Ebert - 30 movies to get you through the holidays

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30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays copyright 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
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The notion of movies to get you through the holidays sounds rather dour, especially since some of my choices are about people who are having problems getting through the holidays.

Many of these films have one thing in common: The holidays represent the only time of the year when families, especially those with buried issues, get together at all. A typical family film in the genre airs all the dirty laundry and opens all the old wounds.

One curiosity Ive noticed is that Thanksgiving films are more likely to tilt toward the emotionally fraught, and Christmas films are more likely to be comedies and heart-warmers.

Setting that aside, some of these titles are just plain great films, no matter what. For example, Whats Cooking?; The Thin Man; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; and John Hustons heartbreaking final film, The Dead.

One of these is just plain bizarreRare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Bad Santa pushes right through the boundaries of good taste.

The real sleeper here is Nothing Like the Holidays, about a Hispanic family in Chicago.

And the gob-smacker is The Polar Express, with Robert Zemeckis showing a virtuoso command of motion-capture animation. Yes, theres a reason so many characters look like Tom Hanks.

R OGER E BERT

	A great film
G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17 : Ratings of the Motion Picture Association of America
G	Indicates that the movie is suitable for general audiences
PG	Suitable for general audiences but parental guidance is suggested
PG-13	Recommended for viewers 13 years or above; may contain material inappropriate for younger children
R	Recommended for viewers 17 or older
NC-17	Intended for adults only
141 m.	Running time
2011	Year of theatrical release

Bad Santa

R, 93 m., 2003

Billy Bob Thornton (Willie T. Soke), Tony Cox (Marcus), Bernie Mac (Gin Slagel), Lauren Graham (Sue), John Ritter (Mall Manager), Brett Kelly (The Kid), Cloris Leachman (Grandma). Directed by Terry Zwigoff and produced by Sarah Aubrey, John Cameron, and Bob Weinstein. Screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra.

The kid gives Santa a carved wooden pickle as a Christmas present.

How come its brown? Santa asks. Why didnt you paint it green?

It isnt painted, the kid says. Thats blood from when I cut my hand while I was making it for you.

Santa is a depressed, alcoholic safecracker. The kid is not one of your cute movie kids, but an intense and needy stalker; think of Thomas the Tank Engine as a member of the Addams Family. Oh, and theres an elf, too, named Marcus. The elf is an angry dwarf who has been working with Santa for eight years, cracking the safe in a different department store every Christmas. The elf is fed up. Santa gets drunk on the job, hes screwing customers in the Plus Sizes dressing room, and whether the children throw up on Santa or he throws up on them is a toss-up, no pun intended.

Bad Santa is a demented, twisted, unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Santa in a performance thats defiantly uncouth. His character is named Willie T. Soke; W. C. Fields would have liked that. Hes a foul-mouthed, unkempt, drunken louse at the beginning of the movie, and sticks to that theme all the way through. You expect a happy ending, but the ending is happy in the same sense that a mans doctors tell him he lost his legs but they were able to save his shoes.

There are certain unwritten parameters governing mainstream American movies, and Bad Santa violates all of them. When was the last time you saw a movie Santa kicking a department store reindeer to pieces? Or using the f-word more than Eddie Griffin? Or finding a girlfriend who makes him wear his little red hat in bed because she has a Santa fetish? And for that matter, when was the last movie where a loser Santa meets a little kid and the kid doesnt redeem the loser with his sweetness and simplicity, but attaches himself like those leeches on Bogart in The African Queen?

Movie critics have been accused of praising weirdo movies because we are bored by movies that seem the same. There is some justice in that. But I didnt like this movie merely because it was weird and different. I liked it because it makes no compromises and takes no prisoners. And because it is funny.

The director is Terry Zwigoff. He made the great documentary Crumb, about R. Crumb, the cartoonist who is a devoted misanthrope. (Crumb drew the