LITTLE ROCK — I was talking with a friend about Christmas movies, and how maybe every generation has its own. My older brother, a child of the ’80s, has a particular attachment to Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story, while I’m more partial to John Hughes’ first two Home Alone movies.
I wonder if, as a culture, we will ever lose touch with classics such as the “life-would-be better-without-me” story It’s a Wonderful Life or the innocent original Miracle on 34th Street. But then I logged into my online Netflix Instant queue and found a seasonal feature on holiday films and TV shows that are anything but canonical (I realize the eclectic selection was probably due more to licensing issues than any attempt to modify the Christmas canon, but still).
So to get a better idea of what people are actually watching - and inspiration for films you might not think of as “classic Christmas movies” - I polled my Facebook friends and Twitter followers for suggestions. Along with the predictable snarkiness, I found a few genuine and provoking answers.
One poster offered Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence - which isn’t a ’70s television special but a Criterion Collection release of a film from the 1980s about a British soldier played by David Bowie in a Japanese prison camp in 1942. This film goes into a category of films that are set during Christmas or Christmas Eve, but don’t have any sort of traditional holiday or Christmas mood. Unless you are a fan of war films like Bridge on the River Kwai, I wouldn’t suggest pouring some eggnog with the family while watching this flick.
Another film that was suggested was Santa Claus: The Movie (1985) starring Dudley Moore and John Lithgow, not to be confused with the Tim Allen film of a similar name. The first half of the film is an origin story of Old Saint Nick, and the second centers on Moore as an elf who goes rogue to team up with an evil toymaker (Lithgow) to take down Santa Claus. The film is billed as a family adventure/ fantasy film, and from the trailer, it seems a predictable performance by Moore, but one Facebook poster recommended Lithgow as one of the best camp villains.
Joe Dante’s campy Gremlins (1984) - a film that’s set during Christmas but doesn’t really seem to be in the spirit - got a couple of mentions. Gremlins dances the fine line of dark comedy and horror, as our hero is given an impossibly cute Furby-like creature who will mutate into an abominable green demon if it gets wet or fed after midnight. The film is fun and smart enough not to take itself too seriously.
Other notable films include the Bruce Willis actioner Die Hard, Bill Murray’s Scrooged and Arkansan Billy Bob Thorton’s Bad Santa - funnier and more entertaining than you might think, although not recommended for young children.
The Richard Curtis ensemble dramedy Love Actually is a personal favorite, as Bill Nighy’s John Lennon-inspired geriatric rocker gives one of the best pop/holiday song mash ups ever recorded on film.
Levi Agee is a programmer for the Little Rock Film Festival and the founder and host of Cameras on the Radio. E-mail him at:
MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 12/23/2011