Christmas movies

Tuesday

Daniel Darling

In praise of Hallmark Christmas movies

You think the Christmas season starts when the Christmas decorations entirely take over Hobby Lobby at the first of November. Or the night of Thanksgiving when, full of turkey, you make your first gift purchase on Amazon. Or for us Christians, the first Sunday in December when kids bug us for that piece of chocolate and we begin reading about the birth of Christ. But we all know Christmas started earlier, perhaps back in October, when your wife began to turn her heart toward the Hallmark channel. Here is some advice from a happily married man of more than two decades: you won’t defeat Hallmark this year. You can only hope to contain it.

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Wednesday

John Ehrett

Violent Night is more than just Christmas carnage

The pitch meeting for Violent Night must have been fun: why not make a big-budget film where Santa Claus himself (David Harbour) must protect a spoiled rich family from a home invasion? It might even settle the age-old debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie: this is what a Die Hard-style Christmas really looks like! Violent Night largely delivers on that premise, serving up high-octane holiday mayhem for the grownup set. Here, we get a disenchanted (and borderline alcoholic) Kris Kringle, who’s grown tired of modern kids requesting only cash and video games and is contemplating hanging up his hat. We’re a long way from the jovial protagonist of The Santa Clause or even the crankier iteration of Elf. Years of munching Christmas cookies haven’t made this Santa soft.

Monday

Ross Anderson

The return of Lindsay Lohan

Falling for Christmas has a ridiculous logline: “Newly engaged, spoiled hotel heiress gets into a skiing accident, suffers from total amnesia and finds herself in the care of a handsome, blue-collar lodge owner and his precocious daughter in the days leading up to Christmas.” The Netflix romp is notable only as it marks Lindsay Lohan’s return to a genre that made her famous. “It’s such a refreshing, heartwarming romantic comedy and I miss doing those kinds of movies,” Lohan told Netflix, in earnest, while describing her character as, “Extravagant. Temperamental. Glamorous.” You could build a campy slasher flick or porno off such plot scaffolding; none would be great cinema. And yet Falling for Christmas is more complicated than that. Why?

lohan