Salon.com > les miser http://www.salon.com Mon, 20 May 2013 02:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Hollywood’s most miserable time of the year http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/hollywoods_most_miserable_time_of_the_year/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/hollywoods_most_miserable_time_of_the_year/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 13:35:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13150621 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.

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