After the horrors of Silent Night Deadly Night, it was a relief that the next movie that showed up in the pile of holiday DVDs I drunkenly knocked over while prepping for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon was a good old-fashioned heartwarming musical. Of course, a lot of people really, really hate musicals, and would rather watch jolly old St. Nick ventilating craniums with a wood axe on endless loop than hear some cheeseball from the Golden Age of Hollywood belt out a single rousing number, so for some of our readers, this might be a significant turn for the worse. However, I will tell you now that those readers are wrong. White Christmas is a wonderful movie, and despite not having any killing in it (well, except for the World War II stuff, I guess), it is superior in every way to our previous movie.
White Christmas is what was once known in the biz as a "jukebox musical". This is where, rather than writing new songs for a production, a bunch of already-existing hit songs are thrown together, a half-assed 'plot' is woven to tie them loosely together, and they are unleashed on an audience who, it is reasoned, will make the jukebox musical a huge success, because you already know that they like these songs. Contemporary audiences tend to think of the jukebox musical as a relatively recent invention, the result of postmodern game-playing like Moulin Rouge and Broadway cash-ins like Mamma Mia!, but in fact, they've been around for centuries -- in the past, when popular songs were generally renowned for who composed them rather than who wrote them, the jukebox musical was ubiquitous.
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