Incessant commercial jingles on the ’tube.
Non-stop radio caroling in the background.
Rudolph, Frosty, Heat Miser and Charlie Brown making their ritual annual appearances.
Looping broadcasts of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story.”
Twelve—count them, twelve!—whole days of Christmas!
Yes, ’tis the season, and in an effort to offer some appropriate viewing suggestions, let’s recount my twelve all-time holiday favorites.
These aren’t all necessarily “Christmas” stories in the sense that they’re about Christmas icons or holiday miracles or that they contain an ironic gift-of-the-Magi plot device. These films merely occur during the Yuletide Season and, perhaps none-too-coincidentally, all of them contain common elements of a bitter Scrooge-like character and the presentation of a very special gift.
I had to put this one the list—and first!—potential overexposure by 24-hour marathon be damned.
This is a loving and wry tribute to post-WWII-Norman Rockwell-Mid-western nostalgia, tinged with an eye-poking cynicism borne of a childhood full of fantasies debunked and humiliating school-yard dilemmas that seemed to play out forever.
Full of classic one-liners, rich in period detail, sweet but never sentimental, broadly comic yet witty and sarcastic, just a bit naughty but never obscene, and featuring the ultimate triple-dog-dare,
“A Christmas Story” is a timeless tale that seems to get more adorable every passing year. Evidently, there’s a reason fans revisit this movie again and again and again.
Can you believe this was made by the same guy whose two previous efforts were the raunchy teen comedies Porky’s and Porky’s II: The Next Day?
Requisite Scrooge(s): The Bumpuses’ dogs from next door, who ruin the Parker Family Christmas feast. And, in one heartbreaking scene, Mrs. Parker herself in a sneaky off-screen bit of spiteful shenanigans.
Special Christmas Gift: C’mon, have you SEEN the movie? It’s Ralphie’s official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time!
Bonus Gift: Mr. Parker’s prized leg lamp, tragic victim of Mrs. Parker’s jealous duplicity, and which might’ve been fixable upon its “accident”…had she not used up all the glue on purpose.
Gremlins (1984)
A cheerfully macabre monster-mash send-up of Christmas in “Spielbergia,” devilishly tweaked by the live-action-Looney-Toon sensibilities of director Joe Dante.
Not as funny or twisted as its playfully subversive sequel, but that one didn’t take place at Christmas.
Requisite Scrooge: Mean old miser Mrs. Deagle, who gets her nasty comeuppance courtesy of Spike and his mischievous pals.
Special Christmas Gift: Billy Peltzer gets a strange new pet…with three rather important safety tips, naturally disregarded.
Special Gift to Junior Splatter-Geeks: The kitchen slaughter sequence, partial cause of the soon-to-be-christened “PG-13” rating.
Die Hard (1988)
John McTiernan’s towering spectacle is still, even twenty-five years later, the gold standard of kick-ass action flicks.
Bruce Willis rocketed to super-stardom as an Everyman cop who crashes his estranged wife’s office Christmas party and is reluctantly forced to go Cro-Magnon against a gang of thieving Euro-trash evildoers. An ode to ’80s corporate greed and the sheer joy of the heist, the movie is perfectly married to the crucial inclusion on the soundtrack of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
In the same way that “Ride of the Valkyries” is permanently associated with the film Apocalypse Now, just as “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and “The Blue Danube” are both forever bound to 2001: A Space Odyssey, so too has Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony become the de-facto theme of Die Hard (it’s even teased on the soundtrack during the previews for the latest sequel).
Requisite Scrooge: The most supercilious prick ever, Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson, played to a “T” by Paul Gleason.
Special Christmas Gift: Hero’s wisecracking, lifesaving antics impress estranged spouse; divorce cancelled, gets to keep wife. For now.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
In this James Bond classic (the lone mission starring George Lazenby), Christmas is a mere backdrop to justify a pivotal plot device involving a dozen hypnotized international super models and their prettily wrapped packages of bio toxin.
Requisite Scrooge(s): Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his mannish henchwoman, Ilsa Bunt, who put a permanent damper on 007’s honeymoon.
Special Christmas Gift(s): Infertility kits.
Trading Places (1983)
A modern twist on the Mark Twain classic “The Prince and the Pauper,” with uptight yuppie Dan Aykroyd involuntarily switching lives with vagrant street hustler Eddie Murphy during the holiday season.
The only movie ever filmed in Philadelphia that makes my hometown actually look nice, which I consider a Christmas miracle.
Requisite Scrooge(s): The perennially greedy and incorrigibly grumpy old bastards Randolph and Mortimer Duke.
Special Christmas Gift: Sweet revenge against the scheming Duke Brothers, who are ultimately sent packing to the poor house.
Bonus Christmas Gift for ’80s Horror Geeks: First square look at “scream queen” Jamie Lee Curtis’ ample bosoms.
Home Alone (1990)
Little Kevin McCallister is accidentally left behind when his busied parents rush off on their Christmas vacation.
He’s forced to make due on his own…and defend the homestead from a pair of opportunistic thieves.
Depending on your fondness for the voice of the late John Hughes, this hit exemplifies either the height or nadir of his screenwriting style. His best work evinces a keen ear for the way real kids talk, as well as a vivid recollection of primal childhood fears and the unbearable awkwardness of adolescence.
Macaulay Culkin is captured here in all of his precocious cuteness before he became a pop celebrity, and he proves himself to be a genuinely funny comic performer with an impeccable sense of timing.
Beyond the movie’s cartoon-style mayhem and physical violence, there’s an undercurrent of genuine emotion here, and a whole lot of heart. It’s no wonder it made a gazillion dollars and spawned multiple sequels.
Requisite Scrooge(s): The Wet Bandits, two bumbling burglars (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) in WAY over their heads.
Special Christmas Gift: Kevin facilitates a tearful reunion between his not-so-scary elderly neighbor and the man’s long-estranged daughter.
Christmas Vacation (1989)
You’ve got to feel for Chevy Chase, milking the Griswold cow for a third time.
As a Vacation sequel this one’s not nearly as funny or epic-scale as its two predecessors—it mistakenly eschews the gleeful R-rated vulgarity that made the original so eminently quotable, and ignores the far-more-fertile comic ground of doofus Clark W. Griswold, Jr. presented as clueless fish-out-of-water.
Though it’s a tad too tame to really skewer its targets—the forced wholesomeness of family dysfunction, kamikaze consumerism and the trashy obsession of staging the Best Christmas Ever—there are ample laughs throughout and a lively supporting cast. Randy Quaid returns as loveable lout Cousin Eddie, delivering the movie’s best line to a neighbor aghast: “Merry Christmas, shitter’s full!”
Requisite Scrooge(s): The Griswolds’ snooty, meddling neighbors.
Special Christmas Gift: Everybody survives the holiday, save for one particularly devious feline who meets its gruesome demise upon the wayward chew of an electrified cord.
The Polar Express (2004)
With Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Forrest Gump and Contact, director Robert Zemeckis, has proven himself time and time again to be a grand master magician of modern cinema.
Here he uses his technical virtuosity to breathe life into a beloved storybook tale of a young skeptic’s journey to belief. This was early days for CGI motion-capture animation, and despite the picture’s magnificent production design and its enthralling use of enveloping 3D, the movie was roundly criticized for its creepy, dead-eyed characterizations.
Look past that and you’ll hopefully appreciate a gorgeous adventure of epic proportions, full of spectacular dream-like imagery, and offering up in equal measure plenty of comedy, suspense, mystery, wonder and, yes, tear-jerking. With songs, and an appropriately grand, goopey orchestral score, naturally.
Requisite Scrooge: Our doubting hero himself, before being set right by Ol’ Saint Nick.
Special Christmas Gift: The tiny bell Santa gives Billy…the one whose heavenly chime Billy can finally hear because he now, at last, believes in Santa…but then Billy loses the bell through the well-foreshadowed hole in his pocket…(sniffle). I get choked up every time and start bawling like a little girl. Don’t get me started.
Scrooged (1988)
An entire sub-genre of movies have been adapted from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”—the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim as selfish geezer Ebenezer Scrooge is often cited as the best, but there was also a 1970 musical with Albert Finney, a performance-capture Disney animation from Robert Zemeckis and Jim Carrey, a plethora of television specials including one headlined by George C. Scott, and even a Muppet movie featuring Michael Caine as the eternal bah-humbugger.
However, the version usually favored by movie geeks is the one where Requisite Scrooge Bill Murray dons the top-hat in director Richard Donner’s boisterous, effects-laden update. Filled with inventive makeup, star cameos galore and plenty of Murray’s trademark sarcastic wit.
Special Christmas Gift: Scrooge—er, Frank Cross—learns the meaning of Yuletide, and gets the girl of his dreams (Karen Allen).
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Yeah, I included it. So sue me.
In this Frank Capra classic that singlehandedly created a shorthand term for the feel-good genre, All-American Everyman Jimmy Stewart learns from his guardian angel what life would be like if he never existed.
You know how there are some precious movies that are simply beyond reproach?
Films that are, in the hearts and minds of those who adore them, veritably untouchable and impervious to criticism?
This is one of ’em. Speak ill or dismissively of this gem and you’ll engender the wrath of anyone who knows deep down that the chime of a bell is the sound of an angel getting its wings.
Requisite Scrooge: Crotchety miser Henry F. Potter.
Special Christmas Gift: A life rich with friends and family, duly recognized.
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Ignore the 1994 remake and instead seek out the original feel-good classic featuring a young Natalie Wood as a precocious girl convinced a kindly department store Santa named Kris Kringle (Oscar-winning Edmund Gwenn) is the real deal.
In either its original black & white or colorized version, this one will make even the crustiest, jadish heart believe in ol’ Saint Nick.
Requisite Scrooge: Mean Mr. Sawyer, who tries to commit nice Mr. Kringle to a psyche ward.
Special Christmas Gift: A beautiful new dream house for Susan and her mom. Cane included.
Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
Forget about the vomitous live-action remake from the year 2000. Chuck Jones’ nimble animated adaptation of the Dr. Seuss favorite, featuring Boris Karloff’s delightful narration, is sufficient to warm any icy grinch’s soul.
Special Christmas Gift: As a redeemed Grinch is imbued by the spirit of Christmas, his heart grows three sizes in a single bound. Plus, he gets to carve the roast beast.
