I love Christmas. I love everything about it. I especially love it when people give me gifts and feed me delicious food. I love our tree and all its ornaments. I love crowded malls and “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” and Larry the Cable Guy getting his own tacky Christmas special on cable somewhere. I even love Hanukkah and I barely know what that is.
But I hate going to the movies in December.
First of all, I have to admit that it’s not by choice that I see depressing movie after depressing movie during the holidays. It’s a combination of other factors forcing me into the theater. It’s my job for starters. I review movies for a living. But the other player in this madness isn’t me. And I have no control over this entity. His name is Oscar and he's the potential new best friend every late-year movie release wants to cozy up to and dry hump into loving it back.
So that means studios wait until late November and early December to unleash hell on you and me. Serious movies are taken seriously by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. So out come the brooding bummers. The running times stretch past the 150 minute mark and the subject matter is bleak (items #1 and #2 in the unofficial “Get Nominated Now” playbook). Witness “The Road” (post-civilization father and son trudge through despair and cannibals on their way to nowhere) and “A Single Man” (suicidal gay man in 1962 spends a day planning his life’s end) and “Everybody’s Fine” (sad, lonely widower tries to make contact with his uncaring children) and “Brothers” (Afghanistan war vet returns home with post-traumatic stress and the realization that in his absence a semi-romance has bloomed between his wife and his brother) and “The Lovely Bones” (a raped and murdered teenage girl narrates her family’s grief from the afterlife) and on and on and on.
It’s like this: Hollywood is using you as a guinea pig for their own greedy ends when they pull these stunts. But you--not being employed to watch them yourself, most likely—don’t have to play along. You can stay home. Rent “White Christmas.” Or “Black Christmas.” Or “Ernest Saves Christmas.” Or “Duck Soup” for that matter. Or just drive around your town looking at lights on houses. Or stay in your kitchen, bake some cookies in the shapes of trees and Fed-Ex them to my house. You have entertainment options, no matter how hard they try to sell you their sad-making products, and those options don’t have to include wallowing in loneliness, misery, child-murder, cannibalism OR “Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.” Take control of your own destiny. And make your days be merry and bright.
