Other Books by Roger Ebert
An Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss
Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook
Behind the Phantom’s Mask
Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary
Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion (annually 1986–1993)
Roger Ebert’s Video Companion (annually 1994–1998)
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook (annually 1999–2007, 2009–2012)
Questions for the Movie Answer Man
Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing from a Century of Film
Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary
I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
The Great Movies
The Great Movies II
Your Movie Sucks
Roger Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews 1967–2007
Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert
Scorsese by Ebert
Life Itself: A Memoir
A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length
With Daniel Curley
The Perfect London Walk
With Gene Siskel
The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas
DVD Commentary Tracks
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Citizen Kane
Dark City
Casablanca
Crumb
Floating Weeds
Other Ebert’s Essentials
33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity
25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart
27 Movies from the Dark Side
25 Great French Films
30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays copyright © 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
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ISBN: 978-1-4494-2148-9
All the reviews in this book originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.
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Contents
Introduction
Key to Symbols
Bad Santa
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Christmas in the Clouds
A Christmas Story
A Christmas Tale
Comfort and Joy
The Dead
Disney’s A Christmas Carol
Elf
Fanny and Alexander
Gremlins
Hannah and Her Sisters
Home for the Holidays
The Ice Harvest
It’s a Wonderful Life
Joyeux Noel
Little Women
Love Actually
The Muppet Christmas Carol
Nothing Like the Holidays
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
The Polar Express
Prancer
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
The Ref
Scrooge
The Thin Man
This Christmas
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas
What’s Cooking?
Introduction
The notion of movies to “get you through the holidays” sounds rather dour, especially since some of my choices are about people who are having problems getting through the holidays.
Many of these films have one thing in common: The holidays represent the only time of the year when families, especially those with buried issues, get together at all. A typical family film in the genre airs all the dirty laundry and opens all the old wounds.
One curiosity I’ve noticed is that Thanksgiving films are more likely to tilt toward the emotionally fraught, and Christmas films are more likely to be comedies and heart-warmers.
Setting that aside, some of these titles are just plain great films, no matter what. For example, What’s Cooking?; The Thin Man; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; and John Huston’s heartbreaking final film, The Dead.
One of these is just plain bizarre—Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Bad Santa pushes right through the boundaries of good taste.
The real sleeper here is Nothing Like the Holidays, about a Hispanic family in Chicago.
And the gob-smacker is The Polar Express, with Robert Zemeckis showing a virtuoso command of motion-capture animation. Yes, there’s a reason so many characters look like Tom Hanks.
ROGER EBERT
Key to Symbols
A great film
G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17
: Ratings of the Motion Picture Association of America
G
Indicates that the movie is suitable for general audiences
PG
Suitable for general audiences but parental guidance is suggested
PG-13
Recommended for viewers 13 years or above; may contain material inappropriate for younger children
R
Recommended for viewers 17 or older
NC-17
Intended for adults only
141 m.
Running time
2011
Year of theatrical release
Bad Santa
R, 93 m., 2003
Billy Bob Thornton (Willie T. Soke), Tony Cox (Marcus), Bernie Mac (Gin Slagel), Lauren Graham (Sue), John Ritter (Mall Manager), Brett Kelly (The Kid), Cloris Leachman (Grandma). Directed by Terry Zwigoff and produced by Sarah Aubrey, John Cameron, and Bob Weinstein. Screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra.
The kid gives Santa a carved wooden pickle as a Christmas present.
“How come it’s brown?” Santa asks. “Why didn’t you paint it green?”
“It isn’t painted,” the kid says. “That’s blood from when I cut my hand while I was making it for you.”
Santa is a depressed, alcoholic safecracker. The kid is not one of your cute movie kids, but an intense and needy stalker; think of Thomas the Tank Engine as a member of the Addams Family. Oh, and there’s an elf, too, named Marcus. The elf is an angry dwarf who has been working with Santa for eight years, cracking the safe in a different department store every Christmas. The elf is fed up. Santa gets drunk on the job, he’s screwing customers in the Plus Sizes dressing room, and whether the children throw up on Santa or he throws up on them is a toss-up, no pun intended.
Bad Santa is a demented, twisted, unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Santa in a performance that’s defiantly uncouth. His character is named Willie T. Soke; W. C. Fields would have liked that. He’s a foul-mouthed, unkempt, drunken louse at the beginning of the movie, and sticks to that theme all the way through. You expect a happy ending, but the ending is happy in the same sense that a man’s doctors tell him he lost his legs but they were able to save his shoes.
There are certain unwritten parameters governing mainstream American movies, and Bad Santa violates all of them. When was the last time you saw a movie Santa kicking a department store reindeer to pieces? Or using the f-word more than Eddie Griffin? Or finding a girlfriend who makes him wear his little red hat in bed because she has a Santa fetish? And for that matter, when was the last movie where a loser Santa meets a little kid and the kid doesn’t redeem the loser with his sweetness and simplicity, but attaches himself like those leeches on Bogart in The African Queen?