 |
| DreamWorks |
Directed by Mike Mitchell
Starring: Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini, Christina Applegate, Catherine O'Hara, Josh Zuckerman, Bill Macy, Jennifer Morrison, Udo Kier, David Selby, Stephanie Faracy, Stephen Root, Sy Richardson
Rated PG-13 for sexual content, language and a brief drug reference.
91 minutes
SURVIVING CHRISTMAS is amazing and one of my favorite terrible Christmas movies. It was released in October 2004 and quickly dumped onto DVD two months later before Christmas, because at the height of anti-Affleck sentiment, people didn't realize the twisted holiday antics they were missing. It begins with a montage of random people committing suicide in the midst of festivities, including an elderly woman making gingerbread men who turns her gas oven on and sticking her head in while "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" blares. It's a great start, but then we're introduced to Ben Affleck's Drew Latham, a decidedly unhinged and excessively wealthy advertising exec who horrifies his girlfriend with tickets for a Christmas trip to Fiji instead of wanting to spend time with his family, so she dumps him. Panicked at the thought of spending Christmas alone, but not close to anyone, Drew counsels his therapist, who tells him to write down his "grievances" and symbolically burn them in front of his childhood home. Ya know, stand in front of a stranger's house and burn stuff. The house belongs to Tom Valco (James Gandolfini) and his family, so Tom whacks crazy Drew in the head with a snow shovel and drags his unconscious body into the house to decide what to do with him. When Drew wakes up, he persuades the Valcos to play as his own family over the holidays for the right exorbitant sum of money, but the charade tries the family's patience as Drew is freaking nuts and has a number of Hallmark card-inspired Christmas traditions he's intent on experiencing. The youngest Valco, Brian (Josh Zuckerman), is addicted to internet pornography, Mrs. Valco, Christine (Catherine O'Hara), is depressed and she and Tom are considering a divorce, and when the oldest of the Valco brood, Alicia (Christina Applegate) comes home, Drew can't decide whether he's in love with her or annoyed with her for fouling up his perfect Christmas plans. Drew tries to get the family to follow a script, signs them to an official contract with his lawyer and hires a local actor to play his grandpa "Doo-Dah." But when the old girlfriend hears that Drew is with his "family" for Christmas, she decides to pay a visit that puts everyone's roleplaying skills to the test, and with the Doo-Dah actor putting the moves on Christine and Drew clearly infatuated with Alicia, the mistaken incest jokes start to fly at an alarming rate.
 |
| DreamWorks |
- The Christmas-themed suicides montage opening credits sequence.
- Porn-addicted son Brian and his fake "Doo-Dah" (Bill Macy) bond while web surfing for "Middle Aged Hotties", only to discover a graphic photo of Brian's mom (whether it's a Photoshop job or actual is left open-ended) just as the family and friends walks in to see as well. Merry Christmas!
- In the final scene before the credits roll, Drew's ex-girlfriend Missy and her parents drive past to see Drew and his supposed sister Alicia making out, which Missy's father justifies with, "'Tis the season to be jolly, honey."
 |
| Warner Brothers |
Directed by Troy Miller
Starring: Michael Keaton, Kelly Preston, Joseph Cross, Mark Addy, Henry Rollins, Mika Boorem, Andrew Lawrence, Taylor Handley, Eli Marienthal, Will Rothaar
Rated PG for mild language.
101 minutes
A family-ish film sprinkled throughout with weirdly inappropriate jokes about snowman penises, JACK FROST is the wonderful story of a man named Jack Frost (Michael Keaton), who plays in a band called The Jack Frost Band (a fountain of originality, this script) who doesn't spend enough time with his family, a problem made considerably worse when he ditches his wife (Kelly Preston) and kid, Charlie (Joseph Cross), on Christmas and drives off a cliff. A year later, Charlie accidentally summons Jack back from the netherworld in the body of a goddamn snowman (ah, there's your originality), and the first thing snowman Jack checks when he realizes that he's a snowman is whether he still has a penis (he does not, however, earlier in the film, the live Jack tried to put a penis on the snowman he was building with Charlie in the middle of the night ("Nose? I thought you said 'hose'!"), so to be fair, he wasn't coming completely out of left field with that one). It then becomes clear that the reason Jack has been brought back as a snowman is in order to get his son to stop moping over the distant dad's gruesomely fatal car accident and get back to more important things, like Little League hockey.
 |
| Warner Brothers |
- Jack comes home in the middle of the night after touring and wakes Charlie up to build a snowman. Charlie gives him the nose to put on and Jack tries to place it beneath the buttons. "Dad, no!" says Charlie. "Nose? I thought you said 'hose!'" says Jack.
- As Jack ditches his family for the last time before driving off a cliff, Charlie protests, "But, dad..." and Jack cuts him off. "Butt Dad? Did you just call me Butt Dad? That'd make you Butt Boy. Bye, Butt Family!"
- While evading snowball-throwing bullies on a toboggan, snowman Jack is hit by a pair of snowballs in the chest region and pauses a moment to fondle his own snow-boobs.
- As snowman Jack is melting, Charlie convinces the school bully, Rory, to help save him, because as Rory points out, "Snow-Dad is better than no dad."
 |
| 20th Century Fox |
Directed by Brian Levant
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman, Rita Wilson, Robert Conrad, Martin Mull, Jake Lloyd, Jim Belushi, E.J. de la Pena
Rated PG for action violence, mild language and some thematic elements.
89 minutes
Okay, first things first, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the hulking, musclebound, chiseled, thickly Austrian-accented beefcake is playing an average upper-middle class mattress salesman/suburban dad. That insanity alone is enough to recommend this '90s family comedy about everything to hate about the holidays, but that's not all! No folks, there's also Phil Hartman as an ultra-smarmy "perfect dad" hitting on Schwarzenegger's wife, pre-9/11 jokes about cops being getting injured by explosive packages, Schwarzenegger punching a reindeer before getting it drunk, and Jake "The Phantom Menace" Lloyd. Oh, and child molestation! A memorable moment of a mistaken case of child molestation. "I'm not a pervert! I just was looking for a Turbo Man doll!"
 |
| 20th Century Fox |
- Anything with Phil Hartman in this movie is legitimately funny.
- When Howard trips Myron with an R/C car while they're running after a woman with a Turbo Man doll and pauses to look down on him on the floor, saying "Poor baby!" before giggling and bolting away. I still remember that from a commercial that played during a Christmas special when I was 5, and it's still freaking funny.
- The whole "Hey little girl, how about a shiny red ball," and "I'm not a pervert! I was just looking for a Turbo Man doll!"
- Myron pushes over a dancer dressed as a wrapped box in the "Wintertainment Parade" and shouts "Outta my way, box!"
- Jake Lloyd and Phil Hartman's kid high-five when they see Cat in the Hat.
 |
| NBC/Universal |
Directed by Jules Bass & Arthur Rankin Jr.
Featuring the Voices of: Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, Keenan Wynn, Paul Frees, Robie Lester, Joan Gardner, Greg Thomas
Not Rated (G-level)
48 minutes
In spite of their perennial popularity, the Rankin/Bass holiday TV specials are not very good. I'm sure there are some people who genuinely appreciate them for their craft and artistic merit, but the most likely source of their cultural endurance is the fact that everyone sees them as children, at which time they are slightly traumatized by the creepy characters and noxious songs, but not enough to go into catatonic shock. The memory of this trauma later registers in adults as similar enough to nostalgia, so they introduce their own children to the specials, and the cycle starts over again. It's a theory anyway. There's a number of them to choose from, most if not all of them falling somewhere around a "good-bad" quality, but Santa Claus is Comin' to Town is the best-worst of the bunch. Narrated by S.D. Kluger, a mailman with the voice of Fred Astaire, the stop-motion-animated short purports to tell the origin story of Santa Claus, in a fashion not so dissimilar from the typical superhero origin story (SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE didn't even come out for eight more years). Kluger claims to be explaining all the questions about Santa that he sees in letters from children, but frankly, he creates as many mysteries as he answers. The villain is a true badass though; the burgermeister, Burgermeister Meisterburger (voice of Paul Frees, perhaps best known as the Ghost Host on Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion). When the baby who will grow up to be Santa is left on the Burgermeister's doorstep for gosh-knows-what-reason by gosh-knows-who (yeah, thanks for the info, S.D. Kluger), the man wisely spits out his food and tells his stooge to take it to the Orphan Asylum. Like I said, a total badass. I love this guy. As the Burgermeister's main henchman Grimsby (also voiced by Frees) is on his way to the Orphan Asylum, the baby blows away in the wind and makes it all the way over a damn mountain before landing at the doorstep of what may be a cult. In any case, they call themselves the "Kringles." There are five short men with bushy white beards; Dingle Kringle, Wingle Kringle, Bingle Kringle, Tingle Kringle, and Zingle Kringle; and they're all lorded over by the significantly taller and plumper Tanta Kringle (voice of Joan Gardner). Naturally, they're 100% cool with adopting a baby that shows up on the doorstep after a storm, even though it's redheaded baby with a name tag that says Claus (apparently they've seen a horror movie, because this is totally a horror movie scenario). In spite of the name tag, Tanta has to make everything her own, so she names the baby "Kris" instead. It is here that Santa, or as he's known at this point, Kris Kringle, attains his first Santa powers. The creepy Kringles teach him to build toys (not that it matters, because later, he'll enslave his adopted family to build all the toys for him), and forest creatures such as deer and sea lions (wtf) teach him nifty tricks like jumping over rooftops and "ho ho ho"-type laughing. Under the rule of Tanta Kringle (maybe their mom, maybe their wife?), the Kringles build toys in their isolated woodland cabin and then let them pile up outside, but when Kris grows into a big, strapping lad voiced by Mickey Rooney, he decides to take those toys over the mountain and give them to the children of Sombertown. Unbeknownst to him though, the Burgermeister recently slipped on a toy, rolled down a flight of stairs and was diagnosed by the worst doctor ever (or maybe the best doctor ever?) with a broken funny bone, and ever since, the Big Government Nanny State has banned toys. Tanta gives Kris a bright red suit, presumably as a prank to make him look like a freak in the overwhelming grayness of Sombertown, and sends him on his way. Along the way, he meets a lost penguin (because why not?), and even though he acts like there's some sort of process to how he names it, he clearly pulls the name 'Topper' right out of his butt, like he's been waiting his whole life to name a penguin Topper. Then, in one of the unintentionally, hilariously, absolutely creepy moments of "family entertainment" ever devised, Kris distributes the toys to the children of Sombertown for a price: that they sit on his lap and kiss him. Um... barf? Seriously, the song is alternatively titled "If You Sit on My Lap Today" (oh, Good Lord) and "Be Prepared to Pay" (omigawd), with lyrics like, "If you sit on my lap today, a kiss a toy is the price you'll pay," and "When you sit on my left knee, don't be stingy. Be prepared to pay!" Um, hey parents! There's a stranger in a flamboyant outfit out in the courtyard offering toys to children who will sit on his lap and kiss him! No freaking duh, the Burgermeister declares him an outlaw (ostensibly for distributing illegal toys, but what public official wants to directly acknowledge an epidemic of whatever the hell else Kris was up to). Escaping the clutches of the Burgermeister's guards, Kris starts to make his way back over the mountain, but this time runs into the super hardcore Winter Warlock (voice of Keenan Wynn; the character closely resembles the Ice King from Adventure Time) who captures him with uncertain intentions. Luckily, Kris still has a leftover toy train to give to Winter, and the act of kindness melts the ice away from the old wizard's heart, and he decides to start hanging out with the Kringles, because what else is a neutered ice warlock to do? Despite being banned from Sombertown for perfectly reasonable reasons, the Kringles won't stop making toys, and Kris has to dump them on those greedy-ass kids somehow. Luckily, Kris has seduced a snooty school teacher named Jessica (voice of Robie Lester) with the gift of a china doll, and she gets the forest animals to take the kids' gimme lists to Kris ("So that's how he gets all the letters!"), and Winter shows him how to spy on children with a magic snowball. Eventually, Kris is arrested, along with the Kringle cult, Winter and the penguin, and the Burgermeister throws them all in the dungeon, leading Jessica to have a bizarrely sincere, hair-down-hippie musical soliloquy (it always made me feel uncomfortable as a child). Luckily, despite being behind bars, Winter still has a pocketful of magic corn that makes reindeer fly, which gives Jessica an idea. Despite, again, those damn iron bars that Kris, the Kringles, the impotent wizard and a penguin are confined by, flying reindeer are the exact solution they need to get out of the dungeons, because apparently flying reindeer render prison walls and bars non-existent or something. Either way, they make their escape, and Kris grows a great big, bushy beard and changes his name to Claus (no explanation about the 'Santa' part) to evade the law, marries Jessica (a sham, if you ask me) and moves to the North Pole. That's how S.D. Kluger tells it anyway.
 |
| NBC/Universal |
SANTA CLAUS IS COMIN' TO TOWN Highlights
- "Wiggle my ears and tickle my toes, methinks I see a baby's nose! It's more than a nose. There's a whole baby attached to it. Better call my brothers. Wingle! Bingle! Tingle! Zingle!" "What is it Dingle?" "It's a baby, Zingle." "A baby what, Wingle?" "A baby baby, Tingle." "I like babies, Bingle" "Our baby's the best baby of them all, Wingle."
- Everything about the Burgermeister. Dude is a badass.
No comments:
Post a Comment