25 Days: BAD SANTA

Not everyone enjoys the holidays, but luckily, Hollywood is full of Jews perfectly willing to provide the anit-Christmas movies to vent our frustrations through.  No, but seriously...
BAD SANTA  (COMEDY/CRIME, 2003)
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Bernie Mac, John Ritter, Lauren Graham, Bret Kelly, Lauren Thom, Cloris Leachman
R for pervasive language, strong sexual content and some violence.
Naughty or Nice?: Very, Very Naughty
Religious or Secular?: Mostly Secular, With Some Religion
Cynical or Sentimental?: Very Cynical 
Holiday Relations: Christmas is Integral to the Plot
OVERALL: 3 out of 4

Willie T. Stokes is one of the nastiest, most disgusting, most morally reprehensible characters ever committed to film.  At a different shopping mall each year, Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) and his 92-pound accomplice Marcus (Tony Cox) take up jobs as Santa Claus and his Little Helper, respectively, so that come Christmas Eve, they can shut down the security system and loot the safes of all of their holiday loot.  Unfortunately, Willie is dreadfully undisciplined, and only getting worse, but Marcus is dependent on Willie for his skill in cracking safes.  As Santa Claus, Willie is little short of a traumatic experience for the children who sit on his lap, frequently holding a bottle of alcohol, with much more besides in his system, swearing, speaking vulgarly and crossly, and prone to urinate all over himself whilst sitting in the Santa throne.  This year, Willie and Marcus take up shop in a mall in Phoenix, Arizona, managed by the prudish Mr. Bob Chipeska (John Ritter, in his last live-action film role), who quickly regrets hiring the pair when he hears Willie swearing and making inappropriate remarks, and even more so when he overhears him "fornicating" with a woman in the dressing rooms, but Marcus threatens to sue for discrimination if their fired, so Chipeska assigns his head of security, Gin (Bernie Mac) to keep tabs on the pair.  Meanwhile, Willie is approached by an obese and spectacularly naive boy (Brett Kelly) who seems to think that Willie is the real Santa, and who later saves Willie from being raped in the mall parking lot.  The kid takes Willie to his house, where he lets Willie know that there are no parents home, and it turns out that the kid lives in a luxurious mansion with only his senile grandmother (Cloris Leachman) for company, so Willie decides to stick around.

Yup.

The plot is kind of a mishmash going in a dozen different directions, like a circus of depravity and criminality, occasionally colliding with the naive.  It's a comedy both in the contemporary sense and in the manner of the Greek theatre, based in satire through dramatic irony, and the protagonist learns nothing from his experiences.  Not really, anyway.  Willie comes to care for the kid in a loose sense, and beats up some bullies who've been picking on the kid, an experience which he shares poetically: "I beat the shit out of some kids today. But it was for a purpose. It made me feel good about myself. It was like I did something constructive with my life or something, I dunno, like I accomplished something."
The kid is heartbreakingly funny, as the film's most sympathetic character, and in the running for most pathetic (honestly, there's a few very strong contenders though), as a lonely and none-too-bright fat kid who's desperate enough to invite an alcoholic Santa to live with him while his dad is in prison.  It's this sort of thing though that makes BAD SANTA a bit of a difficult watch at times, because the lines between what's funny and what is just mean and nasty are consistently blurred.  Because of this, not to mention the continuous profanity and crudity, it's clearly not for everyone; but when you're dealing with something so overtly sentimentalized and revered as Christmas, it is refreshing to see it torn to pieces and used as toilet paper by what has been aptly described as MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET's evil twin.