25 Days: SURVIVING CHRISTMAS

SURVIVING CHRISTMAS    (COMEDY, 2004)
Directed by Mike Mitchell
Starring Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini, Christina Applegate, Catherine O'Hara, Josh Zuckerman, Bill Macy, Jennifer Morrison
PG-13 for sexual content, language and a brief drug reference.
Naughty or Nice?: Not Nice
Religious or Secular?: Mostly Secular
Cynical or Sentimental?: Cynical With a Cynically Sentimental Cop-Out
Holiday Relations: Christmas is Integral to the Plot
OVERALL: 1 out of 4

SURVIVING CHRISTMAS is one of the great bad Christmas movies.  It's just awful.  A starring-vehicle for Ben Affleck, it's a Christmas story laced throughout with jokes about incest, implicit mental illness, senior citizen suicide and pornography, among other things, all anchored by a Ben Affleck performance that ventures well into Nic Cage territory.
Affleck stars as millionaire advertising executive Drew Latham, introduced in a scene where he pitches an advertisement for alcoholic eggnog as a way to survive the holiday family gatherings.  But Drew doesn't have a family, so he presents his blue-blooded girlfriend, Missy Vanglider (Jennifer Morrison), with surprise plans for a vacation in Fiji over the holidays.  Naturally (not actually), she's insulted at the very concept and dumps him then and there.  In a panic, Drew locates his therapist (Stephen Root, in a cameo) going through airport security, and the good doctor advises him to list all of his grievances on paper and rituallistically burn them where they began at his childhood home; in other words, to burn stuff on a stranger's front lawn.  Drew does this, but gets a shovel to the head, courtesy of the current homeowner, Tom Valco (James Gandolfini).  When Drew wakes up, he is irrationally quick to offer the Valcos $250,000 to let him spend Christmas with them, as in the Valcos playing the role of Drew's family.  Tom takes the offer, to the chagrin of his wife Christine (Catherine O'Hara) and son Brian (Josh Zuckerman).  Drew kicks teenaged Brian out of his bedroom to sleep in the garage, with Drew taking Brian's bedroom for himself, and what's most distressing to Brian about his relocation is that he can't lock himself in his room all the time to look at pornography on the Internet.  Drew doen't just want the Valcos to take him in for Christmas though; he intends to make it all legal, bringing in his lawyer to draw up the conditions that include Mr. Valco wearing a Santa hat and responding to the title of "Dad" and Christine as "Mom," as well as there being other required "merriments" to be provided during Drew's stay.  To complete his fake Christmas family, Drew hires a local stage actor (Bill Macy) to play his "Doo-dah."  The Valcos oldest daughter, Alicia (Christina Applegate), is a late arrival to the holiday gathering though and throws a wrench into Drew's perfect holiday plans, which happen to not involve a sister, and Drew's plans are simply inflexible.  Although everyone hates Drew, Alicia is the only one who seems to be actively attempting to remove him, but after Drew eggs her into taking a toboggan ride down a mountain, Alicia's resolve proves to be worthless.  Over the holidays, Drew forces the family to join him for pictures with Santa Claus and to sing Christmas Carols as they put up a Christmas tree.  He makes Brian have a snowball fight with him, which mostly means pelting Brian in the face with a few snowballs.  He gets Christine to do a sexy photo shoot.  He pisses off Alicia with a grand romantic gesture.
When Missy finds out that Drew is spending Christmas with his "family," she shows up along with her own parents to meet them.  Of course, it's on this night that Drew's Doo-dah isn't able to make it, and his understudy shows up black and flirts with Christine, who's supposed to be his daughter.  Drew makes out with Alicia, who the Vangliders believe is his sister.  To top it all off, Brian's locked himself away in his room with white Doo-dah to look at nudie pics on his bedroom computer, and just as he accidentally brings up an explicit image of his mother flashing that orifice from whence he came (remember the sexy photo shoot?), the whole family and the Vangliders walk into the room to see.  Merry Christmas!
Luckily, in the end, the effort it takes to bring the traumatized Valco family back together isn't all that much, and it turns out that spending the holidays with Drew mends Tom and Christine's breaking marriage and gets Brian to quit porn forever.  Alicia even opens up to Drew and the two of them make out to the horror of the bypassing Vangliders.  The end.  Now go watch it.
Last February, Ben Affleck won his second Academy Award, Best Picture for ARGO, which he produced directed and starred in.  His failure to garner a nomination for Best Director was a major point of consternation for critics, and with his two other directorial features, GONE BABY GONE and THE TOWN (the latter of which, Affleck also starred in), all of Affleck's directorial efforts have received reviews reported on RottenTomatoes.com at more than 90% favorable.  SURVIVING CHRISTMAS is ranked at 7%.  Affleck first appeared big on the scene in 1997 as the star of Kevin Smith's controversial romantic comedy, CHASING AMY, and winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for GOOD WILL HUNTING, released in the same year.  Already an indie darling, Affleck then starred in movies like ARMAGEDDON, REINDEER GAMES (another bad Christmas movie), PEARL HARBOR, DAREDEVIL, GIGLI and SURVIVING CHRISTMAS; all terrible movies, little helped by Affleck's presence.  Furthermore, he was showing up frequently in the tabloids with Jennifer Lopez, making up the infamous "Bennifer," which culminated in the mega-flop, GIGLI.  People started calling him "Ass-fleck."  SURVIVING CHRISTMAS was an especially humorous embarrassment, lasting a theatrical run of only two months, releasing on October 22 and making its way to DVD on December 21.
For some reason, audiences just didn't take to the Christmas warmth of incest, pornography, senior citizen suicide (actually only in the prologue montage set to "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," but the DVD has an alternate opening with way more suicide) and talk about a baby's unnaturally lengthy penis.  Go figure. 
SURVIVING CHRISTMAS is a very funny movie, but it's a bewildering sort of funny.  You don't want to laugh at something that's supposed to be funny, because it's so stupid, but it's also unintentionally stupid and creepy that it comes full circle to downright funny.  Go ahead and watch it please.  It's so bad.