By David Stanczak
Stores get into Christmas season before Thanksgiving, so this Forum is timely. One Hollywood tradition is Christmas movies, which have evolved, or rather, devolved over the years. It seems hard to believe, but even in my lifetime, there were movies where the birth of Christ was celebrated, where priests and nuns were honorable people, and where love and giving were promoted, and the whole family could watch them.
As Clouseau would say, “Not any m-o-o-re.” The only difference between a current Christmas movie and any other film is that the trashy talk and behavior happens in a Christmas setting. As Exhibits 1-4, I present the following:
- Office Christmas Party. The title should warn you. At the party, Santa yells, “Merry Christmas, bitches” and a female employee says, “It’s bleeping Christmas, bitches, let’s get motherbleeping drunk.”
- Almost Christmas is a dysfunctional family movie, which features a Santa decapitation and women routinely calling each other bitches.
- Why Him shows what happens when a girl brings her new boyfriend home for Christmas to meet daddy. He greets the family by dropping several F bombs and giving a graphic description of how he and the girl got it on in a hot tub.
- The piece de resistance: Bad Santa 2 (which opens today), a sequel to Bad Santa, in which the title character is a chain-smoking, drunken, foul-mouthed suicidal, sexual predator. In the sequel, when a man objects to Santa using bad language in front of children, he replies with “You can suck my bleeping bleep.” Bob Weinstein, the producer, says he bought the script because, “It was the most foul, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas anti-children thing we could imagine.” Lead actor Billy Bob Thornton wanted to do it because it was “the alternative to the really syrupy Christmas movies.”
These “Christmas” movies were made by the usual suspects in one of the tiny blue areas on the political map. In those areas, they may be just what everyone wants to see at Christmas. Here in the middle of flyover country, I suspect not so much. I’m hoping that people, in Yogi’s words, “Stay home in droves.” Nothing this Christmas would make me happier than for the producers of these films to be huddled up in their safe areas realizing that their creations are financial bombs.
David Stanczak, a Forum commentator since 1995, came to Bloomington in 1971. He served as the City of Bloomington’s first full-time legal counsel for over 18 years, before entering private practice. He is currently employed by the Snyder Companies and continues to reside in Bloomington with his family.
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