Goodbye, 2011. Hello apocalypse. This past year in movies has felt a bit like a holding pattern, a space to get all contemplative and whimsical before the terror of 2012. Despite a few exceptions, it wasn’t a year in which tentpole summer films grabbed a majority of the spotlight (in fact, many of these failed, […]
As I sit down to take in the perennially marathoned A Christmas Story, I realize that I don’t believe I’ve ever actually sat down and watched A Christmas Story before. Normally, it is on the TV in the other room all day Christmas day, and when sullen child/teenager Rachael got bored of hanging out with […]
These days, it is simply accepted that Adam Sandler movies are going to be difficult to watch and yet increasingly generic. He’s made a very comfortable living by continually playing to the lowest common denominator, whether it’s through paint-by-numbers romantic or over-the-top absurdist comedies. But there was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when it […]
Another new Christmas movie for me! Although I’ve seen the animated version more times than you can shake a stick at*, and have read the book pretty consistently since childhood, I was full of enough Jim Carrey-fatigue by the time the live action version of Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas showed up that up […]
Before this project, I had never seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, a fact that inevitably elicited gasps from whomever I told it. It’s a classic, sure, but like most of the pre-Community Chevy Chase oeuvre, I somehow missed it. So it was with great joy that I undertook the task of partaking for the first […]
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is probably the only thing less traditionally Christmas-y than Bad Santa. And yet the straight-to-DVD Always Sunny Christmas movie is about to become a new classic for my Christmas routine. Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito) was a horrible father to Deandra (Kaitlin Olson) and Dennis (Glenn Howerton) throughout a childhood of […]
In honor of Home Alone, a movie I must have watched fifty four thousand times from age 3 to age 13, and not a single time since, I’m going to do this whole review in the form of random observations, and let my rampant, 24-year-old ID take the reins: • Holy Shit, Macauley is young. […]
From the first moment of Bad Santa, the film is fully defining its viewpoint. Billy Bob Thorton, looking alcoholic skinny with a cigarette in his hand and a Santa suit hanging angrily off his lanky frame, provides voice over narration to a scene that is set at a bar and which ends with Billy Bob […]