The Screengrab

After the horrors of Silent Night Deadly Night, it was a relief that the next movie that showed up in the pile of holiday DVDs I drunkenly knocked over while prepping for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon was a good old-fashioned heartwarming musical.  Of course, a lot of people really, really hate musicals, and would rather watch jolly old St. Nick ventilating craniums with a wood axe on endless loop than hear some cheeseball from the Golden Age of Hollywood belt out a single rousing number, so for some of our readers, this might be a significant turn for the worse.  However, I will tell you now that those readers are wrong.  White Christmas is a wonderful movie, and despite not having any killing in it (well, except for the World War II stuff, I guess), it is superior in every way to our previous movie.

White Christmas is what was once known in the biz as a "jukebox musical".  This is where, rather than writing new songs for a production, a bunch of already-existing hit songs are thrown together, a half-assed 'plot' is woven to tie them loosely together, and they are unleashed on an audience who, it is reasoned, will make the jukebox musical a huge success, because you already know that they like these songs. Contemporary audiences tend to think of the jukebox musical as a relatively recent invention, the result of postmodern game-playing like Moulin Rouge and Broadway cash-ins like Mamma Mia!, but in fact, they've been around for centuries -- in the past, when popular songs were generally renowned for who composed them rather than who wrote them, the jukebox musical was ubiquitous.

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Here at the Screengrab, we have an irregularly scheduled feature known as "Forgotten Films", which we use to discuss beloved, or at least interesting, movies that seem to have fallen through the cracks of moviegoers' memories. But what about those films that, while deservedly forgotten, will never be forgotten enough for some people's liking? Films that, in addition to sucking like a Hoover and a half, can only serve to represent the sore spots that their makers would much, much rather they'd never booked into theaters and charged admission? To inaugurate what we suspect will be an even more irregularly scheduled feature devoted to these very special films, today we exhume Guy Ritchie's Swept Away.

THE MOVIE: The British writer-director's third feature is a remake of Lina Wertmuller's 1974 cocktail-chatter classic (whose full title is Swept Away...by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August), with Ritchie's wife, Madonna, and the Italian actor Adriano Giannini taking over the roles originated by the luscious comedienne Mariangelo Melato and Wertmuller's favorite leading man (and Adriano's father) Giancarlo Giannini. Madonna is an obnoxious, motor-mouthed rich bitch--excuse the sexist characteriation, but in both the original film and the remake, that's very much the idea--whose rich tycoon husband (Bruce Greenwood) has plunked her down on a yacht touring the Mediterranean. The ship's fisherman (Giannini) takes exception to her non-stop prattling, her hateful attitude, and her politics, and when, through an outrageously contrived quirk of circumstance, they wind up stranded together on a deserted island, where her money counts for nothing and she is dependent on his manly survivor skills, he takes full advantage of the tables having been turned. Their new relationship begins with him whacking her repeatedly in the face and quickly blossoms into a heated love affair. But then they are rescued, and the movie dares to ask: can the crazed-rutting-weasels romance between a rich dame and a working-class stud survive the artificial pressures that society will thrown up against it?

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