The Screengrab : 12 days of christmas marathon

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "A Christmas Story"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 20:30:00 GMT

A strange concatenation of circumstances hit me today -- it's Christmas Day 2008 at 9:45 AM as I write this. One was obvious, and one was tenuous, but both had a deep impact in my consideration of this, the last film I watched several weeks ago for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon and the last Christmas film I'll be posting about this year. The first was the discovery that a friend of mine, who hosts an excellent radio show in Chicago on the nexus of politics and popular culture, recently presented a special Christmas episode in which the central question was: has A Christmas Story replaced It's a Wonderful Life as America's most beloved Christmas movie?

On the surface, it's a pretty strange question. As often as it's shown -- and that's pretty damned often -- Bob Clark's endlessly re-watchable, terrifically funny tale of a young boy's Midwestern holiday misadventures in the late 1940s has never had the cultural ubiquity that Frank Capra's classic had during the years it was out of copyright. It can hardly be called contemporary anymore; it was made 25 years ago (as celebrated in a deluxe new DVD release that's highly recommended by this writer) and was set only a few years after It's a Wonderful Life. And the older film is a genuine four-star cinematic acheivment, directed by one of the towering talents of the Golden Age of Hollywood, made for a significant amount of money and starring some of the greatest screen stars of the day.

A Christmas Story, on the other hand, was directed by the guy best known for doing Porky's and who went on to direct tripe like Turk-182 and Super-Babies: Baby Geniuses 2. His previous holiday movie was the notorious Christmas horror flick Black Christmas. His stars were a seasoned TV pro, a veteran character actress, an untested child star, and two other kids who went on to have no career and a career as a porn star, respectively, with not a superstar in the mix. It didn't come close to delivering any message, any social meaning or psychological boosts of the sort that Capra's film was designed to instill. And, unlike the endlessly parodied and riffed-upon It's a Wonderful Life, it seemed to have little impact outside of its own: it was a singular thing, a ding an sich which could only be contemplated as itself.

And yet, if pressed, I'd agree: A Christmas Story really has supplanted It's a Wonderful Life as the go-to Christmas movie, very likely because of its singularity and uniqueness. Because it's been so endlessly parodied, the Capra film is hard to contemplate on its own, while Bob Clark's film is almost spoof-proof by design. For many, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed will always occuply some other role in their minds, but Peter Billingsley will be little Ralphie Parker for all eternity. Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon are so completely pitch-perfect in their roles that they will occupy them forever. And A Christmas Story's lack of ambition -- its small-scale determinance to do nothing but tell its simple story, so wonderfully crafted by Jean Shepherd, leaves it no chance to be bloated or hokey, simply funny and warm without cease.

The second, and more distant, event that influenced my writing of this entry was the death of Harold Pinter. What the news of the demise of a cerebral British playwright has to do with my appreciation of A Christmas Story might not be immediately apparent, but it's not as strange as it seems: Pinter not only pioneered the dysfunctional family drama which resonates so in the film, but he also was an early adopter of the comedy of discomfort and humiliation, with his use of the famed "Pinter pause" and the constant black comedy that can be wrought from embarrassment. Shepherd, writing in 1966 -- around the same time Pinter was doing much of his best work -- understood that sort of comedy perfectly: although his end result is heartwarming rather than soul-searing, almost all the laughs in A Christmas Story come from failure, despair, humiliation, defeat, and disappointment. It even culminates with Billingsley learning that most Pinterian of lessons: you can get what you want and still not be happy, whether what you want is a family or a Red Ryder BB gun.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An unquenchable 12 drummers drumming. There's simply no better holiday viewing to be had. Merry Christmas, readers -- and thanks for your support, as always.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: Bad Santa

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Joyeux Noel"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 18:45:00 GMT

It's easy to forget, while we're all enjoying the largesse of the holidays, exchanging gifts and eating rich food and enjoying the company of our friends and loved ones, that there's not one, but two wars in which our country is deeply embroiled. I had forgotten myself until I got to the airport on December 20th to visit my old home town, and saw how many military personnel were in the airport ready to do the same. There were so many of them, and all so young: most of them were just exiting basic training, and spending one last holiday with their families before they got their deployment orders and shipped off to Iraq or Afghanistan, where they will risk their lives daily in service of a conflict whose purpose becomes murkier with every passing day. It reminded me of the penultimate film I'd watched for the Screengrab 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: Joyeux Noel.

The background of Christian Carion's 2005 film is an odd but inspiring bit of World War I history: on Christmas Eve of 1914, German soldiers celebrated the holiday by placing little candles and miniature Christmas trees along the edges of the trenches in which they'd toiled and died since the war began. A few began singing Christmas carols in their native language. More or less spontaneously, they were joined by regiments of Scotsmen and Frenchmen, who at first sang along or favored the enemy with their own carols, and later made the brave -- or foolhardy -- gesture of actually leaving the trenches to meet their opposite numbers in No Man's Land. Precious rations and luxury items were exchanged as gifts; stories were told and songs were sung by those who shared a language.

For over a week, the unsanctioned -- yet completely successful -- truce remained in place. The Allies and the Central Powers played soccer together, exchanged photographs of their loved ones back home, and helped each other bury their dead, who had lain rotting in the free-fire zone. No shots were fired and no one was killed during that period, as ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances accomplished a peace that even the Pope had been unable to achieve. It would seem nonsensical -- and Carion's highly emotional film a manipulative piece of overly idealistic sentiment -- if it hadn't really happened, and been widely reported by witnesses in their letters home. For one brief period, the common humanity of these armed men, most of whom had no idea what they were fighting for, overcame the loathing of their commanding officers.

And it's the reaction of those commanders that provides Joyeux Noel with its grim gut-punch. As predicted by the film's memorable opening, where a choir of innocent, angelic-looking babes sing beautiful hymns pleading God for the utter destruction of their enemies, and as echoed in a chilling scene where a chaplain, delivering a speech to a group of new Scots recruits brought in to replace those who would not fight after their convivial encounter with the enemy, claims that the annihilation of the Germans is forgivable in God's eyes because the Germans are not beloved by Him, the leaders on all sides order a swift and merciless punishment for the high crime of refusing to kill one's fellow human being. The British generals vow that no such truce will ever be allowed again, and rotating shifts of soldiers are instituted in order to ensure that no one becomes too cozy with the fellows across the trench.

Joyeux Noel isn't a perfect film. The characters are often caricatures, and it lets its rank sentimentality pile up to bothersome levels at times. But it's a beautifully made film, with some tip-top acting from a largely unknown cast, and it gathers a massive power simply from the truth of its existence. As we find ourselves losing more of our children, our loved ones, our friends to a war that, like World War I, didn't need to start and should never have been allowed to continue, it's devoutly to be wished that both sides of these struggles are trying to find that common thread of humanity that led to a near-miracle in 1914. Even for those -- like myself -- who aren't of a religious bent, there's a powerful message here, as the official voices of God urge bloodshed and destruction, while the base sinners out in the field find themselves feeling the universal peace and brotherhood taught by Jesus Christ.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A tragic nine ladies dancing, the same way that Diane Kruger's Danish opera singer performs for the troops before seeing the true horror -- and the true humanity -- behind the war. Joyeux Noel (which was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, the BAFTA Awards, and the Golden Globes) will surely bring a tear to your eye, and lead you to reconsider what it really means to support the troops.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Dead

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "White Christmas"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

After the horrors of Silent Night Deadly Night, it was a relief that the next movie that showed up in the pile of holiday DVDs I drunkenly knocked over while prepping for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon was a good old-fashioned heartwarming musical. Of course, a lot of people really, really hate musicals, and would rather watch jolly old St. Nick ventilating craniums with a wood axe on endless loop than hear some cheeseball from the Golden Age of Hollywood belt out a single rousing number, so for some of our readers, this might be a significant turn for the worse. However, I will tell you now that those readers are wrong. White Christmas is a wonderful movie, and despite not having any killing in it (well, except for the World War II stuff, I guess), it is superior in every way to our previous movie.

White Christmas is what was once known in the biz as a "jukebox musical". This is where, rather than writing new songs for a production, a bunch of already-existing hit songs are thrown together, a half-assed 'plot' is woven to tie them loosely together, and they are unleashed on an audience who, it is reasoned, will make the jukebox musical a huge success, because you already know that they like these songs. Contemporary audiences tend to think of the jukebox musical as a relatively recent invention, the result of postmodern game-playing like Moulin Rouge and Broadway cash-ins like Mamma Mia!, but in fact, they've been around for centuries -- in the past, when popular songs were generally renowned for who composed them rather than who wrote them, the jukebox musical was ubiquitous.

There was no better acid test for the notion that jukebox musicals were more likely to meet with success thanks to the audience already being familiar with, and well-disposed to, the songs featured in them than White Christmas. Every song in the movie was by the incredibly successful and well-liked Irving Berlin, and the title track is one of the most popular songs in the history of the English language. (There's an old joke on The Simpsons where Mr. Burns laments that he once lost the chance to buy Picasso's "Guernica" for a song. "Luckily," he says, "that song was 'White Christmas', and by hanging on to it, I made billions.") It had been a massive hit all throughout the Second World War, and White Christmas used it as its can't-miss finale.

Paramount wasn't done stacking the deck, though. Besides hiring Bing Crosby, whose recording of "White Christmas" was the best-selling song of the 1940s (and subsequently became the best-selling single of all time), to play the lead, they crammed the cast with appealing superstars: Danny Kaye plays Crosby's war buddy and singing partner, and the two work with -- and fall for -- a dancing duet played by the gorgeous Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney at the peak of her singing skills. Directing chores were handed to the beloved and prolific Michael Curtiz, the script -- flimsy as it was -- was written by comedic pro Norman Panama, and the filming was done in VistaVision, Paramount's version of CinemaScope, and rich Technicolor that makes it one of the most gorgeous movies of its day. All this scheming paid off in spades, as White Christmas was far and away the top-grossing movie of 1954.

As for the plot...well, don't ask. It's as paltry as the plot of any other musical: Bing and Danny, war buddies under the command of a hideously toupeed Dean Jagger, visit a failing country inn their old CO operates in peacetime. Hoping to help him out, the two decide to put on a show, with the aid of the lovely and talented Mmes. Ellen and Clooney and an all-star assortment of background players, including a scene-stealing Barrie Chase in her first movie role. It's not really any more complicated than that, but with killer songs like "It's Cold Outside", "Heat Wave", "Blue Skies", and the song that its author called "the best song that anybody's ever written", who cares how slender the story is? If you can't be happy with some incredible songs sung by some purely brilliant entertainers, you should watch A Christmas Carol again and figure out which character is you.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A wild ten Lords a-leaping, one of which is the indefatigable Danny Kaye, brought in to replace first Fred Astaire and then Donald O'Connor. Rarely has a third choice been so inspired -- and inspiring. This is a great one to watch while you're not really paying attention, like when you're cooking or eating dinner or opening presents: it allows you to ignore the hokey plot and just let the tremendous music wash over you.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Muppet Christmas Carol

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Silent Night Deadly Night"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:15:00 GMT

How on Earth (good will towards men) did we get from good-hearted classics like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life to this schlocky mid-'80s slasher film from the dregs of the human spirit? Once again, I blame my heroic holiday intake of Christmas cocktails. As it happens, I was getting a little burned out on decency and kindness by the time I reached this point in the marathon, so I was more than happy to see a guy dressed up as Santa Claus take an axe to a bunch of innocent bystanders, but that's just how I roll. Don't show this to any children you may happen to have lying around the house; I saw it for the first time when I was 15, and look how I turned out. Revolution Number Nine in the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: the controversial cult classic Silent Night Deadly Night.

The movie, starring an astonishing array of actors you have never heard of before or since its release, generated a massive amount of controversy on its release. Its premise is simple enough: a traumatized young boy, whose childhood is marred by a bunch of unlikely coincidences involving Santa Claus, grows up to be a mad killer who takes the St. Nicholasian imperative to reward the good and deny the bad rather beyond its normal purview. Taken as high camp, it's actually not that bad, though hampered by some grade-Z acting and direction that it would be a compliment to call perfunctory. The script, based on a Paul Caimi novel called Slayride (!), is lively enough and clearly doesn't take its moments of high drama very seriously, but the movie caused a sort of national paroxysm of moral panic.

It's hard to say why, exactly. Sure, it's violent and exploitative -- but no more so, and indeed a bit less so, than plenty of other slasher films that were released around the same time. And yeah, the killer (played by Robert Brian Wilson, who, like many in the cast, never appeared in another movie again) dresses up like Santa Claus, but weren't we sufficiently jaded by 1984? In fact, it wasn't even a particularly novel concept: 1974's Black Christmas and 1980's Christmas Evil had covered the same territory. Still, the nation's critics and parents went collectively apeshit over Silent Night Deadly Night: the PTA attempted to have the movie pulled from theaters; the Moral Majority singled it out for vehement condemnation; Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert read its production credits on the air, uttering "shame, shame!" after each name; and Leonard Maltin speculated that the next step would be a child-molesting Easter Bunny, an appealing notion that has yet to be picked up by Todd Solondz.

The tidal wave of outrage that greeted Silent Night Deadly Night was way out of proportion to both its cultural presence and its content. It made very little money in a limited release (although it later picked up a cult following based mostly on its infamy), it was a minor studio release with no big-name stars attached, and its violence and nastiness quotient was well below what you'd see in a typical installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. And it's not like the deranged killer was dressed up like Jesus -- although part of his backstory, involving being abused by the Mother Superior of the Catholic orphanage to which he was sent after the death of his parents, was read by a number of critical as anti-religious bigotry. Combined with the detournement of Santa Claus (who was suddenly recast as a religious symbol instead of a commercial one), it struck a lot of religious right types as an all-out attack on the birthday of our Savior.

Curiously enough, though, director Charles E. Sellier Jr. has always denied that this was the case. The Catholic orphanage scenes, he insists, were always just a gimmick to get the plot rolling along, and had no anti-clerical intent; and, as if to atone for his sins in making Silent Night Deadly Night, he spent the rest of his career writing and producing direct-to-video religious fodder like The Case for Christ's Ressurection, In Search of the Historical Jesus, and The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark. Still, despite a flood of truly abysmal sequels, his creation remains a curiously watchable little aberration, and has given us one of the all-time great movie taglines in "He's dreaming of a red Christmas". The movie is set to be remade next year by Alexandre Aja, who no doubt will ruin its ragged charm by taken it completely seriously.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An odiferous, fat, and clucking three French hens. Honestly, this isn't a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it can be enjoyably hooty if you're well in your cups on Christmas Day and looking for a break from the non-stop good feelings. Cram it into your DVD player, banish the kids to go play with their new toys, and warn them afterwards what can happen to little boys and girls who are naughty.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Muppet Christmas Carol"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Alert readers may recall that, while I'm posting the reviews of the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon movies in dribs and drabs over the days leading up to Christmas, I actually watched them all in sequence over the space of two days in a bleary haze of rum-soaked egg nog and seasonal affective disorder. I had a highly formalized plan for which movie to watch in which particular order, but I drunkenly knocked over my stack of DVDs after the fifth movie, and then I just watched them in the order in which they fell on the living room floor. I was hoping that it would be late in the day by the time I had to get around to watching some variation of A Christmas Carol -- I find the irascible-old-bastard Scrooge largely preferable to the lover-of-all-humanity Scrooge -- but here's where it turned up, so you're going to have to read about it.

My own misanthropy aside, it's not surprising that Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas has become one of the most beloved holiday stories of all time. It's got a little bit of something for everyone: a sincere, adorable crippled boy, for treacle fans; a handful of truly memorable characters; abundant humor, some of it rather more mordant than one might expect; a creepy ghost story; and, best of all, a central plot that appeals to lovers of Christmas everywhere: a cranky old jerk who hates Christmas has, after a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, a legendary change of heart and embraces the holiday in full, becoming the very embodiment of the spirit of giving and showering those poor souls he previously spurned with largesse.

Dickens write A Christmas Carol for the same reason he wrote a lot of his most famous work: for a paycheck. But it ended up having a much more vast impact on our entire culture than its author possibly imagined. One of the most widely-read stories of the English canon, its familiar story and infinitely flexible formal structure have led it to become one of the most widely-adapted stories as well. The number of stage plays, movies and very-special-episode television series based on the story are probably uncountable; as long as there is economic injustice, as long as there are lazy scriptwriters in love with the flashback gimmick; as long as there are cranky old jerks who, justfiably or not, aren't as into the holidays as the rest of us, there will continue to be new movie and TV versions of A Christmas Carol.

Just to mix things up a bit, I chose as my preferred adaptation this time around the 1992 felt-puppet version of Dickens' classic. Made just after Muppet maven Jim Henson died, it didn't do that well on its initial release, but gained something of a cult following on home video. There's plenty of inside jokes and a clever framing device of the story being narrated by Dickens himself (played by the Great Gonzo) and a comic foil in the form of Rizzo the Rat; the story is surprisingly faithful to the original; the casting of balcony naysayers Statler and Waldorf as Jacob Marley and -- ho, ho -- his brother Robert is inspired and leads to the movie's best musical number; and best of all, Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge proves that, just as he can turn in a great performance in a bad movie, he can be intensely human and affecting while acting opposite a stuffed bag of felt.

You'd be forgiven, naturally, if you chose a different movie version of A Christmas Carol as your favorite; there's enough good ones to make a 12 days of Christmas marathon of nothing but this particular story. The 'canonical' version is probably the 1951 British adaptation Scrooge, carried on the strength of an unforgettable lead performance by the wonderful Alastair Sim, but there's also the 1970 Albert Finney version, a 1935 adptation starring Leo G. Carroll, the George C. Scott-as-Scrooge TV movie from 1984, a 1999 television adaptation with slices of thick British ham from Patrick Stewart, Joel Grey and Richard E. Grant, Henry Winkler's An American Christmas Carol, Bill Murray's post-ironic 1988 adaptation Scrooged, and animated versions starring Mr. Magoo, the Flintstones, and a bunch of talking dogs that all have their fans.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An enjoyable 9 Muppet ladies dancing. This isn't the best Muppet movie, but it isn't the worst, and its relentless charm is hard to resist. Henson's son Brian and Steve Whitmore do a solid if uninspired job of carrying on the Muppet tradition, and there's the usual blend of kid-friendly shenanigans and clever jokes and references for the grown-ups. Caine's performance as Scrooge, though, is what really steals the show.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Star Wars Holiday Special

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "It's a Wonderful Life"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Eight films into our little holiday movie marathon, we finally arrive at the one that most of our readers who haven't spent the last sixty years in the Witness Protection Program in a cave on Mars have probably already seen a dozen times or so: Frank Capra's legendary 1946 Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life. While there's been dozens and dozens of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, there's only one It's a Wonderful Life: despite decades of references, parodys, homages and metacommentaries, the big-screen adaptation of the Phillip Van Doren short story "The Greatest Gift" remains one of a kind. Thanks to an inexplicable chain of events that led to its falling into the public domain for a number of years, it was shown on pretty much every television station at Christmas for decades; finding someone in the U.S. who hasn't seen it is next to impossible.

The challenge when discussing It's a Wonderful Life, then, isn't to explain its plot or detail the great things about it: these are things most people know intimately from repeated first-hand experience. The challege is to think of something new to say about a movie that almost everyone of a certain age has seen, probably more than once. Frank Capra's surehanded direction, the solid script (primarily by Capra and Frances Goodrich), and iconic performances by screen legend Jimmy Stewart (whose interpretation of George Bailey is more responsible than anything for the cultural shorthand we now have for him), future television star Donna Reed, and Hollywood patriarch Lionel Barrymore are the building blocks for a film that defines the word "Capraesque", but what makes it resonate so? It it simple repetition that makes this the Christmas classic above all others?

Entire books have been written about It's a Wonderful Life, and we'll be breaking no new ground in discussing the film in our limited space. But one thing worth mentioning is that how terrifically effective the entire cast is: at a time when the star system was in full swing, Capra and his collaborators (which included script doctors in the uncredited form of Clifford Odets and Dalton Trumbo) populated Bedford Falls with an entire star system of great actors and actresses, many of them character types who gave the performances of their careers in the film. The entire cast seems to take their acting cues from the oversized yet surprisingly natural performance of Jimmy Stewart, who had to be talked into playing the role -- his first since returning from a traumatic tour of duty in WWII.

One thing that's finally getting a due amount of attention after years of being glossed over in critical overviews, at a time when "Capraesque" was misguided jargon for simple-minded patriotic feel-good movies, is how deeply dark and sometimes subversive It's a Wonderful Life can be. Mixed in with all the appropriately heartwarming stuff about family, neighborliness and the power of choosing life is some undeniably cynical, nasty commentary on life as we live it. Capra lets his social-realist background bubble surpringly to the fore considering this is a movie with a bumbling trainee angel named Clarence in it, and for a movie most parents feel totally at ease showing to their children, there are many dark hints of suicide, prostitution, economic ruin, and anti-capitalism so pronounced that the FBI was said to consider the entire film merely an elevated form of Red propaganda designed to soften up our citizens to commie anti-banker rhetoric.

J. Edgar Hoover's boys weren't exactly off by a mile. Frank Capra meant for It's a Wonderful Life to be inspirational as well as confrontational, to show an American spirit challenged and often miserable if always ultimately triumphant. This was the only major motion picture to be produced by Capra's Liberty Studio, a venture designed to showcase serious issue-driven films about what it means to be an American; but even if it were the only major motion picture Capra ever made, it would be enough. In a way, it's fortunate that RKO's operators made the foolish mistake of not renewing the film's copyright at a critical time: when It's a Wonderful Life slid into the public domain, it ensured that it would be viewable at least once a year by audiences who might not have otherwise gotten a chance to see it, and fully take in its hidden depths.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An unparallelled 12 drummers drumming out a message of hope and redemption. Simply one of the greatest Christmas stories ever told, as well as one of the finest movies of its era (even if it did get screwed by the Motion Picture Academy. If you have the chance, I'd also recommend a viewing of Hirokazu Koreeda's masterful After Life (Japanese title: Wandafuru Raifu), a brilliant, unforgettable film that isn't a holiday movie but purely and beatifully distills the esence of It's a Wonderful Life -- its primary influence -- in an astonishing way.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nighmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Elf"

Leonard Pierce — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Hello again, and welcome back to the sixth installment of the Screengrab's trip through some beloved (and some not-so-beloved) holiday film fare, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon. While, technically, the twelve days of Christmas extend all the way into January and culminate in Epiphany, I'm sure you'll all be too hung over by that point to be able to deal with any Christmas cheer. Plus, most of us will be back at work by January 6th, and we don't want to be the movie-blog equivalent of that one guy on your block who annoys the whole neighborhood by leaving his Christmas lights up long after the joy and wonder of the holiday has vanished. So we've got a lot of movies to get through in the next three days. Let's start with the 2003 Will Ferrell vehicle Elf, which is now general considered a canonical new-classic Xmas flick.

In the spirit of full disclosure, and to further reinforce my reputation as Bob Cratchit and Scrooge inhabiting a single body, I'll admit that, as big a sucker as I am for Christmas movies in general, I didn't think much of Elf when I first saw it in a theater. I was in a bit of a lousy mood at the time, but that doesn't alter the fact that there really is a lot to dislike here: the delicate balancing act between po-faced sincerity and winking, snarky sarcasm, for one thing, doesn't always work, and the movie's tone can come across as artificial. The pace is a bit manic, the premise is undersold, and Ferrell's performance is unneccessarily called upon to carry the entire movie, which is a shame, given that he's surrounded by tons of extremely capable actors. And Jon Favreau's direction can be charitably described as 'clunky'.

The story of Buddy, an orphan child who crawls into Santa's bag one lonely Christmas and ends up the only stranded human at the north pole, gets some early-running gags -- some predictable, others hilarious -- out of the notion of a normal child (especially one as hulking and clumsy as Ferrell) being raised among the elves. Not enough time is spent on this appealing notion, which is especially regrettable given that Buddy's father is played, in a rare screen appearance, by one of the absolute masters of awkward comedy in the person of Bob Newhart. But one of the appealing things about Elf, which becomes much more clear on repeat viewings, is how economical it is: it's constantly making a dollar out of a quarter, milking the script's gags for more than they're worth and making the most out of Ferrell's screen presence.

Indeed, I even surprised myself at how much more I liked Elf each additional time I saw it. It could be argued that I had allowed familiarity and comfort to stand in for quality, but I don't think that's necessarily the case here: a lot of the movie's strengths go beyond script and direction, and for the few wasted performances (there could have been so much more to the character of Buddy's real human father, especially when played by an actor as capable as James Caan), there's always a compensatory moment where an actor does the absolute best with what they're handed, such as Faizon Love, Ed Asner, Peter Dinklage's scene-stealing bits and Bob Newhart's determination to make even his somewhat pointless opening narration a thing of comedic beauty. And, of course, there's Zooey Deschanel, at maximum adorability.

Of course, some parts of it never get better, such as the occasional cloying moments, the overall 'off' feeling of the tonal quality, and the hammier bits of Ferrell's moon-faced performance -- whether those are the fault of the actor or the script they can be extremely grating. And Favreau's direction in his second full-length feature film never gets any better no matter how many times you watch it. But it's at least possible to watch Elf now as the work of a man who's learning his craft, not the work of a man who doesn't know or care about what he's doing. Elf will never be a great movie, or even a great holiday movie, but it's at least an appealing little Christmas tidbit, a tastly little morsel that goes down easy, and at worst, makes you feel slightly guilty that you're overindulging yourself so much on your vacation.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A respectable if undignified 7 swans-a-swimming. Its placement in the middle of the pack of my personal 12 days of Christmas marathon proved to be quite appropriate: it's neither the bottom-feeding camp-only tripe at the bottom or the transcendent art at the top, but merely a non-fattening treat to keep your energy up in the middle. Watch it in the late afternoon, unless you're an angry elf.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Video of the Day: Bad Santa

Leonard Pierce — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:15:00 GMT

It's going to be a light posting week here at the Screengrab, as we all spend time with our loved ones and relations at this sacred time of year. However. we didn't want to leave you without at least one Video of the Day -- this one, a clip of one of the funniest scenes from our 12 Days of Christmas Marathon favorite, Bad Santa.

We know we end up asking one of Billy Bob Thornton's questions to at least one relative per year at the family gatherings. No, not "What's the house number?"

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Video of the Day: Gremlins 2.5

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Dead"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Okay, that's enough of the goofball so-bad-it's-good stuff. We all enjoyed taking a gander at bizarre foreign intrusions, both Mexican and Wookie, into the Christmas traditions in the form of Santa Claus and The Star Wars Holiday Special, but by the time I was done with those two, I needed a nice healthy dose of holiday melancholy to remind me that the festival season can be one of ineffable sadness as well as inexpressable joy. And nobody does ineffable sadness and inexpressable joy like the Irish, so I decided to get things back on the straight and narrow with John Huston's final film as a director, The Dead. Though it's not often thought of as a traditional holiday film, its action takes place on Epiphany, which in the Catholic calendar is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas. And, considering how important the role of epiphany was in his writing, it's no surprise that this is based on a short story (from Dubliners) by the mighty James Joyce, who, like Huston, was an Irishman through and through despite his sometimes standoffish relationship with his homeland and its culture.

The Feast of Epiphany, like Christmas, is a time for family gatherings, for coming together and for realizing how important your friends and relations are in your life. Joyce needed little reminding of the subject; he lived most of his life in the long shadow of his family, for good and for ill. Likewise, John Huston -- literally deathly ill when he made The Dead, the third movie of his highly improbable but hugely successful late-stage comeback -- knew how important family was in his life. His own career as a successful actor and director had been predicted and preplanned by his father, Walter, and The Dead featured a fantastic screenplay by his own son Tony and a tremendous performance in the lead role by his daughter-in-law Anjelica. Like the characters in the story, Huston was surrounding himself, likely for the last time, with the people who loved him, and in the shadow of the people who made him, for one last realization, one last epiphany. The result is one of the smallest and quietest, but also one of the greatest, films of his career.

The action of The Dead, such as it is, revolves around a celebration of the Feast of Epihany in the company of Professor Gabriel Conroy (movingly played by Donal McCann, heading an almost all-Irish cast) and his wife Gretta (a stellar job by Anjelica Huston). The course of the evening's conversations -- and that's all there is to The Dead, conversation and memory and observation and realization -- will reveal a young love of Gretta's which has, through the course of her marriage and her entire life, lingered like an unquiet ghost between her and her husband. As they pass the hours at the home of Gabriel's aunts Julia and Kate, played with lovely grace and competence by Cathleen Delany and Helena Carroll, the professor will realize, in a stunning display of what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls the solidarity of irony, that he is capable of feeling intense affection and regret for someone he has never met, a long-dead rival for his wife's affections: and that because of that, he is capable of loving his wife all the more.

Joyce's work carries an emotional power that is often entirely internal -- its great revelations and transformations take place not in the world we can see, but in the much vaster world that exists inside our heads. The Dead is no exception, and presented John Huston with the challenge of showing us in a visual medium what is actually happening where no eyes can see; but he succeeds admirably by use of a deeply sensitive script and a more than capable cast. The Dead is filled with melancholy and even sadness, but in the purest spirit of the holidays, it's a sadness that binds, that brings together, that makes more human. In the rhythms of the Epiphany feast, in the stories told a thousand times, in the familiar songs sung, the predictable jokes laughed at, and the great sorrows of the past recalled, John Huston -- living out the very story he was filming -- reminded us of why shared unhappiness is just as vital as shared happiness: because it is shared. It is the snow that falls on the living and the dead alike.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A hearty Irish 11 pipers piping. If The Dead isn't a perfect holiday film, it's an intensely felt and enormously moving one, and one of the few that both fits into the mood and spirit of Christmas and is removed enough from it to be a film worth seeing at any time of year.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Santa Claus"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Last week, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon took a bit of a turn in the direction of high-camp lunacy with a look at the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special Today we take an even harder left, into the realm of utter derangement, with a look at the innocuously named yet completely bonkers "Mexiscope" classic Santa Claus. The only holiday film, to my knowledge, to get the full-on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment, Santa Claus is a joint Mexican-American production from 1959. It was written and filmed south of the border on an ultra-low budget, and then re-edited by American schlockmeister K. Gordon Murray for a stateside audience. Who exactly this American audience was supposed to be, however, is left unanswered, as the movie makes no sense whatsoever in the original Spanish and actually crosses into negative sense-making in its English translation. Incomprehensible, culturally deranged, acted by people who weren't quite up to the high professional thespianic standards of professional wrestling, and so cheaply made it looks like it's peeling, Santa Claus is the movie equivalent of toys you buy at the dollar store.

Part of the problem with Santa Claus is that Mexico isn't entirely in synch with American Christmas tradition, so, just as the Japanese adapted jolly old St. Nick into "Annual Gift Man", the original producers of this movie envisioned Kris Kringle as a sort of extraterrestrial wizard whose goal is to turn children on the path of good and thwart the wiles of his crafty arch-enemy, Satan. That's right: the villain of this movie is none other than the Lord of Lies himself, and his wicked henchman Pitch, whose job it is to tempt the children of Earth, embodied in Mexican waif Lupita, into abandoning the true path of Santa and shoplifting toys for the greater glory of Lucifer. Luckily, Santa has his own right-hand man -- the wizard Merlin -- who supplies him with an arsenal of Dungeons & Dragons magic items, including sleeping powder, a skeleton key, and a flower that will make him invisible. Are you following all this? Because it doesn't get any less complicated from here.

Pitch, the gibbering little dope, has little success tempting the saintly Lupita to the ways of Satan, but he does have some success with a troika of bratty boys, recruiting them into a wacky scheme to kidnap St. Nick, steal his bag of toys, and, worst of all, make him a slave so that he will manufacture playthings in the name of the Devil. Along the way, he also manages to sic the cops on the Christmas icon, attack him with an angry dog, and generally make him wish he'd never left home, which for some reason is a futuristic floating cloud in outer space instead of a toy factory at the North Pole. Of course, you'd live there too, if it meant you got to play with cool shit like the Ear Scope, the Teletalker, the Cosmic Telescope, and the Master Eye; all this, combined with the garishly surreal set design, makes Santa seem like less of a beloved Christmas icon than a psychedelicized Big Brother. (He also employs kids in his workshop instead of elves, although it's not clear if that's an improvement or not by worker's rights standards, and when children don't fall asleep fast enough to suit him, he dopes them up with a mysterious substance that probably comes from a cut-rate Tijuana pharmacy.

As might be expected from the man who brought the world Robot vs. Aztec Mummy, there's all sorts of intensely strange stuff happening in Santa Claus. The jolly elfin hero has a disturbing laugh much more suited to a prison snitch than a cultural symbol of kindness and giving; Satan is portrayed by an actor nicknamed "Trotsky"; the dialogue -- much of which was translated by Murray himself -- has a hilariously stilted, Engrish-style literalism to it ("I promise, oh Priceless Prince of Hades, that by my many wiles I will finish Santa off forever, and see that the children commit terrible deeds, and make Santa Claus angry!"); and there's so much zaniness going on in every scene that it almost seems intentionally crazy rather than just inept. (What to make, otherwise, of Santa's mechano-zombie reindeer, which appear to be robotic but which crumble into dust at the sight of sunlight? Or Satan punishing Pinch by making him eat chocolate ice cream, which negatively affects his Satanic metabolism? Or the serious nightmare fuel of li'l' Lupita's dream visitation by an evil doll who tries to make her steal things?) Whatever the intentions of its various filmmakers, Santa Claus is truly one of a kind, and best of all, in our modern DVD age, it's available in any city with a large Latino population for no more than three bucks.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An robust and tasty 6 geese a-laying this rotten golden egg. It's surely not a good movie by any reckoning, but it's one that you'll never, ever forget -- show it to kids at your peril, because they'll be describing it to their therapists later.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Star Wars Holiday Special"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:25:00 GMT

The third episode of our trip through some of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time isn't actually beloved. Notorious would be a better word. Infamous would be another. It also isn't a movie; it's a television special. What's more, it isn't even a television special you can go rent at your local Blockbuster, or queue up via Netflix. In fact, unless you happen to have been watching CBS at 8PM Eastern Time, November 17, 1978, you've probably never seen it. Or, unless you have one of the approximately one hundred billion bootlegged copies that have been floating around sci-fi conventions for the last 30 years. Or unless you have Google video. Anyway, you sure as hell are never going to see an official release: George Lucas -- the man who willingly released Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith into theaters -- has said that he is so ashamed of the Holiday Special that if he could, he would hunt down every copy of it in existence and smash them to pieces with a sledgehammer.

How bad is the Star Wars Holiday Special? It's so bad that even Star Wars geeks, many of whom pretend that the second trilogy wasn't relentlessly awful and have paid real cash money for Star Wars novelizations, think that it's a bad joke. It's so bad that Harrison Ford, during an appearance on the Conan O'Brien show, attempted to deny that he even remembered doing it. It's so bad that it goes beyond so-bad-it's-good into so-bad-it's-actually-terribly-bad and back around into so-bad-it-in-fact-is-immune-to-such-meaningless-abstractions-as-bad-and-good. It's so bad you feel sorry for Jefferson Starship for having had to be in it. Unless you have spent two hours being savagely tortured by members of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it is the most excruciatingly long two hours you will ever spend.

Written and produced during a brief period of time when it wasn't completely certain how humongously successful the Star Wars mythos would become, its creators decided to cash in by putting together something that combined the worst elements of the sci-fi classic with the utter dregs of 1970s variety shows. To get one thing out of the way, the Star Wars Holiday Special does contain the first appearance of Boba Fett, in a nifty little animated sequence by Canada's legendary studio Nelvana. Beyond that, though, it is 100% utterly horrible and awful from the first frame to the last. It's so bad, you don't even know how it ended up on TV even in the late '70s. The plot, such as it is, involves Chewbacca's quest to defy an Imperial barricade and get home to spend "Life Day' -- a sort of outer-space super-Christmas -- with his Wookie family. But the Special isn't so much a story with a plot as it is a bunch of completely disastrous moments strung together so incoherently that it makes you want to commit suicide. At times, you begin to suspect that the Star Wars Holiday Special is what the head of the Silver Shamrock Corporation should have gone with in Halloween III instead of those lame masks that turned kids' heads into bugs.

Picking out the worst moment of the Star Wars Holiday special is like picking out the worst moment of the Second World War: it's really just one unspeakable horror after another, only WWII ended sooner. Every time you think you've seen a scene that is as ungodly bad as it can possibly get, another scene that's even worse shows up, and then you look at your watch and you realize that there's still an hour and a half left to go before it's over. A mere listing of some of the most memorable scenes should be enough to scare off any sane human being: there's the scene where Chewbacca's wife, son and father -- Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy -- bellow at each other in Wookie-speak (which resembles a couple of dying walruses bellowing at each other) for something like fifteen minutes, with no subtitles. There's the scene where Art Carney walks around with his shirt open to the belly-button talking about how he loves to make a Wookie happy. There's the scene where the nauseating old freak Itchy watches Wookie porn, which involves Dihanne Carroll manning a futuristic phone sex line, and makes profoundly disturbing Wookie pleasure noises. There's the scene where an Imperial storm trooper watches a Jefferson Starship music video for no discernable reason. There's the scene where Mark Hammill shows up wearing more makeup than Joan Crawford (and looking considerably less butch, to boot). There's the musical number by a coked-out-of-her-gourd Carrie Fisher, which would be the worst musical number in television history if it weren't for the fact that it comes after an even worse musical number by Bea Arthur. (Yes, that's right, Bea Arthur is part of the Star Wars canon, and there's nothing you can do about it, fanboys.) There's not one, not two, but three comedic roles by Harvey Korman, one of which involves him playing an outer space version of Julia Child called Chef Gormaanda. There's the scene where Han Solo kills a guy just to break up the monotony. And more, more, so much more.

The Star Wars Holiday Special is mind-numbingly bad, but it has a special cachet because of its inexplicable attachment to one of the most popular film franchises of all time. Fans of utter kitsch will enjoy it on its own merits -- I mean, honestly, this thing reeks so bad it's simply amazing that no one breaks character and asks director Steve Binder just what the fuck he think's he's doing -- but for Star Wars fans, it's virtually a rite of passage: if you can watch this colossal stench-bomb, featuring almost all the original cast, and still call yourself a fan, no one can dare question your loyalty to the franchise ever again.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An uncontrollable 2 turtledoves crapping all over your kitchen. The only way this thing could possibly be any worse is if it had Jar Jar Binks and/or Hayden Christensen in it.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "Bad Santa"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Welcome to installment #2 of the Screengrab's leisurely holiday stroll through some of the most beloved Christmas movies in holiday history: the 12 Days of Christmas marathon! You certainly don't have to do what I did, and watch all of these movies in a row over a period of two days, but if you do go that route, make sure you have a really comfortable chair and a lot of stuff to mix with your eggnog. For our second go-round, we decided to follow the path set for us by The Nightmare Before Christmas and move on to another movie with a somewhat jaundiced view of the season. But while The Nightmare Before Christmas was a harmless kid's toy, the equivalent of a scampish M-80 in the toilet of Christmas cinema, today's movie is substantially more dangerous and unpredictable, a grenade pitched into a urinal.

Released in 2003, Bad Santa was the second narrative film directed by Terry Zwigoff, and his first attempt at full-blown comedy. It's a movie that could easily have gone astray: the last thing the world needs is another picture about a cynical, world-weary rogue who cons his way through Christmas only to find redemption and learn to love again at the hands of a good woman and/or an adorably winning urchin. And to be sure, Bad Santa has those elements in spades, to the degree that plenty of people, already leery of Zwigoff's ability to handle broad humor as adeptly as he'd handled teen angst in his previous effort Ghost World were getting pretty nervous. Casting Billy Bob Thornton, who had already been tempted to the dark side of mediocre but high-paying blockbusters, didn't help much.

But audiences and critics who doubted what the combination fo Zwigoff and Thornton were capable of in this most subversive of holiday fairy tales were severely underestimating how far they were willing to go to fuck up the formula. Although there are tiny moments of redemption buried in the mountain of hiliarious sludge that make up the movie, they carry around them not a whiff of treacle, because of the degree of virulence the director and star apply to their extended middle finger to the genre. Willie T. Sokes isn't just some tired old wag who's seen one too many people being naughty on Christmas Eve; he's a genuinely loathesome old creep so impossibly degraded that even the kind of life-changing redemption that such movies save for their third act would manage only to transform him from irredeemable to merely disgusting.

And Bad Santa doesn't stop there in its ruthless determination to make hash out of one's expectations from this sort of thing. The adorably irascable sidekick is an African-American elf so breathtakingly foul-mouthed that he wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Deadwood, and he doesn't like the main character very much either. The love interest is a hopeless superfreak. And best of all, the adorable waifish child, in whose name the hero is expected to get his shit together and walk the narrow path towards salvation, is less an elfin Dondi clone than a borderline sociopath fat kid who inspires feelings of helpless creep-out. Like a lot of holiday movies, this one is about lost souls finding each other; but once they do, they don't know what the hell to do with each other, or even particularly like each other very much.

Bad Santa isn't a perfect movie. It oversells itself on occasion; it goes for one too many cheap gags; and it does, at its black and evil core, want us to walk away with a song in our hearts and the sun on our shoulders. But happily for those raised on a steady diet of the unpalatable saccharine of most holiday movies, it's still admirable and highly successful in its determination to ape the formal structure of those movies while yanking the rug out from under them at every turn. It's not the kind of thing you want to share with the whole family, but it's a hell of a funny movie, and after the stress of spending 14 hours with that one uncle who keeps telling the same story about when he worked at the dog food factory in Newbridge, it's the perfect palliative to too much holiday cheer.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An acrobatic 10 Lords a-Leaping. Despite its early placement in the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, this is one you probably want to save for after darn on Christmas Day, when you and your special someone are cranked full of enhanced adult beverages and sick to the gills of all the fake-ass festivities.

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The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Nightmare Before Christmas"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:20:00 GMT

If you are anything like me -- and why wouldn't you be? -- you're a sucker for Christmas. The arbitrary yet somehow natural-seeming traditions; the carols which somehow only sound right when you've got just enough bourbon-fortified eggnog in you; the extra days off from work; the fact that people give you free stuff wrapped in shiny paper; the way everyone pretends to be nice to each other for a change: what's not to like? It's also one of those Western cultural touchstones so universal (suck it, Judaism!) that pretty much everybody gets into the act; despite the bogus claims from pouty conservatives about a "war on Christmas", the birth of Baby Jesus is still commemorated on almost every TV show on the air, and Yuletide is second only to summer as a Hollywood high holy day.

So, in the spirit of this year's Summerfest series -- where I lazily Netflixed a dozen or so movies with "summer" in the title and reviewed them so you'd know what to watch while the pool guy skimmed the drowned crow out of your Jacuzzi -- I present the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, where I get drunk and watch some of the finest Christmas movies that Hollywood has crammed down our throats, and ask: will this movie fill you with holiday cheer or seasonal depression?

First up is 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, also known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in Disney Digital 3-D, although a more accurate name for it would be Not Actually Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas or even Hi Everybody We're Henry Selick and Caroline Thompson and We Directed and Wrote This Movie Respectively And What Do We Have To Do To Get a Little Credit For That?'s The Nightmare Before Christmas. While Burton created the lead characters and wrote a poem that served as the movie's inspiration, he had very little to do with making the film itself, and the fact that he's generally given all the kudos for it is a shame, because if nothing else, it proves how other people are capable of taking his quirky, creepy aesthetic and running with it.

Made using a daring, innovating, and highly striking form of 3-D animation, The Nightmare Before Christmas uses the clever (and somewhat underexplored) notion that all holidays are represented geographically in an otherworldly tableau to tell the story of Halloween bigwig Jack Skellington -- voiced by Chris Sarandon, with song vocals by the film's composer, Burton stalwart Danny Elfman. Jack happens upon the existence of Christmastown, and, meaning well but flummoxed -- and slightly jealous -- of the universal love showered on its big shot, one "Sandy Claws", resolves to cut in on his action. Hilarity ensues, lessons are learned, and all that standard Christmassy crap, but filtered through a truly weird visual sensibility.

One thing that director Selick and screenwriter Thompson share with Tim Burton is a sort of whimsical disregard for the conventions of storytelling. Setpieces ramble one to the other, and the story rolls gregariously along without ever making a lot of sense -- you get the idea that the filmmakers were as impatient as some of their younger audience to get on to the next bit of cool stuff. That said, the movie is breathtakingly gorgeous, with incredibly clever and intricate visuals that took as much time and effort as the story didn't. (There's currently an exhibit of some of the models used in the film on display at an art museum here in San Antonio, where I live, and seeing them up close, you get an unexpected sense of how elaborate and careful the building of them was; it's clearly no accident the movie looks as good as it does.) Kids old enough not to be freaked out by some of the jarring elements of the movie will adore its highly successful visual style, which blends cute and creepy in a way rarely seen outside of Japanese animation, and adults will be engaged by the swell performances and the overall intricacy of the movie's design.

Despite the Halloweeny themes and the often shocking visual play, there's really nothing gloomy or depressing about The Nightmare Before Christmas; it's an old-fashioned entertaining all-ages romp like rarely gets made any more, and the songs, while not exactly unforgettable, are loads of fun while you're experiencing them, especially "The Oogie Boogie Song", a monster's rollicking threat towards a kidnapped Santa Claus. In contrast to Burton's own weepy-assed Christmas effort, Edward Scissorhands, the only bummer to be found is that some of the great talents on display in the voice cast -- including Paul Reubens, Catherine O'Hara, and Glenn Shadix -- don't get nearly as much work as their talent deserves.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A solid 8 Maids a-Milking. The story and the script won't stay with you past Christmas morning, but it's a pure good time you can sing along to after you've gotten deep in the punch bowl Christmas Eve -- and you won't even have to chase the kids out of the living room.

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