A Christmas Story Christmas Story Christmas ... with subtitles

On my side of the family, we have only one Christmas movie that has been passed down from the generation before mine; or rather, a Christmas movie that we jointly discovered in the first years of its existence, nearly three decades ago.

That's Bob Clark's A Christmas Story, but to call it "Bob Clark's" feels like a misplaced possessive. Clark was the guy who directed Porky's, and I feel like that's more indicative of his directorial output than this. (Want some more titles? He also directed Baby Geniuses and its sequel, the Sylvester Stallone-Dolly Parton movie Rhinestone, From the Hip, a movie called The Karate Dog, and of course Porky's II: The Next Day.)

But before this turns into a full Bob Clark dumpfest, let me at least say it's good he has this one outlier on his resumé.

It's been quite some time since I've watched it -- more than 15 years for sure. (I started keeping track of my rewatches in mid-2006, and it's not on that list.) And having my dad and his wife in town for Christmas seemed like the perfect occasion.

Making it all the more so is that the next generation, my kids, haven't seen it yet, though my wife has. (We must have watched it together the first Christmas we were together in 2005.) 

Our Friday night viewing was only a single viewing for everyone in else in my family -- my wife, who doesn't particularly care for it, was going to skip it, but ended up watching the final two-thirds and liking it better than she did the first time. For me, though, it was the first of a double feature, the second movie being ...

... A Christmas Story Christmas, the newly released sequel that finds Ralphie and his family 33 years later in 1973, days after the December 19th death of his father, and trying to make this a great Christmas so they don't always associate the holiday with his passing.

I had at one point considered having my dad (and the rest of us) watch the sequel, but he said he was fine just watching the original. Given the likelihood of it not being very good, that seemed like a good decision. 

And indeed it was the right decision, though I still gave A Christmas Story Christmas three stars on Letterboxd. That's well short of the five that its predecessor got, but at least it achieved the minimum star rating necessary for a recommendation.

The first movie got off to a potentially rocky start when the closed captioning was set into the ON position. This would have only taken a moment to correct, but seeing the captions as an option allowed my dad's wife to seize on the idea of leaving them on to assist her with the dialogue. (She says she's becoming hard of hearing, though it doesn't impact her in day-to-day conversation.) 

At first this annoyed me a bit. When you are watching a movie that you understand without subtitles, it can feel like quite the encumbrance to have them on. Try as you might, you can't really ignore them -- you end up reading them and then there's a temporal disconnect between what you're hearing and what you're reading. In some instances the captions reveal a joke before it's been spoken, for example.

I must say, though, that in the case of this movie, which relies heavily on Jean Shepherd's cleverly written voiceover as the adult Ralphie, it sort of added to my appreciation of the writing. There are some jokes that maybe I didn't get the last time I saw it (even though I've worked out I must have been 32), and having them spelled out for me only added to my enjoyment of the film, in the end.

And what enjoyment. The three of us on the coach -- my dad, me, and my dad's wife -- did the most laughing, but my wife and older son joined in as well. My younger son seemed sort of restless, but he claimed also to have liked it when all was said and done. (Incidentally, it should have been him sitting between the two of them on the couch -- what kid doesn't want to cuddle with his grandparents during a movie? -- but when he saw that his older brother wasn't going to take the bean bag chair, he said he wanted it. Yeah kid, me too. Three adults should never have to sit together on the same couch, even with a movie as short and as delightful as this one.)

I could tell my dad was really chuffed (to use the Australian word) to have watched it and to have gotten such good reactions from everyone else present. I had asked the kids to be on their best behavior in terms of exactly how honest they were in their post-movie comments. Fortunately, they didn't need to force positive words or a polite and toothless "it wasn't my favorite" sort of rejection. You can fake enthusiasm for something, but you can't fake the goofy grin on your face when you're watching something you enjoy.

My dad's wife shared some popcorn with my older son and everyone enjoyed a personal ice cream at the midway point, so it was a big win for Christmas Eve Eve. And by opting to watch it in the living room rather than on the projector in our garage, we got to have the lit Christmas tree -- which they helped decorate a few days ago -- shimmering warmly in our peripheral vision. 

The sequel started out strong enough that I was immediately kicking myself for not pushing harder to watch it with everyone, and mentally calculating whether the 48-hour rental window would still allow a Christmas Day viewing. Fortunately (I guess), it quickly stopped delivering -- not totally, but enough to reinforce the decision I'd already made not to watch it collectively. Though I suspect we all would have found it cute enough, and harmless enough, as was my experience of it.

One issue I had with A Christmas Story Christmas was that there were too many callbacks. Not only did they try to echo most of the vignettes from A Christmas Story, even straight-up repeating them in some cases, but Darren McGavin's "The Old Man" hovered over this movie ten times more than T'Challa hovers over Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. McGavin, like Chadwick Boseman, did die, but that was ages ago, in 2006. Although I certainly find him to be the funniest and probably best character in the original, it's hard to assume that your whole audience feels a huge amount of sentiment for him, such that his best lines from the original movie echo throughout this movie as Ralphie's memories. (Or maybe I just didn't need to be reminded of them because I had literally just seen them.)

Interestingly, although I was pleased to see how well someone like Peter Billingsley can still act, my favorite parts of the movie were two actresses who were new to the "franchise," if you want to call it that: Julie Hagerty, who has taken over from the still-living Melinda Dillon as Ralphie's mother (probably because she's 16 years younger), and Erinn Hayes, who I mistook for Lost's Maggie Grace, who plays Ralphie's wife. Both women are great and both spend a lot of the movie drinking. It's pretty hilarious.

It's a nice movie that seemed like it could have been ten percent better than it was without too much effort. But that ain't bad at all.

It was interesting for me to note that while both movies provide something of a window into my dad's and my childhoods, both are also just before our time -- in fact, by almost exactly the same amount. At Christmas of 1940, my dad was about 14 months old. At Christmas of 1973, I was about two months old. However, in both cases, the toys these characters wanted were still going strong when my dad and I were old enough to actually want them ten years later. My dad talks about his own Red Ryder BB gun -- he still has it -- and though I don't specifically relate to the Easy Bake Oven that Ralphie's daughter wants, I'm pretty sure my sister had one. (Ralphie's son wanted, and got, a sled, which was also something I wanted -- but his was a sled with the metal rails, while I always wanted the plastic-bottom ones.)

Anyway, it was a pretty nice three+ hours of Christmas cheer on the night before the night before Christmas.

If I don't talk to you again before it becomes Christmas where you are, I hope you have a merry one.