December 2010
20 posts
Metropolitan (1990)
Metropolitan, or How I Learned to Stop Kvetching and Love Christmas
by Ben Mauk
Falling for the shiksa girl is a cliché at least as old as Goodbye, Columbus, but you should have seen Christina, the newt-nosed, willowy blonde in my sixth-grade algebra class. Christina—her very name the bacon cheeseburger of trafe signifiers—had the requisite blue eyes and lilting, decidedly non-Brooklyn...
Christmas Week: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
RIGHT HERE WHERE WE LIVE.
by Erika Schmidt
Christmas can be hard.
I remember being little, feeling excited enough about Christmas to collapse on the ground and roll around in fits of ecstasy at the thought the delights swiftly approaching: presents, special food, family from out of town. Snow.
When did Christmas become more complicated than that? I imagine we each have our own set of...
Christmas Week: Christmas in Connecticut (1945)
FAKE IT ‘TIL YOU MAKE IT.
by Brianna Ashby
I grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut, a small town in Litchfield County that is low on crime and high on charm. Signs in the historic district boast that it was founded in 1693, and structures still stand to prove it. It is picturesque and charming to a fault, especially in winter when snow blankets the tops of old farmhouses and barns and silos...
Christmas Week: The Ref (1994)
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU
by Erica U.
The Ref is no place for idealists. If It’s a Wonderful Life was crafted for holiday cheer - cozy as fleece, warmed with the scent of redemption and mulled spices - watching The Ref in December is like cuddling with a corpse. It’s hard to get comfortable. There’s too much of our own worst selves. No wholly good or...
Christmas Week: The Nutcracker (1977)
The Nutcracker, Or: Baryshnikov’s Incredible Body and Kirkland’s Dream
by Elizabeth Wilcox
Christmas is the one time of year when a larger subsection of the population than usual—say, 5% instead of 2%—thinks about ballet. Yes, I know Black Swan just came out, but that’s not an annual occurrence—it may even have been timed to coincide with our country’s temporary tenderness towards tutus....
Christmas Week: Little Women (1994)
Little Women: AKA The Kickass Girls of the 90’s Holiday Extravaganza
by Letitia Trent
If, like me, you spent the mid- to late-nineties in a house without cable television, you probably also saw Little Women almost every Christmas. ABC or NBC used to air it around the first or second week of December as a special holiday event, the advertisements for the movie bordered in Christmas-y, white,...
Christmas Week: The Apartment (1960)
WHY CAN’T I EVER FALL IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE NICE LIKE YOU?
by Hallie Cantor
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that The Apartment is the movie that makes me feel the happiest when I am watching it.
It makes me feel happy in a very specific way. Here’s something else that makes me feel that way: on the last day of high school before winter break, when your last class of the day...
Christmas Week: It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?
by Chad Perman
It’s easy to lose track of your life. All of us do it, in one way or another, locked up so tightly in our own heads - our own private little worlds - that we lose sight not only of The Big Picture, but of even our own smaller pictures: our families, our friends, the things we set in motion, the lives we impact and influence on a daily...
Christmas Week - A Christmas Story (1983)
AMAZON REVIEWS AS WRITTEN BY THE CHARACTERS OF A CHRISTMAS STORY
by Michelle Said
Red Ryder Carbine-Action 200-Shot Range Model Air Rifle (Compass in the Stock)
The best present of all time!!!!!
by Ralphie (Hammond, Indiana)
This is my dream gun! I have wanted this BB gun for so long! It’s basically perfect in every way imaginable! Not only is it ideal for playing cowboys and indians but...
Christmas Week - Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
NO ESCAPE
by Evan Bryson
An ideal secular holiday film might be based on Lydia Davis’ short story, “We Miss You: A Study of Get Well Letters from a Class of Fourth Graders.” It contains all the warmth, longing and spiritual ambiguity of this strangely rapacious season, and many of its injuries, too.
Until then, we have films like Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause. I have worn this...
Christmas Week: White Christmas (1954)
WHAT A FINE OUTFIT
by Anaïs Escobar “I liked White Christmas a lot more before I found out that Bing Crosby beat his kids.”
This is the only line of this essay I’ve had sitting in drafts for days. It sums up how I feel about the movie, yet it’s a bit too pithy to convey the ache. I saw a lot of movies early in life but White Christmas had a strong hold on me. In my family,...
Christmas Week: Love Actually (2003)
WINTER WONDERLAND?
by Danielle Lee
There is some vast terrain in the overlap between Christmas and Love. And squarely in the middle of the largest slice of this Venn diagram would be the Right to Act Like a Child/Giddy Teenager. Which could largely explain the motivations and actions of the London characters that comprise the destined-for-mosaic-poster treatment of nu-holiday classic Love...
Christmas Week: Die Hard (1988)
DIE HARD IS ABOUT FUCKING
by Chris Cantwell
Die Hard is about fucking. Actually, there’s no sex in Die Hard—except for a brief awkward topless woman in the holiday party scene—but you can count the entire film as a metaphor for sex. Which I do.
I’ll go you one better. What if I told you Die Hard was actually about 20 different sperms battling it out in the caverns of a 37-story* erection...
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)
AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN MCCALLISTER ON THE 20TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF HIS ABANDONMENT
by Bebe Ballroom
He is forty minutes late. The pigeons in Central Park have taken the seat on the bench next to me. His hot chocolate is cold chocolate now. My phone buzzes and sends the pigeons scattering. He has sent a text message. It reads:
Traffic! ={
He shows up twenty minutes later, walking briskly in...
Christmas Week: Elf (2003)
BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE
by Chris Cantoni
When I was a kid the most exciting event marking the coming Christmas season was the delivery of the Toys-R-Us Christmas mailer, a multi-page full color catalog of all the hot toys waiting at the store for the grubby fingers of millions of children! I could go through it page by page circling possible toys to ask for. Hungry, Hungry Hippos! A...
Christmas Week: The Muppets Christmas Carol (1992)
by Andrew Root
Jim Henson was dead, to begin with. A freak bout of pneumonia had taken away the man who was at the centre of countless projects and characters; the very voice of Kermit himself. Richard Hunt—who performed Beaker, Scooter, Sweetums, and Statler, among many others—had also died, and the number of beloved characters that had been shelved out of respect was ever growing. How could The...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 1...
by Edward Montgomery
I admit it: I swim in the deep end of the pool of Harry Potter fandom. I’m even worse than the little fat kid having too much fun with his new pair of goggles: I’m one of those who has been living in Harry’s world since the debut of book one. Those who share this with me know that we even feel a bit like the pool has been built only for us and the rest of the crowd are...
THESE THINGS MATTER
by Brianna Ashby
I have trouble throwing things away. I have plastic bins full of boxes labeled for each year of high school, one for college, and a couple that hold miscellaneous trinkets and paper goods that I’ve collected in the years since. If you open the drawer in our desk that is designated for my use you won’t find a single office supply, but you will find bits of...
