Sacred- NBC’s MARY MOTHER OF JESUS starring Anakin’s Mom & American Psycho as Mom & Son.
SHE WAS ANAKIN’S MOM, FOR GOD’S SAKE AND HE WAS
A LITTLE WUSSY MOMMA’S BOY WHO COULDN’T EVEN MAKE
UP HIS OWN PARABLES. THEY WERE BEDTIME STORIES SHE TOLD HIM WHEN HE WAS LITTLE!!!
Secular- ONE MAGIC CHRISTMAS- Harry Dean Stanton (whom I love) as the most depressing guardian angel ever, Santa’s workshop is apparently Heaven as good dead people work there, & when the angel screws everything up, Santa undoes it BY MAKING THE MAIN TRAGEDY OF THE FILM NEVER TO HAVE HAPPENED!!!
Okay, start sending me the coal now, because I really hate ‘A Christmas Carol’. Call me a kook, call me a cynic, but I just don’t buy Scrooge’s redemption even a little bit. The lengths they have to go through to convince him, plus the ultimate fact that he’s really just scared of dying unloved don’t show me anything more than that he’s just as selfish as before. (Compare to the Grinch, fromt he animated special and book - I buy his conversion a lot more.)
On a lighter note, I remember when Iwas a kit that they did an animated special called “Nestor”, about the donkey that Mary and Joseph rode on to the manger. For me, this was the height of absurdity. We’ll do animated specials on every bit player in the nativity story (coming up next! ‘Bob the Littlest Manger and the Christmas Miracle!’) except for Jesus.
The Rankin-Bass production of “The Little Drummer Boy” made my skin crawl, when I was a kid. A few nights ago, I saw a bit of it again, and it made my skin crawl again.
I don’t know which was worse:
The godawful songs
Greer Garson’s grating narration
The way they beat us over the head with their “message.”
Yeah I made it a point last year to seek out all the Rankin/Bass specials (I was surprised to see I’d missed so many. I’d never seen “Jack Frost,” for example.) Anyways, I couldn’t make it more than 10 minutes into Drummer Boy. I didn’t remember the Nestor one being so hit-over-the-head religious either.
The Year Without a Santa Claus really bites, even for a Rankin-Bass. The plot just takes a left turn towards the end and goes into the ozone somewhere.
I really like Christmas Carol, by the way. And nobody asked, but here’s how I rank them, in descending order of goodness:
Alistair Sim
George C. Scott
Mr. Magoo
Muppets (Michael Caine)
Patrick Stewart
Bill Murray (Scrooged)
Disney (really blows)
Haven’t seen the Reginald Owen version enough to comment.
Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey made me cry as a kid (when his mother died), but when I saw it on DVD last year, I realized what a sucker I had been.
Does Rudolph’s Shiny New Year count as a Christmas movie? If so, that is my worst, at least for non-religious.
Ernest Saves Christmas
Jim Carrey’s The Grinch
Home Alone 2
Jingle All the Way
Reindeer Games
Any of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series A Very Brady Christmas
I’d gladly sit through the hoariest Rankin-Bass selection multiple times over sitting through any of these again.
The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, produced by Rankis-Bass from a written work by L. Frank Baum Yes, THAT L. Frank Baum. You can imagine the imagery and dialogue that that movie contained…
“Tonight…the angel of death will visit Santa Claus”
“These children are traing to be Samurai, Kris.”
It’s the only christmas movie I can remember that has a freakin’ sword fight in it.
I won’t even comment on Nestor, aside form saying that it’s the cinematic equivilant of having your beating heart wrenched from your chest, thrown down upon cold concrete, and ground under a jackboot. And that…did anyone else notice that Nestor went back to his Neanderthal owner at the end of the movie? The same one that killed his mother?
Another pet peeve about the “religious” Christmas movies that Rankin-Bass would make occasionally? The fact that EVERY Roman soldier is wearing an officer’s helmet. The one with the “brush” on the top. Apparently none of the Roman military personel garrisoning Judea actually worked for a living.
Ranchoth
(Yasumu, Rankin-Bass.)
Would the Mexican Santa Clause that showed up on MST3K count as sacred or secular. On one hand, it’s about Santa and how Merlin and the children he’s abducted from around the world to work in his sweatshop save Christmas with no mention of Jesus or anything else like that. On the other hand, the devil is trying to stop Santa and at one point in the movie the characters pray to Santa. So it is sacred in some sense but not sacred as us normal humans understand it…
Patrick Stewart did a one man Christmas Carol on B’way and it is the best version of that story. You can get a book on tape recording of him as well.
On the one hand all the Rankin-Bass stuff is horrible. Did thoses guys do anything besides crappy Christmas specials?
On the other hand The Grinch with Jim Carrey and directed by Ron Howard is horrible but done by compentent people so you had high expectations and were terribly let down. (Though I did enjoy the dog)
Rankin-Bass all together have made more minutes of crappy Christmas so I’ll go with them.
(Well, I’ve heard varying things on their version of The Hobbit – but their Return of the King is a universal butt of jokes among Tolkien fans. “Where there’s a whip there’s a way…”)
All right, I’ll say it: A Christmas Story. I never liked that movie. Sorry.
And while I like the movie, Christmas Vacation. I have seen that movie about a million times, and I’m sick of it. EVERY YEAR my cousin has to drag it out and every laughs their head off.
