Merry Christmas!
As a bit of fun this holiday season, the family decided that we'd do a little holiday movie challenge from Thanksgiving until Christmas. The basic idea was that we could create a list of movies that we would watch during the season that consisted of movies we love during the season, movies we haven't seen in years, and movies that he had never seen. We ended up with 30 days (counting Christmas Day) and ended up with 41 movies on our list (some weren't movies, the classics such as Santa Claus is Coming to Town). We originally were going to finish the challenge on Christmas Eve, over the period we ended up having five days where we couldn't get anything in those days and extended it one final day. As I type this on Christmas evening we're watching White Christmas, the final and 38th film we made it to.
The Ones We Missed:
There were three movies that we weren't able to get to, and all three were movies that we had never seen, and two of them were also not high our our list. We had never seen Bad Santa or Office Christmas Party, but also didn't think they were going to be all that good, so they were strategically removed from the list when we had schedules packed too full. The third was Meet Me In St. Louis. This is of course the famous Judy Garland Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas film, which we did want to see, however it didn't seem overly Christmas-ey but we didn't have the time for it, so we'll probably watch it sometime soon as the winter is traditionally our old movie season.
The Classics:
There are some movies that you have to watch every season because they're the classics, and of course we had a number of these on our list. Of course there were the classic Rankin/Bass specials, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Christmas in Connecticut, Miracle on 34th Street, Holiday Inn, White Christmas, and It's a Wonderful Life. Most of these we had seen before, however Holiday Inn was a new one this year. Overall, very classic movie with the general showbiz person doing showbiz stuff and shenanigans ensue. However, I knew there was a scene that was, as they say "include stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now." A horrible blackface scene that I knew was coming somewhere in the movie, and then turned out to be even worse than I thought it would be.
The It's Been A While:
There were some that we hadn't seen in ages and thought we'd add them to the list to see if they hold up. We've never loved A Christmas Story, and watched it again and were still un enthralled. The Santa Claus films were pretty good still. We decided to give Jingle All The Way a try, and it was ok. It's your typical "I need the hard to find toy and didn't get it." Sal was entertained by it all. We also decided to add Babes In Toyland to the roster. This one I had seen many years ago but I hadn't seen it since. It's a weird kind of movie, but it was amusing and I actually enjoyed it. Becky and Sal had never seen it, and they weren't all that in love with it. We also added Prancer on from the 1980s, this turned out to be terribly slow and kind of boring.
The Never Seen
There were some movies that we had never seen before even though they'd been out for ages, but also some that were brand new this year and thought we'd give it a try. The newest was Spirted, which is your basic Scrooge story but with Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds in a musical version which was a lot of fun. We also included Fred Claus, which turned out to be a lot better than I thought it would be given it was a Vince Vaughn movie and it looked rather stupid. Another new one was A Christmas Story Christmas, which was a follow up to A Christmas Story, and I think I may have liked it more than the original. It was actually pretty good, the story was fun, it had some fun throwbacks. I won't watch it every year, but it was good. Some older thing we watched but hadn't seen included Scrooged with Bill Murray. I actually didn't really enjoy this one, it was a standard Scrooge story but was set in the 80s and was just kind of meh. We also had a moment when he made this "absurd" for the time commercial but it really seemed like something believable today. We also watched Santa Claus which I remember from my childhood because we had the McDonalds book version of it. It turned out to be terribly boring. It seemed like the writers didn't really know what they wanted to do with the story and so it was all over the place. It won't be returning to our list. Two new ones that I really enjoyed were The Man Who Invented Christmas, which told from the view of Charles Dickens trying to write A Christmas Carol. The cast was good, and the idea was fun, and I really enjoyed it. I also really loved the animated movie Arthur Christmas, about Santa and his sons as they're looking at who will take over the family business. It was pretty funny, and was a nice little movie. Definitely will be on our future watching plans next Christmas.
In the end, we finished with 38 movies, and in general it was pretty fun but by the end it felt a little oppressive to try and stick to the schedule so we could hit all our movies. However, it's good practice for in a few months when we have to do our Oscar movie marathons.
So, thus ends our Christmas season and our holiday movie challenge.
