The Official Inclusive Non-denominational Holidays 2020 (and forever) Thread

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I love Christmas movies. Maybe not as much as I love horror and Halloween movies. I already have all the best ones in my collection. Back in October I did a search through a movie torrent site and downloaded a few things I hadn't seen. I'm not afraid to watch something that might suck. Sometimes you get lucky and find something cool. And even if it turns out that it sucks, at the very least, it's something DIFFERENT.

The worst comes first...


Carol for Another Christmas (1964)



Starring Sterling Hayden (played Police Capt. McCluskey in The Godfather), Ben Gazzara (played Brad Wesley in Road House), Pat Hingle (played Commissioner Gordon in 1989's Batman), Peter Sellers (played Insp. Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies). Written by Rod Serling, narrorator/host/writer on the old Twilight Zone tv show. That said... it's VERY Rod Serling/Twilight Zone-esque. If The Twilight Zone was going to have a Christmas special, this would be it. It also credits Charles Dickens as writer because it's based on A Christmas Carol. It's got the three ghosts, all the same story elements that any Christmas Carol clone would have... eh, sort of.

I suppose the whole thing had some personal political connotations for Rod Serling when he wrote it... and it's really not a good twist on the Christmas Carol story in my opinion. The "Scrooge" character, Daniel Grudge (played by Sterling Hayden) is a bitter old man, mad that his only son died in WW2 (mind you this came out in 1964), and now preaches that America should've always practiced a strict isolationist policy, and that would've kept his son from having to die. The three ghosts come, one of them shows him a prison camp, blah blah blah,... and in the future portion, nuclear war has killed 99.99% of earths population, and some crazy maniac (played by Peter Sellers) leads the survivors of one town and tells them that they need to kill all the people in the next town rather than co-existing with them. So... I guess the point being that "isolationism is bad" and "we need dialogue because when we stop talking, we start fighting." I dunno, perhaps it was more politically relevant back in 1964 when communism was spreading. But in the end... he doesn't change all that much. It feels very non-climactic. Just a very very awkward Christmas movie. I can't even say that it's terrible. The first half of the movie is actually okay. But somewhere in the middle, it just loses you and feels really "off". I guess there's not enough of a solid relatable "moral of the story" underneath it all to make it feel like a competent Christmas movie.

So... if you want something "different", oh yeah, it's different alright. But it's not a "good" kind of different, at least in my opinion.


A Smoky Mountain Christmas (1986)



Starring Dolly Parton, Lee Majors, John Ritter, other people you probably don't know. It was a made-for-TV thing back in the mid-80's that was pretty well known. I never saw it back then, but I definitely remember seeing it listed in the TV Guide on ABC every year at some point in December. That's the only thing that made me think to download it.

Dolly plays Lorna Davis, a country singer doppleganger of herself basically, that is lonely and tired of her life of fame. She wants to get away from it all for a while. She calls up a friend and asks to stay in her old cabin in the mountains. When she gets there, she discovers a bunch of runaway orphan kids living in the cabin. She lets them stay and takes care of them. Blah blah blah, won't give away the ending (cuz I know you're just dying to see it fer yerself, right?).

Not terrible. Dolly Parton sings a lot in it though. I've never been a fan of her. I like old country music, and she's always been a pretty good singer, but she's just not the kind of country music I'd ever listen to by choice. Not my cup of tea. I won't delete it, I'll keep it in my collection, but it'll probably be a few Decembers away before I'm bored enough to watch it again.


It Happened One Christmas (1977)



Starring Marlo Thomas, Wayne Rogers (player Trapper on the first few seasons of MASH), Orson Welles. It's a not-very-good remake of the old James Stewart and Donna Reed Christmas classic, It's A Wonderful Life. But in this one, they made the woman the lead by flipping the names: Mary is Mary Bailey, and George is George Hatch. And from there, pretty much everything is copied from the original movie.

Again... not really terrible, I'll keep it in the collection, but it's not good enough that I'd want to watch it every year. I'd much rather watch the original.


The Munsters' Scary Little Christmas (1996)



Starring Sam McMurray as Herman Munster, Elaine Hendrix as Marilyn Munster, Mary Woronov as Mrs. Dimwitty. Other than Sam McMurray (who's always had small bit parts in a lot of movies) and Mary Woronov, it's a bunch of nobodies.

Really goofy. But it's the Munsters - par for the course. Little Eddie gets bummed out at Christmas, Grandpa tries to help by conjuring Santa Claus... elves mess in Grandpa's lab and find a potion to turn Santa into a Christmas fruit cake... Lilly has to make a potion to turn him back... the Munsters decorate the house in a ghastly fashion in order to compete in the neighborhood decorating contest, which makes the neighbor Mrs Dimwitty (Mary Woronov) angry because she wins every year.

It's silly. It's pointless. It's not very good (unless you really want some silly pointless shit). But it's something different.


Spirited (2022)



Starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds... and whooooooole bunch of diversity hires.

First of all... it's a fucking MUSICAL. I HATE MUSICALS. Without Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, there'd be literally ZERO REASON to watch this movie.

When I said "diversity hires" ...My god. This movie definitely had a DEI department. The amount of conspicuously pre-fabricated diversity in the extended cast and background extras is as noticeable as glittery nipple tassels painted on the Mona Lisa. WOW, YOU PEOPLE ARE REALLY DOING THE WORK TO HELP RACIAL MINORITIES FEEL BETTER ABOUT THEMSELVES BY SEEING MORE REPRESENTATION ON THE SCREEN, HUH? Only... you still got two fuckin' white dudes and ONLY TWO WHITE DUDES on the cover of the movie. Sorry, but this DEI and woke bullshit is just a retarded circle jerk that the idiots of this world perform to make them feel like they're good people so they can feel better about themselves (or feel like they're better than others, like the arrogant pricks they are) ... rather than actually going out and doing GOOD THINGS FOR REAL PEOPLE. Anyway... enough about that shit.

Basically a mixed up modernized re-working of the Dickens Christmas Carol. And above all, it's a MUSICAL. For that reason, it's a little painful to sit through. Like I said, without Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, this would be unwatchable and excruciating. But they're kinda funny, so it prevents you from turning it off because you want to see how it ends.

Not good though. If you never get to see it, no problemo, you really didn't miss anything. This one's probably getting deleted.


A Christmas Story 2 (2012)



Starring Daniel Stern as the dad... bunch of others I'm not familiar with.

A Christmas Story from 1983 is a classic. One of the best Christmas movies EVER. I saw the "official" sequel with Peter Billingsly playing adult Ralphie, A Christmas Story Christmas, when it came out a couple years ago. I thought it was pretty good. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 6.3/10. I'd mostly agree with that, maybe as high as 7. But I think Christmas Story 2 was considered the "unofficial" sequel by most people. It seemed to have gotten mostly negative reviews, which is what I always heard about it, which is what kept me from bothering to watch it until now. But...

I was very surprised. I really liked it. It's definitely not as good as the original, but it's not the pile of crap that I always heard it was. It has more of a silly cartoonish feel to it than the original, but not in an altogether bad way. I don't think I like it as much as the Peter Billingsly sequel, but it's not far behind. This one's definitely a keeper in my collection.

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Corona Extra "O Tannenpalm" Christmas commercial turns 34 this year.

• First aired in 1990. It remains the longest running beer ad of all time.
• It was filmed in Akumal, Mexico. - The ad's creator, Mike Rogers, chose the location on the Yucatan Peninsula after a family vacation there where he was struck by the town decorated in Christmas lights.
• It cost less than $50,000 to make. - Or approximately 1,852 packs of 24 Corona Extra bottles. Even better, because there were no actors, the company hasn't had to pay any residuals, effectively making it one of the cheapest commercials ever made and making it easier to stay on the air for 30-plus years.
• Alligators kept invading the set. - According to the ad’s creator, Mike Rogers, the area in Akumal where they were filming was very marshy and home to large numbers of alligators. They kept wranglers on set to keep the reptiles away from the crew. "We had to scoop the alligators out of the way and keep them out of the way," Rogers recalled in 2015. "The cameraman was petrified." Thankfully, they only needed 10 takes.
• Corona has considered replacing the commercial. - But they couldn't come up with a better idea, according to Jim Sabia, the chief marketing officer of Constellation Brands Inc's beer division. "We've tried over the years to come up with another holiday ad, and every time we look at the storyboards and concepts, we go back to this," Sabia told the Wall Street Journal in 2015. "It's so simple, powerful and emotional. It's extremely hard to beat."

https://youtu.be/7xSrXpYGXCg?si=xHz5NKghKeyzSEFz

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Note:

I started to rename this the "Christmas in perpetuity thread" but... whatever.

It was called "The Official Inclusive Non-denominational Holidays 2020 Thread (and 2023)", but since the forums won't let me add enough to the Subject of the first post to just keep adding years every year (lol), I just put "and forever".

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I've mentioned horror movies and westerns around here before. But I also like Christmas movies too, especially the classics.

I love Christmas movies. Maybe not as much as I love horror and Halloween movies.

Meh, I take that back. I guess I like them just as much. The older I get, the more I enjoy Christmas. These days, I go out of my way to decorate the outside of the house with lights and stuff (maybe I'll get some pics soon).

Anyway, back to movies...

I love all the various Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol movies - Reginald Owen version, Alistair Sim version, George C Scott version, and the Patrick Stewart version. There are others too. Most people think the one with Reginald Owen and Gene Lockheart is the oldest one (1938), but there's actually an even older but lesser known British-made one from 1935 called Scrooge starring Seymour Hicks. For the longest time, the only surviving copies available were all no bigger than about 360p and in pretty bad shape with cloudiness in some parts and LOTS of scratches on the film. People did their best to clean it up and piece together the most viewable version possible from several different sources. And alas, finally a couple of years ago, a professional outfit got ahold of some original film and remastered it to a very decent looking colorized 4K 2160p version. There are other "colorized 1080p" versions on youtube, but they look like crap. This is the best one to watch. I'm normally not a fan of black and white colorization (I prefer the original black and white version of It's A Wonderful Life), but with the improvements and clarity in this version compared to the old commonly available versions, this one is far superior and I can gladly overlook the colorizing.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eotS-FnRJE

In some ways, I think the 1999 Patrick Stewart version might be the best version in that it follows the actual Dickens story the closest. A few years back, I was at Barnes & Noble and picked up a book that was a collection of Dickens' Christmas stories, including A Christmas Carol, and I actually read A Christmas Carol in several hours start to finish. All of the movie adaptations follow the biggest points of the story, but there are a few small details that you don't see included... the biggest one I can think of is when Scrooge arrives home, he sees Marleys face on the door knocker. Usually you see him go up the stairs to his room... and thats it. But in the story, as he is going up the stairs, he is terrified to see the ghostly apparition of a horse-drawn hearse going up the staircase. Dickens clearly intended the idea of ghosts and haunting and terror to be a theme throughout the work, and I don't think any of the adaptations do a good job of reflecting that. Anway, back to what I was saying about the Patrick Stewart version...

I believe I have the original DVD version somewhere in the basement in a box of christmas movies, but I never dig the DVDs out anymore - I have everything on MP4's on a portable hard drive. I can transfer them to a USB stick and then pop that in my mini blu ray and MP4 player in the living room, or I can transfer them to the video folder on the pc itself and then stream it any other tv via the media player app on my XboxOne. But for a long time, the only version I could find was the 480p version that someone copied from the DVD. This year I've found a 1080p version that was apparently ripped from the TBS streaming app, and it seems to be 4 minutes longer than the DVD version... so maybe it's got some bonus scenes, I dunno yet. I also found another version where someone AI upscaled it to 4k from the 480p DVD source. Both look much better (obviously the 4k one looks more well defined), but they both have frame rate issues. There's a very small bit of choppiness to the frame rate, whereas the old 480p version is very smooth with a constant steady 24fps. Perhaps the original files were MKV and someone encoded them to MP4 poorly.

At any rate... I've found this particular version that also seems to be remastered or upscaled to 4K from the original 480p DVD source, and this one has a nice and smooth frame rate. Note that this is not the TBS version with 4 additional minutes. I'll try to watch both versions at some point this month and figure out where the extra 4 minutes are coming from. I can already tell that the TBS version is definitely different because the font for the opening credits from the DVD source is a yellow script style font, and the TBS version has white plain letters similar to Arial or Helvetica font.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5qrGM1Nx5k

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The older I get, the more I enjoy Christmas. These days, I go out of my way to decorate the outside of the house with lights and stuff (maybe I'll get some pics soon).

No pics of the outside yet.

But I did spend a few hours taking out my old It's A Wonderful Life Christmas village and train set. They used to sell these pieces at Target from about 1987 until about 1997 I believe. My mom started collecting it and would display it on top of the upright piano in the living room every Christmas. By the early 2000's, she had collected so much Christmas crap that she didn't have the room to store all of it, and she considered throwing the village set away. I always enjoyed it as a kid so I held on it to it. But I've never gotten it out to display at christmas time because... I have kinda the same problem: TOO MUCH STUFF. By the time I get everything else set out, I have no more table space big enough.

But this year I was feeling nostalgic, so I said I'd finally break it out and let it see the light of day after more than 20 years being packed away. Unfortunately, I'll have to put it all back into boxes and pack it away again before christmas day so the family will have a place to eat when everyone gets here that morning.



My cameras really old and it sucks.

The train runs on 4 AA batteries that are stored in the coal car just behind the engine (you can see the little red switch on the top rear of the coal car that turns it on and off). My mom had packed it away with batteries still inside. When I opened it up, they were of course crusty and corroded. The expiration date on the batteries said 2011. Amazingly, none of the little figurines or cars were broken even though they were all packed into one single big ziplock bag inside a box. I've moved the container in and out of the basement 20 Christmases, dropping it, bumping it, beating it around, not knowing how poorly the ceramic figures were packed, and somehow it all survived.