Your Favorite Holiday Movies — Page 2

I love to watch:

White Christmas

Mrs. Santa Claus (1996 TV movie)

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

It's a Wonderful Life

A Christmas Story

and Mickey's Christmas Carol

Definitely White & Planes

This may be hard for you to believe but.I have never seen It's A Wonderful Life

You prefer the 1994 version?

I don't necessarily think it's the better movie, it just happens to be the one all my fuzzy warm memories are attached to. Like "Santa Claus : The Movie", which is probably a dreadful movie but I just love it for sentimental reasons.

"Tangerine." By FAR.

Silent Night Deadly Night is the ultimate Christmas movie to me, because it is simultaneously entirely sincere and entirely ludicrous. It's either brilliant satire or absolutely stupid, and is my prime example of how something can be pure camp without even a touch of queer perspective or influence. The soundtrack album was just released last year and it's just as mixed message as the film itself.

Mister Matt said: "The Family Stone is first and then there's everything else.

" I forgot all about that one! So funny! HOLIDAY INN is another great one too

I love the 1951 version, too (though it gave me nightmares as a child), but for some reason, I've always found the 1938 version the most compelling and it's the one I always want to watch.

So glad to see the love for Scrooge here. That was the version of A Christmas Carol that is the annual viewing in my family. I love the score. Albert Finney is incredible, especially considering how young he really was at the time (I think it adds a lot that he was able to play the younger version of himself in this), and it's clear that Alec Guinness was having a grand time as Marley, especially when he really gets to ham it up for the added scene in hell.

Some of my other favorites are pretty standard: Home Alone (I still remember my parents and all their friends having an "adults" night out at the movies and telling all of us they were going to see Dances With Wolves, then coming home and telling us they actually saw Home Alone, you wouldn't believe how upset we all were), Christmas Vacation, and A Christmas Story (being born and raised in Cleveland I don't think we are allowed to dislike that movie), and Meet Me in St. Louis.

I like them all but I really like a lot of the Christmas Vacation movies. Also I enjoy some of the ones that were back in the day and like seeing the changes that they brought to the movie for the younger generation to enjoy. Like Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

Batman Returns

For me, the 1951 SCROOGE with Alastair Sim is the best adaptation of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, the best Christmas movie ever and the best adaptation of Dickens yet on film.

Alastair Sim's Scrooge is the best. Period. No one else comes close -- it is absolutely definitive. Sim's Scrooge moves from the darkest grimmest behavior (that horrible little smirk as he signs Marley's death certificate) to the most joyful ebullience (his elated dance on Christmas morning, singing "I don't know anything, I never did know anything, but now I know that I don't know, all on a Christmas morning" with everything in between.

Ultimately, I think what sets Sim's Scrooge apart from all the others that I have seen is this: he really seems to be sorry for what he has been in the past, and deeply ashamed of himself, and this regret shows itself in many interesting little moments, most touchingly in his appearance at his nephew's Christmas dinner. Reginald Owens' Scrooge greets his nephew's fiance with a smile and a kiss and that's it. Sim's Scrooge meets his nephew's wife with a shamefaced smile and a sincerely heartfelt yet gentle apology for his past behavior that never fails to touch me. There's even one remarkable quiet moment upon Scrooge's arrival at his nephew's home, a privileged moment of Scrooge alone, having to work up his courage to enter the party room. There's a little maid standing nearby, who has just taken Scrooge's coat, who smiles at him and seems to motion to him to go ahead and go in to the party. Scrooge responds with a little flicker of a smile that is one of the loveliest little moments in the film. And check out that little moment between Scrooge and his landlady on Christmas morning, as he's desperately trying to calm her fears at his sudden mad conversion -- when he asks her how much he pays her, there's this little appalled flash on his face when he hears the criminally low amount, which he forthwith raises 500%. And the final moment in the office with Bob Cratchit is sublime -- when his laughter fades into embarrassment and the line, "I've not lost my senses, Bob: I've come to them."

I'm not a big fan of the George C. Scott version. Scott's Scrooge is amusing in places, but I felt that it gave short shrift to the big wakeup moment at the end, it feels rather rote. This version does have my favorite Marley's Ghost, a really terrifying Frank Finlay. Finlay is the only actor I've ever seen to convincingly dominate George C. Scott. That hideous shriek of rage he lets out when he demands "Man of the worldly mind, DO YOU BELIEVE IN ME OR NOT?!?!?!?!" is just bloody hair-raising.

I rather like Finney's Scrooge, but it doesn't have quite the darkness that Sim's version has, somehow, and too many of the songs bring the story to a halt, especially Marley's. Finney's a marvelous actor and all, but I find his Scrooge unappealing, which is of course the point, but that ghastly whiny voice and scrunched twisted face get on my nerves after a while.

Never liked SCROOGED -- despite some good fun from Bobcat Goldthwaite and the sublime Carol Kane. Murray's smirking persona doesn't allow for the unbridled joy in humanity that the role of Scrooge requires -- he'll be back to his old assh*lish ways after a couple of drinks.