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