Day 8: That's A Christmas Movie?

A few days ago I tackled the Christmas "Special" side of the holiday.  I limited it to TV shows and we all took a trip down memory lane with some classic episodes and I even teased many of you with a glimmer of hope about the Star Wars Holiday Special.  We now leave the small screen (because 42" TVs are considered small now) and go to the big screen aspect of Christmas.

Just like TV Christmas "Specials" there is a plethora of Christmas Movies out there and we all have had to endure sitting through them.  Now, let my heart grow a little bit here, I enjoy most of them and will openly watch movies like A Christmas Story, Home Alone (the 1st one, not 2-5), Miracle on 34th Street, The Santa Clause (Disney bought Tim Allen's soul too), Polar Express and so on.  I enjoy them, they are good movies.

I refuse to watch any Christmas Movie that airs on the We Hate Men Channel (Lifetime) because like every other movie shown there, the man is ALWAYS portrayed as the bad guy and everyone should be lesbians and live happily ever after.  I can only imagine what happens with a Christmas movie shown on T.W.H.M. channel...Santa gets arrested for breaking and entry, brought up on sexual harassment charges for calling women ho's and Mrs. Claus kills him for cheating on her with Vixen (and I'm not talking the stripper).  On the same note I don't watch the movies on the Hallmark channel either because it's supposed to be a happy time of year and all they play are tear jerkers.  That's exactly what I need right now, to be pushed deeper into a depression funk.

Everyone loves the traditional movies this time of year but there are some that a lot of people forget about.  Just like the Christmas "Special" Top 5 I did a few days ago, I bring you the Top 5 Most Missed Christmas Movies.

5.  Gremlins - What?  Gremlins?  Yeah, it was based around a Christmas present!  Gizmo was given to Billy as a Christmas gift and like all gifts it came with rules that Billy broke.  Don't get them wet, don't expose them to sunlight and don't feed them after midnight...kind of sounds like an ex-girlfriend of mine.  I personally liked Gremlins 2 but I am more of a comedy guy anyway.  Gremlins teaches us that no matter how bad the gift is or how much you want the money instead, you can't return it without a receipt.


4.  Die Hard - Yippie-kay-yay-mother fucker and Merry Christmas.  The whole movie starts on Christmas eve when a NY cop comes to LA to make amends with his ex-wife.  Nothing says Merry Christmas like a rogue cop stuck in a building shooting terrorists.  The building gets blown up, bullets fly and the best part is Professor Snape is in it and guess what?  He plays the bad guy!  It's a must watch this season and I guarantee it will warm the cockles of your heart (yes I said cockles again).


3.  Eight Crazy Nights - We need to be nondenominational here.  You know there are other holidays that fall in December other than Christmas right?  All I have to say about this movie is it has all the great actors in it...Adam Sandler, Adam Sandler, Adam Sandler, Adam Sandler, Jon Lovitz, Rob Schneider, Adam Sandler.  The only character that looks somewhat normal and not entirely cartoonish is Adam Sandlers character...go figure.  If you are looking for Christmas movie about an alcoholic clepto who  is Jewish then this is the movie for you!

2.  Batman Returns - Holy tinsel up the ass Batman!  Set in the Christmas season, Gotham City (which ALWAYS looks like a demilitarize zone) struggles getting the city Christmas lights lit.  I guess billionaire Bruce Wayne couldn't kick in a little moola for that and could have avoided the whole pesky Penguin situation. Oh and how can you beat Michelle Pheiffer in a skin tight, rubber Catwoman suit? Regardless, this Batman movie takes place during the Christmas season and should be considered a Christmas Movie.

1.  Life of Brian - Surprise!  Yeah this Monty Python film really didn't have anything to do with Christmas except that Brian was born on the same day as Jesus Christ himself!  Whaaaaaaat?  In the manger next door!  Jesus is the reason for the season remember, unless you celebrate one of the other holidays in December but you can ask any Catholic, those don't count.  Even if it doesn't have a lot to do with Christmas, it's Monty Python for shit's sake, so watch it.

I have one honorable mention before I wrap it up.  One movie that always gets overlooked is James Bond 007:  The World Is Not Enough.  Dr. Christmas Jones and Bond are hooking up and 007 says to her, "I thought Christmas only came once a year."  thus making it a Christmas Movie.

Once again I got the drop on Gonads and cornered him eating my Hickory Farms smoked sausage log (now we know what made him drop that stink pickle) and he is a quick little bastard, he reached for the knife and took a stab at me before dissapearing into...well wherever the fuck he goes when he reports to the Fat Man of the North.

Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Not Batman

I apologize for being a day late and a dollar short on this post, it as crazy this weekend and I just didn't have time to sit at the computer and do a blog post, but here we go.

My heart goes out to all of the families of the victims of the  Aurora Colorado shootings.  It goes out to the victims still alive recovering in the hospital and it goes out to the ones who lost their lives in the shooting.  My heart goes out to everyone in Aurora Colorado.  I could never imagine, nor would I want to imagine a scenario like that where you go to a movie and someone comes in and opens fire on the crowd.  Men, women, children.  Father, mothers, brothers, sisters.  It is horrible and I once again I cannot even imagine what my life would be like if I lost the Trophy and the Minions.

There are a ton of stories out there all on different media sources, all covering the same incident at different angles.  Some cover the story from the victim's point of view, some cover the story from an outsider's point of view and some even cover the story from the shooter's point of view.  There are so many different stories about the shooting one cannot possibly read or watch them all.  We all know the general gist of the what happened and the shooter has been caught.  Yes, I am calling him the shooter because I do not want to mention this douche's name, he doesn't deserve the recognition.

One trend I am seeing with a lot of these stories is the media and non-media now calling the it the "Batman Massacre" or the "Batman Shooting".  I knew that was going to happen when I woke up in the morning and heard the news on the radio.  At that point it was still the "Aurora Shooting" or something similar and had nothing to do with Batman.  And that is my point, it has nothing to do with Batman.  Bruce Wayne didn't enter the theater and open fire, his alter ego didn't swoop in and kill these people, even the villain Bane didn't murder and harm these people.  They are fictitious characters.

The nickname "Batman Shooting" caught on like wildfire and soon there were hundreds of Photoshoped images of Batman crying for the victims, new black support ribbons and even a post that went viral demanding Christian Bale dress up as Batman and visit the victims in the hospital.  All of these things are great gestures and are good for moral but people need to realize one thing.  People cannot blame the movie, comic books, video games or even the novels.  There is only one person to blame and that is the piece of shit who pulled the trigger.

This has been a disturbing trend for a while now, people trying to find other things to blame for someone's actions. "Oh he stabbed that person because he watched Friday the 13th" or "She sucked so many dicks because of Debbie Does Dallas.". No, no, fucking no. You can only blame the person who did the action. When a movie is made, I'm sure the director and producer did not sit there and say, "Gosh, I hope we make a bazillion dollars AND we cause someone to go on a rampage."

Granted things have changed since I was a youth and the movies, TV shows and video games have become more graphic and more realistic, but chances are the person who decides to go hunt zombies and accidentally kills a person, was probably tapped in the head to begin with, the zombie movie didn't mysteriously do it.

Growing up I watched cartoons, lots of cartoons. What kid didn't watch cartoons on a Saturday morning in the 80's? I watched cartoons like He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Voltron, Transformers, G.I. Joe and even Thundercats. I pretended to be characters from the cartoons, in fact when I would go over a friend's house after school we would play Transformers and we got to choose five Autobots we could turn into. We always chose the good guys. Sure we built play guns and swords out of Construx and pretended to fight the Decepticons, Cobra, and Shredder but not once did we say, let's go kill someone in real life.

I read X-Men comic books, I never thought to myself that I should go and cleanse the world of non superior beings. Did I make a Wolverine claw out of an old work glove and three of my mom's knitting needles? Sure I did, but never went berserker on anyone with it. I grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they were created in the area I lived, I've met the creators, read the comics, watched the cartoon and movies. I made a set of nunchucks and took an old broom stick and pretended to be Michalangelo and Donatello but the only victims where some trees and their branches, they suffered the ninja experience.

I watched Star Wars, the old Batman movies, Rambo and even the classic Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. Again, not once, did I think to myself, let me go and get a giant knife and gut my parents or my school mates. I never wanted to dump poison into the town's drinking water supply or did I ever have an inclination to pull a blaster out and shoot an alien. My parents let me have cap guns and play swords, I didn't turn out to be mass murderer and none of my friends did either.

I grew up with video games, granted not as graphic as they are now, but we had Mortal Combat, Contra and Mike Tyson's Punchout. Again, playing these never made me go bat shit crazy.

I don't know, maybe I'm off the mark on this one and I'm sure many people will dispute and argue with me until they are blue in the face but I feel that the problem isn't in the video games, movies, comic books and TV shows. The problem stands at a different level. What level it is, I don't know. I probably will never know but one thing I do know is before you go looking for something to pass the blame on, take a good hard look in the mirror. People are responsible for their own actions. This isn't just the nut jobs who are shooting up movie theaters, killing multiple victims or raping someone, this is also the people raising the nut jobs.

There I said it, if you bring a kid into this world, don't fuck them up. Be a parent, do your job and show them the difference between Autobots and Decepticons, G.I. Joe and Cobra, Thor and Loki, good and evil. Educate them about right and wrong.