Mainlining Christmas

Just about everyone my age has some memory of watching this when they were young, although most of us can't seem to remember the details all that well.  Lindsay and I came across this in a drug store about a year ago and snatched it up. This viewing actually helped me put this in perspective.  By the time we got around to it, we'd already seen around seventy or eighty Christmas specials.  You'd think the burnout would work against this one, but, if anything, the contrast underlined just how good this special is. Before I get involved with that, let me take a moment to explain why such context might be needed.  The thing about Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (and, just to be clear, it is a THING, not an ISSUE), is that it's slow.  Last year, when I saw this for the first time in two decades, I found it a little too slow for my tastes.  If it makes sense, I wouldn't call the special "boring," but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't bored. T

At one point during this Lifetime Original made-for-TV movie, Lindsay pulled my hand away from my head to keep me from literally pulling my hair out of my head.  I tried to explain that I knew what I was doing, that it was distracting me from the pain.  She stopped me anyway.  I think, in time, I'll come to forgive her. This one was hard for me.  It's not that I'm a guy: I can take dramas, chick flicks, what have you.  But the thing is, I'm also a writer.  And, as such, there's a level of bad dialogue that will hurt me.  In high enough doses, it might even kill me. Like most Christmas dramas, this was actually a science fiction film, though it buried that fact beneath five metric tons of melodramatic nonsense.  Even so, the plot was a pretty straightforward time jump: the main character, a self-obsessed career woman, jumps forward ten years in her life to find herself a wife and mother, dutifully living out her husband's philanthropic dreams.