Hit the deck!

Noel Vera

I have to confess, I'm not a big fan of Christmas. No, let me be
more frank: I loathe Christmas. Absolutely hate it. The pressure to
haunt department stores and shove fellow shoppers aside for
expensive gifts, heavily discounted; the horrendous traffic, made
far worse by endless Midnight Madness sales; the parties where you
overeat and drink and go ho-ho-ho when all you want to do is go home
and pull the sheets over your head till it's all over; the
obligation to stre-e-e-etch your cheeks upwards in a death rictus
and force a "Merry Christmas!" from between gritted teeth (greet me
and I'm likely to snarl). Given the choice between an extended
Christmas season (nowadays pushed as far backwards as what we
Filipinos like to call the first of the "ber" months, meaning
September) and a long and slow root canal done without the benefit
of anesthesia, I'd choose--no, I'd insist--on the root canal.
Christmas, the way it's celebrated in America and the way it's being
aped more and more in Manila, is just not my style.

Maybe one of the worst manifestations of this wretched season would
be the Christmas movie, that annual Hollywood display of forced
Yuletide cheer (when Filipino films try it, the results can be even
worse). In the old days it would be a fairly tasteful display of
pious sentiment like the 1947 "Miracle at 34th Street" (the '94
version wasn't too bad, either); nowadays it's something farcical
and chock full of CGI effects like Tim Allen's endless "Santa
Clause" movies (the latest featuring a face-off between Santa and
Jack Frost). A more recent trend is farce without the CGI, driven by
cute "concepts" like a self-centered celebrity adopting a family for
the holidays (the gruesome 2004 movie "Surviving Christmas,"
starring a perfectly typecast Ben Affleck as the aforementioned self-
centered celebrity).

Oh, there are exceptions-- Tim Burton's 1992 "Batman Returns" was
set during the season and featured an alarmingly mutated Penguin
(Danny Devito in glorious chilled-corpse makeup as the supervillain)
declaring "the sexes are equal, with their erogenous zones blown sky-
high;" Henry Selick's 1993 "A Nightmare Before Christmas" (produced
by Burton--I like his take on Christmas, what can I say?) gave the
season a healthy dose of Halloween (a much better holiday, in my
opinion, with its pagan roots and horror-film paraphernalia and dark
chocolate rush); " Terry Zwigoff's 2003 "Bad Santa" had Billy Bob
Thornton playing a profanely alcoholic cornholer of a Kris Kringle
planning a department store heist, and was all the more refreshing
for it.

Which brings me, however reluctantly, to the movie at hand. Matthew
Broderick plays Steve Finch, an optometrist who is more than a
little anal about Christmas--seems that his father was a military
officer who moved from base to base and that as a boy he could never
properly enjoy the holiday, hence his need to give his own family
its own "traditions." Danny Devito (in a sad comedown from his
wonderfully malevolent Penguin) plays Buddy Hall, head of a family
that has moved into a house opposite Finch and is starting out as a
car salesman, a good one; problem is, he can't seem to stick to one
job, he's forever looking for the one thing he could do that's, as
he puts it, "monumental." When that one thing turns out to be
decorating his house with enough Christmas lights to be seen from
space (didn't he--or any of the three writers who worked on the
script--consider lasers?), Finch is at first disdainful, then
violently opposed: this isn't the kind of Christmas he was hoping
for.

Cute concept? You bet your heavily decorated tannenbaum. There's the
whisper of class conflict here--upper middle class optician versus
transient car salesman--but the competition doesn't develop beyond
the level of "anything you can do I can do better" (I've seen
episodes of "The Simpsons" (where Homer regularly feuded with hated
neighbor Ned Flanders) that were ballsier, funnier, more imaginative
than this). The wives (Kristin Davies and Kristin Chenoweth,
respectively) rise beyond their spouses' petty rivalry, which is a
mistake; they're a drag on the comedy when they should be a cause of
its escalation. A pity, especially when the movie makes the quick
suggestion that Chenoweth's background isn't exactly wholesome
(noticing the Finches ogling a barely dressed portrait of herself,
she explains "I used to model"), but beyond that quick early mention
and the continually prominent display of her tightly stretched
breasts, she's strictly Donna Reed (Chenoweth looks like a game
comic actor whose role was rewritten to be "PG" when she could have
given a breakout performance with an "R" rating).

Director John Whitesell directs with unmitigated banality (his
filmography shows mainly undistinguished TV work), and writers Matt
Corman, Chris Ord, and Don Rhymer betray that now all-too-familiar
configuration in Hollywood nowadays, the two newbies (Corman and
Ord) selling what was probably their first script, and a
professional (Rhymer, another TV veteran) polishing up and
essentially sanding off whatever might have been original and
distinctive about the script in the first place. Nothing else to
add, really, except that Hall's pair of pretty identical twins,
played by Sabrina and Kelly Aldridge (who are twins in real life)
are so woefully underwritten they function mostly as a pair of
Christmas ornaments, albeit with nubile limbs, and I feel, being an
identical twin myself, that this is an insult to all twins,
everywhere. We are not as bland and pretty as all that; we have our
share of "edge" and "angst;" and we demand the phone numbers of
those Aldridge sisters, to console them with regards to this crass
exploitation of their pneumatic persons. Merry Christmas, one and
all.

(First published in Businessworld, 12/1/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)