overriding importance of appearances, it also evokes the absence of those on which these white Confederate women would have relied. And while the war itself is present, with low rumbles of cannon fire on the soundtrack and smoke on the horizon, it remains distinctly, deliberately abstract as “The Beguiled” purposely jettisons politics of the War Between the States to exclusively scrutinize the War Between the Sexes. In recounting that war, Coppola is frequently successful.

McBurney, frankly, often comes across less like a soldier than a male odalisque, framed to ogle as he is propped up in bed where his leg mends. When he initially arrives, passed out cold, Miss Martha washes the dirt off his body, pausing to wring out her scrub like she might pass out, a moment which Kidman plays at a more comical pitch than sensual, like she, beacon of piety, has run up against an immovable erotic object. He, quite aware of the spell he casts, indulges in it, though with far less of the naked aggression in Siegel’s version, with Farrell cutting a courtly figure as he goes about whispering sweet nothings in each one’s individual company, making promises he never intends to keep, particularly with Edwina, who projects her desire to escape these stuffy surroundings onto this interloper. This, however, is an underwritten subplot that strangely gets the shrift in the film’s denouement, though Dunst still provides her character a credible melancholy ache and a closeted carnal desire.

His manipulations eventually give way, and when they do so does his fragile physical state which suddenly turns perilous, transforming him from manipulator into monster, though, like so many monsters, he ultimately proves more make believe. When Marie (Addison Riecke) makes the fateful suggestion for how they might be rid of their guest it is astonishing to see how it easy it comes to her, like it was hovering in the air all the while just waiting for someone to grasp it, and when Miss Martha gives it her blessing, Kidman delicately but demonically allows her character to revel in this sudden acquisition of power. And though McBurney’s comeuppance takes place in a traditionally suspenseful context, Coppola, as she does elsewhere, deliberately strips away that suspense, the capper hinging on McBurney’s own oblivious doltishness with Miss Martha’s wicked smile as the laugh track, the latter revealing the movie’s inclination to laugh at McBurney rather than be frightened by him. To that point, when McBurney gets hold of a gun and waves it around, it is born as much from desperate impotence as menace, evinced in how quickly he discards that gun when Edwina lets herself into his room and more or less throws herself at him.

Just as Coppola eliminates so much suspense, she also does away with the majority of the material’s inherent grisliness, most acutely emblemized in a shot when Miss Martha’s nightgown is streaked with blood, which elicits the air of an oil painting hanging in some musty museum where the tastefulness of the gore yearns to illustrate how the macabre and the femine are not meant to mix. The concluding shot, with the seven women gathered on the front porch, resembles a painting too, as if they are sitting for a portrait, though the portrait begins in a wide angle with the women in the distant background and McBurney in the foreground. Then the camera closes in on the women, slowly removing McBurney from the frame, and you can almost hear a seemly southern gentleman saying to himself as he passes by, “My, my, what good Christian women.”

A Movie For Our Moment (even though it might not be)

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be ‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.” – Joan Didion, The White Album

Movies are just movies. They are a series of aesthetic choices made principally by a lone filmmaker in a vacuum, on set, on location, away from the quaking madness of the world, where harnessing a finished product that can speak to an audience anytime, anywhere is the end goal.

Movie trailers are not movies at all (unless you’re Michael Bay). They are two minute commercials designed to sell the final product to the widest possible audience. Ascribing any sort of meaning to them beyond your own insta-desire or dislike is a fool’s errand and beside the point.

Still, we live in extraordinary times. We live in a time when the American President is a man who boasted about sexual assault and passed it off as locker room talk. This, combined with a good ol’ boy controlled Congress getting set to hitch up its good ol’ boy britches and go after women’s rights, prompted millions of women around the country to take up protest signs and pink hats and march in the streets.

That means even though the latest Sofia Coppola Grand Appartement du Reine, a remake of Don Siegel’s “The Beguiled”, for which the first trailer just dropped yesterday, and which looks like her latest chic cauldron of atmosphere, and which stars Kirsten Dunst and Nicole Kidman which is like Steph Curry and Kevin Durant playing for the same team, is a film on which we should attempt to reserve judgment until its release date of June 23rd, well, who are we kidding? Because “The Beguiled” is a film in which a Union soldier is nursed to health by a group of women at a boarding school only to devolve (or evolve) into the group of women getting what’s theirs. Or, more accurately, it involves taking from the man what’s his, more or less makes good on Siegel’s explanation that the Thomas P. Cullinan novel on which it was based stemmed from “the basic desire of women to castrate men”.

And if the Union soldier was played by Clint Eastwood in the original, meaning he had to be the star, sort of muddling the feminist message, Sofia’s version, which seems to be bringing the women up in the mix and taking the man down, would seem more perfectly in tune to our suddenly perilous times. This is mere speculation, of course, me simply wanting a movie to be something it might not, and so feel free to lodge your complaints in the comments section. I will judge the movie for what it is when it arrives but for now please excuse me for looking through my pre-release lens and imagining it as the answer to my mournful prayers...

Tiffany Trump, a Sofia Coppola Film

“She has a decided predilection for showing empty moments in human lives and deals with characters who continually expose the void within themselves.” This is how Anna Rogers described Sofia Coppola’s oeuvre in a wonderful analysis of the impeccable director in 2007 for Senses of Cinema, and I thought of that line as I watched Tiffany Trump, daughter of Donald and Marla Maples, speak this past Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention. The twenty-two year old Tiffany, recent graduate of Penn, California resident as opposed to an east coaster like her father and three half-siblings, was tasked with imparting the notion that her pops is a family man, enlisted to soften the bronzed ogre who once told Buzzfeed “Marla used to say, ‘I can’t believe you’re not walking Tiffany down the street,’ you know in a carriage. Right, I’m gonna be walking down Fifth Avenue with a baby in a carriage. It just didn’t work.”

That guy, however, the one that wouldn’t walk down Fifth Avenue with a baby carriage bearing his own flesh and blood, still seemed to emerge, inadvertently but tellingly, in Tiffany’s speech. Where some people claimed to see humanization in Tiffany’s slight anecdotes about her father, Ruth Graham of Slate saw a “sad, vague tribute”, “praise (that) was edged with sadness: He’s good with advice, (Tiffany) said, but ‘he keeps it short.’” “It’s telling,” Claire Landsbaum observed for The Cut, “that neither anecdote she chose to include actually involves her father’s physical presence.” That might be attributed to Marla choosing to move her daughter across the country to California, but then Donald is the same guy that flew to the Iowa State Fair last year to take other kids for rides on his helicopter, and I can’t help but wonder if Tiffany caught that footage on the NBC Evening News and wondered why her dad never took her for rides in his luxurious whirlybird. “Her father,” Graham notes, “doesn’t follow her on Twitter, and he rarely mentions her.” And if that sounds like maudlin millennial nonsense (waaaaah! He doesn’t follow me on Twitter!), well hey, it kinda is, a signal of what constitutes important values in these ludicrous times, where even if Tiffany has a vaunted Snap Pack, she can’t get a follow from dear old Dad.

The pain that a lack of a Twitter follow might cause is something that seems ripe for a Sofia Coppola movie, since she is a skillful chronicler of both the toll of emotional isolation and the moneyed morose, whether it’s the young Queen of France suddenly plunked down in Versailles where she doesn’t know a soul or a confused newlywed sitting on a window ledge overlooking the expanse of Tokyo, inundated with people yet all alone. And Coppola observes her characters, Rogers writes for Senses of Cinema, “Through the use of dead time, liminal images that hang between dream and reality, a wandering and restless camera-eye that mirrors the gaze of the protagonists, and discrepancies between visual and sound tracks, crisis can be directly translated into the image.” And the story of Tiffany Trump, which has been less documented than her attention-craving father’s, now eking out in various details scattered across the cyber-megacosm, comes across readymade for Sofia’s image-heavy style, a perfect aesthetic to expose the void within her subject.

Think of the recording session of Tiffany’s ill-fated pop ditty “Like a Bird” that has been making the unfortunate Interwebs rounds, a song with nothingness posing as lyrics and swathed in autotune, so much that you leave it with less of a feel for who Tiffany Trump is than you had before cranking it, and which I imagine Sofia transforming into less of a cruelly funny “You’ve Got the Touch” and more the improbable melancholy of “More Than This.” Think of Tiffany missing her mother’s appearance on “Dancing with the Stars” to stay at school and study, which sounds like the sort of existential crisis only the rich & famous know, but that I have no doubt Sofia could translate into something uniquely heartbreaking, Erin Andrews chortling on the TV while Tiffany wistfully looks on, a Romanesque art book in her lap. And Coppola would wring genuine ache from places where seemingly none should be found, putting Tiffany side by side with the storefront window of Tiffany & Company, for whom she was named, in the dying afternoon light, rendering rich girl tragedy.

Still, no image could carry more impact than the one broadcast across the nation on Tuesday, one so supremely cinematic that it momentarily transcended the rageful space in which it occurred, moving me in a way I found as beautiful as I did strange. You can be alone, of course, amidst the multitudes, and that’s what Tiffany Trump was, specifically standing up for a man who couldn’t even bother to be there, projecting himself instead on a video screen from the comfort of New York, which is where he’s always been while his daughter has always been somewhere else. After the speech, scribes inevitably weighed in on how well Tiffany did or did not do. I wondered if her Dad might pull up those Internet report cards, scribble a few notes and send them to his daughter by email.

A Very Murray Christmas

There is a moment in the Netflix holiday special “A Very Murray Christmas” that you might not miss, necessarily, but could easily kind of gloss over, in which Bill Murray (as himself) takes a phone call and comically hangs up on the person, a person who turns out to be his sister. It’s funny, right; he’s just another self-absorbed star. Ah, but Mr. Murray’s director, Sofia Coppola, rarely makes unintentional decisions, and this seemingly innocuous bit of jocularity hangs over “A Very Murray Christmas” like a sad-eyed angel at the top of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. After all, Bill is often alone in this special named for him, save for Paul Shaffer, situated throughout at a virtually omnipresent piano, the Graham Stark to Murray’s Peter Sellers. But then, even Paul admits he’s just there for the steady paycheck. And so while “A Very Murray Christmas” is very funny and joyful, it is also infused with notable melancholia, a reminder that the season isn’t just silver and gold, but sometimes blue.

The film opens with disconsolate, tuxedoed Murray, his bow-tie conspicuously undone, singing “Christmas Blues” (“The happy crowds are mingling / But there's no one that I know”) as if he’s Dean Martin and the rest of the Rat Pack has abandoned him. It’s a moment that no actor alive is more equipped to effect. Murray pushes past the inherent comicality of novelty reindeer antlers atop his head to find the very real sorrow of the moment as your laughter gradually subsides and you just feel…wistful. He simply wants his Christmas special, live from the Carlyle Hotel, to go forward, but none of his booked guest stars can get there because a raging blizzard has completely shut New York City down. His frantic managers have more or less given up hope, and so has Bill, until he miraculously encounters Chris Rock and conscripts the unwilling comedian in a “Do You Hear What I Hear?” sing-along improbably re-claiming the old standard from Perry Como and twelve million malls via a simultaneously earnest and tongue-in-cheek rendition that earns two thousand bonus points for looking like the cover of “Bookends” with holly corsages. The evening could be a hit! Then the power goes out.

Another movie might have taken this electrical outage as a cue to manufacture a television show anyway with a little production jerry-rigging, but not “A Very Murray Christmas”, which in keeping with the charmingly extemporary attitude of its star sticks to a leisurely gait. In his despondency, Bill finds a bunch of others bummed about being stuck on December 24th with nowhere to go, and together they try and foster some holiday spirit by more or less singing their blues away. He meets a couple would-be newlyweds (Rashida Jones and Jason Schwartzman) whose wedding has gone awry on account of the weather. He cedes the stage to the French band Phoenix, posing as the Carlyle’s kitchen staff, to sing “Alone on Christmas Day”, a solid offering of original winterland wistfulness. He performs a duet of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with indie icon Jenny Lewis, playing a hotel waitress, who croons while Murray is more content to play down the song’s infamously creepy lyrics by seeing if he can get his duet partner to break character which she doesn’t because she’s goddam singing royalty and everything she does is perfect and no I’m not unfairly biased in her favor. And Maya Rudolph steps in to stop the show by standing in for Darlene Love on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” None of this amounts to anything like a real narrative, nor should it. This isn’t a Russian winter in a Russian novel; this is a holiday hang at the Carlyle.

Eventually, however, this hang gives way to an extended fantasy sequence, one where George Clooney materializes to make martinis at Paul’s piano and Sofia smartly peels away all the extraneousness that usually comes with Miley Cyrus and has the youthful starlet simply sit down and really rip “Silent Night”, a version that sounds more cabaret-y than Lutheran Church-y, which makes it appropriate that she’s wearing a fairly revealing Santa outfit while still singing about the Savior being born. And if this sequence, with its white lighting and Clooney’s 59 carat smile feels out of step with the preceding laid-back karaoke-ish misadventures, well, of course it does.

This is how Bill imagines his Christmas special might have looked if it hadn’t gotten called on account of a snow day. It’s grand, yes, and yet that makes what transpires before it come across even sweeter, and triumphant, really, in its elegantly shaggy way. The holiday season, with its stress, sadness and occasional disrupting blizzards, rarely turns out the way we see it in our dreams, but, all in all, don’t be surprised if the spirit of Christmas manages to miraculously instill itself in you anyway.

Christmas Comes Early

I saw some scuttlebutt from the Twitter autocrats recently in the wake of a few amounts of copious praise for the latest PT Anderson opus that some critics, if you want to use that word, are too un-judicious in their hyperbolic praising of auteurs for which they possess immense fondness. And while the autocrats weren’t aiming their social media bellyaching at me and my devout adoration for Sofia Coppola, well, they may as well have been because I don’t hide my Sofia zealotry. I go tell it on the mountain. She’s the awesomest, bro, and you can take your polite reservations and journalistic objectivity and drown it in my leftover Sofia Blanc de Blanc. Real talk: we all have biases and I do not hide mine.

I was having a day. Just, you know, a day; a regular ol’ day. I mean, I live in Chicago and the Cubs beat the Cardinals in the playoffs last night and their four games from [redacted for fear of jinxing it] and the city’s alive with sounds “Cubs Win! Cubs Win!” And I’m cheering for the Cubs, sure, and I’m happy for Cubs fans, obviously, but I’m not a Cubs fan and I can’t (and shouldn’t) own their enthusiasm like they do and I really, really wanted access to that same unbridled exultation. Who wouldn’t?! Then, as if by fate above, yesterday afternoon, it was announced that Sofia Coppola/Bill Murray joint Christmas venture percolating for a year is going to be a reality come December and I cued up the 30 second blip and a tuxedo-ed Bill Murray declared “Tonight will go down as the greatest night in history” and I felt myself swept away to a fantasyland I only permit myself to believe in on unbearably overcrowded el train rides. It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as A Sofia Coppola Film Starring Bill Murray.

Netflix, where it will be released this December, advises that Mr. Murray plays himself, concerned that no one will arrive for his big holiday special at The Carlyle Hotel, that ancient upper east side stronghold, on account of a New York snowstorm, only to have the magic of the season prove his fears unfounded as famous guests arrive to help put on a show. It’s an homage to the classic variety hours gone by, and God bless it. In this era where our talk show hosts are more determined than ever to turn their programs into hour long Youtube videos and even The Muppets, variety show purveying pioneers, are determined to stop being polite and start getting “real”, Monsieur Murray, he who can wink at the camera with such awe-inspiring earnestness and lavish entertainment with the deftest of touches, is here, it seems, to restore the faded title Master of Ceremonies its old world joie de vivre. I’m projecting, perhaps, wishing, hoping, pining, and yet…watch the clip. Tell me I’m wrong.



I haven’t had such a burst of {champagne cork popping emoji) from a teensy weensy trailer since, well, that itty bitty “Bling Ring” spot. A Very Murray Christmas looks like Nick the Lounge Singer crossed with Billy Mack but with a touch of class, an air of dignity, perhaps afforded by that apparent walk and talk with George Clooney, who I kinda want to pretend is something like a Sofia-imagined Dickens ghost. And maybe you think that Miley Cyrus should be the apparition, appearing to appear but not really, except that I’m so in the tank for Sofia that even the world’s foremost twerker merely made me contemplatively scratch my chin and think “I could totally see that working.” Granted, I’m a little heartbroken there was no sign of Kiki. But maybe Kiki had to film “Fargo.” Or maybe Kiki’s appearance will be a surprise. What’s Christmas without a surprise? Wait. What did you say? Jenny Lewis is going to be in this? *Nick faints.*

Over there. To the left. That's the coolest person alive. With Bill Murray. Totes Mcgoats.