Christmas Movies

 The holidays are once again upon us. After those of us in the United States sit down to our annual Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, the decorating and preparing for Christmas, or any number of winter holidays that people in this country and around the world observe, will be in full swing. If you were to pop in the W6KSR house unannounced, there's a decent chance you would find a Hallmark Christmas movie on the television. It doesn't matter which one. They all follow pretty much the same formula. A woman from the big city goes back to the small town she grew up in for the holidays, falls in love with a guy she hasn't seen since high school, and starts a small business baking Christmas cookies on the small town's charming Main Street—all while the cameras maintain sufficiently low f-stops as to keep the Christmas lights in the background (there are always Christmas lights in the background) softly blurred.

No one in the W6KSR house is intently paying attention to these movies, of course. They're merely something to fill the silence of our empty nest while my wife is cross stitching and I'm on the radio trying to make contacts with Parks on the Air activators. We have a separate list of true classics—and unlikely favorites—that we'll make a deliberate effort to sit down and watch each year. Some titles may rotate in and out from year to year, but these, in no particular order, are the ones we almost never miss.

The Holiday Affair (1949)

Struggling single mom Connie Ellis (Janet Leigh) is, out of necessity, teaching her young son lessons about frugality and the need—particularly at Christmas time—to not set one's expectations too high. Love interest Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum) buys the kid an electric train so that "every now and then . . . he'll know that these things can happen," and I'm completely on board.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Animated Christmas specials in the mid '60s were a dime a dozen, but when an exasperated Charlie Brown asks if anyone knows what Christmas is all about and Linus answers with a reading from the Luke version of the birth of Christ story, somehow this one's gonna stand out.

Die Hard (1988)

A New York City cop (Bruce Willis) flies to Los Angeles to patch things up with his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia) by crashing her company Christmas party. Unfortunately, a group of terrorists/robbers led by evil mastermind Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) have their own ideas about crashing the party, and Willis finds himself in a downtown high rise trying to singlehandedly stop Rickman and his gang. A debate has raged for years over whether the flimsy premise that the film's action takes place during an office Christmas party is enough to qualify it as a Christmas movie. The argument is moot. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas there's plenty of time for snowmen and reindeer and Christmas cookies served with a steaming cup of hot cocoa in a Santa mug. Sometime around mid-December, you're going to want a little change of pace, and two hours worth of Bruce Willis blowing shit up might just about do it.

Knowing Me Knowing Yule with Alan Partridge (1995)

Fresh off his failed six-episode chat show Knowing Me Knowing You (named for a lesser-known Abba song, a breakup song of all things), Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) negotiates a £300,000 budget to produce a Christmas special in a BBC studio mockup of his house in Norwich. When one of his guests turns out to be Chief Commissioning Editor of BBC Television Tony Hayers (David Schneider), we realize almost immediately that the entire show is just a shameless appeal for a second Alan Partridge series. One by one the softball interviews and hokey entertainment pieces end in hilarious disaster, as an increasingly testy Alan Partridge becomes combative with his guests. It's hardly a spoiler to say that no second series is forthcoming. Two years later, Coogan and Schneider will reprise their roles in I'm Alan Partridge, where we find Alan working the overnight shift at Radio Norwich and living in a hotel ("equidistant between Norwich and London") while his wife (whom we never see) lives in their Norwich home with her live-in lover. 

Jingle All the Way (1996)

Flakey dad Howard Langston (Arnold Schwarzenegger) waits until the last minute to buy his son the holiday season's hottest toy: the Turbo Man action figure. Like with so many real-life hot-selling toys, there is an acute shortage of Turbo Men and Schwarzenegger is forced into an uneasy partnership with letter carrier Myron Larabee (Sinbad) to somehow acquire the sold-out toy and not ruin Christmas. The chemistry between Schwarzenegger and Sinbad is brilliant, the references to Schwarzenegger's earlier action films are subtle and nicely played, and Phil Hartman delivers one of the finest performances of his all-too-short life as Schwarzenegger's sickeningly perfect neighbor.

Holiday Inn (1942)

Tired of the show biz grind, singer Jim Hardy (Bing Crosby) converts a Connecticut farmhouse into an inn that's only open on holidays, and winds up in a love triangle with singer/dancer Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds) and dancer Ted Hanover (Fred Astaire). But who cares about the story? The film is really a platform for the trio's considerable talents in one lavishly produced musical number after another as we take a tune-filled journey through the calendar, holiday by holiday. Although other holidays are featured, the movie starts, and effectively ends, at Christmas. It's the movie that the song "White Christmas" came from. (The eponymous film was produced years later to cash in on the song's unexpected success.) As far as I'm concerned that's enough to make it a Christmas movie. This movie does come with a warning. For reasons that have frustratingly¹ little to do with moving the story forward, the film makes use of racial stereotypes that were wrong then and are shockingly wrong now. It takes a lot to objectively separate the brilliance of the performances elsewhere in the film from the appallingly poor choices the filmmaker took in how to frame part of the story, and choosing to not make that separation, either by sitting this movie out or by skipping past the Lincoln's Birthday sequence, is a valid choice.

Love Actually (2003)

It's Christmas time in London, and we're treated to nine independent story lines involving a star-studded cast of characters who all have various connections with one another. The story lines range from quirky to laugh-out-loud funny to deeply touching. Actually, most of the story lines each contain all three of those characteristics, in varying proportions. If you're one of those guys (and I say guys because from about the '80s on Hollywood has marketed romantic comedies almost exclusively to women) who doesn't like romantic comedies, give this one a go; you'll be pleasantly surprised at this bit of cliché-free filmmaking.

A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (2011)

Harold's (John Cho) father-in-law (Danny Trejo) adores Christmas, and takes immense pride in his Christmas tree, which Kumar (Kal Penn) accidentally sets on fire. The two go on an offbeat hero's journey to replace the tree before Trejo discovers that it's missing. Along the way, they get mixed up with Russian gangsters, Christmas claymation special characters, and an alternate version of Neil Patrick Harris who ironically pretends to be gay in order to facilitate his womanizing. The humor is coarse and saturated with drug references. It's not for everyone, but if you're someone who's extremely hard to offend there's something darkly funny about seeing Harold & Kumar pick up where Cheech & Chong left off three decades before.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)

The original animated one. Not the innumerable reboots. Certainly not the live-action Jim Carrey version. Just the original. And yes, I hang a pantooka on the ceiling of my home every year, but that's another story.

1. To be sure, the kind of dehumanization we see in the Lincoln's Birthday scene would have been inexcusable even if it was the only effective way to move the story forward. The fact that the filmmaker found it so easy to make that choice rather than exercising just a small amount of creativity to tell the story of Crosby trying to hide Reynolds' identity from Astaire using some device—any device—other than a musical number done in blackface is where the frustration comes from.