CFB51 College Football Fan Community
The Power Five => Big XII => Topic started by: utee94 on December 20, 2022, 02:16:52 PM
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We've probably done this before, but I don't recall.
I have a lot of favorites. I like all of the old Rankin/Bass stop-motion classics, I like Charlie Brown, I like A Christmas Story and Elf and Home Alone and Christmas Vacation. I like new classics like Polar Express.
And lately, we've been introducing the kids to the REALLY old classics, like It's A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. I'd been holding off because I was worried the kids would be bored by them, but they are REALLY enjoying them.
Hmmm so my three favorite?
1) A Christmas Story
2) It's A Wonderful Life
3) Die Hard
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Christmas Vacation
is one of mine
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I also like
The Polar Express
Bad Santa
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Last night we watched a double feature of Bing Crosby classics-- White Christmas, and Holiday Inn.
I had forgotten the very prominent scene in Holiday Inn where the entire ensemble of their review, appears in blackface. It led to an uncomfortable but necessary discussion with my kids, regarding race relations past and present.
Despite that, the kids still really enjoyed the movies.
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Last night we watched a double feature of Bing Crosby classics-- White Christmas, and Holiday Inn.
I had forgotten the very prominent scene in Holiday Inn where the entire ensemble of their review, appears in blackface. It led to an uncomfortable but necessary discussion with my kids, regarding race relations past and present.
Despite that, the kids still really enjoyed the movies.
I forgot that was in there
Kinda surprised they showed it
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You could cut all those scenes and it wouldn't affect the movie. Even the musical number was terrible.
But I'm actually okay with them leaving it in, because it led to a discussion with some nuance.
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We've probably done this before, but I don't recall.
I have a lot of favorites. I like all of the old Rankin/Bass stop-motion classics, I like Charlie Brown, I like A Christmas Story and Elf and Home Alone and Christmas Vacation. I like new classics like Polar Express.
And lately, we've been introducing the kids to the REALLY old classics, like It's A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. I'd been holding off because I was worried the kids would be bored by them, but they are REALLY enjoying them.
Hmmm so my three favorite?
1) A Christmas Story
2) It's A Wonderful Life
3) Die Hard
Tough to pick 3 from older, more classic films and newer stuff because they're so hard for me to compare. Easier to pick 3 from each, but that's not the point of the exercise, I suppose.
1) Charlie Brown Christmas special
2) A Christmas Carol (Jim Carey computer animated version)
3) Scrooged
Honorable mention goes to It's A Wonderful Life and many other versions of A Christmas Carol, most notably the George C. Scott version--I'm a total sucker for that story. 34th Street was a childhood favorite of mine. Never thought about it til now but it appears I'm partial to the more recent stuff over the classics. Polar Express is high on my list too.
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Tough to pick 3 from older, more classic films and newer stuff because they're so hard for me to compare. Easier to pick 3 from each, but that's not the point of the exercise, I suppose.
1) Charlie Brown Christmas special
2) A Christmas Carol (Jim Carey computer animated version)
3) Scrooged
Honorable mention goes to It's A Wonderful Life and many other versions of A Christmas Carol, most notably the George C. Scott version--I'm a total sucker for that story. 34th Street was a childhood favorite of mine. Never thought about it til now but it appears I'm partial to the more recent stuff over the classics. Polar Express is high on my list too.
Oh there are no hard and fast rules to the exercise. I was just curious as to which movies folks liked, and maybe even why...
Today we'll be making Christmas cookies, wrapping presents, and watching:
1) Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
2) Santa Claus is Coming To Town
3) A Christmas Story
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Also forgot to add: kudos to you for understanding that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Amazing how many people don't get that.
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(https://i.imgur.com/BoHj535.jpg)
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Also forgot to add: kudos to you for understanding that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Amazing how many people don't get that.
I don't get it
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I don't get it
me either
if they want to call Die Hard a Christmas movie no problem some folks think we never went to the moon too
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well, I'm not much of a movie fan anyway
I did and do enjoy watching die hard
I suppose you could label Trading places a Christmas movie as well
(https://media.tenor.com/fIC4F7PLz_YAAAAC/tearing-out-louis-winthorpe-iii.gif)
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me either
if they want to call Die Hard a Christmas movie no problem some folks think we never went to the moon too
https://www.thepioneerwoman.com/holidays-celebrations/a41577637/is-die-hard-a-christmas-movie/
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Home Alone must have been a Christmas movie too
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I didn't think that was even a question.
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Home Alone must have been a Christmas movie too
Of course it was.
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I didn't think that was even a question.
it was to Longhorn
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He's old and forgetful, you know.
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He's old and forgetful, you know.
you hurt longhorn's feelings
longhorn hurt
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hah, I'm old and forget full
and he has a few seasons on me
I Don't know ANYBODY that old
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Gremlins
Christmas Story
Christmas Vacation
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Gremlins
Christmas Story
Christmas Vacation
Christmas Vacation is one of those movies I never get tired of watching
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Movies get released at Christmas, so makers like to throw in a Christmas element.
Except for "Miracle on 34th St" which was released in the summer.
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I was just kidding about Gremlins. I don’t consider either it or Die Hard a Christmas movie. My criteria for any movie to be a Christmas movie is it has to have these elements :
It has to be released near the Christmas holidays, preferably mid-November, and Christmas should be the main plot driver.
But each unto his or her own.
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Yup it's always interesting to hear folks' opinions on the matter.
And then dismiss them for being wrong, because Die Hard is absolutely a Christmas movie.
:)
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I was just kidding about Gremlins. I don’t consider either it or Die Hard a Christmas movie. My criteria for any movie to be a Christmas movie is it has to have these three elements :
It has to be released near the Christmas holidays, preferably mid-November, and Christmas should be the main plot driver.
But each unto his or her own.
Wait, you only listed two criteria.
Also, Miracle on 34th Street was released in the summer. So... it's not a Christmas movie?
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We watched It's a Wonderful Life last night. Never saw it before. I enjoyed it.
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We watched It's a Wonderful Life last night. Never saw it before. I enjoyed it.
Yup it's a good 'un.
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Oh there are no hard and fast rules to the exercise. I was just curious as to which movies folks liked, and maybe even why...
Today we'll be making Christmas cookies, wrapping presents, and watching:
1) Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
2) Santa Claus is Coming To Town
3) A Christmas Story
We also watched the new "A Christmas Story Christmas" on HBOMax. It was better than I thought it would be. The kids really liked it.
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I've been wondering about that. Most of the times old properties are revisited and milked again for the Hollywood machine I have been so disappointed that I usually no longer bother.
Maybe we'll give it a try.
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Wait, you only listed two criteria.
Also, Miracle on 34th Street was released in the summer. So... it's not a Christmas movie?
Modified my post.
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Wait, you only listed two criteria.
Also, Miracle on 34th Street was released in the summer. So... it's not a Christmas movie?
Never seen Miracle on 34th Street.
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Never seen Miracle on 34th Street.
Get out.
Sorry....kneejerk reaction. What I meant to say was "you really should watch it."
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I've been wondering about that. Most of the times old properties are revisited and milked again for the Hollywood machine I have been so disappointed that I usually no longer bother.
Maybe we'll give it a try.
I mean, it's not great. Please don't blame me if you don't like it.
But I had very low expectations beforehand, and it exceeded them by at least a bit. If nothing else, it was a decent nostalgia piece honoring the first movie, which in itself was a significant nostalgia piece.
I like nostalgia.
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Me too.
You might say I have a sentimental longing and wistful affection for nostalgia.
#meta
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I mean, it's not great. Please don't blame me if you don't like it.
But I had very low expectations beforehand, and it exceeded them by at least a bit. If nothing else, it was a decent nostalgia piece honoring the first movie, which in itself was a significant nostalgia piece.
I like nostalgia.
I enjoyed the movie. It was nice revisiting almost all the characters years later.
I wish they put the original mom on, not sure if she’s still alive or not. Darren McGavin, the dad, died 20 years ago, but she was much younger than him iirc.
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THE BULWARK
There Is No Mary Problem in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
George’s vision of his wife without him is essential to the film, but critics continue to miss its true—and profound—meaning.
by CLARE COFFEY DECEMBER 20, 2022 5:30 AM
Despite its sinking into insignificance upon initial release, the eventual ascendency of It’s a Wonderful Life was always almost inevitable. For one thing, it stars Jimmy Stewart. For another, like all the greatest Christmas literature, it has an undercurrent of darkness to it. Like A Christmas Carol or A Charlie Brown Christmas, it deals with the death of human hopes as much as their renewal. And, most importantly, its emotional punch grows, not diminishes, with rewatching over the years.
An icon with such well-established status is an irresistible target, and the competition to come up with the definitive contrarian takedown of the film is now a Christmas sub-tradition in its own right. Every year people write their little pieces about how Mr. Potter is a new urbanist or Bedford Falls is full of NIMBYs or George is a toxic narcissist or Uncle Billy caused the financial crisis or umm, the movie is actually really depressing?, or high school gyms don’t really have swimming pools underneath them. Every year I read them and laugh, knowing the movie will bury them all.
But there has always been one criticism I found harder to ignore: the Mary problem. When George Bailey, after a lifetime of sacrificially thwarted ambitions and dreams, facing ruin and disgrace at the hands of his venal enemies and incompetent friends, tries to commit suicide, his guardian angel Clarence is dispatched to help him. In order to convince George that he has in fact had “a wonderful life” that it would be a crime to throw away, Clarence shows him what his town would have looked like had George never been born into it. So far, all well and good.
Clarence shows George the lives in which George intervened at a critical moment or that he shaped through the cascading effects of his choices: the brother he saved from drowning in childhood, the pharmacist distracted with grief whom he prevented from accidentally poisoning a child, and so on. Finally, George asks Clarence to show him his wife, Mary. “You’re not going to like it,” says Clarence. Absent George, Mary is an old maid, closing up the library in a skirt-suit and spectacles.
Aside from the dubious implication that the worst fate that could befall a woman is a single life as a small-town librarian, this scenario simply beggars belief. The idea that Mary, played by a luminous Donna Reed, who has been lighting up the screen with her charisma and warmth for the last hour and a half, would be short of suitors in George’s absence—it’s ludicrous. That she needs George to be rescued from spinsterhood as his brother needs him to be rescued from death is insulting. It adds an ugly note to the pageant of significance Clarence puts on. Even in his most intimate partnerships, must George always and only relate to others as a savior? If he were out of the picture, Mary would much more likely be the wife of the wealthy plastics manufacturer Sam Wainwright, wrapped in a new mink coat and spared a life of toil, care, and George’s dark moods, I thought.
It was a flaw in the picture, I had to admit, even as I had no love for the critics who brought it to my attention. At best, I could spin it as subtly implying that George was not an uncomplicated hero, that Clarence could only show him a version of reality he could bear—one in which even his non-existence did not leave him supplanted by another. The movie is perfect, I argued, precisely because it shows the redemption of a self-pitying egoist as well as the vindication of a heroically self-denying preserver of his home and servant of its people. In many stories, these roles are mutually exclusive. In life, and in this movie, they coexist in tension, but without contradiction—such is the pity and possibility of the human heart.
I still believe this. But I no longer think it relates to the Mary problem in the same way, nor do I stand by my earlier resolution of the issue. My mind changed last year, when I had the chance to see It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen, in my town’s theater. Perhaps you just notice things differently over the years—this is, after all, one of the charms of the movie. Perhaps seeing the film as it was meant to be shown really does unlock new insight. Either way, I found myself paying attention to one exchange as I never really had before.
George: Mary Hatch, why in the world did you ever marry a guy like me?
Mary: To keep from being an old maid.
George: You could have married Sam Wainwright, or anybody else in town.
Mary: I didn’t want anybody else in town. I want my baby to look like you.
The scenario that the counterfactual world presents us is explicitly foreshadowed by Mary’s playful, obviously ridiculous rejoinder, “to keep from being an old maid.” Once I realized this, it became my interpretive key to the problematic later scene.
From the beginning, it is Mary who chooses George, not the other way around. In a scene from their childhood, she sits on the counter and whispers in his bad ear, “George Bailey, I’ll love you ’til the day I die,” while George, oblivious, drones on about coconuts. Reunited at the high school dance, her eyes fix on him with the loving, predatory gleam of a wifely panther. Throughout their strange, bittersweet courtship, it is she who chases him, as much as Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, or Barbra Streisand in What’s Up, Doc? George, for his part, is as outraged, as protesting, as ultimately helpless as any of his counterparts. It is a screwball chump-chase transposed into the register of drama, with George playing the part of the chump.
Mary could marry any man in town. She doesn’t want to. She wants George. She takes the measure of George, seeing something in him that he can’t see, and which is perhaps only partially visible to us. What Mary sees in him does not reflect any of the abortive visions George has for himself.
It is Mary who sees the potential of the old house from the first, Mary who acquires it and patiently restores it over the years. It is Mary who sees the oncoming bank run as well as its solution, Mary who offers up their honeymoon money without wasting time either asking for permission or indulging in regrets. George’s life is shaped by a recurring characteristic act: the heroic acquiescence to duty when circumstances require it. But Mary sees the greater vision from the start. She is determined that George will lasso the moon, even if she is the only one who can see it in the sky.
It is certainly pleasant but not unduly extraordinary to be a popular and beautiful woman who can marry a rich and popular man if she chooses. It is less ordinary to see, with Mary’s perfect clarity and uncanny certainty, the life and man you want, and to choose it in the teeth of discouragement with all its disadvantages apparent, to persist single-mindedly in the face of hardship. It’s a Wonderful Life is, in part, the story of someone becoming, kicking and screaming, against all intentions and desires, a big man. Mary sees the big man in George from the first, because she is a big woman.
She is, as much as George, a profoundly unusual person laboring under her own personal destiny. In the world where George does not exist, she has not married not because she couldn’t, but because she does not want to. There is not a Mary-sized man in town, and Mary Hatch does not do anything just because it’s what might be expected of her. Her story in this counterfactual is a sad one, but it is not one of passive submission to circumstance.
To be chosen and known and loved by such a woman is not a small thing. It is seeing Mary without him that breaks George enough to make him ask for life, as it is her just anger at him that sends him into the most desperate phase of his downward spiral. When he chases the alternate Mary through the streets, his desperate cry is not “Mary! What have they done to you?” but “Don’t you know me? What’s happened to us?” If Mary does not know him, if Mary does not see who he really is, he must not exist indeed.
I would not, now, if I had Frank Capra’s ear and a gasper and martini in my hand and the studio at my command, go back and change the scene I once thought the only major blemish in a perfect movie. It is the climax of a great love story—between people with children and not enough money and frustrations and shameful failures, as many great love stories are. It is a recognition of the unpredictable depths of a woman too easily rated as charming decoration in her own story. But more importantly, it is a pivot within the story Clarence is telling George. For all the extraordinary, irreplaceable good George has done for others, what makes his life finally wonderful—awe inspiring, mysterious—is what has been done for him. He never, after all, set out to win Mary Hatch.
This is the revelation that brings him back to his proverbial knees, begging for his life—crucially, still believing he is facing ruin and disgrace.
George: Clarence! Clarence! Help me, Clarence. Get me back. Get me back. I don’t care what happens to me. Only get me back to my wife and kids. Help me Clarence, please! Please! I want to live again!
But when he gets back, there is no ruin and no disgrace. Everyone in town has heard he’s in trouble, and everyone in town—all people he has served and saved over the years—has leaped into action to extricate him from his plight. Money has once again appeared at the eleventh hour, as if out of thin air, and not, this time, to rescue the Building and Loan, but for his sake.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” says Uncle Billy. “Mary did it, George, Mary did it.”
Clare Coffey
Clare Coffey is a writer living in Idaho. Twitter: @ClareCoffey.
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Thanks for posting, C-Dubb, that was very interesting. And it hit on my only real concern in the movie as well, and I had traditionally excused it just as the author said she initially did. But I really love her explanation of Mary's alternate George-less and husband-less state as a choice. She was always far too strong of a character, to end up there by happenstance.
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I'm glad Clare finally figured it out
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way too much thought going into into this
just sit back and pass the popcorn
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I enjoy thinking critically about art. Perhaps it's the thespian in me.
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I enjoy thinking critically about art. Perhaps it's the thespian in me.
so they question the Mary thing but an angel without wings going back in time no problem
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so they question the Mary thing but an angel without wings going back in time no problem
Yup. That about sums it up.
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In no particular order
It's a Wonderful Life
A Christmas Story
A Christmas Carol - 1951 version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge
Miracle on 34 Street
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Hmmm so my three favorite?
1) A Christmas Story
2) It's A Wonderful Life
3) Die Hard Bad Santa
:banghead: That's not a Christmas Movie,you're just yanking chains.Now take that down and put up Rudolph or something.That Eggnog must be very powerful this year.There I FIFY
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I saw Bad Santa, didn't like it.
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I saw Bad Santa, didn't like it.
we dont care
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Because you incorrectly claim "Die Hard" isn't a Christmas movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxtSX1lg8rE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJgeO2wL8zE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLBCmTEKQLk
I've got more. I'll shoot! I sweardagawd I'll shoot!
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dammit
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we dont care
What a rude response.
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he's a rude arrogant longhorn
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What a rude response.
are you shocked
tis the season
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he's a rude arrogant longhorn
hush or I'll revoke your tourist visa
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Somebody peed in lh320's Metamucil.
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Somebody peed in lh320's Metamucil.
actually Im in pretty good spirits
its above freezing and the lights are on
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beautiful weather here
Top Golf Tomorrow
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beautiful weather here
Top Golf Tomorrow
glad to hear it
There was a time in my life when Id been right there with ya
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beautiful weather here
Top Golf Tomorrow
70s and sunny. True Christmas weather in Texico.
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https://youtu.be/vw89o0afb2A
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Jon Lovitz as Potter Priceless
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(https://i.imgur.com/2g8gEmp.png)