With exactly one month to go until Christmas, my thoughts have (briefly) turned to holiday movies. I'm not what you'd call a big fan of Christmas, nor of movies about it, but I've enjoyed a few over the years.
My all-time favourite is probably It's a Wonderful Life, with Jimmy Stewart. When you boil the story down, it's essentially a "What If?" (or alternate history, if you prefer), so what's not to like about that? And of course the line "Everytime a bell rings, an angel gets his wings" has spawned all kinds of PopCultRef variations (I heard one within the last week).
The other one I always end up stopping to watch if I surf across it is A Christmas Story. It's famous for the kid desperately wanting a BB gun for Christmas and hearing "you'll shoot your eye out!" everytime he asks for it. And I love the scene where the boy stands in line for the department store Santa, and we as viewers get to see what it must seem like to a small kid, with weird camera angles simulating a child's POV (I know I could never figure out why kids would cry when seeing Santa, until I saw this for the first time).
I also have a soft spot in my heart for A Christmas Carol, maybe because of its core message about a heartless man's redemption. I was always something of a Dickens fan in my younger years, and while I don't think this is one of his best, it's a good, compact example of tight writing.
It'll only be a matter of a few days before the parade of seasonal flicks start up. I'll be skipping most of them, but the three mentioned above could very well suck me in if I happen to land on any of them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Have you ever been to a live reading of A Christmas Carol? CBC has been doing them across the country for several years; I went to the one in Port Stanley a couple of years ago (some friends were providing music) and had a fun time.
This year's performance in London is on December 9 at the Palace Theatre.
My favourites are The Grinch (the Borid Karloff animated one, not the Jim Carrey version) and 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'. Rudolph has some really catchy music and is quite funny.
The funniest scene in a Christmas Story has to be the naked women's torso lamp.
Another one almost worth seeing is Chevy in the National Lampoon one...priceless when he plugs in his outdoor lights.
Post a Comment