Is It Really Christmas Already?

It seems like it was just Black Friday last week.

Even though we crammed a lot of holiday cheer into this season, our list-of-things-to-watch is only getting longer. As I mentioned this year, researching one holiday special keeps leading us to more and more. Netflix sees our patterns and recommends more Christmas-themed stuff. We buy obscure movies and specials all year long whenever we find them cheap. So don’t worry about us running out of material anytime soon.

The thing that most surprised me this year was how many honestly enjoyable, quality movies we watched.

Some of the highlights of this year for me were:

• Meet Me in St. Louis - a classic movie musical, expertly crafted and gorgeously filmed
• The Apartment - another classic, this one quietly subversive, biting, and extremely clever
• 8 Women - a french film about family, anger, passion, and the judgement of women by women
• Mrs. Santa Claus - a sweet family musical about feminism and social justice in the 1910s, starring Angela Lansbury
• A Christmas Horror Story - a series of interlocking dark fantasy stories full of interesting characters and bloody twists

Of course, in the spirit of the holiday, we put up with a bunch of crap, too. But even terrible films and specials are fun to write about.

Some of my favorite reviews to write or read this year were the low-lights, like:

• Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever - it was easy to make fun of, much easier than it was to sit through
• Dear Santa (2011) - Erin had fun exploring the depths of stupidity
• A Princess for Christmas - I took the opportunity to give you all some training in higher-level holiday-movie resistance
• A Miser Brothers’ Christmas - I’ll admit it, I was downright inspired by the depths to which this sunk
• The Christmas Candle - I think Erin absolutely nailed this one

And then there were things that defied characterization.

• The Monster’s Christmas - fascinatingly weird, and weirdly fascinating.
• Nutcracker Fantasy - beautifully done, but makes very little sense
• Winter on Watership Down - not bad overall, but why does this exist?
• Chanuka at Bubbe's - the people who made this had their heart in the right place, it just wasn’t in the place necessary to make a good final product

We hope you had fun following along with the insanity this year. As always, we’re not going far, and you’ll see some off-season posts for things which are particularly timely or on the margin of ‘Christmassy-enough’ for us.

P.S. Did you get your gift yet?