My Top Ten List of Christmas Movie (#1)

1. A Christmas Story

What other Christmas movie could claim the spot? What other Christmas movie is as well-written, well-acted, timeless, funny, heartwarming and inexhaustibly entertaining? I’d even go so far as to place this movie in my all-time top 25. Its importance in our cultural heritage is without question. You almost cannot think of Christmas without thinking of the phrase, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Perhaps its pervasiveness is illustrated by TBS’s willingness to replay the movie for 24 hours straight from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day. I am unashamed to admit that on average, I watch about 18 of those 24 hours.

It’s great because it’s so real. It doesn’t sugarcoat the holidays, and when it verges on sentimentality, it throws in something like the infamous “fudge” event or a Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a butchered version of “Deck the Halls.” There may be no truer moment than this:



Honorable Mentions:

The Bells of St. Mary: Though a tad dry and at times boring, the grade school nativity play is so cute you’ll almost wish you had a young children at home to dress up like Joseph and Mary. Almost.

The Nightmare Before Christmas: This one’s hard to categorize. Certainly, it falters on creating that whole Christmas spirit thing (unless you like your Santas deranged), and it always made me more nostalgic for Halloween. However, it is one heck of a cool movie.

The Nutcracker: This might have made the list for the music, but as I’ve never seen it, I have no idea what happens in this movie beyond that fact that I can say, with near certainty, that it involves a nutcracker of some sort. Plus, this is known more as a ballet anyway.

The Stinker Awards:

Christmas with the Cranks: There’s no better way to induce nausea over the commercialization of the holiday season than by watching this movie. When Tim Allen (a Christmas movie mainstay) decides to forego Christmas and take his wife on a cruise when his daughter announces she will not be coming home for the holidays, the neighbors go nuts. What? The Cranks will not be celebrating the holidays? How inconsiderate does one need to try and take one’s wife on a cruise? The eventual bonding between neighbors does nothing to restore any sense of wholesomeness to this love song to Christmas hams, unchecked capitalism, and plastic, rooftop snowmen. Then again, what should I have expected from John Grisham and Chris Columbus?

Eight Crazy Nights: If you like crude fart jokes, start here. As a Happy Gilmour fanatic when I was younger and a proud owner of They’re All Gonna Laugh at You, I was predisposed to liking Adam Sandler. Nothing, however, can save this stinker of a film, especially not Sandler’s Opera Man rendition at the film’s conclusion.

Love Actually: Perhaps it’s all the infidelity. Perhaps it’s the Britishness of it (a Brit coming to Wisconsin to bang all the easy chicks? C’mon). Perhaps its because I first saw this movie in the theatre with my family (you can imagine how awkward it was to watch the pornography shoot scene with my mother sitting next to me). Whatever it is, I have never understood the appeal of this movie. Granted, I have only seen it once.

Miracle of 34th Street: This one will get me into trouble, I’m sure, but I have never been able to make it all the way through this one. Gosh, it’s so boring.