Salon.com > Holiday movies

Hollywood’s most miserable time of the year

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 13:35:00 +0000

Ever since George Bailey attempted suicide on Christmas Eve in 1946’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Hollywood’s been blurring our visions of sugar plums with amorphous specters of death and doom. Gifts may necessitate gift taxes; brown paper packages tied up with string may contain sodden lumps of coal. And in the duel between naughty and nice, an assessment of “naughty” may result in less of a mild finger wag than an apocalyptic bloodbath.

Maintaining good cheer in December 2012 appears particularly challenging. While holiday revelers had been taken by surprise at having to witness the drawn-out death of a beloved yellow Labrador in 2008’s “Marley & Me,” or watch abused horses perishing in the mud, their spindly legs taking a final stumble in the ooze of 2011’s “War Horse,” this year’s audiences have been provided with a veritable cornucopia of cinematic sadism.

“Love, Actually”: The worst Christmas movie ever

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:44:00 +0000

It's got an Anglophile's dream cast, a rousing version of "All I Want for Christmas" and an overstuffed romantic plot that takes place in the loveliest, coziest, most well-to-do version of London you've ever seen. Perhaps then it's no wonder "Love, Actually" has, in the nine years since its release, become something of a holiday classic. At this time of year it regularly crops up on cable and in Netflix queues. Slant calls it "the greatest modern Christmas movie," and Empire puts it in its top 10 "Best Christmas Movies Ever." Screw all that.

“It’s a Wonderful Life”: Occupy Bedford Falls!

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 00:30:00 +0000

I must have been 9 or 10 years old. It was Christmas or only a few days before. My parents had taken me along on a final whirlwind of holiday grocery shopping and last-minute gift buying. I was left alone at Tower Records and happened upon a VHS copy of Frank Capra’s holiday classic — and my mother’s favorite film — "It’s a Wonderful Life." In the spirit of the season, I bought the tape.

At home that night, I presented the movie without wrapping or bow to my mother, and we watched it immediately.

But when the tape began to roll and the wood-post sign declaring “You Are Now in Bedford Falls” appeared on the screen, it was clear something was wrong. Gone were the familiar white sky, the gray snowdrift on the median, the almost black oak and its ashen limbs reaching out from the background. Instead there was a pink sky, illuminated as if from behind like a paper lantern, a display of pastels highlighting the snow drift, a landscape washed in peach and ochre.