Mainlining Christmas

Erin and I are on the same page with this one, I mainly want to add two small observations to Erin’s excellent write up. Patton Oswalt was right If you’ve ever heard the horror that is the Christmas Shoes song, hopefully you’ve also seen Patton Oswalt’s hilarious take-down (NSFW!!) . One thing that I noticed watching this extended version of the story is Patton Oswalt's complaint about the moral of the song is even more pronounced here. The poor woman’s death is there, primarily, to benefit the rich couple. If what’s-her-name hadn’t been sick, would Kate ever have found her true calling taking the poor woman’s place as the volunteer music teacher? Would she ever have been truly fulfilled? And of course the whole kid+shoes scene causes Robert (Rob Lowe) to reevaluate what’s important in life, and fix the incredibly minor made-for-TV-style problems with his marriage. I mean, for their part, I guess the widower learns that he should let his son have a puppy. Those are some

The Christmas Shoes: the legendary song by NewSong which has topped numerous lists for the all-time worst Christmas song ever recorded. As we all know, nothing this bad can go unadapted. Even before the song was finished being written, it was being turned into a book, which in turn became a televised movie in 2002. And now, eleven years later, we sat down to watch it. This movie is manipulative. It is not subtle about being manipulative, either: it's quite up-front about its intent. It wants you to empathize with its characters. It wants you to cry. It probably did not want us to laugh our asses off for most of the movie. Oh, well: you can't get everything you want. The Christmas Shoes starts out so bad it's good, then gets aggressively worse as the TV-movie goes on. I can't imagine watching this alone: you need someone with you, to help you retain your sanity. It's incredibly, amazingly - almost impressively - stupid. Written without a shred of nuance or

This is the first Spongebob Christmas episode made, but the second we’ve seen . It features a bizarre framing device and a plot about bringing Christmas to the inhabitants of Bikini Bottom. It’s actually hilarious. The episode opens with a holiday-ized version of the theme song, and then launches into a live action framing sequence with a “pirate”, similar to classic children’s TV. This guy recurs throughout the episode with a terrible puppet and commentary on the episode. It’s surreal, and ludicrous. We laughed a lot. The main plot follows Spongebob himself. After Sandy the squirrel explains about Christmas and Santa, Spongebob spreads the word to the other people of the town, and helps everyone decorate and write letters to Santa (via bottle-messages). There’s a funny musical number as they prepare for Santa’s imminent arrival. Squidward, of course, doesn’t believe Spongebob, and says that everyone will be angry when Santa doesn’t arrive after all. The resolution of the

It's strange that it took me so long to see The Ref . It's relatively well known, but somehow it always slipped below my radar. But it finally came up on my Netflix queue. The plot revolves around a thief who takes a dysfunctional family hostage on Christmas Eve to hide out from the cops. By and large, comedies about families with issues are just about the worst genre holiday entertainment has to offer, but miraculously, The Ref is actually pretty good. While there's a long list of things this movie did wrong, the filmmakers made several extremely smart decisions that elevate this to something worth watching. First of all, they cut the slapstick down to a minimum. Second - and maybe more important - they wrote some depth into the main characters. If the husband and wife had been two-dimensional, this thing would probably have been as bad as Surviving Christmas . Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the point. Fortunately, the husband and wife were well cast (Judy D

We came across this on Netflix and watched it on a whim. It's essentially a series of segments about Christmas trees and Christmas tree-inspired displays judged by TLC to be "extreme." The first segment is about a thirty-two foot tall Christmas tree that gets wedged into the Biltmore House by hand. There was a ridiculous amount of pageantry surrounding this: they actually drove it up the house in a horse-drawn carriage, a choice that almost led to disaster because horses, unlike trucks, don't have an emergency brake. The narration was particularly egregious while the tree was going up: they tried to ratchet up the tension. "With victory just a few feet away, the unimaginable happens." For those of you following along, the unimaginable was that they ran into a moderate snag which they quickly corrected before any damage was done. Of course, they did - these people are professionals, and they can get the job done even if they have to do so without machin

This isn’t a full episode, just a short. The nice thing about shorts is they don’t overplay their gimmick. In this piece, Dexter disbelieves in Santa, while DeeDee says he’s real. To prove his sister wrong, Dexter sets up a series of elaborate traps to prove that their father is Santa. I, uh, may sympathize with this a little too much . Due to classic cartoon logic, Santa is real, and Dexter ends up chasing him all over town using a rocketship built in their chimney. He’s convinced until the very end that it’s his dad, breaking out the special effects to trick the kids. This ends badly for all involved. It’s not brilliant, but it’s an amusing few minutes. If you want to hunt it down, it's part of Episode 37 in Season two.

In what may be the single greatest Fox News clip ever recorded, Megyn Kelly hosts a frank discussion about race with a bunch of white people. This video is required viewing: To recap, Jesus and Santa Claus are historical figures. And they were white. This actually contradicts the prevailing view that Jesus's precise ethnicity is unknown (though probably not "white") and Santa Claus is a mythical being representing an amalgamation of figures from folklore, as well as stories about a fourth-century bishop. But according to Kelly, both are historic figures, both are white, and this is a "verifiable fact." Break out the champagne, people, because this is the best news we could have hoped for. You see, there's only one way she could possibly be that certain about Jesus's skin color: time-travel must have been invented. That's right. Time travel. Because no self-respecting journalist - really, no human with even a shred of integrity - would eve