Make the Christmas Movie Madness Stop

Originally when I thought of this post I was just going to say that any Christmas movie made after It's a Wonderful Life (1946) should be destroyed.

But then I got to thinking that there are some that post date that, although darned few, that are worth saving.  The Peanuts A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), for example, is a definite exception.  A Christmas Story (1983) is an absolute classic.

So obviously that would have been grossly over broad.

But only barely so.

And yes, I know that by saying that I'm including such time worn smelly classics like How the Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the originally 1966 cartoon one. . . not the Jim Carrey (Ron Howard directing film version that should end his career).  Indeed, there are a lot of really bad cartoon Christmas efforts that are dragged out every year without fail but which fail simply because they are.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (1964) is one such example.  It may have been cute the first year it was out, if you are under four years old, but it was long in the tooth by 1974.  Frosty the Snowman (1969) is just as bad, except that it's afflicted with the bad 1950s style cheap animation that afflicted television animation throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  It can go.  Now that Tom Hank's The Polar Express has been in circulation for 18 years, can go too.  It was a much better effort than the every single cartoon and animation offering after A Charlie Brown Christmas, but it isn't passing the test of time and isn't novel anymore.

Some of the actual movies afflicted upon the silver screen in recent years are truly horrific.  Tim Allen, for example, should not be making movies.  Any movies.  I don't care if he comes up with something that's as good as anything ever done, there's no atoning for any of the Christmas movies that he made.  That can't be done.  All of copies of any version of The Santa Clause should be rounded up and made to be added to the "lost movie" list on AMC.  Christmas with the Kranks (2004).  Uff.

So why are there so many bad Christmas movies, if we include the small screen as a movie?

They aren't serious.

That may sound really weird, but it occurs to me that the single common feature of really good Christmas movies, and the ones that nearly make the "good" list (of which there are several, is that they have a really serious overtone that the failures don't.

It's a Wonderful Life is obvious. The protagonist, George Bailey, is on the verge of suicide until Divine Intervention steps into show him that the singular achievement of his life on unintentional sacrifice is to the enormous benefit of the lives he touched. . . a really deep point that is very well presented.  It's so well presented, in fact, that the film could be shown and enjoyed any time of the year.



A Charlie Brown Christmas is great because Charles Schultz insisted in including having Linius read the Nativity portion of the Gospel of St. Luke.  The producers hadn't wanted him to do that, but he insisted.  It's what made the cartoon great, taking the presentation out from being a cartoon into something else.



Really good, or at least nearly good, Three Godfathers, is a John Ford Western and occasionally actually outside of the Christmas season.  It's also so blatantly religious that its religious content can't be denied, even though Ford doesn't begin to deliver it until about 1/2 way through the film (the film is, in my view, the most, and oddly, Protestant of John Ford's movies). The movie is good through and through.



An example of the same, in the nearly good list, is the church scene with the old neighbor in Home Alone.  Home Alone was written by John Hughes.  Hughes produced some great films, and some dogs, but the best of his have a deep undertone to them, while the worst have the opposite.  Home Alone was redeemed from being just slapstick nonsense by a deep message of redemption that was delivered in a church and then carried out to the end of the film.

Even A Christmas Story has a surprisingly serious undertone, even though its the single example that I've noted in this list that doesn't have any overt or subtle reference to religion in it.  The protagonist and his family are never shown going to church and don't make reference to one anywhere in the film, which probably closely matches Gene Shepherd's own upbringing.  But it's that reference that makes the film surprisingly serious.  The film is really a homage to seriousness and romance of youth in a way that few films really catch. Offhand, only  Stand By Me, To Kill A Mockingbird and the television series The Wonder Years really compare, which is in a way why watching any of them involves an element of heartache.  When Ralphie proclaims the Daisy Red Rider bb gun to be the best gift he ever received, we know he means it, and we can all think of something just like that which was the same for us.  It's no mistake that the "best gift" is a feature of Citizen Kane as well in nearly the same way.

In contrast, almost every other Christmas movie or television show is at worst a "celebration of the season" or at best the reduction of really deep points to something like the American Civil Religion, which is that its nice to be nice to the nice, and we're all nice.  Which actually isn't the point of Christmas.*

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Indeed, the Seinfeld Christmas episode which introduces the holiday of "festivus" is legitimately funny because it gets all of this.  It lampoons the superficial nature of much of American Christmas by introducing a "festivus for the rest of us" which is intentionally superficial while also standing apart from Christmas and Hanukkah as they're religious holidays.