A strange concatenation of circumstances hit me today -- it's Christmas Day 2008 at 9:45 AM as I write this.  One was obvious, and one was tenuous, but both had a deep impact in my consideration of this, the last film I watched several weeks ago for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon and the last Christmas film I'll be posting about this year.  The first was the discovery that a friend of mine, who hosts an excellent radio show in Chicago on the nexus of politics and popular culture, recently presented a special Christmas episode in which the central question was:  has A Christmas Story replaced It's a Wonderful Life as America's most beloved Christmas movie?

On the surface, it's a pretty strange question.  As often as it's shown -- and that's pretty damned often -- Bob Clark's endlessly re-watchable, terrifically funny tale of a young boy's Midwestern holiday misadventures in the late 1940s has never had the cultural ubiquity that Frank Capra's classic had during the years it was out of copyright.  It can hardly be called contemporary anymore; it was made 25 years ago (as celebrated in a deluxe new DVD release that's highly recommended by this writer) and was set only a few years after It's a Wonderful Life.  And the older film is a genuine four-star cinematic acheivment, directed by one of the towering talents of the Golden Age of Hollywood, made for a significant amount of money and starring some of the greatest screen stars of the day.

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It's easy to forget, while we're all enjoying the largesse of the holidays, exchanging gifts and eating rich food and enjoying the company of our friends and loved ones, that there's not one, but two wars in which our country is deeply embroiled.  I had forgotten myself until I got to the airport on December 20th to visit my old home town, and saw how many military personnel were in the airport ready to do the same.  There were so many of them, and all so young:  most of them were just exiting basic training, and spending one last holiday with their families before they got their deployment orders and shipped off to Iraq or Afghanistan, where they will risk their lives daily in service of a conflict whose purpose becomes murkier with every passing day.  It reminded me of the penultimate film I'd watched for the Screengrab 12 Days of Christmas Marathon:  Joyeux Noel.

The background of  Christian Carion's 2005 film is an odd but inspiring bit of World War I history:  on Christmas Eve of 1914, German soldiers celebrated the holiday by placing little candles and miniature Christmas trees along the edges of the trenches in which they'd toiled and died since the war began.  A few began singing Christmas carols in their native language.  More or less spontaneously, they were joined by regiments of Scotsmen and Frenchmen, who at first sang along or favored the enemy with their own carols, and later made the brave -- or foolhardy -- gesture of actually leaving the trenches to meet their opposite numbers in No Man's Land.  Precious rations and luxury items were exchanged as gifts; stories were told and songs were sung by those who shared a language.

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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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How on Earth (good will towards men) did we get from good-hearted classics like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life to this schlocky mid-'80s slasher film from the dregs of the human spirit?  Once again, I blame my heroic holiday intake of Christmas cocktails.  As it happens, I was getting a little burned out on decency and kindness by the time I reached this point in the marathon, so I was more than happy to see a guy dressed up as Santa Claus take an axe to a bunch of innocent bystanders, but that's just how I roll.  Don't show this to any children you may happen to have lying around the house; I saw it for the first time when I was 15, and look how I turned out.  Revolution Number Nine in the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon:  the controversial cult classic Silent Night Deadly Night.

The movie, starring an astonishing array of actors you have never heard of before or since its release, generated a massive amount of controversy on its release.  Its premise is simple enough:  a traumatized young boy, whose childhood is marred by a bunch of unlikely coincidences involving Santa Claus, grows up to be a mad killer who takes the St. Nicholasian imperative to reward the good and deny the bad rather beyond its normal purview.  Taken as high camp, it's actually not that bad, though hampered by some grade-Z acting and direction that it would be a compliment to call perfunctory.  The script, based on a Paul Caimi novel called Slayride (!), is lively enough and clearly doesn't take its moments of high drama very seriously, but the movie caused a sort of national paroxysm of moral panic.

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Alert readers may recall that, while I'm posting the reviews of the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon movies in dribs and drabs over the days leading up to Christmas, I actually watched them all in sequence over the space of two days in a bleary haze of rum-soaked egg nog and seasonal affective disorder.  I had a highly formalized plan for which movie to watch in which particular order, but I drunkenly knocked over my stack of DVDs after the fifth movie, and then I just watched them in the order in which they fell on the living room floor.  I was hoping that it would be late in the day by the time I had to get around to watching some variation of A Christmas Carol -- I find the irascible-old-bastard Scrooge largely preferable to the lover-of-all-humanity Scrooge -- but here's where it turned up, so you're going to have to read about it.

My own misanthropy aside, it's not surprising that Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas has become one of the most beloved holiday stories of all time.  It's got a little bit of something for everyone:  a sincere, adorable crippled boy, for treacle fans; a handful of truly memorable characters; abundant humor, some of it rather more mordant than one might expect; a creepy ghost story; and, best of all, a central plot that appeals to lovers of Christmas everywhere:  a cranky old jerk who hates Christmas has, after a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, a legendary change of heart and embraces the holiday in full, becoming the very embodiment of the spirit of giving and showering those poor souls he previously spurned with largesse.

Dickens write A Christmas Carol for the same reason he wrote a lot of his most famous work:  for a paycheck.  But it ended up having a much more vast impact on our entire culture than its author possibly imagined.  One of the most widely-read stories of the English canon, its familiar story and infinitely flexible formal structure have led it to become one of the most widely-adapted stories as well.  The number of stage plays, movies and very-special-episode television series based on the story are probably uncountable; as long as there is economic injustice, as long as there are lazy scriptwriters in love with the flashback gimmick; as long as there are cranky old jerks who, justfiably or not, aren't as into the holidays as the rest of us, there will continue to be new movie and TV versions of A Christmas Carol.

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Eight films into our little holiday movie marathon, we finally arrive at the one that most of our readers who haven't spent the last sixty years in the Witness Protection Program in a cave on Mars have probably already seen a dozen times or so:  Frank Capra's legendary 1946 Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life.  While there's been dozens and dozens of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, there's only one It's a Wonderful Life:  despite decades of references, parodys, homages and metacommentaries, the big-screen adaptation of the Phillip Van Doren short story "The Greatest Gift" remains one of a kind.  Thanks to an inexplicable chain of events that led to its falling into the public domain for a number of years, it was shown on pretty much every television station at Christmas for decades; finding someone in the U.S. who hasn't seen it is next to impossible.

The challenge when discussing It's a Wonderful Life, then, isn't to explain its plot or detail the great things about it:  these are things most people know intimately from repeated first-hand experience.  The challege is to think of something new to say about a movie that almost everyone of a certain age has seen, probably more than once.  Frank Capra's surehanded direction, the solid script (primarily by Capra and Frances Goodrich), and iconic performances by screen legend Jimmy Stewart (whose interpretation of George Bailey is more responsible than anything for the cultural shorthand we now have for him), future television star Donna Reed, and Hollywood patriarch Lionel Barrymore are the building blocks for a film that defines the word "Capraesque", but what makes it resonate so?  It it simple repetition that makes this the Christmas classic above all others?

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Hello again, and welcome back to the sixth installment of the Screengrab's trip through some beloved (and some not-so-beloved) holiday film fare, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon.  While, technically, the twelve days of Christmas extend all the way into January and culminate in Epiphany, I'm sure you'll all be too hung over by that point to be able to deal with any Christmas cheer.  Plus, most of us will be back at work by January 6th, and we don't want to be the movie-blog equivalent of that one guy on your block who annoys the whole neighborhood by leaving his Christmas lights up long after the joy and wonder of the holiday has vanished.  So we've got a lot of movies to get through in the next three days.  Let's start with the 2003 Will Ferrell vehicle Elf, which is now general considered a canonical new-classic Xmas flick.

In the spirit of full disclosure, and to further reinforce my reputation as Bob Cratchit and Scrooge inhabiting a single body, I'll admit that, as big a sucker as I am for Christmas movies in general, I didn't think much of Elf when I first saw it in a theater.  I was in a bit of a lousy mood at the time, but that doesn't alter the fact that there really is a lot to dislike here:  the delicate balancing act between po-faced sincerity and winking, snarky sarcasm, for one thing, doesn't always work, and the movie's tone can come across as artificial.  The pace is a bit manic, the premise is undersold, and Ferrell's performance is unneccessarily called upon to carry the entire movie, which is a shame, given that he's surrounded by tons of extremely capable actors.  And Jon Favreau's direction can be charitably described as 'clunky'.

The story of Buddy, an orphan child who crawls into Santa's bag one lonely Christmas and ends up the only stranded human at the north pole, gets some early-running gags -- some predictable, others hilarious -- out of the notion of a normal child (especially one as hulking and clumsy as Ferrell) being raised among the elves.  Not enough time is spent on this appealing notion, which is especially regrettable given that Buddy's father is played, in a rare screen appearance, by one of the absolute masters of awkward comedy in the person of Bob Newhart.  But one of the appealing things about Elf, which becomes much more clear on repeat viewings, is how economical it is:  it's constantly making a dollar out of a quarter, milking the script's gags for more than they're worth and making the most out of Ferrell's screen presence.

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It's going to be a light posting week here at the Screengrab, as we all spend time with our loved ones and relations at this sacred time of year.  However. we didn't want to leave you without at least one Video of the Day -- this one, a clip of one of the funniest scenes from our 12 Days of Christmas Marathon favorite, Bad Santa.

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Okay, that's enough of the goofball so-bad-it's-good stuff.  We all enjoyed taking a gander at bizarre foreign intrusions, both Mexican and Wookie, into the Christmas traditions in the form of Santa Claus and The Star Wars Holiday Special, but by the time I was done with those two, I needed a nice healthy dose of holiday melancholy to remind me that the festival season can be one of ineffable sadness as well as inexpressable joy.  And nobody does ineffable sadness and inexpressable joy like the Irish, so I decided to get things back on the straight and narrow with John Huston's final film as a director, The Dead.  Though it's not often thought of as a traditional holiday film, its action takes place on Epiphany, which in the Catholic calendar is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas.  And, considering how important the role of epiphany was in his writing, it's no surprise that this is based on a short story (from Dubliners) by the mighty James Joyce, who, like Huston, was an Irishman through and through despite his sometimes standoffish relationship with his homeland and its culture.

The Feast of Epiphany, like Christmas, is a time for family gatherings, for coming together and for realizing how important your friends and relations are in your life.  Joyce needed little reminding of the subject; he lived most of his life in the long shadow of his family, for good and for ill.  Likewise, John Huston -- literally deathly ill when he made The Dead, the third movie of his highly improbable but hugely successful late-stage comeback -- knew how important family was in his life.  His own career as a successful actor and director had been predicted and preplanned by his father, Walter, and The Dead featured a fantastic screenplay by his own son Tony and a tremendous performance in the lead role by his daughter-in-law Anjelica.  Like the characters in the story, Huston was surrounding himself, likely for the last time, with the people who loved him, and in the shadow of the people who made him, for one last realization, one last epiphany.  The result is one of the smallest and quietest, but also one of the greatest, films of his career.

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Last week, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon took a bit of a turn in the direction of high-camp lunacy with a look at the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special  Today we take an even harder left, into the realm of utter derangement, with a look at the innocuously named yet completely bonkers "Mexiscope" classic Santa Claus.  The only holiday film, to my knowledge, to get the full-on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment, Santa Claus is a joint Mexican-American production from 1959.  It was written and filmed south of the border on an ultra-low budget, and then re-edited by American schlockmeister K. Gordon Murray for a stateside audience.  Who exactly this American audience was supposed to be, however, is left unanswered, as the movie makes no sense whatsoever in the original Spanish and actually crosses into negative sense-making in its English translation. Incomprehensible, culturally deranged, acted by people who weren't quite up to the high professional thespianic standards of professional wrestling, and so cheaply made it looks like it's peeling, Santa Claus is the movie equivalent of toys you buy at the dollar store.

Part of the problem with Santa Claus is that Mexico isn't entirely in synch with American Christmas tradition, so, just as the Japanese adapted jolly old St. Nick into "Annual Gift Man", the original producers of this movie envisioned Kris Kringle as a sort of extraterrestrial wizard whose goal is to turn children on the path of good and thwart the wiles of his crafty arch-enemy, Satan.  That's right: the villain of this movie is none other than the Lord of Lies himself, and his wicked henchman Pitch, whose job it is to tempt the children of Earth, embodied in Mexican waif Lupita, into abandoning the true path of Santa and shoplifting toys for the greater glory of Lucifer.  Luckily, Santa has his own right-hand man -- the wizard Merlin -- who supplies him with an arsenal of Dungeons & Dragons magic items, including sleeping powder, a skeleton key, and  a flower that will make him invisible.  Are you following all this?  Because it doesn't get any less complicated from here.

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The third episode of our trip through some of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time isn't actually beloved.  Notorious would be a better word.  Infamous would be another.  It also isn't a movie; it's a television special.  What's more, it isn't even a television special you can go rent at your local Blockbuster, or queue up via Netflix.  In fact, unless you happen to have been watching CBS at 8PM Eastern Time, November 17, 1978, you've probably never seen it.  Or, unless you have one of the approximately one hundred billion bootlegged copies that have been floating around sci-fi conventions for the last 30 years.  Or unless you have Google video.  Anyway, you sure as hell are never going to see an official release:  George Lucas -- the man who willingly released Star Wars Episode III:  Revenge of the Sith into theaters -- has said that he is so ashamed of the Holiday Special that if he could, he would hunt down every copy of it in existence and smash them to pieces with a sledgehammer.

How bad is the Star Wars Holiday Special?  It's so bad that even Star Wars geeks, many of whom pretend that the second trilogy wasn't relentlessly awful and have paid real cash money for Star Wars novelizations, think that it's a bad joke.  It's so bad that Harrison Ford, during an appearance on the Conan O'Brien show, attempted to deny that he even remembered doing it.  It's so bad that it goes beyond so-bad-it's-good into so-bad-it's-actually-terribly-bad and back around into so-bad-it-in-fact-is-immune-to-such-meaningless-abstractions-as-bad-and-good.  It's so bad you feel sorry for Jefferson Starship for having had to be in it.  Unless you have spent two hours being savagely tortured by members of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it is the most excruciatingly long two hours you will ever spend.

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Welcome to installment #2 of the Screengrab's leisurely holiday stroll through some of the most beloved Christmas movies in holiday history:  the 12 Days of Christmas marathon!  You certainly don't have to do what I did, and watch all of these movies in a row over a period of two days, but if you do go that route, make sure you have a really comfortable chair and a lot of stuff to mix with your eggnog.  For our second go-round, we decided to follow the path set for us by The Nightmare Before Christmas  and move on to another movie with a somewhat jaundiced view of the season.  But while The Nightmare Before Christmas was a harmless kid's toy, the equivalent of a scampish M-80 in the toilet of Christmas cinema, today's movie is substantially more dangerous and unpredictable, a grenade pitched into a urinal.

Released in 2003, Bad Santa was the second narrative film directed by Terry Zwigoff, and his first attempt at full-blown comedy.  It's a movie that could easily have gone astray:  the last thing the world needs is another picture about a cynical, world-weary rogue who cons his way through Christmas only to find redemption and learn to love again at the hands of a good woman and/or an adorably winning urchin.  And to be sure, Bad Santa has those elements in spades, to the degree that plenty of people, already leery of Zwigoff's ability to handle broad humor as adeptly as he'd handled teen angst in his previous effort Ghost World were getting pretty nervous.  Casting Billy Bob Thornton, who had already been tempted to the dark side of mediocre but high-paying blockbusters, didn't help much.

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If you are anything like me -- and why wouldn't you be? -- you're a sucker for Christmas.  The arbitrary yet somehow natural-seeming traditions; the carols which somehow only sound right when you've got just enough bourbon-fortified eggnog in you; the extra days off from work; the fact that people give you free stuff wrapped in shiny paper; the way everyone pretends to be nice to each other for a change:  what's not to like?  It's also one of those Western cultural touchstones so universal (suck it, Judaism!) that pretty much everybody gets into the act; despite the bogus claims from pouty conservatives about a "war on Christmas", the birth of Baby Jesus is still commemorated on almost every TV show on the air, and Yuletide is second only to summer as a Hollywood high holy day.

So, in the spirit of this year's Summerfest series -- where I lazily Netflixed a dozen or so movies with "summer" in the title and reviewed them so you'd know what to watch while the pool guy skimmed the drowned crow out of your Jacuzzi -- I present the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, where I get drunk and watch some of the finest Christmas movies that Hollywood has crammed down our throats, and ask:  will this movie fill you with holiday cheer or seasonal depression?

First up is 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, also known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in Disney Digital 3-D, although a more accurate name for it would be Not Actually Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas or even Hi Everybody We're Henry Selick and Caroline Thompson and We Directed and Wrote This Movie Respectively And What Do We Have To Do To Get a Little Credit For That?'s The Nightmare Before Christmas.  While Burton created the lead characters and wrote a poem that served as the movie's inspiration, he had very little to do with making the film itself, and the fact that he's generally given all the kudos for it is a shame, because if nothing else, it proves how other people are capable of taking his quirky, creepy aesthetic and running with it.

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