Accidental Christmas movies

I have a rule about not watching Christmas movies after Christmas. My rule is so extreme that I don't even really like to watch a Christmas movie on Christmas day. Christmas Eve is pretty much my cutoff. So January 19th is certainly out of the question.

But when it happens accidentally, well, there's not a lot I can do about that.

This was the case with The Baltimorons, my penultimate viewing of 2025 before I post my rankings early Friday morning my time. I was already committed to my $5.99 rental by the time I was ushered in to the movie by the familiar sounds of what sounded like the Vince Guaraldi version of "O Tannenbaum" from A Charlie Brown Christmas. (Looking it up online, I can see that this was just composer Jordan Seigel's loving homage/ripoff of Guaraldi.)

There were two reasons I had to doubt/never consider that The Baltimorons might be a Christmas movie:

1) The title. It wasn't A Baltimorons Christmas or Jingle Balts or something that would have given it away.

2) The release date. When I looked it up on IMDB to confirm its eligibility for 2025 -- this being a movie I only recently realized I should watch, it being directed by a Duplass brother -- I saw that it had hit U.S. theaters on September 5th. The second half of the year, at least, but not otherwise within the logical range of releasing it in conjunction with the holiday.

Of course, if I'd actually read its synopsis, I would have been set straight: "A newly sober man's Christmas Eve dental emergency leads to an unexpected romance with his older dentist as they explore Baltimore together."

I guess in the end I'm kind of glad I didn't, because I would have skipped it and then might have continued skipping it in perpetuity. When December rolls around each year, we tend to watch new Christmas movies and classic Christmas movies, rarely seeking out the middle ground between the two. 

But it wasn't only liking the movie enough to be glad I'd seen it. It was that I happened to also be taking down our Christmas tree last night, so it seemed appropriate.

Yes in my house we keep our Christmas tree up for most of January. Traditionally we don't take it down until Australia Day, which is next Monday, but I'm starting early this year. I'm giving up the ghost on Christmas. My wife is out of town and has been so all month, tending to a family matter. She won't be back by Australia Day, so unless she reads this, she won't even know I took it down early -- nor will she care. But it's been dead for several weeks now and in the Australian summer, that becomes a fire hazard.

I was slow-walking the undecorating. I'd started it the day before, but then got distracted by another household chore, since I'm doing all of them myself at this point. (I'm not bothering to make my kids help me with them. Let them have their summer.) But I resumed last night while watching the Australian Open, and soon I'd gotten all the ornaments I could see removed from the tree. In order to help see them better, I turned on the Christmas lights for the first time in probably two weeks.

That looks nice, I thought.

So I didn't unstring the nights, deciding I'd let them illuminate my second-to-last viewing of 2025, whatever it might be.

And of course it ended up being a Christmas movie. I felt the coziness of the holiday there in my living room, even on January 19th.

And it's kind of nice that the Michelle Pfeiffer film Oh. What. Fun. is not the only new Christmas movie I watched in 2025. That one was forgettable, or rather, bad enough to be memorable, which is probably worse. It didn't give me that warm fuzzy feeling.

This one did, and I'll take it, even on January 19th. 

Just a touch of Christmas

I'm taking a cheeky few minutes to write a Christmas Day post before all the action starts. So I have to be quick here. 

(Merry Christmas, by the way!)

I mentioned yesterday that my problem with many if not most modern Christmas movies is that they absolutely strangle you with the Christmas. Every plot point is about some Christmas-related pageant, shopping excursion or decoration competition, and the movie is festooned with crass physical representations of Christmas -- or even tasteful ones that become crass through their sheer number.

Well, as I finished off my wrapping and cooking on Christmas Eve, this year I rewatched a film that has just a touch of Christmas by comparison.

Thomas Bezucha's The Family Stone is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. I'm sure that's not the reason most of those who are watching it this year are watching it. They are also honoring star Diane Keaton in the first Christmas after her passing, which is especially wrenching in a movie where she has cancer and is trying to wait until after Christmas to reveal it (best of luck there, no screenwriter would allow that).

The distributor didn't really know what to do with The Family Stone when they first released it in 2005. Although it had a Christmas release -- like, just before Christmas, on December 16th -- that angle was not particularly played up at the time. In fact, if you read this post that I wrote in 2012, you'll know just how little they played it up, including no mention of Christmas on the DVD copy, and releasing it on DVD the following April rather than waiting until November, as would be traditional for a Christmas movie. (You'll see from the poster above that they did ultimately conjure up some more traditional Christmas-related advertising for the movie.)

And maybe that was possible because of the aforementioned small quantity of Christmas.

If The Family Stone were made today, they would probably shove the Christmas of it down our throats. It's the same as they would never release Die Hard in July (or was it August?) if they made it today. Any Christmas aspect to it would have been amplified by studio notes, and the advertising would capitalize on it, 100%.

But though The Family Stone takes place almost exclusively on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, this is a movie about these characters, not specifically what errands they have to run related to Christmas. In fact, there is nary a Christmas errand in this whole movie, just a lot of conversations, some funny, more heavy.

In fact, on what I was suprised to discover is only my second viewing of the movie, I was even more surprised to learn what little percentage of this is actually geared toward laughs. Yeah there's that bit where Claire Danes' character takes a goofy header down the stairs getting off the bus, or where Stone brothers Dermot Mulroney and Luke Wilson engage in a comical wrestling match on their kitchen floor -- though it's anything but comical for the characters. And there are certainly plenty of jovial interactions. But there's also a melancholy hanging over this movie that only gets further explicated as the plot goes along. 

And thank goodness it's only a little bit about Christmas, because that allows all these tones to ultimately bring out the warmth, the combativeness, and the just plain seeming truthfulness of this extended clan, who just so happen to be gathered for the biggest Hallmark holiday there is. 

It's exactly the percentage of Christmas I needed this year -- enough to remind me that, in fact, it is that time of year, a time of year of great joy for some people and great pain for others. We're experiencing both this year, and that was better reflected in my Christmas Eve viewing by a movie that grapples with both, rather than shoving ugly Christmas sweaters down my throat for 90 minutes.

And as for Diane Keaton ... I was also surprised to find her to be less of the kooky Connecticut liberal mom than I thought she was, and than I eulogized her as when I mentioned this movie a few months ago when she died. She's a real person here, too, prone to her personal weaknesses, her judgments, her disappointments at how things are going in what she knows may be her last Christmas, when she should just let go and love as much as she can. 

That's to the credit of The Family Stone, and it's a reminder to us all to let go and love as much as we can, especially this time of year, especially since we are never sure how much time we may still have with the ones we love the most.

Cramming in a Christmas movie, somehow

There's a lot going on right now at my house.

That is both literal and metaphorical. 

At the moment we have as many as a dozen people spending a significant portion of every day in our house, three of them under the age of 12. The reason for this gathering is sad, but we the people are doing our best to be happy. That's all I can really say out of a sense of privacy for my family. I'll just say that it does not involve the health of any of the immediate three members of my family, or me.

As a result of this thing and of the crazy year I've had at work, my movie viewings have taken an absolute nosedive. Just to give you some idea of that, I've seen only 13 new movies in 24 days of the month so far. That would be plenty for your average person, but for me, it's pretty low. We aren't to the end of the month yet, so a full comparison is not yet possible, but I saw 29 movies in December of 2024. I no longer have to worry about shattering my 2024 ranking record of 177 movies. 

I did, however, finally see my first Christmas movie -- and probably only new Christmas movie -- on December 23rd. 

It wasn't the greatest 2025 Christmas debut, but hey, I still have Christmas Eve to wash the taste out of my mouth. 

That's the thing I find most unpleasant about most new Christmas movies, of which Michael Showalter's Oh. What. Fun. is a particular exemplar: their chintzy taste and general sense of garishness. This poster gives you some idea. 

When you watch a movie set in and around Christmas these days -- the Eddie Murphy movie Candy Cane Lane is another example -- the production designers have left things so chockablock with Christmas paraphernalia that you literally don't have a shot in the movie without a gaudy lawn ornament or a bad Christmas sweater somewhere in it. 

And though this is, in most movies, supposed to be at least partly a commentary on the crass commercialization of Christmas, it's us who have to spend our time immersed in this space. And at a time of year when we are feeling frenzied because of our own responsibilities, it hardly feels like a relaxing way to spend our downtime, further assaulted by the colors red and green and just reminding ourselves of the present we haven't yet wrapped and the complicated toy we haven't yet constructed. 

Oh. What. Fun. is supposed to be a distiff Christmas movie in that it styles itself as focusing on the mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) rather than the dad (in this case, Denis Leary), as every other Christmas movie in the past does. In fact, as part of the extremely meta and self-aware setup of this film, Pfeiffer even narrates as much as she goes through a literal shelf of VHS tapes of all these other movies focused on the harried dad at Christmas. The most instructive example for the structure of this film is probably National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which I also don't care for.

But because it's Christmas Eve, and it's been a very hard year, I don't really want to leave you with a glass of curdled egg nog on my blog, especially if I don't get a chance to write about the movie I hope to watch tonight -- and with all these people around our house, I don't know if I will.

I will say that I missed the opportunity to watch Home Alone yesterday with this big group of people, as they did it during the last hour of my workday. That would have been nice, though it isn't a personal favorite of mine and I may have seen it only twice. 

So if you get the chance, treat yourself to a Christmas classic over the next few days -- even if it is about a harried dad -- and leave some of these newcomers unwrapped. 

Merry Christmas all. 

I didn't miss Red One after all

One of the greatest Christmas movie calamities I can remember was the release of a 2004 film called Surviving Christmas, starring Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini and Christina Applegate. I've written about it on this blog before and recounted its salient talking points before, but that was back in 2010, and repeating a story every 15 years is, I think, quite alright.

Famously, the movie was released so early in the "Christmas season" (October 22nd) and performed so poorly at the box office ($15 million worldwide gross) that they released it on video in time for that very Christmas, to recoup any little bit of their $45 million investment. And that was in an era when the window between theatrical release and home viewing release was as wide as it has ever been. Releasing a movie on video a mere two months after the theater -- when theaters would, ideally, still be playing it -- was unheard of.

But times have changed, and in retrospect, there seems to be a certain brilliance to the move, even if it was born out of desperation. The drawback Christmas movies have always had is that they may do big business in the theater, but the home video market is likely to have significantly depleted profitability due to the fact that there is no point to release it there a mere three to four months after it was in cinemas. Because no one wants to watch a Christmas movie in February, you wait until the following year, at which point it's old hat -- or at least, no different than any other old movie a person chooses to rent or buy.

I have to think Surviving Christmas did make a little extra money on video just by virtue of being a "new" movie -- people always love the new -- and by being easily available at home when they still wanted to watch Christmas movie.

Nowadays, it was likely always the plan to release Red One on Amazon Prime in time for this Christmas, which they did last week -- even though they released it only a month before that in cinemas. That's in spite of how well it did in theaters, which was reasonably well: $175 million globally. That's nothing compared to a budget of -- am I reading this right? -- $250 million, so yes, it's not a hit, though it's more of a hit (percentage-wise) than Surviving Christmas was. Obviously not what they were hoping for, but it's not going to tank the studio or anything. 

I had resigned myself to missing Red One. Not with a huge amount of regret, but I do like to watch a new Christmas movie or two each year, and not just limit myself to the pap and dreck that's released on streaming. (That's an oversimplification, as some of the Christmas movies I've enjoyed most in the past ten years -- Klaus, Spirited and Jingle Jangle -- all went straight to streaming.) It was easy to see that Red One would lose out in a crowded field of awards contenders when vying for my limited viewing time.

But then the other weekend, I took my younger son to the theater to see Moana 2 as part of a birthday party for one of his friends. He was looking at one of the trailers playing in the lobby for Red One, with a certain knowledge of its existence and essential details that could have only come from interest (or watching something about it on YouTube). That was when I experienced a small amount of regret, as it could have been a way for us to usher in a Christmas season that has been slow to get started, in part because we are going overseas tomorrow, and therefore have not gotten our own tree or done much in the way of decorating. 

Then all the sudden, there it was, available for streaming. 

And I felt just like the Surviving Christmas viewers of 2004 must have felt, only with significantly more optimism. 

I had hoped to watch it with my ten-year-old on Saturday, but we are also building a deck -- don't ask -- and my wife was concerned about a preplanned engagement to watch the movie cutting short our deck time. However, it was clear we were ahead of our pace, so she happily approved the potential viewing. Only when I put it to my son, offering him either Saturday or Monday as possible dates, he opted for the Monday -- a small, but ultimately unimportant, setback.

I did watch it with him on Monday, on the hottest day of the year so far, when we were cocooned inside our air conditioned living room, feeling almost as cold as the polar climates depicted in the movie. 

I think he might have slightly preferred not to watch it, since kids have short attention spans these days, and the video games he would have otherwise been playing are more natural fits for that. The evidence of this was that at one point during the movie, he had to get up and "twirl around" behind our couch for a few minutes. Yes, he's prone to being antsy, but it doesn't mean he's not enjoying or doesn't have the patience for the activity in question. He might even do it during the brevity of a Simpsons episode.

But he hasn't yet turned 11 -- that's just a few weeks off -- so I still have him as a captive audience for another year or two, as a kid who would rather make his dad happy if all it takes is spending a little bit of his unlimited fungible free time. This time next year, it might already be that much harder to watch Red One.

And in the end, the movie was not a huge hit with him. He called it "alright," then tried to hastily upgrade his assessment when he saw my surprise at his middling level of approbation. (It turns out, his reaction to the movie was more in line with the general outlook than my own.) Probably two hours and three minutes is too long for this movie, but not when you consider how absolutely bursting with ideas it is -- both good and not so good.

Me? I had cause for my optimism. I ended up giving it a 7/10 in my just-posted review on ReelGood, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments when I flirted with an 8. Clearer heads prevailed, and by the time I actually wrote the review, I realized the things I had to say were more in line with a 7. 

But a 7 can be a pretty positive review, and it's way better than the half-star (out of five) I would have given Surviving Christmas if I'd been in charge of the star rating on the old site where I reviewed it. (In a now strange-seeming procedural move, some editor at the site gave a film a star rating based on available consensus, and it didn't matter if what you wrote was relatively out of sync with it.) (I just went to my old review site, AllMovie, to check to see what the star rating was, and this is how I discovered the fairly momentous news that the writing we all did back then appears to have been largely scrubbed from the site, replaced by a Wikipedia plot synopsis and a place for people to add their own reviews. This would be an even bigger deal if I hadn't printed out all my reviews at the time, though I must admit that this is a thought-provoking turn of events for me as a critic that may require its own separate post at some point. For what it's worth, the current star rating for Surviving Christmas is a quite-laughable three stars out of five.)

In any case, since this is a time of year for Christmas movie recommendations, I can give you one for Red One. It doesn't have any chance of entering the canon of classic Christmas movies, but it's a lot better than the average pap and dreck released directly to streaming -- and not only because it has that desirable imprimatur of having gotten released on the big screen just a month ago. 

Christmas movies aren't really about Christmas

I saw three new Christmas movies in 2023. 

Three of the ... carry the one ... 278 new Christmas movies there were on various streaming services and what have you.

If the three I saw were any indication, they've cracked the code for a Christmas movie: Just make a regular movie and add some Christmas stuff into it.

Family Switch, which we watched with my family and my mother- and sister-in-law on Christmas Eve, was an example of that. We ultimately enjoyed it quite a bit (which I can't say for the other two on this list), laughing a lot and ending with grins on our faces. 

But did it need to be about Christmas? No it did not. (I mean, the poster doesn't even have any holly or a Santa hat in it.) 

It's basically Freaky Friday, except both the kids switch with both of their parents, matched on gender. And it's sort of the second such movie Jennifer Garner has starred in. They even name check her film 13 Going on 30 just to make sure we didn't miss it. 

And whenever it goes too long without having anything to do with Christmas, they sprinkle in a carol on the soundtrack just to remind us. 

Maybe it's a Netflix thing. Netflix also put out the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Genie this year. It's basically just a genie movie, with a few scenes set in the snow and a few Christmas songs popping up to remind us. (This one was terrible. This and Candy Cane Lane, which does intrinsically have to do with Christmas, can duke it out to see which was worse.)

I'd be cynical about this, but after having my spirits lifted by Family Switch -- which was directed by McG of all people -- I'm less inclined to go that way. 

And since it's my instinct to leave you with a Christmas post that lifts your spirts, I'll put forward this thought:

Christmas movies aren't really about Christmas, anyway.

Even in the best of times, with the best of Christmas movies, Christmas is really just a backdrop. Yes we love these movies in part because they engage with the tropes of the holiday season, and they increase our sense of holiday good cheer. But even terrible Christmas movies do the first and try to do the second. The ones that succeed are a success because of something else about them ... some essential understanding of the world and the people who live in it.

So whatever you watch on Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day, or even in the days after it and leading on into 2024, I hope it has that keen understanding of life -- because the rest, really, is just window dressing.

Merry Christmas. 

For unto you this day, a lamb is born

As I continue to cram movies before my 2021 list closes in a couple weeks, there's only one reason I take a night off: total cumulative exhaustion. That means there's a movie all other nights, even Christmas Eve -- or Christmas itself, when you start watching the movie at 11:15 and don't finish until nearly 3 a.m. (I think Santa tiptoed through the living room while I was sleeping on a bean bag on the floor, my movie paused with about 20 minutes remaining.)

Christmas Eve was actually a two-movie night, considering that we did watch Elf -- again a big hit as it always is. That properly put us in the Christmas spirit that loaned an additional frisson of excitement to our remaining annual Christmas Eve traditions before the kids went to bed.

The goal for the second movie, on this holiest of nights (note my playful sarcasm), is to watch something that's compatible with Christmas -- or at least, not incompatible with it.

I took a gamble on Vladimar Johannsson's Lamb, knowing it had been chattered about joyously by cinephiles, knowing it might be batshit crazy, knowing it would push the limits of "not incompatible."

As it turns out, this is a lot more of a Christmas movie than you would ever guess.

LAMB SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

For starters, the very first image you see is wild horses trotting through a snow-swept Icelandic landscape. Snow is something I desperately need to be reminded of here in Australia, where it was hot enough yesterday for the kids to go swimming in our pool -- the fifth consecutive day of doing so since we arrived on Monday. And the horses? They easily reminded me of reindeer.

Then we go to sheep in a barn, surrounded by straw. It was very manger-like.

The icicles hanging from the barn continued that necessary dose of winter chill. 

Then we go to the house, to a man and a woman. She's wearing a festive red outfit and carrying a roast. There are candles lit and hymns playing. The movie doesn't specifically say so, but this could actually be Christmas night itself. The woman looks sad, though, so it's a melancholy Christmas, for reasons we will soon discover, related to the loss of a child.

Fast forward to what appears to be that spring. The man and the woman are delivering baby lambs. One particular baby is "special," possibly due to some sort of "immaculate conception," though we don't immediately learn what her special attributes are. We just know the man and the woman look at each other with a certain gravity leavened by hope, and begin taking care of the lamb in their own home, swaddling her, sleeping her in a cradle, feeding her bottles of milk.

It may be another ten or 15 minutes before we finally see that while this creature has the head of a lamb, it has the body of a human girl. 

"Immaculate conception" indeed. I mean, neither of them had sex with a sheep, did they? I suppose it would have to have been him. It wasn't an immaculate conception, but we go through much of the movie thinking it might have been before another batshit crazy reveal.

It wasn't boredom with Lamb that caused me to take naps during its second half, and, as I learned from reading the plot synopsis afterward, to sleep through about ten minutes of the action. No, the movie just succumbed to the same fate as every other movie I've watched during this epic week of moving into our new house and preparing for Christmas. I pressed on despite massive evidence of the "cumulative physical exhaustion" I mentioned earlier as a reason not to watch a movie, only yielding to that sensible advice on December 23rd, when I just couldn't fool myself into the attempt. 

But after today, after we host local relatives for a big Christmas lunch, and show them our new house for the first time, I can finally relax -- and maybe get through a movie without a half-dozen naps and finally retreating to my bed closer to breakfast than dinner. 

Merry Christmas all, and a lamby new year. 

Attention spans > seasonal appropriateness

A person in one of my film discussion groups on Facebook noted today that the February 23rd DVD release date for The Good Dinosaur seemed to serve as a particularly swift response to its underperformance at the box office. As you might imagine, the discussion that followed revealed that a three-month journey to video was pretty typical these days.

That led to the larger discussion of delays that violated that ever-shrinking three-month window, and I brought up Christmas movies. Last time I noted it, Christmas movies were still taking more like ten months to arrive on video, the thinking being that you want to have your big video unveiling at a time when people are actually thinking about watching Christmas movies.

That, too, seems to have changed.

I gave as my example the fact that I expected The Night Before not to release on DVD and BluRay until late October or early November. I had to provide an addendum to that comment when a quick internet search revealed March 1st as the date for its video/digital release.

It's a depressing concession to a reality we have willingly acknowledged elsewhere in our lives: Any particular phenomenon's window is extremely short-lived, and if you don't capitalize on that window, it will just disappear into the ephemera along with everything else we pause on for a moment before discarding.

Not that The Night Before is worthy of gaining a solid foothold in our cultural legacy. It was a disappointment. And even though some people in my audience were laughing, I don't see them collectively conferring the movie a new-classic status. Movies like Elf only come along infrequently. Elf was 13 years ago, and we're still waiting for something else like it to really captivate our hearts.

But I sort of liked the past scarcity of the Christmas movie. If you missed it one Christmas, you had to wait until the next one -- at least upon its initial release. It was like egg nog in that way.

Given what else I know about our society, I'm kind of surprised you can't actually get egg nog year round. Sure, it would make it less special, but what do its manufacturers care? If it meets a craving, people will buy it. And if that craving were being satisfied by something else, you'd think egg nog purveyors would take note and take corrective action.

I don't really have a point, I guess. If I sound disappointed by what I've learned today, it's probably a small case of devil's advocacy. More than anything it's just interesting to note that the thinking has changed on this topic. I don't usually follow these types of things, but I'll try to make a note of how The Night Before sells on video (physical and digital) when it releases on a date when most people symbolically start to think about spring -- which is actually the first day of autumn in Australia. (They change their seasons on the first of the month in the southern hemisphere -- Lord knows why.) More likely, I'll forget to do that.

More than anything, I just wanted to get a new post up so that Zac Efron and Robert DeNiro would not continue to greet the visitors to my blog.

The gateway drug to grown-up movies

Twenty fifteen has been a year of transition -- or at least, hoped-for transition -- for my five-year-old son, when it comes to the movies.

As he's gingerly taken the first few steps into live action, he's also recoiled in horror. Pan was obviously a mistake, but even the dog and penguin movie Oddball presented difficulties for him -- first in terms of boredom, then actual fear. Meanwhile, Inside Out and Hotel Transylvania 2 continued to prove his love for movies ... the right movies, that is. Taken in total, the year provided ample evidence that he wasn't ready for Star Wars: The Force Awakens -- superfluous evidence, as we had pretty much ruled it out even before any of the live-action mishaps of September.

Those were all theatrical screenings. Maybe we needed to try something at home instead. And maybe it needed to be a Christmas movie about a hilarious, oversized elf.

I got the inspiration to try Jon Favreau's Elf, which I consider to be in the holy triumvirate of Christmas movies (along with A Christmas Story and It's a Wonderful Life), maybe a month ago, though it could have been as long as a year ago. In fact, I remember people talking on Facebook last Christmas about showing Elf to their kids, and even asking them if age four was too young for it. At the time they told me probably not. I couldn't remember myself, because even though it's in my top 100 films of all time and I own it, it has shockingly been more than a decade since I've seen it. (I've probably seen parts since then, but not the whole thing.)

About a month ago I convinced my wife that "our son" (to use the phrase overused by Han and Leia) was ready for Elf, and that December 23rd would be the perfect time to do it. It'd be exciting for him because he could stay up past his bedtime to watch it out on the couch with Mummy and Daddy, he could eat that candy cane he'd been asking about all week, and if he didn't like it, all he had to do was go to bed. There would be no leaving the theater, no crying, no wasted money. Plus, staying up later on the 23rd would probably make him fall asleep earlier on the 24th, or so the thinking went. (We'll find out tonight for sure.)

Well, I'm pleased to say it was a total hit. Helped along by his father's encouraging laughter -- genuine laughter, but probably a tad more than I would have otherwise provided -- he instantly got how funny and endearing Will Ferrell was as the title character. And the rest pretty much went smoothly, with only a few hiccups that I'll get to in a minute.

Simply put, I was astonished by how well this movie is constructed to cater to the interests and attention spans of children. Even live-action movies that are more directly aimed at children -- such as Stuart Little and The Smurfs 2, which we've tried and sort of half-finished at home -- have a lot more dead spots, where a child's attention might wander. Not Elf. It is action-packed from the start, and never releases you from the grasp of its charm.

I did worry at the very start. The movie begins with the soft, folksy, almost intentionally boring rhythms of a Bob Newhart narration, and for a moment I thought a) the whole narrative structure they were going for might be over my son's head, and b) Newhart himself might turn him off. But he made it through that, which really is only about a minute of screen time before the action proper begins.

It certainly helps lay the groundwork that the entire first 20 minutes (or so) take place at the North Pole. This goes a long way toward telling a child "this movie is for you, and it exists in a world you love and are familiar with." So even when the action shifts (permanently, my son was sort of disappointed to eventually learn) to New York City, the memory of this being a North Pole adventure is still intact. Certain movies would have hurried to get us to New York, but Elf knows that showing us the world Buddy knows is key to us appreciating the world Buddy doesn't know, and seeing that world through his eyes.

Then of course there are the great touches of Buddy talking to the Rankin-Bass characters, the woodland creatures and the debonair snowman. My son hasn't seen Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer -- the next oversight I must work to correct -- but he obviously knew that kind of thing was aimed at someone his age. When the narwhal surfaces to wish goodbye to Buddy, I leaped at the opportunity, knowing that there's a narwhal in one of my son's favorite shows, Octonauts. He didn't instantly remember the name of that mammal, but a smile crept across his face when I reminded him of it.

He laughed at Buddy's long walk south -- "That's a long way to walk!" -- and joined us in the laughter over Buddy obliviously getting hit by a taxi, trying the revolving doors for the first time and taking his first steps onto an escalator, which turn into that long lunge forward that makes the best use of Ferrell's elongated body. I couldn't help but think of my son in that scene, both literally, when he tried his first escalator (something my two-year-old is currently grappling with), and figuratively, as the whole movie of Elf was kind of like a metaphorical escalator for him.

No, I'm not entirely sure all the laughter he produced was involuntary, or if some of it was social laughter to show us that he got the same jokes we did. But it kept him engaged, and that was the important part.

I had a worry early on when there was talk of whether Santa was real or not. Even the possibility that Santa was not real was not something I wanted him to think about. Fortunately, this movie's position is that Santa is absolutely, 100% real, so the lack of belief in him is a characteristic ascribed only to those on the naughty list. There's also that part where Artie Lange plays the department store Santa, and his beard is pulled off, revealing an imposter. My son did have a few comments about that, but they did not lead to the conclusion that all the Santas he's seen in various shopping malls have been imposters. (Not one that he voiced, anyway.)

He did get bored at exactly one point, and it's funny how easy it would have been to predict. It's that scene when James Caan's boss, played by Michael Lerner, visits him in his office and makes threats about the security of his job if he doesn't meet a certain deadline. A totally necessary scene for advancing the plot that probably lasts about 90 seconds. Yet this was enough time for my son to ask how much time was remaining in the movie, and my wife to get irritated and tell him that if he wasn't enjoying it he could just go to sleep. This was the only time that I feared we wouldn't complete Elf, and the fear proved short-lived as Buddy returned front and center in the next scene.

This is an astonishingly tight script. At about the 50-minute mark, my wife told my son that there was an hour left, and I worried that if that were really true, we certainly might lose him. But not long after that the movie starts moving in high gear toward its conclusion and wraps up in a neat and tidy 90 minutes, bringing a tear to my eye in several spots, as it always does. The fact that there is zero fat in this script makes it even funnier that my son's primary complaint about the movie was that it was "a bit long."

And being up until 9:15 meant that there were no bedtime shenanigans. No sooner had the movie ended than he disappeared to the bedroom and was not heard from again. Leaving his parents free to provide ample evidence of there being no Santa, by building the "pirate fortress" that Santa is going to bring him later on tonight.

So my hope is that Elf is what was needed to get my son over the hump, to make the next movie with no animated characters just that much easier for him to swallow. With a distant eye on the long-term goal -- being absolutely sure he's ready to go to the movies with me for Star Wars: Episode VIII in May of 2017.

Christmas in July in December

One of the most unusual movies to come out this summer had to be Happy Christmas, which released in the U.S. on July 25th.

As a movie, there's nothing "unusual" about it at all. In fact, writer-director Joe Swanberg would probably wear its "usualness" as a badge of honor, as the ostensible goal of mumblecore films (he helped found that movement) is to depict everyday life.

The unusual part is that a movie with the word "Christmas" in the title came out nowhere near Christmastime. Though they did throw the marketing team a bone by releasing on the 25th of July, which is the informal date of "Christmas in July." (We held our Christmas party that night at my old summer job, I can tell you that much.) The fact that the 25th happened to be a Friday, the traditional release day for new movies, meant they didn't even have to bend over backwards to make it work.

Still, salvaging a gimmicky release date doesn't mean that the move makes a lot of sense from a marketing perspective.

However, it does go with the film's sensibility. Movies about Christmas actually released at Christmastime inevitably carry big expectations ... big expectations that a Joe Swanberg movie was never meant to satisfy. A Joe Swanberg movie was better off being consumed by most of us on Netflix ... and its July release date meant that it was perfectly situated to be watched by most of us at Christmastime.

So my wife and I watched it on Sunday night, December 21st, with our own tree twinkling just off to the left of the screen.

And darn it if I did not enjoy the hell out of this movie.

That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Even though I traditionally love mumblecore -- the Duplass brothers can do (almost) no wrong in my eyes -- I did not really dig Swanberg's last movie, Drinking Buddies, which was (quite surprisingly) the first Swanberg film I'd seen. The characters in that film may be raucous and playful with one another, but there was an essential off-putting quality to them and a lack of warmth in the film overall.

Not so with Happy Christmas. I felt Joe Swanberg's empathy seeping through every frame of this movie. And I wasn't necessarily sure Swanberg had empathy, having watched him as an actor this past year in movies like You're Next and The Sacrament -- both of which I liked (the latter a lot more than the former), but neither of which is what you would exactly call optimistic about humanity.

Happy Christmas gets the humanity just about perfect, and in turn becomes a perfect delivery on the promise of the non-ironic reading of its title. It's not like there's no conflict here, but the conflict is life-sized and believable, and deals with relatable human foibles. Everything is so low-key that you aren't bracing yourself for some operatic tragedy in the third act. It's just a small-scale human dramedy set against a Christmas backdrop, with delightfully intuitive improvised performances from its cast of seasoned pros. (I always love me some Anna Kendrick, and I don't always love me some Lena Dunham, but she worked very well here in a supporting role. Plus, how often do we get to see Melanie Lynskey speak in her native Kiwi accent? Meanwhile, Joe Swanberg is so cool that he doesn't even include his own name on the poster, though he's got about the same sized role as the people he does list.)

Then there's the fact that the movie operated on a very personal level for us, dealing as it does with how to maintain your sense of self and identity while having to adjust your working life following the birth of a child. Both my wife and I have had to deal with that before -- she initially, me more recently. To make matters yet more relatable, Lynskey's character is trying to find the time to get back to her writing -- something my wife has been struggling with, especially since the birth of our second, but even since the birth of our first. Then you've got a woman from New Zealand married to a guy from America, living in America ... well, that was us just 18 months ago, if you swap New Zealand for Australia. So yeah, this was "our movie."

And it made for quite the nice Christmas treat.

For most of you, this will post will publish on your Christmas Eve. That means you still have time to watch it on the 24th or the 25th, since you almost certainly have Netflix, and you may not have already figured out what your Christmas-themed viewing will be.

It would have been plenty delightful in July, but it's all the more so now.

Merry -- make that, Happy -- Christmas, everyone.

Two Christmas movies there, none here

Being upside down on the seasons, I hadn't been as quick to notice that there were no Christmas movies coming out this year.

There's Disney's Frozen, which is opening on Boxing Day, but I don't believe it has any explicit connections to Christmas. It's a winter movie, not a Christmas movie -- coming out here five days into summer. Crazy world.

Oh but wait. As an email I just got from the Mission Tiki drive-in in Montclair has reminded me, there are Christmas movies this year -- two of them, in fact. They just aren't opening in Australia.

Ever heard of two little movies called The Best Man Holiday and A Madea Christmas? No one in Australia has.

Just as they never heard of Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor and Baggage Claim, two movies aimed at African-
American audiences that came out earlier in 2013.

I could have said "blacks," but there's a reason (other than political correctness) I chose the term "African-Americans." There is no equivalent phrase in Australia, so there's no solid business reason to release movies that allegedly only appeal to this demographic.

Lest you mistake these comments for an accusation of racism among Australians, nothing could be further from the truth. This is a country with a huge population of foreign-born residents. There are almost as many Asians in Melbourne as white people. There's also a huge population of Somali refugees in my neighborhood -- their children make up half of my son's schoolmates. This is a country where if you're a woman of devout Muslim faith, you can actually walk around with your face covered, and no one is calling homeland security. And of course, in much smaller numbers, there are Australia's indigenous people, the Aboriginal people.

There just aren't any African-Australians. There are plenty of Australians from Africa, but their arrival here is much too recent to have developed into a prominent demographic with its own share of the cultural market. And even if there were things being aimed at them, they would hardly be movies about American blacks, who are quite different from them in background and experience.

In one sense it seems odd that this small subsection of American mainstream films is being systematically shut out of Australia. In another, though, it's quite unsurprising. The movie business is not one where issues of political correctness factor in. There may be political correctness in the making of movies -- in fact, of course there is, which is why you get at least one token black character in almost every movie aimed at whites. Tokenism, of course, is merely a scheme for making more money, and only even seems like a win for political correctness if observed on the most superficial level.

In the distribution of movies, political correctness has no place whatsoever. A Madea Christmas and The Best Man Holiday would only open here if there was some sense that they could do business. And clearly there isn't.

I'm glad to say that the embargo does not include movies with primarily African-American subject matter. I did see The Butler here, and 12 Years a Slave is set to open on January 30th. But those movies also feature Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Robin Williams, Alan Rickman, James Marsden, John Cusack, Liev Schreiber, Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano and Benedict Cumberbatch. They are more than token whites. (My inability to get my hands on a DVD copy of 42? I blamed it on Australians' aversion to baseball, not to movies about American blacks.)

Again, not racism, just reality.

This is not to say there isn't racism in Australia. There's a ton of it. The history of relations between whites and Aboriginal people is littered with ugly incidents, including the period of time when Aboriginal children were stolen from their families to live with whites, where they could become something other than "savages." This occurred regularly from the beginning of the 20th century all the way to the late sixties. Only five years ago did the government even officially apologize for it. There are backward parts of this country where the intolerant hicks would make Klansmen blush.

But the Australians never had African slaves, which means they never developed a thriving population of freed slaves who would become a major ethnic group and one day demand the Australian release of A Madea Christmas.

This holiday season, that's something to be thankful for, I guess.

Christmas disowned

If you're selling something and there's even the flimsiest way to tie it in to Christmas, wouldn't you take that opportunity?

Not if you're the distributors of the 2005 movie The Family Stone.

More on that in a moment.

Around Christmastime each year, the conversation among film fans inevitably turns to the greatest Christmas movies of all time. Because it's been a notoriously weak genre, I always contend in these discussions that there are exactly three classic Christmas movies: It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story and Elf. I'm sure I'm drastically oversimplifying things (I haven't seen a number of the prominent Christmas movies from the 1940s and 1950s), and you could also argue that It's a Wonderful Life was never intended to be a Christmas movie. But I can never think of another title that I would elevate to this Christmas Valhalla beyond those three.

The discussion does get me thinking about the second-tier Christmas movies, the ones you really like, even love, but are not prominent enough to enter any discussion about the genre's touchstone films. One I might put forward is The Family Stone, Thomas Bezucha's generally unheralded 2005 film, whose all-star cast (seen above) suggests it should have gotten a lot more attention than it did. I really enjoyed this film, though part of that could be because it presents my idealized version of a modern liberal family (dysfunctional though they may be).

So when I saw it on sale last weekend at Target, it seemed a perfect choice for someone on my Christmas list (I'll remain vague who it is, on the off chance they're reading this).

Tuesday night I went to wrap it, and happened to scan the back of the DVD to read the two short paragraphs providing a plot description and evidence of critical praise. They are as follows:

"An incredible all-star cast shines in this deliriously funny comedy that 'balances heart and humor' (Houston Chronicle) with a 'sharp comic edge' (Rolling Stone)! Featuring Sarah Jessica Parker in a Golden Globe-nominated role, The Family Stone is 'engaging, enticing [and] first-rate' (Los Angeles Times)!

Corporate executive Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker) is as uptight and ultra-conservative as her pin-striped designer suit. Her boyfriend Everett Stone's (Dermot Mulroney) family are as relaxed and quirky as their aging New England Colonial. So when Meredith ventures out of Manhattan to meet Everett's clan, it's no wonder her arrival is met with all the enthusiasm of a nasty Nor'easter. But one surprise guest, two shocking romances and several beers later, Meredith's icy exterior begins to thaw ... and she may just melt the hearts of the Family Stone!"

This description makes the movie sound pretty lame, but it's about what I expect from the ad copy on the back of a DVD. These things are always written by people with an excessive fondness for exclamation points.

What's more troubling: No mention of Christmas whatsoever.

And it's not like this movie is only tangentially about Christmas. The whole movie takes place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, if I remember correctly -- in any case, the action starts no earlier than December 23rd. The whole lumpy Stone clan is gathered for Christmas, their area of Connecticut is blanketed in snow, and logistics related to Christmas comprise much of the action.

Yet Fox, which released The Family Stone, used the back of the DVD to play up a clash between political dispositions, which is really only a minor part of the story. (My wife and I actually went to a special screening of the movie on the Fox lot back when it was released.) Apparently, Fox had no interest whatsoever in any of the fringe benefits of being a Christmas movie.

My conclusion? The decision was made to help immediate DVD sales, since right after its release is when a studio can expect to make the most money on a DVD.

Unlike many Christmas movies, The Family Stone did not wait until the following November to come out on DVD. After a December 16, 2005 theatrical release (which, granted, is already very late in the season for a Christmas movie), the movie hit DVD for the first time the following April 17th. And it's true, at that time, its status as a holiday film would have very little value to the buying public. (Speaking of Elf, I just had an argument with someone yesterday about their decision to watch Elf for the first time in the month of April. When this person didn't end up liking the movie, I argued that she had set herself up to fail.)

While I get why they did it, the problem is, it brands The Family Stone as not a Christmas movie for the rest of its existence, therefore minimizing all potential future holiday sales. Could they really have thought that this movie would fly off the shelves in April of 2006? Wouldn't it have been better to sit on it for another seven months, then try to play up the Christmas angle (which wouldn't even need playing up, since the movie is all about Christmas) and try to establish this as a word-of-mouth favorite? Retailers will always be looking to sell Christmas movies to people each November, so The Family Stone could have been a modest seller for years to come, and maybe even outperformed that modest level if it caught on with people. That's also a time of year when shoppers are not particularly selective about what they buy, as long as they can check someone off their list. You could say that I myself did not buy this movie selectively -- I made the decision to buy it in under a minute. But I was only able to do that because I happened to already know that it was a Christmas movie -- which most people never will. (I know what you're now thinking -- "Vance, was it being marketed alongside other Christmas movies?" I don't think it was -- though its position of prominence probably meant that someone at Target chose to feature it specifically because it takes place at Christmastime.)

You could say they didn't really know what to do with The Family Stone from the start. Here was the original poster for it:

So not only were they not pushing the Christmas angle in the original advertising campaign, they were actually making it seem like some kind of assault on good taste, which it isn't. You could argue that they were trying to appeal to a darker Christmas audience, the kind that had made Bad Santa a modest hit two years earlier. But if that's what they were trying to do, wouldn't they have chosen at least some iconography related to the holiday?

Maybe Fox was just uncomfortable with this movie's politics, and having found themselves unwittingly in bed with a film that turned out differently than they expected, wanted to do what they could to bury it. After all, Bezucha presents Sarah Jessica Parker pretty unsympathetically here. It won't be spoiling much to say that she doesn't finish the movie as a one-dimensional stereotype, but she certainly starts out that way. Plus, the whole thrust of this movie is to sing the praises of the liberal mindset and make conservatives seem stiff and humorless. That couldn't have sat well at Fox corporate.

In this post I've been talking about seeing movies in a context that gets the most out of them, but as I conclude, I'm realizing that we are always setting people up to fail when we buy them Christmas movies for Christmas. I think you'd agree that the best time to see a Christmas movie is in the month leading up to December 25th. But when you buy someone a Christmas movie for Christmas, and they open it on Christmas, Christmas is already "over" for that year. Unless they want to wait until the following Christmas to appreciate their present, they will be watching it at a time when Christmas is no longer an upcoming excitement in their hearts, an event on the horizon symbolizing joy.

So I guess I'm hoping that at least one of the two Christmas movies I'm buying people this year gets watched that night, when the last vestiges of this year's Christmas will still be with them. Considering who I'm buying them for, that seems unlikely at best. But neither can I really suggest that they open the present early, because that ruins the fun of Christmas morning -- while also implying that I expect them to watch it before Christmas, and will be waiting for their full report.

At least The Family Stone should be just as good of a watch in April, according to Fox.

It's November 10th. Do you know where your Christmas movies are?

Whenever my wife and I were batting around screenplay ideas that we thought had a decent chance of selling, we would always come back to Christmas movies. It's a specific niche, and studios always need Christmas movies, right? Plus, they usually make money.

Then we talked to someone in the know, who informed us that the studios had such a surplus of holiday-themed scripts that they probably had their next ten years' worth lined up already. That's the flip side of this niche -- only two or three get released each season, at most, from all the studios combined.

Which makes it all the more strange that it's November 10th, and we have yet to even hear about which movies are filling those slots for 2010.

Do you ever remember going this late into the fall without even seeing an advertisement for a Christmas movie? In most years, the movie has already been out for a week by this point. Maybe that's why I don't already feel like Christmas is upon us this year -- in fact, for once, I've been allowed to let Halloween settle before being inundated with Christmas-related advertising.

There is at least one new Christmas movie this season, and it's a fairly lavish-looking one -- a 3D update of The Nutcracker, scheduled for release two weeks from today, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. That's certainly an appropriate time to release a Christmas movie, if you ask me. But this one, for all its apparent trimmings, is totally under the radar. Maybe it's because I haven't been going to the movies as much this fall, but I haven't seen it advertised once in the form of a trailer or a TV commercial. Even more surprisingly, I haven't seen any outdoor advertising for it, and that's the kind of advertising you can't escape, regardless of any changes in your schedule. In fact, the only reason I even knew this movie existed was because I saw it on a schedule of upcoming releases on the "2010 in film" entry on wikipedia. But even then, when I tried to link over to read more about it, wikipedia told me that a page did not yet exist for this film, and would I like to create one?

Oh, and the distributor? Some company called Freestyle Releasing, which has been responsible for such classics as An American Haunting, Civic Duty, Dragon Wars, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and The Collector. We'll see if it's actually 3D or more like 2 1/2 D.

Just to show you how strange the dearth of 2010 Christmas movies seems, I thought I'd go back to the exact moment when I truly recognized how early in the season Christmas movies were being released. It was 2002, and the second Santa Clause movie was upon us. (Which actually turned out to be a pretty good movie, but I digress.) Not content to go with the somewhat modest November 8th release date, Disney threw Santa Clause 2: The Escape Clause out there the day after Halloween. That's right, November 1st. And since that was a Friday, it seems possible some people were actually still having Halloween parties that night. "I can't make it to your Halloween party -- I'm going to see a Christmas movie." Maybe the person in question could have dressed up as Santa Claus for the Halloween party, then caught the midnight screening of The Santa Clause afterward.

In 2003, the first Christmas movie again arrived on the first Friday in November, but this year that Friday had the decency to land on November 7th. It was Elf, and it instantly became one of the great Christmas movies of all time.

Things got really ridiculous in 2004, and there was a price to pay. Surviving Christmas hit theaters not on the last Friday of October, but on the second-to-last Friday of October, I guess to avoid direct competition with the slate of horrors being released for Halloween. (That was the same year the original Saw came out -- seems like ancient history now.) Because this movie was absolutely terrible, and because it had been released on October 22nd, an unprecedented chain of events occurred: The film was actually released on DVD in time for the very same Christmas, just two months later. The whole thing became a mockery of the early release dates of Christmas movies.

It's probably no coincidence that there was some kind of market correction in 2005. Two movies that were not really Christmas movies ended up becoming that season's first Christmas movies -- The Ice Harvest and Just Friends, which were both released on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, November 23rd. The best and most legitimate Christmas movie of that season was The Family Stone, which was not released until the second week of December.

In 2006 and the 2007, it was either the first or second Friday of November again -- The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (November 3rd) in 2006, Fred Claus (November 9th) in 2007. I guess there was another market correction in 2008, because Vince Vaughn's second straight Christmas movie, Four Christmases, didn't hit theaters until the day before Thanksgiving, November 26th. But last year, it was back to that first November Friday again, November 6th, with Disney's A Christmas Carol. And because of how much money went into that movie, it was already being advertised pretty heavily by late September.

So what has happened in 2010 that studios have "forgotten" about Christmas this year? Oh, there will be plenty of "Christmas movies" in the sense of movies released to capitalize on the Christmas holiday, among them, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Little Fockers and Tron: Legacy. But the theme of Christmas itself will barely be seen at the multiplexes in 2010, with the exception of that one Nutcracker, and nobody has put enough money into it for you to even know about it.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Christmas movies are almost always disappointing. As a genre, they tend to be naked money grabbers, seeking only to capitalize on the American national fervor for the holiday that arrives on the 25th of December.

I do think it's a strange thing, and that's what I like to point out on my blog: strange, counterintuitive trends. Like the fact that the studios probably have hundreds of ideas for original Christmas movies pitched to them each year -- and those are just the ones that get past the nutcracker soldiers guarding the gate -- yet they saw so little potential in those ideas to even release one Christmas movie from a major studio this year.

Maybe quality does actually count for something.

Christmas in April

The Christmas movie is a totally unique type of movie. Here are three distinct things you can say about it that you can't say about any other genre:

1) It's the only type of movie you have to wait a whole year to see if you miss it in the theaters. While every other feature film arrives on DVD between three and five months after its theatrical run, the Christmas movie goes into hibernation for 11 to 12 months, since there's zero value in making it available for purchase in March or April.

2) It's the only type of movie you're absolutely guaranteed to find free for rental at any other time of the year, and have a hard time renting at Christmas -- even if it's a terrible movie.

3) It's the only type of movie where watching it outside its designated season of relevance feels bizarre.

This last is what happened with me this past Saturday, when I popped in The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.

That's right, I decided it was finally time to polish off that egg nog we had squirreled away in the back of the fridge, eat the rest of the holiday fruit cake, and take down the tree. Yes, we moved at the beginning of March, but we didn't take down our tree. We just loaded it on the truck and set it up in our new living room.

Actually, you can probably guess why I saw The Santa Clause 3 -- I was reviewing it. I'd requested it back when it was actually Christmastime, but didn't get a chance to watch it. Who can blame me -- I was also reviewing Deck the Halls, Fred Claus and the 1984 TV version of A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott. I was too Christmas movie'd out to fit The Santa Clause 3 on my viewing itinerary.

But when I get approved to review a movie, I also don't like to just let it sit there and go stale. If I planned to wait until it was Christmasy again before watching it, I'd have to sit on it for another year. It wouldn't be the first time, but it's something I try to avoid. Besides, my editor at the site has been swamped lately, and was slow to approve my recent request list of fresh titles. If I wanted to keep plugging away at my reviewing, I had to push titles like The Santa Clause 3 to the top of my queue. And, my reasoning went, it'd be easier to get them in April than November/December anyway.

And so it was that I pulled up a section of couch on the morning of April 18th, when my wife was still sleeping, and threw myself into the world Tim Allen's Kris Kringle, now a lot less reluctant to be the Big Fella than he once was, and his attempts to save Christmas from the clutches of the evil Jack Frost (Martin Short).

The experience reminded me of a Christmas episode of The Sopranos I once saw. At least one of my faithful readers may remember the season of The Sopranos that was either delayed, or scheduled all along to finish in early summer, even though the arc of the story was playing out in early winter. I remember watching the finale of that season, a particularly quiet finale with Tony and his brood standing around looking at the Christmas tree. Meanwhile, it was something like 115 degrees outside in the San Fernando Valley.

No one asked me to create that kind of disconnect when I watched The Santa Clause 3, but in the case of The Sopranos, it was a decision made by the writers, or possibly the schedulers at HBO who postponed their season.

But it does raise an interesting point: Is it legit to show a Christmas episode of a TV show in the month of June? It's hard to know how to work around that issue. Your viewers won't be in that frame of mind at all, and it runs the risk of souring a perfectly good episode, even on a subconscious level the viewer may not be in touch with. (And maybe it was the seasonal disconnect that made me remember the end of that season as flat). But what if you're a TV show that only runs in the spring, year in and year out? Does that mean your characters never get to experience Christmas? It's an interesting question, and I don't think I have an answer.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go move Santa Claus: The Movie, the 1985 "classic" starring Dudley Moore and John Lithgow, to the top of my queue.

If you think I'm kidding, just keep your eyes open for it in my "Most Recently Seen" section. Sometime in June sounds about right.