Christmas Movies

Episode 2

Rich’s:

Scrooged
A Christmas Carol (1984)
Love Actually
Trading Places
Bad Santa

Spencer’s:

Scrooged
Love Actually
Family Stone
It’s a Wonderful Life
A Christmas Story

Links and such:

Here’s my review of It’s a Wonderful Life (1948) written shortly after watching it for the first time in 2023 or so.

1 – There is no way to watch a famous 75-year-old movie for the first time without having some preconceptions.  I associate Jimmy Stewart with old age, having cut my teeth on years of caricatures performed by Dana Carvey and other comics, so I’m already going into this movie thinking of George Bailey as an old man.  It’s not clear how old George Bailey is actually supposed to be during the first 10 minutes or so of the movie, but we know the following: (1) George is currently working for the family building and loan business; (2) George has not gone to college yet but wants to go; (3) when George attends his kid brother Harry’s post-high school graduation party, everyone there knows him very well.   It seems clear George graduated from the same high school either one year or two years before Harry, making him either 19 or 20 years old.  God forbid he’s supposed to be older than that given that one of the explicit reasons he goes to the HS graduation party is to troll for chicks (and, in fact, he finds one!).  Let’s say George is 20.  Jimmy Stewart was 39 (!) when the movie was filmed, and frankly, he looked older than that. It was hard to suspend disbelief about his age.

2 – I really liked the kid who played George as a boy when he worked at the pharmacy.  Over the course of the movie George enters that pharmacy three different times, and all three times he pulls some sort of a lever on a contraption bolted to the pharmacy counter top which sparks a small fire.  Each time he wishes for a million dollars and excitedly exclaims “hot dog!” when it sparks a fire, as though he got lucky to have sparked the fire.  I had no idea what the contraption was or why he was wishing for a million dollars when he pulled the trigger.  Here’s the contraption:

Subsequent research confirms it’s a cigar lighter.  Subsequent research cannot explain why it was apparently customary to make a wish before activating the lighter, but I suspect it was because these contraptions were so unreliable that there was only a one-in-a-million chance it would work on any given pull?  If so, why not just use a match?

3 – Similarly, there was a very intricate and somewhat sinister-looking device that caught my attention on Mr. Potter’s desk in his office.  George and Mr. Potter have to work around it when Mr. Potter tries to buy George off with a high-paying job and hands him paperwork to make the deal official.  But the device plays no role in the plot.  It’s as though it was a normal part of every businessman’s desk in 1948, but completely foreign to me.  I found a picture:

Subsequent research suggests it’s two different things:  The thing on the left in a tray is a “letter sealer”, and the skull with the teapot behind it is some sort of antique ornamental pocket watch?  More internet research may be needed.  I also need to do a better job of not being distracted by these old-timey contraptions.  

4 – I loved the alternate universe that unfolded after George had never been born.  Dozens of movies use a similar plot structure and I assume this is the one that inspired them all.  There’s a montage of downtown bars, billards’ halls, and cabaret reviews that are meant to suggest to the viewer that Baywood Falls went to shit without George Bailey there to protect the town, but it kinda had the opposite effect on me — the bars, halls and topless cabarets actually looked pretty classy to my modern eyes.  Clearly, all of the people in town were much better off for having George Bailey in their lives, but the town itself?  I’m not so sure.  Downtown Potterville didn’t look all that bad.   

5 – I hear a lot about how this movie is one of the all-time tear-jerkers.  I was moved by the outpouring of love and support for George and his accompanying epiphany, but I did not cry.  

All in all, an enjoyable flick that I’m glad I watched, but not that great.  6 out of 10.