Mr. Movie’s take on the best — and worst — holiday films

I am not a fan of holiday movies. After having seen most of them a dozen or more times, enough is enough. Besides, I spend hours each week in movie theaters and the last thing I want to do when sitting in the comfort of my living room is watch a movie.

This goes for any time of year.

While many of you catch them in bunches, somewhere between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, I’ll find a way to watch three movies. The first one wasn’t intended to be a Christmas movie but ended up a Christmas favorite and now — for the politically correct — a “holiday” movie favorite.

The second is from a book centered published about 50 years before cinema as invented and 100-years before TV. It’s centered around Christmas but it’s really more about how our actions turn into heavy life weights. Connected to that theme is one that isn’t a movie. It’s a 1966 half-hour TV show narrated by Boris Karloff.

The third isn’t a Christmas movie at all and features the most disgusting Santa Claus in the history of movies and maybe in the history of Santas.

As you read my comments, you’ll notice a theme. It’s redemption and second chances. As a person whose life is filled wasted but wonderful life chances, redemption and second chances resonate.

Missing from my list are movies I’m so sick and tired of that I refuse to talk about them or write about them. I definitely will never watch them again. And I start with the three people will scream the loudest about:

• Elf
• Home Alone
• A Christmas Story

Others:

• Bill Murray’s Scrooged
• The Nightmare Before Christmas
• Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas
• White Christmas

I’m sure there will be others from your list that I’ve missed mentioning here, and that would be missing from my want-to-see list anyway.

It’s a Wonderful Life

The question I’m asked most by readers, friends and fans is what movie is my favorite. I hate the question but if pushed, It’s a Wonderful Life is often the one I say sits at the top of my list. It’s that, or The Wizard of Oz, which many of you know was my first movie theater experience.

Done by Frank Capra in 1946, it has — in my opinion — Jimmy Stewart’s best performance in a career full of best performances. He’s poor, do-gooder George Bailey, stuck in his hometown of Bedford Falls doing what’s right and not what he wants. George would rather be anywhere else. His foil — other than himself — is the greedy, miserly Mr. Potter, who more or less rules the town.

As you know, theft of cash from his savings and loan causes Bailey to want to bag life. By the tear-filled climax, Bailey learns that life’s biggest treasure is life itself and loving others and the love returned.

Capra, via Stewart, tells us that while we don’t think our life is that important and that what we do doesn’t touch others, it does.

The flick features near-brilliant directing and cinematography. In fact, some of today’s best filmmakers learned many of the techniques they use from watching Capra be Capra. The movie also features acting from some of the best character actors of all time, like Lionel Barrymore, Ward Bond, Frank Faylen, Gloria Grahame and Billy Mitchell. And there’s Stewart and the gorgeous and talented Donna Reed.

What’s not to love?

Every year, It’s a Wonderful Life reminds us that it’s wonderful to be human. No one gave more than George Bailey. And for decades this three-dimensional, and flawed human being, has inspired me — and hopefully you — and shows us there is no better calling than to serve others.

A definite hanky movie. Few of us can get through this one without shedding a tear or two.

Anything A Christmas Carol

Depending on what research you access, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been done in one form or another in movies or on TV from 100 to 200 times. It’s my all-time favorite story, and its moral is timeless and as relative to today than when Dickens published his novella in 1843.

In fact, today it may even be more relative.

It doesn’t matter to me which one I see, and every year, I try to see a new one. It’s almost impossible to ruin Dickens’ classic. The only one I’ve seen so far that I absolutely hated is Bill Murray’s Scrooged.

Purists like Alastair Sims’ version best, but I like the story so well that I almost don’t care who does it. Henry Winkler, George C. Scott, Jim Carrey, the Muppets, Mr. Magoo and Disney all have versions.

A scrooge-like favorite is Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Chuck Jones and Ben Washam — the Warner Brothers geniuses — and Boris Karloff, boomy-voiced, Thurl Ravenscroft and and Rocky & Bullwinkle’s June Foray faithfully follow Seuss’ very entertaining and moral-based book.

Its 26 minutes says it all and is more fun by light years than Ron Howard and Jim Carrey’s bloated version from 2000. And like It’s a Wonderful Life, both Scrooge and Grinch have life lessons that end up with redemption and second chances.

Bad or Badder Santa

The last redemption movie is Badder Santa. Disgusting is probably the word that best describes this one from the opening sequences to the oddly happy, unhappy ending. No one in the movie — other than maybe Lauren Graham’s Mrs. Santa’s sister — is close to likable. And just when you think director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb) and his writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris, Crazy, Stupid, Love) have gone too far, they take one more step.

And then one more.

Badder Santa is the director’s cut. It’s longer and has a bit harder R rating than Bad Santa. The differences are subtle enough that it doesn’t matter which one you catch. Since it came out in 2003, it has been a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day tradition at my house.

That said, the film is often so disgusting — there’s that word again — that I seriously doubt it’s ever going to be a traditional viewing for millions of others.

Billy Bob Thornton stars. In 2006, I had the pleasure of interviewing Thornton. The focus was supposed to be his new movie, The Astronaut Farmer, but I opened the interview talking to him about Bad Santa. It’s actually the reason I wanted to interview Thornton in the first place. Like Stewart, he has a career full of great performances. This is his very best.

More importantly, no one else could have played the character and made this movie work. He’s perfect. Or better defined, perfectly disgusting.

Thornton and Tony Cox play a drunk and a dwarf who play Santa and his helper at a different super mall ever year. At the end of the season, they break into the mall safe and abscond with thousands in cash.

Thornton’s Willie ends up living in the home of the most likeable movie kid ever. He’s a sweet boy, but he’s so pathetic that it takes a long time to connect. Willie also picks up a beautiful girlfriend the kid calls Mrs. Santa’s sister. Love blossoms and eventually chinks are found in Willie’s drunken armor.

In addition to Thornton and Cox, Bad or Badder Santa features a bunch of equally exceptional performances. It’s the last movie done by John Ritter. He’s hilarious, as is Bernie Mac, who gets the pleasure of doing an eating scene that is definitely in the top five most revolting of all time.

An almost unrecognizable Cloris Leachman plays the boy’s grandmother.

Disgusting yes, but Thornton and his co-stars manage to keep you laughing. Sometimes the laughs are uncomfortable. I caught this one a few days before Christmas in 2003 with 12 other critics. A few of us laughed. Two of us laughed a lot. I’m one of the two.

I’m still laughing.

Honorable mentions

• Arthur Christmas. I have only seen this one once. But I laughed all the way through this charming animated feature. Arthur is Santa’s youngest son who makes a perilous trip out into the world to undo his dad’s one Christmas Eve mistake.
• Miracle on 34th Street. Edmund Gwenn stars as Hollywood’s most believable Santa ever and is the best proof ever offered that there really is a Santa Claus. It also stars Maureen O’Hara and John Payne — not Wayne — and is Natalie Wood’s first movie.

This story was originally published December 3, 2015 at 3:26 PM with the headline "Mr. Movie’s take on the best — and worst — holiday films."