22/12/2015

Christmas with a Capital C

    
Apparently this puts the Christ in Christmas. It also puts the ass in Christmas.
   
   
It's a heavy handed comedy-drama about a dick who moves into a tiny village and tries to take it over from its Victorian god-fearing occupants. The message is that of course Christmas crap should be everywhere in December, and of course everyone should see a reenactment of childbirth in a barn in their local mall. America is a Christian country, damn it, and none of these small town patriots want anyone else's heathen stuff in their communal space.
Yeah, OK. I don't know about you, but I started feeling uncomfortable when the central protagonists' brother got up and started doing a speech about how ridiculous it would be to start putting up Jewish stuff, and then just starts mocking Kwanzaa. Come on guy, they're all as silly as your one.
Apparently this whole thing is a big deal in the US, being called the War on Christmas. People can actually sue one another over Christian shit in public spaces. I'm vaguely surprised this is an issue, but I'm even more... not surprised, exactly... that anyone cares. Everyone in this movie sucks. The mayor and his family is annoying and preachy, the baddy is an ass who's motivations aren't ever satisfactorily explained. The acting is either really bad, or a nice self-parody (which I doubt). The script slogs through speech after speech about why all religion is evil and the big city makes people mean, or why Christianity is the best thing ever and no one else should think anything, before eventually concluding the film by lazily wrapping up the villains hidden agenda and then having him randomly have a change of heart. There's also a teenage romance storyline that made me want to pull my eyeballs out and then put them in a public space and start worshiping them.
A crap, slightly fascist movie about the joys of a winter selling campaign set somewhere around the time that someone who probably existed was born a few thousand years ago.
    
Christmas with a Capital C: 6.1