Author Topic: Christmas Movie Cliche thread  (Read 549 times)

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Neumatic

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Re: Christmas Movie Cliche thread
« on: December 08, 2012, 08:11:32 pm »
You know, for the longest time (ever since I first heard about it), I wanted to see the three-hour cut of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  I love that flick.  Then I read the script and I realized how much bad stuff they had to cut out.  A lot of John Candy's dialogue got dropped at some point, and it really made all the difference in the world between him coming off as the lovable doof he does in the flick or being the guy Neil felt he was for the longest time.  He's really not endearing on the page.

Home Alone, holy cow, I always dug those first two films (though, like Star Trek, I took a couple years off to re-build my affection for them), and those are flicks I think could probably stand a re-make today.  And not those crummy Disney channel spin-off straight-to-TV whatevers, I'm talking about going back to the roots of this kind of jerk kid who feels totally left out and alone because of this giant family, a dependent who becomes totally independent and learns to fend for himself... there's a lot of emotional stuff at the core that's still good that you could rebuild off of... and it's all capped with zany looney tunes-style pranks and physical violence at the end (I do feel that maybe we should have been brought up to that a little bit).  I did dislike all the bird lady stuff in the sequel, though.

Home Alone did something I quite liked which was make Christmas feel grand and royal.  In the commentary track they mentioned flicks like "Great Expectations" and Dickens and gave this sort of old England regency, taste, and pomp to all the pure Christmas stuff.  It's like a Serif font.  A bit of Victorian Christmas ideal in the modern age, and I think because I saw that at such an early age (when I looked just LIKE the kid in the movie), that's what I thought Christmas should look like.

Can I be honest and say "A Christmas Story" isn't really a fave of mine.  I've seen it a zillion times but, like Elf, I feel like I'm slightly left out of the joke that everyone else is in on.  I will say that the newly-made cash-grab sequel looks terrible, and I'm in the same pain every other fan is about it.


I have no desire to see it, but it's got to be better than Randy Quaid and family stuck on a desert island in Christmas Vacation 2, right?

 

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