Merry Christine to you

We've spent Christmas with Christine Baranski, but it hasn't been all egg nog and good cheer.

After being one of the best parts of The Ref, a movie we really liked, on the 23rd, she was one of the worst parts of A Bad Moms Christmas, our Christmas Eve viewing.

And we hated A Bad Moms Christmas.

Which is a shame, because I was wildly, irresponsibly, on the other side of the spectrum with the first movie, which I gave 4.5 stars and ranked in my top 15 of the year. This one I gave one star and was teetering on the verge of the dreaded half. (And Baranski looks nothing like the actress whose mother she is supposed to play, Mila Kunis.)

The first Bad Moms is probably not as good as I remember it, but this one is that bad.

But since I am writing these words on actual Christmas, I won't linger on the negative.

I did want to quickly mention that this is a funny movie to have watched on the heels of The Ref as it's a second straight Christmas movie that has an identity crisis on how to market itself.

We'd always planned to watch the Bad Moms sequel this Christmas season, and it was there for the streaming on Netflix. But as I could not be sure what kind of internet we'd have in our "holiday house" in Tasmania, I also picked up a DVD copy at the library, just in case.

Funnily enough, it was the DVD copy we couldn't use. The aspect ratio was too squished, and we just couldn't figure out how to correct that. Fortunately, it streamed just fine. (Or maybe unfortunately, as we probably would have enjoyed our Christmas Eve better had we not watched it.)

I noticed the DVD was titled Bad Moms 2, as the film was distributed in Australia, whereas Netflix bore the film's U.S. branding you see in the poster above.

Unlike with the aforementioned The Ref or The Ref's own predecessor in ambiguously branded holiday fare, Die Hard, A Bad Moms Christmas/Bad Moms 2 was not released at some other point of the year. And Australians are, if anything, even more Christmas crazy than Americans, even with the summer Christmas and everything.

Maybe they're wiser than Americans about protecting the sanctity of their favorite holiday. Maybe they didn't want to taint Christmas by affiliating the woebegone Bad Moms sequel with it.

Here's hoping your holiday viewings are untainted by inferior fare, and if you've hung your Baranski by the chimney with care, you get a Ref rather than a Mom. Merry Christmas!