Lucky Christmas

Gary Yates, 2012
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 14%

We're scraping the bottom of the stocking this time. Notice that that 14% score is an audience rating. As we all know, the audience reviews are usually unrealistically positive, so this is a truly abysmal showing.

This is, of course, a Hallmark original movie. Over the last few years, the Hallmark Channel has become to adults what the Disney Channel once was for children, namely a clearinghouse of inoffensive, inexpensive, incompetent movies produced on the business model of an all-you-can eat buffet: Quantity over quality, drinks are extra, and stay the hell away from the seafood.

Starting around Halloween and continuing until the New Year, Hallmark throws its assembly line into overdrive and produces at least 600 new movies a day, all of them cheesy, family-friendly romantic comedies taking place around Christmas and featuring actors whose names are vaguely familiar. This time out we get Jesse Spano from Saved by the Bell and Lt. Randy Disher from Monk as Holly and Mike.

As always, the female lead is a pretty, likable single mom whose tremendous intelligence and potential are being squelched by her life circumstances. And as always, the male lead is a handsome, likable single man whose foolhardy but non-malicious actions get him into trouble. (I say handsome, but Mike does his best to hide his handsomeness in this film by wearing a hideous House M.D. beard.)

Holly is a chef by trade, but she just can't get together the money she needs to open up a restaurant. Meanwhile, Mike is a highly-educated architect who is stuck doing menial labor in the family business because his uptight brother won't listen to his big ideas. While Holly is lamenting her difficulties with her best friend (a character who never once speaks to anyone else but Holly—is she a ghost?), she fails to realize that Mike is in the same bar with his best friend, the world's biggest chowderhead.

Mike has taken one too many of his sister's snake-oil cold pills, so he passes out at the bar, and his idiot friend has to drive him home. Since the friend's car has been booted by the police for unpaid parking tickets, he decides to "borrow" another car, which just so happens to be Holly's. Now, the idiot friend has no intention of keeping the car, but once he discovers a lottery ticket in the glove compartment, he ropes Mike into a harebrained extortion scheme. Needless to say, the scheme requires Mike to pretend to fall in love with Holly, and now you can see the shape this mess is taking.

You can probably fill in the rest of the blanks for yourself. It involves Holly's horrified revelation that their relationship is a sham, Mike's belated realization that he has fallen in love for real, a lot of ineffectual attempts by Mike to make things right, and a huge number of very prominent references to the Pinewood Derby. (You probably wouldn't have guessed that last one, but man, they sure plug that Pinewood Derby for all its worth.)

Mike attempts to return the lottery ticket, but due to a contrived series of oversights, Holly doesn't find it until the last ten minutes of the movie. The lottery ticket has to be turned in at midnight on Christmas Eve, and Holly finds it two hours before the deadline. But just to manufacture some suspense for the big finale, she then spends an hour and 45 minutes driving around the city searching for Mike to reconcile with him before they cash in the ticket. She finds Mike with just minutes to spare, and then stands and talks to him for an eternity while the clock ticks down. For crying out loud, there's suspense, and then there's just bad writing.

The final shot of the movie is Holly and Max walking into City Hall to redeem the ticket just as the clock strikes twelve. There's a school of thought that holds that leaving a story's outcome to the audience's imagination makes it more satisfying. I have some sympathy for that perspective, but with a movie this bad I don't think it's worth the bother. If they really want to take that strategy, why not just end the movie right after the opening credits?

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Yeah, this is a really bad movie. But 14% from the viewers? That's just appalling.

Unbelievably, but this thing managed to be

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TMoC:

1. The lottery is your secret to a happy life.
Actually, as the state lottery commission informs us, "lottery games are based on chance, and should [not] be played[.]"

2. The Pinewood Derby is an alternate secret to a happy life.
When George Costanza was a Cub Scout, he got stuck on Webelos for three years because he kept losing the Pinewood Derby. Happy Festivus!

The Grinch

Ron Howard, 2000
Rotten Tomatoes score: 53%

I saw this movie in theaters the winter of 2000, and the theatrical poster was the one you see to the left of this paragraph. The title was The Grinch. Then, when the movie came out on video, the title had been expanded to Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. (And that exclamation point is part of the title; I did not type that sentence with any enthusiasm.)

Apart from being an unwieldy mouthful, this train wreck of a title disingenuously implies that the film is a close adaptation of the Dr. Seuss children's book of 1957. I will continue to refer to the Jim Carrey movie as The Grinch, so as to forestall any confusion with the 1966 cartoon, which has exactly the same title.

Another point on the title before moving on: No version of this story is called "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." So stop calling it that.

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This is a difficult movie to review. The book and the cartoon are so nearly perfect that it was risky to even attempt a live-action adaptation.

After all, the story derives its charm from its simplicity: The Grinch is a misanthropic creature who, for no reason at all, hates Christmas and begrudges the people of Whoville their happiness. So senselessly curmudgeonly is the Grinch that he goes to absurd lengths to deprive the Whos of their Christmas presents, thinking he can make them as miserable as he is, but he is redeemed in the end by the revelation that simple companionship is what makes the Whos happy.

Even filling a 26-minute cartoon required a lot of extra material, but fortunately it all took the form of songs and cartoon set-pieces; not a word was added to the story. But you just can't go from 26 minutes to 104 minutes without massively changing the plot. So rather than the inoffensive non-speaking plot devices we're familiar with, the Whos are now an irritating bunch of busybodies and bad neighbors who make the Grinch look like the hero. (I guess he's supposed to be the hero, but why does that mean the Whos have to be so obnoxious?)

As for the Grinch, he's given an unnecessary backstory to explain why he's such a grouch. (His heart is two sizes too small—isn't that enough of an explanation?) Cindy Lou Who has been aged, soap-opera style, from "not more than two" to about six, and her part has expanded as well. Since she's the only really sympathetic character in the movie, this is a welcome change, but her role is limited to having the Wide-Eyed Innocence of a Child and trying to persuade the townspeople that the Grinch is not all bad. (But he is all bad! That's the whole point!)

But I think I'm being unfair. Nothing could have lived up to the original Grinch, so it's only right to evaluate the movie for what it is.

And for what it is, it's all right. Jim Carrey of course steals every scene, and he's exactly what a live-action Grinch should be. He spends about half the movie talking to himself, and these scenes are my favorite because the Whos aren't there. The voice he does sounds similar to Boris Karloff in the cartoon, and just look at him—he looks exactly like the Grinch. (They actually won an Oscar for this make-up, but why do the Whos have tiny rat-noses? Aren't they bugs?)

They did a reasonably good job of making the movie look like a Dr. Seuss book, though not quite as well as in the Nickelodeon show The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss. It certainly has a stylized look, but I could have done without all the intense red and purple lighting; all the nighttime scenes look like they take place in front of a bar in a bad part of town. The music is good, including some new songs, but the best number remains "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," this time sung by the Grinch himself, which is clever and very in-character.

Well, I've been pretty critical of The Grinch, and I was going to say it was overrated, but then at the last minute my icy cold heart grew three sizes. So I guess it's

...but not by much.

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The True Meaning of Christmas is:

1. The joy of Christmas is the company of your fellow rat-nosed bug people.
It will come without packages, boxes, or bags, but according to this movie it will be like pulling teeth towards the end.

2. Just watch the cartoon.
I have to admit, it still gets to me when the Grinch hears a sound rising over the snow...

I'm sorry, I just... talk amongst yourselves.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Henry Selick, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 94%

I've occasionally encountered controversy about whether this is a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie. It's true that it came out around Halloween, but that's only one week earlier than most Christmas movies. And yes, it's a scary, but don't forget that Tim Burton also made two other scary Christmas movies around the same time.

Anyway, this is a pointless argument. It's clearly both Halloween- and Christmas-themed, so it makes the list. After all, it does have the word "Christmas" in the title.

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As the movie begins, the narrator explains that all our favorite holidays are somehow created by the denizens of fantasy towns, accessible by a bunch of warp zones hidden in the woods. Who knew?

The people of Halloween Town (not the unforgivably long Disney Channel movie series, but a different Halloween Town) spend 364 days out of every year planning a scary festival for October 31. In charge of the excitement is Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, adored by the townsfolk but secretly dissatisfied with his life. The only person who understands him is Sally, a Frankenstein created by some guy who looks like a duck.

While wandering aimlessly through the woods, Jack stumbles across the entrance to Christmas Town. In a musical number that will be familiar from the Coming Attractions you fast-forwarded through on every VHS tape you ever owned in the 90s, Jack wonders at the jolly world he has entered. He returns home with a few souvenirs in the hopes of persuading his fellow Halloween Town citizens that there is more to life than ghosts and goblins.

Jack becomes determined to bring Christmas home, so he enlists the help of some obnoxious children to kidnap Santa Claus (who Jack believes to be a giant lobster), and persuades Sally against her better judgment to make him a Santa outfit. On Christmas Eve, the kids return from their caper with Santa Claus in tow, and he is by far the scariest-looking thing in the movie. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something in his gigantic, inhumanly-proportioned body, his stiff wiry white beard, and his sandpaper voice that my eight-year-old self found really disturbing. Seeing it again today, I can confirm that he is as hideous as ever.

Just look at him:

And he's not wearing any pants, either.

On their own initiative, and apparently believing that they're doing Santa a favor, the kids deliver him into the lair of a homicidal gambler called Oogie Boogie, who is really just a bunch of bugs in a burlap sack.

Meanwhile, Jack has disguised himself as Santa and set off to deliver scary, often deadly presents to the children of the world—that is, the real world, although it too is populated by creepy-looking stop-motion characters. The real world doesn't take kindly to Jack's antics, so they shoot him down with anti-aircraft artillery, apparently killing him.

Back in scary world, Sally has entered the bogeyman's lair to free Santa, only to find herself captured alongside him. Finally, Jack returns, having survived his encounter with the Real World Military. (Actually, Jack said at the beginning of the movie that he was already dead, so why did anyone think he had been killed?) Jack disables Oogie Boogie by pulling a loose thread on his burlap skin, releasing the vermin inside. (As Oogie Boogie disintegrates into a swarm of insects, his voice cries out "My bugs!" What's going on here? The burlap skin has been removed, so the bugs are all that's left. Who is crying out? Isn't he made of bugs? That would be like if a person died and cried out, "My cells!" Okay, forget it.)

Jack and Sally realize that they love each other, and the movie's over.

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I was surprised to discover that this movie was not directed by Tim Burton. His name is placed so prominently on every piece of promotional artwork, I had always assumed he was an auteur. But no: Burton wrote the three-page poem on which this was based. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it was a super-weird poem.

Really, the man of the hour is Danny Elfman, who wrote the music and lyrics, and who provided Jack Skellington's singing voice. (It's common in cartoon musicals for the speaking and singing voices to be done by different people, and usually the speaking voice is treated as the "real" voice, with the singer just jumping in for the songs. But here, Jack spends most of the movie singing, so Elfman really is the star of the show.)

Since the plot makes no sense, you really are watching just to enjoy the way everything looks and sounds. But that's not a bad thing—it looks and sounds great.

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Here's the True Meaning of Christmas and/or Halloween:

1. Life is better when you celebrate multiple holidays.
I'd hate to live in Washington's Birthday (traditional) Town. That must get old.

2. Santa Claus can be horrifying.
Remember that episode of Full House where Nicky and Alex were afraid of Santa Claus? (Or were they just afraid of Joey Gladstone dressed as Santa Claus? Because that I could understand.)

Frosty the Snowman

Rankin/Bass, 1969
Rotten Tomatoes score: 60%

How strange that Rotten Tomatoes has critics' reviews for this thing. Previous "TV specials" on my list have always had to do without official scores, but this phoned-in 30-minute cartoon gets the full treatment.

Well, maybe "full treatment" is an overstatement—there are a total of five reviews, and only two are from sources I've heard of. Anyway, it's a number, so I'll just go with it.

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The song "Frosty the Snow Man" was written for and recorded by Gene Autry in 1950, in a conscious attempt to follow up on Autry's previous hit "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Many years later, after Rankin/Bass had struck gold with their Rudolph movie, they decided to give Frosty a try too.

It seems that their goal with Frosty the Snowman was to recapture the spirit of Rudolph, but to put absolutely no thought, effort, or money into it whatsoever. Rudolph's stop-motion animation looks charmingly old-fashioned; Frosty looks a notch or two above Clutch Cargo. Rather than stop-motion, they went in for traditional hand-drawn animation, but it's the corner-cutting, Xerox-heavy animation style that was all the rage in cheaply-produced Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

(Have you ever wondered why Fred Flintstone and George Jetson have five o'clock shadows all the time, or why Yogi Bear wears a tie? It's because the animators needed clear boundary lines between their body parts, so that they would only have to animate the bare minimum, then paste it into a still image of the rest of the body. Try talking without moving any part of your face except your mouth; it's not as easy as Fred makes it look.)

As with all Rankin/Bass movies, this one is hosted by a celebrity narrator, depicted on-screen as an animated representation of himself. Frosty has Jimmy "Schnozzola" Durante, who also sings the title song. (Isn't it weird when you hear some actor sing for the first time, and you think, "Wow, I never knew he had such a good voice"? This is not one of those times.) The rest of the cast consists of a lot of famous people I'm not familiar with.

As you would expect, the movie starts with the premise of the song: A bunch of kids build a snowman out of "Christmas snow," and when they place an old silk hat on his head, he comes to life. But did you ever wonder where the "old silk hat" came from? Well hold onto your seats—it came from a self-described "evil magician" named Professor Hinkle, who threw the hat away after a failed performance in the children's elementary school classroom. I bet you didn't expect that. Now, once Hinkle discovers that his hat is really magic, he decides to steal it back, even though he knows this will snuff out the life of an animate being.

Meanwhile, Frosty and the kids have another situation on their hands. The temperature is starting to rise, and Frosty is afraid he will melt unless he takes a train to the North Pole immediately. (Frosty doesn't know how to count to ten or what a traffic light is, but he has an instinctive understanding of thermometers and the location of the North Pole.) He decides to stow away on a refrigerated boxcar, and he invites one of the human children to come along for the ride. Karen is apparently the stupidest 10-year-old alive, as she believes she can make it to the North Pole and back before bedtime. What's more, Professor Hinkle is also aboard, scheming to take back his hat at the first opportunity.

As the freezer car rambles on northward, the inherent tragedy of his life dawns on Frosty. He realizes that the cold that sustains his life is slowly inflicting hypothermia on Karen, so he takes her out of the freezing boxcar and into the freezing wilderness. Frosty's rabbit pal Hocus Pocus hops off to fetch Santa Claus for help, while Frosty carries Karen to a conveniently-located heated greenhouse. But wouldn't you know it, Professor Hinkle has been waiting in the wings for such an opportunity, so he locks Frosty in the greenhouse to melt. This is quite a crisis, but luckily we're down to the last few minutes of the movie, so Santa immediately shows up, brings Frosty back to life, reprimands Professor Hinkle, and takes Karen home.

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Remarkably, there have been a number of Frosty sequels. The first one, in 1976, had Andy Griffith as the narrator, and in 1979, Frosty teamed up with Rudolph in a two-hour stop-motion extravaganza. John Goodman took over the role of Frosty for a 1992 pseudo-sequel, and yet another one was released direct-to-DVD in 2005, with Burt Reynolds (!) narrating.

I've never seen any of these sequels, but I read on Wikipedia that the 1992 version removed all references to Frosty's corncob pipe. Honestly, are they really concerned that Frosty might turn children on to pipe-smoking?

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Once again, the True Meaning of Christmas:

1. It's wrong for small children to board freight trains bound for the North Pole, accompanied only by snowmen.
Just kidding. This is never addressed.

2. Once you've thrown away a piece of headgear in frustration, you forfeit every conceivable right in it.
Jimmy Durante tells us this in no uncertain terms in the first five minutes of the show.

3. Christmas snow can never disappear completely.
This is how Santa explains his resurrection of Frosty in the finale. So is the snow magic, or is it the hat? And why exactly is "Frosty the Snowman" considered a Christmas song? It's really just a cold-weather song.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder (edited for content)

Renny Harlin, 1990
Rotten Tomatoes score: 66%

Even though this came out on the Fourth of July, it is set at Christmas time (for what reason I can't say), so it makes the list. Now, I know what you're thinking—1988's Die Hard 1 is also set at Christmas, so why use a sequel?

I have three reasons: First, because I remember it better; Second, because I like it better; and Third, because of this:

And this:

So just to be clear, I am reviewing the TBS edited-for-television version of Die Hard 2, which recounts the thrilling tale of John McClane, a tough-as-nails cop who never swears, but replaces all profanity by bizarre euphemisms, and lapses into a freakish caricature of his normal voice every time he does so.

The story begins one year after the events of Die Hard 1, in a parallel universe where 1990 was the next year after 1988. John McClane is visiting Our Nation's Capital, and we meet him on a snowy day at Dulles Airport awaiting the arrival of his wife (Bonnie Bedelia). Unfortunately, before the flight can land, McClane gets into a violent altercation with a couple of shady characters. He believes the thugs are part of something bigger and more dangerous, but the airport's police captain, Dennis Franz, is obligated by the plot to belittle McClane and dismiss his well-founded suspicions. (I wonder which sets off the metal detector first: the lead in his [head], or the [junk] in his brains?)

It turns out that the crooks are working for Colonel Stuart, whose evil plan is to intercept the incoming military plane extraditing a tin-pot dictator and drug lord named Esperanza from the (fictional) Latin American country of Val Verde into the (real) North American country of the United States. If you saw the first Die Hard, you were probably expecting this dictator business to be a cover for a more mundane heist scheme, but no, they really are trying to free this guy.

Of course, if Dennis Franz had moved his fat [feet] when John McClane told him to, they could have nipped Stuart's plan in the bud; instead, they find themselves hip-deep in [snow] when the bad guys cut off air-traffic communications and power, leaving all incoming planes stuck circling over Dulles. McClane realizes that his wife is on one of the planes these guy's are [foolin'] with, so he decides to take on the bad guys with or without Dennis's help. Before long he's up to his [neck] in terrorists again.

When the villains wreck a plane to prove they mean business, even Dennis can't deny the seriousness of the situation, so he calls in an Army Special Forces team to save the day. McClane suspects the Special Forces leader Major Grant of being a [rascal], but Grant assures McClane he's "your kind of [rascal]." But after a snowmobile shootout, McClane realizes that the Special Forces team has gone rogue, and their weapons are loaded with blanks. He decides to prove this to Dennis Franz in the most discreet way possible, by firing away at him with a blank-loaded machine gun in the presence of a roomful of cops.

Meanwhile, in one of the planes circling the airport, Bonnie Bedelia has been fulfilling her contractual sequel obligation by trading angry dialogue with Dick Thornburg, the tabloid reporter whose yellow journalism endangered the McClane family last year. It turns out the [stupid arrogant psychopath] is at it again, transmitting from the airplane lavatory and panicking the travelers snowed in at the airport. Bonnie stops his obnoxious but non-violent meddling by shooting him with a tazer, which seems like an outrageously gratuitous act of violence, but then again this is a movie where a guy is about to get sucked into a jet engine.

Back on the ground, McClane has just minutes to stop Colonel Stuart and Major Grant from spiriting Esperanza away in a commandeered 747. McClane jumps from a helicopter onto the wing of the plane, where he does battle with Grant and Stuart in turn. I won't give away how Grant dies (because I just gave it away in the previous paragraph), but during the fight with Stuart, McClane opens the fuel hatch before falling from the wing. He lights the leaking fuel ablaze, and the plane explodes. In case this was not a sufficiently cartoony ending, the stranded planes now use the wreckage to visualize the runway and land safely.

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I said earlier that I liked this movie better than Die Hard 1, but honestly I think that's just because I don't remember the first one that well. This one is (even) more over-the-top than its predecessor, which I like, but on the other hand, it reduces Sergeant Carl Winslow's role to a brief cameo, and the principal from The Breakfast Club doesn't even make an appearance.

But in spite of those egregious lapses of judgment, this movie is

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Now it's what you've all been waiting for, the True Meaning of Christmas, according to Die Hard 2: Die Harder:

1. It's important for spouses to spend time rescuing each other from violent death.
Yeah, that's kind of a reach. Sorry.

2. Danger never takes a holiday.
But you knew that when you became an invincible action-movie protagonist.

3. Sequels can be worth watching, as long as they have at least one scene with Carl Winslow.
Did you know that both Die Hard and Die Hard 2 are based on books, but the books have nothing to do with each other? Carl Winslow's not in either of them.