[JINGLE BELL ROCKS!
Screens Friday March 28th at 4:50 pm, Saturday March 29th at 8:00 pm,
and Sunday March 30th at 1:50 pm at the Cleveland International Film
Festival.]
Review by Bob
Ignizio
However you feel about Christmas, even
if you loathe the holiday or are ambivalent to it, there's probably a
Christmas song for you. For Vancouver based
JINGLE BELL ROCKS!
director Mitchell Kezin, that song was Nat King Cole's “The Little
Boy that Santa Claus Forgot”. It's a song about a kid with
an absentee dad who, despite being good and having a perfectly
reasonable Christmas list, winds up being passed over by Old Saint
Nick. “The Christmas Song” it ain't, but nonetheless it struck a
chord with Mitch, whose own father was frequently absent (or might as
well have been) around the holidays.
As strange as it
might seem, that one dreary carol started Mitch down what he thought
was a lonely road collecting Christmas music, and despite the film's title, not just of the rock and roll variety. As it turns out,
though, there's actually a sizable underground of Christmas music
collectors, many of whom put great time and effort into searching for
rare records and then making mix CDs of their finds for friends and
family each year. Once Mitch realized how widespread his hobby was,
he decided to make a movie about it.
