The Sprout

The 1st Blog Of CLICmas

Postiwyd gan neilramsden o Caerdydd - Cyhoeddwyd ar 13/12/2010 am 09:30
6 sylwadau » - Tagiwyd fel Diwylliant, Ffilmiau

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From Monday 13 to Friday 24 December, CLIC will feature a different guest blog each day - The 12 Blogs Of CLICmas, in fact! Here is the first...

Hi, I'm Neil, and I write film reviews for theSprout under the guise of 'Flick Flak', as well as gig reviews and general articles on things which have grabbed my attention!

Christmas films. More so than most types of film, they often suffer from a total lack of originality. To be fair, how do you come up with an original Christmas film? They generally need to involve a recognised figure: Santa, Scrooge, a reindeer, a little helper, a snowman.

A true Christmas film (in the eyes of the accountants) will be a family film, therefore will not be too edgy, and will have a worthwhile message or a moral. Now, I much prefer something controversial to something standard, so when I think of the great Christmas movies, I don't gravitate towards your traditional Christmas Carol (I prefer a muppet version.) So here's a few of my favourite Christmas films.

As a child I owned many videos, but there were two that I wore out from repeated use: Jurassic Park, and Home Alone. In an age when children's Christmas fun could overlap with extreme violence, and Macaulay Culkin was the most famous brother, Home Alone was the only Christmas film that mattered to me.

Back when Tim Burton hadn't bored everybody by making the same film over and over, The Nightmare Before Christmas stunned audiences who were expecting a pleasant little cartoon. Deliciously gothic, it features some of Danny Elfman's greatest work, both writing and singing Jack Skellington's songs. A Christmas song that features the lyrics "What's This? There are children throwing snowballs here / Instead of throwing heads / They're busy building toys / And absolutely no one's dead" is a winner every time in my opinion.

Without a doubt, my favourite Christmas film is Die Hard. I don't know what that says about me. It might seem to be a mindless action film with death, explosions and a comedy accent from Alan Rickman ("Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho."), but at heart it's about family and love. Maybe.

I wish Bill Murray was my uncle so that he was around every Christmas. Scrooged is the perfect Christmas film: the traditional Charles Dickens story blended with Bill Murray's bitterness and cynicism.

And the reverse: Blackadder's Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Blackadder, who is a thoroughly nice guy, is visited by the ghost of Christmases past, present and future and realises that his ancestors succeeded in life by being evil. Thus, by the end of the visits he decides to be far less pleasant - and unknowingly misses out on being awarded a cash prize for being Britain's nicest man.

There have been incredibly few Christmas movies worth watching in the last ten years; Elf is one of the few. Will Ferrell's second funniest character, but probably his most well known, a human baby raised as an Elf at the North Pole until his ungainly size and poor toy-making abilities result in him being dispatched into the world to find his real father. A rare thing: an original Christmas film.

With any luck there'll be some good films on TV over Christmas, but if not, get some of these in on DVD and have an alternative Christmas!