Christmas Movies that Don't Suck.

So you’ve seen Tiny Tim say “God bless us, everyone” so often you’ve turned Satanist.  You know the exact number of times that Joe Pesci would’ve died in real life from Kevin McAllister’s torture in the first two Home Alone movies, and every time a bell rings all you get is annoyed.  Believe me, I’m with you.  If you’re like me and just can’t take seeing a young Natalie Wood pull Kris Kringle’s whiskers again, here are some alternatives to cure that Christmas Movie Fatigue.

The Ref (1994) - Denis Leary – angry, loud, fast-talking Denis Leary before the Ice Age films – stars in this black comedy about a very dysfunctional family in the suburbs (including Kevin Spacey and Christine Baranski) being taken hostage by a jewel thief on Christmas Eve.  In 93 minutes it manages to poke fun at suburbia, entitled teens, local law enforcement, high-maintenance mothers-in-law and marriage.  If you’ve ever wanted to tell a loved one’s parent “I know loan sharks that are more forgiving than you,” this is one to watch.

Scrooged (1988) - Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a mean-spirited but highly successful network executive, happy to make others miserable until his old business associate comes back from the grave to warn him of visits by three ghosts to help him see the wrong of his ways.  Sound familiar?  It’s because Scrooged is a (very refreshing) update of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  He’s supported by an all-star cast, including Karen Allen, Carol Kane, Robert Mitchum and Bobcat Goldthwait.  Clearly a comedy cast, director Richard Donner (The Goonies, Lethal Weapon) delivers a hilarious look at a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge that manages one of the best closing monologues in film history.

Trading Places (1983) - Wall Street milquetoast Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) and con man Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) are the unwitting pawns in a life-switching experiment by Winthorpe’s multimillionaire bosses, the Duke Brothers.  Just in time for Christmas, Winthorpe finds himself on the streets, framed for drug dealing, penniless and befriended only by a prostitute (Jamie Lee Curtis) while Valentine suddenly lives the high life with a private chef and chauffeur.  Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy are at the top of their game, working adult humor into this dark comedy directed by John Landis (Animal House, The Blues Brothers).

Bad Santa (2003) - “If I’d have known this is how my life would turn out, I would have killed myself a long time ago.  Come to think of it I still might.”  In this pitch-black comedy from director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World), Billy Bob Thornton is a robber posing as a mall Santa.  Together with his elf (Tony Cox, Oz: The Great and Powerful), each year they work a new mall, entertaining kids by day and casing the joint by night.  Thornton’s addictions to booze and sex occasionally get in the way of him mooching food and shelter off a lonely bullied child, but the kid brings out some Christmas goodness in him and his girlfriend, a bartender with a Santa sex fetish.  This is likely not one for the kiddies.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) - Tim Burton and director Henry Selick bring this stop-motion classic to life with songs by Danny Elfman.  Jack Skellington is the de facto leader of Halloweentown, scaring kids worldwide, but he’s grown bored with his repetitive task and tries to bring Christmas to his spooky village instead.  Beautiful for its entire 76-minute run, it works great for kids, with themes about trying to be something you aren’t and learning to embrace yourself for who you are.  Selick went on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, while his animation studio also created Paranorman and The Boxtrolls.

Love Actually (2003) - A romantic comedy?  Really?  Yes, really.  I was a real naysayer on this until I agreed to watch it, and now I’m converted.  An ensemble cast including Liam Neeson, Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, Colin Firth and Keira Knightley lead this series of interwoven stories of romance, drama and humor in England on the week of Christmas.  On the funny side of things, a bachelor decides to book a plane ticket to America based solely on the presumption that American women love a British accent; an aging and jaded rock star (Bill Nighy) stuck in the machine of the celebrity industry takes outrageous steps to stay relevant in an age obsessed with boy bands (“Don’t buy drugs, kids…become a rock star and people will give them to you for free!”); a male and female body double for adult movies meet and make shy small talk while in the most suggestive poses/actions.  At the same time, a middle-aged man (Alan Rickman, Harry Potter) has trouble staying with his prickly wife (Emma Thompson) when a young co-worker expresses her feelings for him; a new bride (Keira Knightley) discovers that her new husband’s best friend (The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln) is in love with her and it may cost him his friendship with the couple.  Love Actually is a bit cutesy at times, but a pretty tight movie.

A Christmas Story (1983) - An official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred shot range model air rifle.  This is all that Ralph Parker, a nine-year-old boy, wants for Christmas: a BB gun.  Non-fiction writer Jean Shepherd (who also narrates the film) brings us this amazing holiday story in the vein of NPR’s This American Life.  Ralph is a kid in the Midwest growing up post-World War II and this film runs him through the gauntlet of experiences that childhood and Christmas are made of.  A mouthful of soap for cursing, mom bundling her kids up in too many layers, seeing someone get their tongue stuck to a frozen pole on a dare, hideous homemade Christmas outfits from a crazy relative – it’s all in there.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) - Only a little gentler than The Ref, the original National Lampoon movies starred Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo as Clark and Ellen Griswold, a slightly dysfunctional Chicagoland couple with a son and daughter.  In Christmas Vacation, Clark deals with hosting his parents, in-laws, brother’s family and uncle for the holidays.  Of course nobody appreciates Clark slowly losing it while desperately clinging to Christmas traditions, leading to some pretty crazy moments.  Aside from the 60-second insult Clark spins at his boss at the end of the movie (If you don’t YouTube it, you’re basically a bad human being), there are scenes like Clark’s senile aunt being asked to say the blessing over their dinner and in return reciting the pledge of allegiance.

Elf (2003) - Elf is a Will Ferrell movie for people who don’t like Will Ferrell.  Ferrell is at his best as Buddy, a human raised by elves at the North Pole.  Bob Newhart plays his adoptive elf father, while James Caan is his real father, Ed Asner is Santa Claus and Zooey Deschanel is Ferrell’s love interest.  Buddy learns he’s a human – and not just an elf twice the size of all his friends – in his thirties and goes to find his real father, a cranky children’s book publisher.  Jon Favreau directs while Buddy learns to be a person, often the hard way – including getting in a fistfight with a mall Santa for calling him out on not being the real Santa (“You sit on a throne of lies!”).  Seeing Peter Dinklage beat Buddy up for calling Dinklage an elf is worth the price of admission on its own.

Pride.

June is LGBT Pride Month, in anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village starting June 28, 1969.  If we're going to talk about this, I'd like to get myself out of the way first.  I support marriage equality.  I support equal rights for the LGBT community.  I've heard the phrase "straight ally" tossed around to represent my thoughts on this, and that's fine by me.  Call me what you want; whatever term means "I don't bat an eyelash whether you like men or women."

As a straight white guy, you can imagine I've faced little to no real prejudice against myself in my 31 years.  It pains me to see people with a different skin color, gender or sexuality than mine have to struggle and fight to obtain what I got for free at birth: the right to marry, freedom from most hate crimes and social skepticism and so on.  My eyes were opened to discrimination when I lived on Maui for four years with my family and I was bullied daily, beaten regularly and stabbed when I was 13 years old, just for being white.  And it sucked.  A lot.  Then we moved back to the mainland and I saw people being treated the same way I was for those four years - but this was their entire lives.  And it was worse out in the world: rape, homicide, suicide, second-class citizenship, life-long trauma and abuse just for being different.

Now, people who "look like me" have the least flak thrown their way - no doubt.  In fact, having even tasted a bit of prejudice, I was changed for life.  So let's consider some of the points being thrown around regarding LGBT's.  

I've heard it said that the movement for LGBT rights is "being blown out of proportion," that "there aren't that many of them in this country."  So first, let's look at the LGBT population of the country.  A study published many years ago claimed that 10% of the American population was LGBT, while a 2012 Gallup poll claims the numbers are around 3.4%.  Even if someone performed polygraph tests on all 316 million plus Americans, asking about their sexuality, polygraphs are only 99% effective, offering a potential error margin of over three million people.  Finding an exact report of the sexuality of the United States is impossible, but what we can do is consider the most conservative figures as an "at least" figure.  If 3.4% percent of 316 million Americans fit into LGBT identities, that makes for a 10.744 million population, which is more than the state populations of New Mexico, Arizona and Idaho combined.  Just over half that many people (excluding the slaves they owned) seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy, leading to the American Civil War.

That sounds like a lot of damn people to me.

I've heard it said that "being LGBT is a choice," not a matter of how you're born.  I'll pretend it's any of my business what the deepest roots of your sexual identity are, but only for a minute, so I can say this.  In college I read a study (my apologies for losing the source material since then) in which lab technicians sprayed paper strips with pheromones of either men or women.  They offered the strips of paper to test subjects who only knew they were there to smell strips of paper and choose which of the two they found more pleasant or attractive, or both.  The subjects had no idea which strips were sprayed with what.  Then they were asked if they identified as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc.  The results came back and the correlation between sexual identity and natural attraction to pheromones was in the 90th percentiles.  Speaking on the laws of probability, the odds that over 9 out of 10 people would coincidentally identify as a sexuality and choose their preferred gender's natural body fragrances over the non-correlating result is pretty astronomical - not impossible, but incredibly unlikely.  Other studies have been conducted since then, but the pheromone test helped seal the deal for me.  My own personal belief is that people are born with their sexuality, even though it often makes itself known in adolescence.

Many people believe, however, that sexual identity is a choice.  Travis Nuckolls released a YouTube video in 2008 asking people on the streets "So when did you choose to be straight?" and it makes a good point - it's worth watching just to see the expressions on people's faces - but I'd like to stick a pin in everything else for a minute and talk about the belief in "LGBT by choice."  So, if some undeniable, empirical, end-all be-all, absolute evidence were released that proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that these 10.74 million Americans were making a conscious choice to be gay or straight...isn't that at the very least a choice that they have every right to make?  If we have the right to be romantically involved with all kinds of consenting adults, whether they differ in hair color, body type, age, skin color, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, credit score and everything else under the sun, then shouldn't we also - as physically- and mentally-matured adult organisms - get to choose whether we prefer the company of men, women, both or neither?  I've made it a life habit of putting the shoe on the other foot, so if you've read this far, consider this: how would the world react if people said that being straight was just a choice - a phase or a mental condition, even, likely developed from some faulty upbringing - and eventually straights would grow out of it, stop the foolishness and find the right same-sex partner?  I hate to go out on a limb and speculate, but I imagine a lot of people would be less than thrilled.

I've heard it said that marriage equality shouldn't pass because homosexuality goes against the word of The Bible - and I'm going to offer my opinion because I'm an idiot.  Much of the debate centers on Leviticus 18:22, which reads (in the English Standard Version) "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is abomination."  Most of my religious friends practice a very "live and let live" or "love thy neighbor" attitude when it comes to religion and sexuality, but this argument is still alive in the news and such, because many see Leviticus 18:22 as indisputable evidence that homosexuality is a sin, and should therefore be against the law, especially when it comes to marriage.  The full grounds for some is "If The Bible says it shouldn't be done, it shouldn't be done regardless of what it is."  I can respect people wishing to adhere to the word of their god; however, there are dozens of other things condemned by The Bible as well.  There are passages in The Bible that forbid tattoos, working on Sundays and women speaking in church, and yet none of those things are made illegal - in fact the tattoo taboo is in the very next chapter of Leviticus.  There are lingering connotations about people with tattoos in general, but rarely are they suggested to be made against the law.

I've heard it said that that's different, that homosexuality is "the really important one" to outlaw.  And it's fine for people to believe that in their own lives, and to speak their beliefs.  The issue is generally that forcing one's religion onto everyone's law is not only a conflict of the separation of church and state, but is actually why colonists fled Europe for North America in the first place.  From the Library of Congress:  "The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens" [emphasis added].

I've heard it said that the nation is founded on Christian principles, which should be enacted into law.  If that's true, nobody told John Adams, who - alongside uniting the colonies in the revolution against Britain - also said "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."  None of this is to say that the morality of Christianity - or religion in general - shouldn't overlap with society's laws, but only that forcing 316 million Americans to live in accordance with only one religion is fundamentally contradictory to most foundations of our country.

Turning away from the strictly religious facet of the debate, I've heard it said that "tolerance" is a hypocrisy because those who favor marriage equality call it being "tolerant" while also being "intolerant" of its opponents' freedoms to stand against marriage equality.  However, this is also untrue.  If a marriage equality proponent says to someone against it, "You're not allowed to think or speak on your beliefs," then that is hypocrisy - the First Amendment guarantees your right to express your opinions.  However, that opinion does not equal fact, law or justification for a crime.  To rape, shoot in the head and beat to death different LGBT's isn't anyone's right or freedom regardless of their motives, nor should a civilized society be "tolerant" of that person's actions.  This argument is akin to Hitler addressing America and saying "If America is all about freedom, why am I not 'free' to commit genocide in my own country?"

I've heard it said that allowing same-sex marriages will make hetero marriages "less special" and "less enjoyable," and that it "takes away straights' freedoms."  When America freed its African-American slaves, did whites all decide that it wasn't as fun or exciting to be free anymore?  Did whites have less freedom (besides the abhorrent privilege to own, rape and kill another human being as their own property)?

In summation?  Whether you believe sexuality is genetic or a choice, the LGBT population isn't going away.  The camps they're sent to, to "pray away the gay," will look in 50 years like a Whites Only bathroom.  The "gay agenda" is to not fear for one's life walking down the street.  And opinions opposing it are legal to express - but subjugation, harassment and violence in the name of that opposition are not legal, nor respective of the society we claim to represent.  Think what you will, but I say when one in six gays report being a victim of a hate crime, and only one in 10 crimes reported lead to a conviction, it's hard to claim that the perpetrators are the ones under attack.