By David Raether
New Year’s is not a sentimental holiday. It just isn’t. It’s not like Thanksgiving or Christmas or the Fourth of July where your mind floods with memories of family and friends. New Year’s is a holiday that acknowledges the passage of time but nobody gives you presents.
And here it is again. Yawn?
For twenty years, however, I had something to look forward to every New Year’s, thanks to the fact that I lived in Pasadena, which is, of course, the site of the annual Tournament of Roses Parade. I was never really sure what the tournament was contesting, but that’s beside the point. It’s glorious for its pointlessness.
Over the course of my life, I’ve successfully maintained a deep loathing for parades. I mean, what is going on with a parade? You stand on the sidewalk and watch clowns (eek! and yuck!), horses, fire trucks, marching bands and “floats” go slowly cruising by. What?! This is entertainment of the lowest order, ranking slightly above Casino Night at your local Elk’s Club.
And then one year I actually went to the Rose Parade. Honestly, until you’ve been up close to one of these Rose Parade floats and seen and smelled the flowers, you have no idea how spectacular they are. There is nothing even remotely as incredible as a Rose Parade float up close. They’re crazy and ethereal and jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There are several companies in Pasadena that have enormous warehouse spaces that build these things. They are outrageous year-long projects. And two days after the parade, they are all dismantled and thrown away.
The other feature of New Year’s Eve in Pasadena is that people begin to line the parade route days before the parade. It is a rite of passage for kids in that area of Los Angeles to spend New Year’s Eve on the parade route, all bundled up, chattering away in often bone-chilling temperatures. You have hundreds of thousands of people sitting on lawn chairs, warming themselves around space heaters and producing an almost thunderous amount of yakking all night long, until the first band comes striding down the avenue in the morning.
Can’t go to Pasadena for New Year’s? How about some fun movies tied to the holiday! Here are my choices for the best of the New Year’s-themed movies.
It’s New Year’s Eve in New York City in 1981 and Monica is throwing a big party, but nobody seems to be coming. This is an unjustly overlooked but completely fabulous comedy with an enormous ensemble cast, starring Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, Dave Chappelle, Courtney Love, Angela Featherstone, Jay Mohr, Martha Plimpton, Christina Ricci, and Paul Rudd.
If you’ve ever felt rotten about your life and your prospects while everyone is gallivanting around feeling festive on New Year’s Eve, this is the movie for you. Everyone’s lives are just not going that well and they all end up somewhat miraculously at Monica’s (Plimpton’s) disappointing party. Do things all sort of work out? Well, you’ll just have to rent it, won’t you? Trust me on this one—this is a fun movie.
In 2001, director Steven Soderbergh did a stylish remake of this classic 1960 heist movie. The film was so successful that a series of sequels were made: Ocean’s 12 (2004), Ocean’s 13 (2007), and Ocean’s 8 (2018). All of these movies were appropriately well-done and charming, but you really owe it to yourself to watch the original.
Here, Frank Sinatra plays Danny Ocean and he leads a merry band of fellow World War II veterans/thieves in a series of casino robberies on New Year’s Eve. The cast is enormous and star-studded. It has the whole Rat Pack: Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin, plus a bunch of other stars from that era, including a stunningly beautiful Angie Dickinson.
Special treat: the screenplay was co-written by the legendary Charles Lederer. Even more special treat: music was by Nelson Riddle, the man who famously arranged most of Frank Sinatra’s finest recordings in the 1950s and 60s. This is the movie to have on the big screen in your apartment during your New Year’s Eve party.
This is one of the best romantic comedies of the past 20 years. Renée Zellweger shines as Bridget Jones and Hugh Grant and Colin Firth are perfect as romantic rivals. The movie begins and ends on New Year’s Eve. The choice of Zellweger to play Bridget Jones was controversial because the film is based on Helen Fielding’s much-loved British novel of the same name, and the idea that an American actress would play such a beloved English girl did not go over well. Zellweger, however, proved them all wrong. She is an utter delight. The novel itself was based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Sure, you could watch the 2005 version of this story with better special effects, but that wouldn’t be nearly as fun as watching the cheesy original version of this story about an ill-fated cruise ship that flips over and starts to sink on New Year’s Eve. The tagline for the movie was “Hell, Upside Down.” This movie is pure, glorious 70s-disaster-movie-heaven.
You might think that a film that features five—count ‘em, five!—Academy Award winners would be good. But you would be wrong. (We’re talking about Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Albertson, Shelley Winters, and Red Buttons.) The film’s mediocrity should in no way prevent you from watching this movie. It’s hugely, enormously, disastrously, entertainingly bad. I love it. It really is hell, upside down.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.