Christmas movies
’Tis the season to rewatch Die Hard, but where are the new festive classics? The mission to save Christmas starts here…
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the release schedules, with The Grinch, The Nutcracker And The Four Realms, Surviving Christmas With The Relatives and Nativity Rocks! on bauble duty. Whether they’ll join our future festive binge-athons is another issue: mild-to-damning reviews of each suggest places on Santa’s naughty list await.
Thank heavens for re-releases, because the golden age of Christmas movies seems to be dead. When we ready our Chrimbob viewing list, few contenders are post-2003. In that year, Elf, Bad Santa and Love Actually proved what a broad church Christmas movies could be. Yellow tights, snowball fights, heartbreak, bottom sex – it was all there. The ’80s-’90s stands as an earlier golden age, thanks to A Christmas Story, Scrooged, Trading Places, Die Hard, Home Alone, Gremlins, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Muppet Christmas Carol and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. (No thanks to Jingle All The Way, mind.)
True, later years have not been starved of cockle-roasters. Arthur Christmas deserves treasuring. Some weirdos even rank Iron Man 3 as a Christmas film, though it plainly belongs in the MCU binge pile, not the Yule one.
Most more recent Christmas films offer stuffed stockings of blandness. The Polar Express and Disney’s A Christmas Carol sucked out the season’s soul through deadened CG eye-sockets. Deck The Halls and The Holiday made 2006 a big year for keep-the-receipt movies; 2008’s Four Christmases was three too many. Hallmark, meanwhile, has monopolised the tinsel-brained TV movie market – though Netflix is weighing in for 2018.
Low-level horror has fared better, with Rare Exports, Krampus and Better Watch Out slicing out some quality seasonal sadism. But if you fancy a prime Christmas balance of sadness, sentiment and silliness, tough. Did such movies stop selling, or did the franchises take over Christmas? Did the duds kill Santa, or do we not warm our hands around Christmas TV for long enough nowadays for films to grow into cherished staples?
The big-screen Christmas regular deserves reviving. Classics such as
Meet Me In St. Louis or The Apartment can still melt us. Ditto It’s A Wonderful Life, in which an angel showed James Stewart’s end-of-his-tether hero how impoverished the world was without him. Christmas cinema doesn’t need angels: just movies with heart, humour and heartache in the right places. KH