Christmas Movies for 2023

I'm going to round out the year with some festive Holiday text posts, because i'm visiting my people and don't have a microphone or editing software to make videos. So i hope you can read or you're going to hate this like Santa hates my letter demanding Jay and Silent Bob toys every year. He must have gotten lost again because i'm still waiting on those, along with my Britney Spears memoir and I'm Just Ken shirt. Come on, I've been good this year, you old bastard.

Two things you can count on every year are Christmas Movies, and unfunny losers telling you over and over again that Die Hard, Gremlins, and Batman Returns are also Christmas movies. Yes, you're very clever, as are the other 10 million nerds who have already memed that talking point to death, if cracked .com still exists i'm sure they'll hire you.

I've decided to expand the criteria for Christmas film a little more, if only so we can discuss movies that aren't Die Hard, Gremlins, or Batman Returns, for once. From now on the only criteria for being a Christmas film is if you watch it around Christmas. So here are 4 short reviews of completely random movies i happened to watch in the last week or so. Some of them are more Christmassy than others, but all of them are movies, so this is clearly a job for The Buff Christmas Movie Buff, me.

Big George Foreman.

I watched this on a plane. It was either gonna be this or Land Before Time, and i didn't want the teenage girl and middle aged man i was sitting between to see me cry, so i went with the boxing movie. As the title may suggest this is a biopic about the man with possibly the strangest boxing career i've seen dramatized. Compared to George Foreman even Rocky's life makes sense, and George Foreman is actually real.

This dude starts out smearing poop on his face to escape police dogs, then just decides to be an undefeated boxer, clobbers the fuck out of like 50 people and becomes the world champ without even trying. Then it all goes bad. First his ungrateful wife leaves him for banging too many ring rats and even worse, Mohammed Ali makes fun of him and beats him up.

After that he loses his confidence and gets his ass kicked so bad he finds Jesus. Then he becomes a reverend, and straight up apologizes to the guy who kicked his ass, even though he's the one who got beat up and called a dummy. That is pretty dumb to be honest. I guess finding Jesus makes you do stupid shit. Thank God i ain't found Jesus yet.

If that weren't bad enough he also makes the classic boxing mistake of putting some fuccboi white person in charge of his money, and of course the weaselly little turd-burgler loses it all. So he decides he better start beating the shit out of people again and selling grills. He makes millions and gets fat and gives all his kids the same name like a fuckin weirdo. All in all, pretty based. The tagline for this flick and all biopics should be "Based on a Based Man".

Movie Scale: 7/10 Worth a watch.

Christmas Scale: 6/10 Suitable for Christmas viewing.

Violent Night

This flick is really just a pastiche of other movies associated with Christmas. You've got your basic badass killer Santa trope along with some walkie-talkie Die Hard bullshit and some Home Alone trap crap. John Leguizamo is in it, which is pretty cool, and so is David Harbour, which is less cool.

Something about this guy creeps me out. I just don't like him. He's like some big lumbering, dreadfully uncharismatic truck driver who keeps getting thrown in movies for some reason. Every time i see him i get the sense that other people find him cool but i just don't see it. He delivers all his lines in this awkward "aww shucks" kind of way, like he's just the most boring man in the world.

It doesn't help that every dialogue scene in this movie is just slightly wordier than it should be. It's a weird thing to describe but i swear there are lines that sound like they wanted to be punchlines but they take 3 or more lines for the characters to spit them out. It's bizarre, and i'm confident if you watch the movie you'll see what i'm talking about.

I feel like i've seen 10,000 different movies based around the gimmick of Santa being badass or having a dark past. I actually think a movie like this, where Santa has to save a family from some baddies, would be more interesting if Santa wasn't a badass, but had to fight anyway. Just have him be a friendly magic guy in over his head, surely that's more compelling than just making him OP and having him mop the floor with a hammer for a mop and guy's brain splatters for mop water. What is he Triple H? He was already Goldberg one time.

I'll tell ya who should have played Santa in this. Mick Fuckin Foley. For one thing Mick has legit Santa cred, and for another thing he's actually capable of being menacing and believably violent, unlike David Har-bore.

I wanna see Saint Mick cut an ECW style Cactus Jack promo on the walkie-talkie and start massacring people with barbed wire. That's a perfect movie. But instead you cast this ponderous oaf with all the intensity of a bear who just crawled out of his hibernation cave to scratch his ass on a tree. David Harbor sucks.

Movie Scale: 6/10 Not bad.

Christmas Scale: 8/10 Actually trying to be a Christmas movie.

The Grey

In this film Liam Neeson is in a plane crash with a bunch of assholes and tries to keep everyone alive while fending off wolves. It's technically a good movie but this is the second time i've seen it and for some reason it just felt excruciatingly long and boring this time. I get it, wolves are scary and all these jerks are gonna get eaten until just Liam Neeson is left. Can we just get on with it please?

One thing that really annoys me is this reoccurring bit where Liam Neeson recites a poem that i guess is supposed to be thematically relevant. But in the poem he keeps saying "once more into the fray".

Um... okay... so why isn't the movie called "The Fray"? Why is it called "The Grey"? Nobody even says grey. There's nothing grey in the movie! At least The Fray would make sense, he does get into a fray or two, both with the other guys and with the wolves.

Like okay, i guess they're technically Grey Wolves. But i saw those wolves and most of them were black. Stupid movie, bad review.

Movie Scale: 6/10 Not Bad.

Christmas Scale: 7/10 Does feature snow.

They Shall Not Grow Old

Peter Jackson restored and colorized like 100 hours of museum footage of WW1 to pay tribute to a generation who died in the mud for jack shit, and if you have a dick, balls, or a soul you shouldn't need me to review it, because you're probably already being moved to tears by it as we speak. I ruminate on WW1 daily and i assume every good boy does.

First of all the footage is incredible. For some reason grainy, black and white footage from old newsreels seems so far back it might as well be another world. There's a degree of separation because it looks like old-ass history. But seeing it all in such vivid color and detail does so much to humanize these guys from 100 years ago. You could watch this with ear muffs on and still be blown away because you're seeing something real and important and it truly feels like it. I wish i had seen this in IMAX or something.

The wisest decision Jackson made was to not have any traditional documentary narration. Instead using archival musuem interviews to let the soldiers tell it themselves. There are dozens of voices that all seamlessly flow into each other without stopping to introduce anyone or clarify anything with dates and locations. This looser format lends a great deal of emotional authenticity to the film. It feels like listening to grandpa tell a story and then dreaming that you're there.

To not only edit all these different interviews into one cohesive narrative, but also match it so flawlessly with whatever footage was available would be an astounding work of historical filmmaking, even without the upscaling and colorization. Some of the details and stories are profoundly interesting while others are just profoundly sad, and actually hearing the voices of the men who lived these experiences is more meaningful and impactful than any dry documentary script could ever hope to be.

The only thing more impressive than the footage is the veterans themselves, who speak with such grit, sensitivity and wisdom about the shit they went through. Some pontificate on the meaningless of it all, or the difficulty finding work after the war. One man's voice cracks with emotion ever so slightly when describing having to mercy kill a fellow Englishman. Others describe watching on helplessly as soldiers sink to their death in deep mud, or of seeing men's feet rotted off from days of running around in knee-deep water. They recall so matter-of-factly grisly scenes of corpses contorted on barbed wire, Germans blasting them to hell with the new invention of flamethrowers, and surviving mustard gas attacks by breathing through piss rags in the absence of gas masks. This shit is fucking insane, yo. These dudes are the realest ones of all time.

Most enlightening of all were the descriptions of the general attitude of the time toward the war they were fighting. For most of these guys enlisting wasn't even something they questioned. Despite the entire war being about political alliances that the average person couldn't hope to understand, they accepted it eagerly as a young man's duty, and seemed to regard it all as an unserious little spat between countries that would surely be settled in a matter of weeks. They marched off optimistically, many of them enjoyed the training and spent their down time laughing it up and goofing off, and decades later they look back on these moments with fondness. They don't even really complain about the actual warfare, describing unimaginable horrors and mind-breaking fatigue as if it were just a crappy Monday they had to endure one time.

Of the enemy they speak with zero hatred, and in fact most often with respect and admiration. German soldiers are consistently described as good fighters and brave men. It truly seemed to be considered by all involved a war with no real villains, and no real reason to fight beyond simple duty to one's country of origin. It comes very near to sounding downright civilized, a dishonorable war fought by honorable men. One dude recounts a football game (or maybe it was rugby i don't remember) between England and Germany being interrupted by the very announcement of war, which resulted in both teams briefly unsure if they should start stabbing each other with forks before deciding as far as they were concerned the war could start tomorrow. German POWs are described as being well-liked, cooperative, and friendly, with both sides too exhausted by the war to even dislike each other by the end of it. One gets the sense that the war finally ended only because nobody cared to continue fighting it. There were no winners, just a lot of hurt and tired men who couldn't be arssed with it anymore.

The only small nitpick i have about the film were some distracting moments where they try to increase the immersion by adding lip-synch voice-acting to some of the footage. Most of the time it works well enough that it does it's job of immersing you further into a world that didn't actually have audible voices in film yet. But there was at least one moment where it felt a little unneeded and silly. An injured soldier is swatting a bird away, and for some reason they thought this needed voiceover of a guy going "get off me bird, get out of here". Dude's lying there with his head wrapped up because there's a bullet in his face, i don't think he'd be bantering with the bird.

But like i said that's a nitpick. I'm ashamed to even pick that nit because this movie is amazing. Everybody in the world should see it because as my high school history teacher once tearfully chastised us after we were mean to a substitute "if you kids don't wanna learn from history, you're gonna BE history!"

I miss that lady, and looking around at my own generation, I'd say she was right.

Movie Scale: 10/10 Masterpiece

Christmas Scale: 10/10 New Annual Tradition