Shit Christmas: Christmas With The Kranks

Tim Allen has starred in four Christmas films throughout his career. I've seen all of them. This isn't even the worst one.

Shit Christmas

The Partially Educated Review

In 50 Words or Less: Conform or die! That is the moral of this film. Don't watch it is the moral of this review.

In Detail: The first thing that may throw you with Christmas With The Kranks is the opening credits, namely the bit that says that this is based on a novel by John Grisham. Yet there's not a taut legal proceeding anywhere to be seen. Instead, we've got Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple who decide to forego Christmas, rather than face the prospect of spending it without their daughter. If this was a normal scenario, everyone would ignore them and allow them to continue with this plan as they wish. I'd have been a lot happier if this was the case. Instead, we get Dan Aykroyd leading the sort of villagers that you'd usually expect as a precursor to a load of teenagers getting slaughtered. Aykroyd doesn't like the idea of a gap in his street's festive displays and so he sets out to force Christmas upon the Kranks. God forbid if a Goldstein or Patel family move in.

But this is not a film that wants to dwell on the possibility that Christmas may not be celebrated in some households. Instead, it wants to bring us all in to a sheltered existence in which Christmas is the only thing that matters and what better way to do that than accepting your own cult-like neighbourhood and discovering the importance of community. 

Not that one.

Christmas With The Kranks has a message that it thinks is heartwarming, but it's horribly misguided, instead demonstrating a conform or die attitude, as though it's making a B-line for Kim Jong-un's DVD collection. It also has a dearth of laughs and an inability to decide whether it's characters are grounded in normality or nestling into the bosom of insanity. Particularly in the case of Allen, whose occasional rationality is offset by the sort of erratic behaviour that would suggest a bipolar diagnosis is on the way. At one point, skipping Christmas will save them money. At the next point…

Curtis doesn't fare a whole lot better, as she can't decide whether she's on board with the idea or not; a rational thought process, but it doesn't give you anything to enjoy, just excited shrieks followed by nervous panic. Then, the film really shows it's ineptitude with a final character twist that ranks on the idiotic scale somewhere between Dude, Where's My Car? and any combination of words leaving the mouth of Donald Trump.

If that's not enough to put you off, then bear this in mind. My boss likes this film. She also thinks The Muppet Christmas Carol is rubbish.

THREE out of 10

Shit Christmas: Jingle All The Way (plus Star Wars)

It's Star Wars week, which is somewhat coincidental as Shit Christmas continues with a film that directly attributes the blame for the existence of Darth Vader to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Shit Christmas

The Partially Educated Review

In 50 Words or Less: Arnie's on a toy hunt. He kills no one. Kind of defies the point of an Arnie film.

In Detail: There are those who will defend Jingle All The Way. There are also those who will defend Charles Manson. Both parties exist in the same realm of correctness.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays salesman Howard Langston who, on top of missing his son's karate exam, has completely forgotten to buy the "must have toy of the season" Turbo Man. Cue a Christmas Eve of charging round the stores in a desperate bid to find a Turbo Man, all of which sold out a long time ago. All the while, he must contend with a rival father looking for the exact same toy (Sinbad, that's the actor's name, not the character's), a rival neighbour on the hunt for his wife's affections (Phil Hartman) and his own son crying and telling him what a bad father he is. Which would be bad enough, but then you suddenly realise said son is played by Jake "Anakin Skywalker" Lloyd and spend the whole time thinking…

I'm not entirely sure what Jingle All The Way thinks it is. Other than funny, but it's misguided on that one. At times, it's striving to be a comment on the consumerism of Christmas. At other times, it's gunning for the wholesome family "Spirit of Christmas" role. Then, at others, it's an off the rails slapstick farce. Is it possible for a film to be all three? Yes, of course it is, but Jingle All The Way isn't capable of multi-tasking so it flits from one style to the other like a Ritalin addled 2 year-old with no skill in handling any of them. It's rally cry against the commercialist side of it all is undone by it's own mentality that Christmas is all about toys. The family side of it is negated by the fact that no one whose age has reached double figures will be able to stand it. As for the farce, it's painful, providing cheap gags and painfully misjudged cartoonish moments. When Schwarzenegger becomes (admittedly second handedly) involved in a fake bomb threat, there's only one way for your mind to react.

The ending is a foregone conclusion, which doesn't always mean the death knell. In fairness, it would be unwise to expect anything different from a film aimed at children, but if a film is predictable, it needs something to keep you going and this rarely has that. Most of the enjoyment to be had comes from hearing Schwarzenegger's enunciation issues and laughing at just how low this man will sink in the name of a paycheck. Still, occasional enjoyment deserves some reward, so it's only fair to reflect that in a slightly elevated score.

THREE out of 10 (yes, that's elevated)

No, Arnold. No.

There'll be none of that here. Honest. Though to ensure that, I'm keeping it brief.

Shut up.

Up until now, I have stood firm in my resolve. I wouldn't hand out a 5 star review to any Star Wars film. Maybe The Empire Strikes Back if my own enjoyment hadn't been limited by the fact that I knew the ending, but that didn't happen. Now that I've seen The Force Awakens, I can say that I STILL wouldn't give a 5 star (or 9-10 out of 10) review to any Star Wars film. The Force Awakens is good though. At times, it's very good and in comparison to the prequels, it's certainly a huge improvement. It's new stars are almost all excellent, with flaws often down to their characters being underwritten (Oscar Isaac), rather than issues with their performance, though Domnhall Gleeson is only a few steps shy of Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending. 

Particular praise must go to John Boyega and Daisy Ridley, who show George Lucas the type of unknown (relative in Boyega's case) he should have cast when finding his Anakin Skywalker (either of them). As for the old hands, they're coasting a little bit, but nostalgia allows them to. The plot ticks along nicely and the action is well made, with a particularly exciting final fight. One of it's main moments of impact is telegraphed way ahead though, which kind of flattens it and there's also a resounding feeling that the film has blown one of it's later twists before it's even got there. All in all though, it's a return to form, though again bear in mind that I only class my Star Wars fandom as casual at best.

SEVEN out of 10

Shit Christmas: Surviving Christmas

Partial Education Presents

Shit Christmas (half) Month

The path to the Full Education of Seven Pounds is taking longer than I thought, particularly when I can think of a multitude of things that I'd rather be doing than watching every single episode of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air (shin kicking for one). That being said, I have noticed that posts on this blog have been infrequent at best over the past few months, so I'm going to do something about it. Lucky you.

So, welcome to Partial Education's December, hereby known as Shit Christmas (half) Month: a (half) month in which I will look at the some of the real Christmas stinkers that have come out over the years. The type of films that feel like biting into a Pig in Blanket, only to realise it's a vegetarian one. It's not hard to find bad Christmas films, so, rather than just delve in and randomly pull one out, I'm only allowing films which had a wide release in cinemas. We begin with a Ben Affleck film released but one year after Gigli. A film that made me consider Jennifer Lopez a lesser evil.

In 50 Words or Less: A witless, aggravating abortion of a film. Ben Affleck's career took it's swan dive before this. This just completed the face plant.

In Detail: This is a film that deserves more infamy than it has. Those who know of it know it's reputation even if they haven't seen it (lucky bastards). There are many though who don't even know of it's existence (luckier bastards) and that feels like an injustice to me. Surviving Christmas deserves to be decried in the same breath as Batman And Robin, The Last Airbender or any recent Adam Sandler effort. Yet, despite the fact that the film deserves it, I can't help but feel like I'm about to be unfair on this film. Picking on it is starting to feel a bit like the horse decomposed years ago and I'm still beating the ground into which it went.

It's just so damned awful though, with Affleck playing the type of millionaire that even the Kardashians would consider shallow. After suggesting he and his girlfriend holiday in Fiji, he finds himself spending Christmas alone, when she informs him that he's an odious tower of pond-scum. That or she wants to spend it with her family, I forget which and either are justifiable. A couple more contrivances later and Affleck winds up at his old family home, now populated by James Gandolfini and Catherine O'Hara avec family, where he pays them to pretend they are his family over the Christmas period. Cue gags about the awkwardness of it all, interspersed with painful moralising about the importance of family.

In fairness to the performers, O'Hara always gives her best for a laugh, probably because she's gotten used to appearing in crud like this. Giving your best only helps if there's something to play for though. This doesn't have that. Gandolfini plays pissed off very well, though it's debatable whether this is acting or his general attitude towards the film. During the shoot, he apparently locked himself in his trailer for a day, demanding rewrites before he would continue filming. It didn't help. Meanwhile, Christina Applegate provides the film's sole voice of reason, but pretty much stands there commenting on how grotesque it all is. Yeah, we know. You still agreed to be in it though. I wonder where your motivation came from.

Affleck, on the other hand, is in a league of his own. The bottom one. His smile is at it's most excrement consuming. The attitude of his character makes Jordan Belfort seem borderline humane and the worst part of it all isn't that the film sends the character on the dreaded JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY!…

…it's how he ends said journey. This next bit will qualify as a spoiler, but I wouldn't worry. I won't. Affleck ends his journey just as self-centred and hateful as he was when he began and the film clearly hasn't realised this. It thinks we now like him. It believes that it's done enough to convince us that the other characters can now accept him. All that achieves is us hating all of them for their failure to leave him festering away in the most miserable Christmas of all time.

If you survive Surviving Christmas, you deserve nothing less than canonisation. I've now survived it twice, so from here on out you may refer to me as Saint James.

TWO out of 10