If you are anything like me -- and why wouldn't you
be? -- you're a sucker for Christmas. The arbitrary yet somehow
natural-seeming traditions; the carols which somehow only sound right
when you've got just enough bourbon-fortified eggnog in you; the extra
days off from work; the fact that people give you free stuff wrapped in
shiny paper; the way everyone pretends to be nice to each other for a
change: what's not to like? It's also one of those Western cultural
touchstones so universal (suck it, Judaism!) that pretty much everybody
gets into the act; despite the bogus claims from pouty conservatives
about a "war on Christmas", the birth of Baby Jesus is still
commemorated on almost every TV show on the air, and Yuletide is second
only to summer as a Hollywood high holy day.
So,
in the spirit of this year's Summerfest series -- where I lazily
Netflixed a dozen or so movies with "summer" in the title and reviewed
them so you'd know what to watch while the pool guy skimmed the drowned
crow out of your Jacuzzi -- I present the Screengrab's 12 Days of
Christmas Marathon, where I get drunk and watch some of the finest
Christmas movies that Hollywood has crammed down our throats, and ask:
will this movie fill you with holiday cheer or seasonal depression?
First up is 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, also known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in Disney Digital 3-D, although a more accurate name for it would be Not Actually Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas or even Hi
Everybody We're Henry Selick and Caroline Thompson and We Directed and
Wrote This Movie Respectively And What Do We Have To Do To Get a Little
Credit For That?'s The Nightmare Before Christmas. While Burton
created the lead characters and wrote a poem that served as the movie's
inspiration, he had very little to do with making the film itself, and
the fact that he's generally given all the kudos for it is a shame,
because if nothing else, it proves how other people are capable of
taking his quirky, creepy aesthetic and running with it.
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