If you want to be touched by an angel this holiday season, several Hollywood fantasies available on video may be the answer to your prayers.
New-to-video this season is a holiday episode of CBS’s miraculous top-rated series, “Touched By an Angel: A Christmas Miracle,” starring Roma Downey and Della Reese as angels who restore hope to guest star Randy Travis.
In Disney’s “One Magic Christmas,” Mary Steenburgen also loses faith, but wouldn’t you if your guardian angel was seedy Harry Dean Stanton?
‘Tis the season, of course, for “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Clarence, the rookie guardian angel who teaches George Bailey that no man is a failure who has friends (or a basketful of money). For pilots Irene Dunne and Holly Hunter, it’s good to have spirits Spencer Tracy and Richard Dreyfuss in their cockpits in “A Guy Named Joe” and the Steven Spielberg remake, “Always.”
One good angel movie deserves another, as witness “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” and “Heaven Can Wait,” “The Bishop’s Wife” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” two “Angels in the Outfield” (pick the 1951 original) and Wim Wenders’ ethereal masterwork “Wings of Desire” and the follow-up “Faraway, So Close.”
Some angels smell like just-baked cookies (John Travolta in “Michael”), and others like rancid beer (Peter Fonda in “The Wild Angels”). Still others have the devil in their heart, like Christopher Walken in “Prophecy.”
