Everybody loves Christmas carols and everyone loves Christmas movies, but did you ever consider how your favorite films use your favorite music? Fifth in a 12-part series.

Though it’s only associated with Christmas by an isolated sequence – assuming you think of it that way at all – Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis will always hold an honorary spot in the heart of any holiday music fan. This is the film that gave us “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” sung by Judy Garland to young Margaret O’Brien as a melancholy hymn of coping through an unhappy upcoming holiday.

And if you think the onscreen version sounded glum, you may never have heard about the original lyrics. According to a definitive article on the song published by Entertainment Weekly in 2007, composer Hugh Martin had conceived of the song as a legitimate downer: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last / Next years we may all be living in the past.” From that article:

”I often wondered what would it have been like if those lyrics had been sung in the movie,” laughs O’Brien, now 69. ”But about a week before we were to shoot the scene where Judy sings it to me, she looked at the lyrics and said, ‘Don’t you think these are awfully dark? I’m going to go to Hugh Martin and see if he can lighten it up a little.”’

Martin eventually acquiesced, and the marginally less downbeat onscreen version became a huge hit – enough to attract the attention of Frank Sinatra, who decided it should be even more optimistic when he made his own recording. That’s why we now hear alternating lyrics of “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow” or “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” depending on whose rendition is being sung on the radio.

As for Meet Me in St. Louis, its use of this modern classic carol underscores a different way of looking at Christmas: sometimes the holiday is more of a touchstone to get us through tough times. And it gave Garland (who ultimately married director Minnelli) the role of her career after The Wizard of Oz. Even with the depressing lyrics, she found a way to muddle through somehow.

Everybody loves Christmas carols and everyone loves Christmas movies, but did you ever consider how your favorite films use your favorite music? Fourth in a 12-part series.

I have it on good authority that Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was originally published on this date, way back in 1843. (OK, a friend posted it on Facebook. Don’t judge me.) Assuming this is true, there won’t be a better day to talk about Scrooged in this 12-part series. So here we go.

Has another holiday tale been told and re-told more often at the movies than “A Christmas Carol”? The magic of the story is right there in the text, but the secret of its appeal is hardly a secret at all. Christmas is a state of mind that wraps nostalgia and hope in a blanket of benign nighttime mystery. Something amazing happens after a child goes to bed on Christmas Eve, so it’s perfectly reasonable to presume that amazing things could happen to grown-ups, too. Even a grown-up who seems absolutely irredeemable.

In Scrooged (1988) that grown-up is Frank Cross, played by Bill Murray at an interesting time in his career: after the hilariously subversive comedies that made him a star, but prior to Groundhog Day, Rushmore and the films that would mark his emergence as a genuine actor. Richard Donner’s update of the Dickens classic is fiercely modern, and aggressively meta – the live telecast of “A Christmas Carol” being prepped by Frank’s TV network is constantly popping up in the periphery, winking at us while our antihero is being visited by his own set of “actual” Christmas spirits.

Frank’s constantly venal behavior is complemented by the vulgar excesses gleefully embraced by the TV show he’s producing – and, heck, by Donner’s own film, when you get right down to it. But amid a cacophony of hoary celebrity cameos (Lee Majors! Buddy Hackett! Robert Goulet! Mary Lou Retton! John Houseman!), the classiest is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance by jazz musicians Miles Davis, Larry Carlton, David Sanborn and Paul Shaffer, as unnamed buskers playing “We Three Kings” for spare change on a busy Manhattan sidewalk. Their entire screentime is barely 20 seconds – plenty of time for Frank to lob an annoyed bon mot their way, and for their rendition to take root in the film’s musical soul.

More than the Al Green-Annie Lennox cover of “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” that closes the film, that Miles Davis moment is Scrooged‘s musical apex. It’s the splash of rum in the cinematic egg nog, and an elegant grace note that punctuates the pleasantly acidic rat-a-tat sarcasm. My only regret: even 25 years later, I still wish we could have heard the whole song.

Everybody loves Christmas carols and everyone loves Christmas movies, but did you ever consider how your favorite films use your favorite music? Third in a 12-part series.

According to our friends over at Wikipedia, composer Frank Loesser wrote “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in 1944 as a duet for him and his wife, Lynn, to sing at parties. Four years later he sold the rights to the song to MGM, where it was used in the 1948 film Neptune’s Daughter, and promptly won the Oscar for Best Song. Since then it’s become a holiday staple, because nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a back-and-forth between a woman who wants to go home at the end of a date and a guy who won’t let her.

OK, that’s not fair: at its best, the song has a rakish charm – and part of the problem of this duet is that its old-fashioned interplay has been trampled over the years by too many mismatched performers who didn’t really connect with the music. Not so in Jon Favreau’s Elf (2003), an against-all-odds modern all-ages Christmas movie in which semi-tough New Yorker Jovie (Zooey Deschanel) doesn’t have any idea what to do with oddball new-in-town misfit Buddy (Will Ferrell). What she doesn’t realize is that, unlike all the unfortunate denizens of Manhattan who may think they’re an elf, Buddy comes by his mistaken identity honestly: he’s spent his entire life working with Santa at the North Pole, and now he’s back in New York looking for his birth father (James Caan).

Buddy discovers a warts-and-all New York City, one in which “Santa” is an imposter and people’s apartments sometimes don’t have hot water. That latter circumstance prompts Jovie to steal a shower in the locker room of her employer – the same department store where Buddy has found a job. He innocently wanders in when he hears Jovie singing; cue the duet, which suddenly becomes less about romantic avariciousness and more about the fact that, well … baby, it’s cold outside.

At its heart, Elf works so well because of its ability to deftly balance adult sensibilities against the childlike sense of wonder that the holiday season can inspire. This song, dripping with nostalgia, is a perfect complement to Favreau’s nicely established tone. And it doesn’t hurt that Deschanel (now best known for TV’s “New Girl”) has quite a set of pipes on her. If you like what you hear, check out her 2011 holiday album, A Very She and Him Christmas. Like the actress, it’s irresistible.

Everybody loves Christmas carols and everyone loves Christmas movies, but did you ever consider how your favorite films use your favorite music? Second in a 12-part series.

Richard Curtis’ Love Actually is having an odd 10th anniversary year, as cultural critics from all over are taking this occasion to debate the merits of the movie – when they’re not cutting to the chase and simply calling it “the worst film ever made” or “the least romantic film of all time.” I’ve made my thoughts known on this movie here, but in this post I come not to bury Love Actually, nor to praise it. Instead, there’s just one scene on my mind.

There’s plenty of music in Curtis’ film, including “Christmas is All Around,” a quasi-parody of every lame contemporary pop holiday tune that shows up periodically during the movie like a freshly poked bruise. (In fairness, the film is in on the joke of the song’s awfulness.) But there’s only one show-stopping moment of musical Christmas cheer, and it’s a doozy: the last-reel holiday concert in which 11-year-old Olivia Olson belts out a perfect pint-size arrangement of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

Since the song was released in 1994, it’s achieved a level of popularity and universal acclaim that’s impressive even relative to Carey’s broader career. (I’m still kind of amazed at how many sales records she’s set in 25 years.) Plenty of pop stars put out Christmas albums these days, but virtually all are forgettable affairs; amid the detritus of her peers, “All I Want for Christmas is You” has emerged as the only meaningful addition to pop culture’s holiday-music canon since the end of the Reagan era.

When the song shows up in Love Actually, it serves as a validation of sorts – an endorsement of all the good will and aching Christmastime wistfulness that has saturated Curtis’ film up to that point. It can even be read literally as a script point: after all, there’s pretty much no one in the film’s enormous cast of characters that wants anything more for Christmas than to find true love. (Or to save it.)

Mostly, though, it’s a hoot to watch. In addition to Olson’s prematurely lush vocals, watch for her would-be love interest Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) faking a drum solo behind her; in the years that followed, Olson and Brodie-Sangster went on to perform together in the Disney animated series “Phineas and Ferb.” And just within the context of Love Actually, their chaste “romance” is a small delight: the stuff that songs — and timeless movie moments — are made of.

Peter O’Toole, who died yesterday at 81, lived more years as a legend than not. That what comes of delivering your career-defining performance at age 29, when he stepped into David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (Lean’s third choice, after Marlon Brando and Albert Finney) and proceeded to set the bar for a couple of generations of filmmakers.

He did more than Lawrence, though – much more. If that film is #1 on everybody’s O’Toole list, here are numbers 2 through 6 on mine:

• My Favorite Year (1982) – Richard Benjamin’s film looked back with sweet nostalgia to the days of 1950s live-TV variety shows and gave its star (above, with Mark Linn-Baker) a chance to look back on his own swashbuckling career.
• The Stunt Man (1980) – As a megalomanical movie director, O’Toole brought a savage ruthlessness to a role that could easily have fallen into cliché.
• The Ruling Class (1972) – Brilliantly satiric class warfare and a definitive comedic performance from O’Toole as an unhinged British royal.
• Ratatouille (2007) – The actor, in the voice role of feared Parisian restaurant critic Anton Ego, brought gravitas to an already terrific film – as well as a monologue on the nature of criticism that everyone who’s ever written a review should commit to memory.
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969) – The movie itself was so-so (a musical remake of the far superior 1939 version) but O’Toole clicked in his performance as a Latin teacher whose life and career evolve over 40 years.

What is there to say about a man who set a record for earning the most Oscar nominations without a win? Who became as famous for his carousing as for his acting? Who always, always, always was the smartest thing about any film in which he appeared? Just this: rest in peace, sir. You’ve earned it.

Everybody loves Christmas carols and everyone loves Christmas movies, but did you ever consider how your favorite films use your favorite music? First in a 12-part series.

Mark Sandrich’s Holiday Inn must have been a watershed event for a lot of filmgoers: Imagine sitting in a movie house in 1942 and hearing Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” … for the first time ever. I’m watching that scene right now while writing this – it happens around 26 minutes into the film, as Bing Crosby’s former-entertainer-turned-hardscrabble-innkeeper is teaching the song to Marjorie Reynolds’ wannabe showgirl. It’s not an understatement to call the scene movie magic. (Watch it here.) There’s an encore for the movie’s final scene, of course, because even Berlin (who wrote all the songs for this film) knew he had a hit on his hands.

Nine years later Michael Curtiz (better known for a little job called Casablanca) would helm a quasi-remake of Holiday Inn, with that film – White Christmas – focused more exclusively on yuletide-style entertainment. (The conceit of Holiday Inn involves Crosby performing original showtunes themed to each major holiday of the year.) Of the two movies White Christmas has become more of a default choice for holiday movie lovers seeking their “White Christmas” fix; the latter film is in color, which makes a difference for a lot of people, and it certainly has a more finely distilled take on Christmas cinematic confectionery. It’s a fine film as it goes (and I’ll cover it later in this series). But Danny Kaye, bless his heart, is no Fred Astaire. And for me, well … you can never see something again for the first time.

The Golden Globe nominations were announced yesterday, and about five minutes later the press started posting stories with breathless exuberance. Trouble is, everybody couldn’t stop talking about everyone who didn’t get nominated. There is virtually no coverage that doesn’t include the word “snub”:

• The Daily Beast lamented the lack of Oprah Winfrey (for Lee Daniels’ The Butler) and Jon Hamm (for TV’s Mad Men).
• Variety said Hugh Jackman (Prisoners), Martin Scorsese (The Wolf of Wall Street) and Saving Mr. Banks all deserved more love.
• Yahoo Movies called the lack of a James Gandolfini nomination (for Enough Said) “mind-blowing.”
• E Online tsk-tsked at the omissions of Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station) and Forest Whitaker (Lee Daniels’ The Butler) from the Best Actor category.

Folks, there were something like 300 movies released this year. Of those, there may be a couple dozen whose acting, direction or technical achievements merit year-end recognition. There are only five slots (usually) for any given category. Many, many more people are not going to be nominated than those who are. It’s math.

The actual nominations look pretty good to me. I still haven’t seen all the year-end films, but it doesn’t surprise me to hear praise heaped upon American Hustle, and 12 Years a Slave (pictured above) is that rare combination of a film whose subject matter deserves recognition and whose quality demands it.

More significant than all the movies and performances that weren’t nominated is the fact that 2013 saw a lot of good-to-great movies and performances. This is a positive thing. I like that the Best Actor field is hideously crowded this year. It means there were that many great performances.

And for the record, Lee Daniels’ The Butler didn’t get “overlooked” or “snubbed.” I think the Globes voters probably paid a lot of attention to Lee Daniels’ The Butler, and then promptly determined that Lee Daniels’ The Butler was a bad movie. Oprah Winfrey’s performance was the best thing about an overly self-important, too-laden-with-distracting-cameos affair. It would not have bothered me to see a Winfrey nomination, but Sally Hawkins (for Blue Jasmine) is not an unjust alternative. When is a snub not a snub? When it speaks truth to power.