Movies 10 - 7

Well, I ended up going to the bar for happy hour yesterday, rather than finishing my promised post on movies, so the two for one is going to come today.

Virginia has finally cooled down to the point of being downright cold.  I left the house about 6pm yesterday and just a sweatshirt wasn't enough as I froze in my car until it warmed up.  Maybe I need to move further south.

Movie #10: Miracle on 34th St.

When I was younger and people still used to watch movies on VHS, this was one of the go to Christmas movies.

Speaking of VHS, have you watched anything on VHS lately?  It is insane how spoiled we have become with the quality of DVDs.  I recently bought a movie on VHS from goodwill on the recommendation of a friend, and when I watched it I was almost livid that I had to watch something in such poor quality.  Tracking?  Can you believe you used to have to fight with a VCR to make sure the tape lined up correctly?  Louis CK was right, technology has ruined us.

Anyway, it has been a few years since I sat down and watched Miracle on 34th St, so I won't sit here and mine plot details from Wikipedia to pass time.  What I will do is tune in to it next time I notice it is on cable--and lets be honest, it will be somewhere between five and one thousand times in the next two weeks.

Movie #9: Jingle All the Way

Sinbad, Arnold, the late Phil Hartman all together in a movie about the insanity of shopping around the holidays.  If there was one thing that Schwarzenegger was good at before his career change to politician, it was playing the dopey lead--Kindergarten Cop for example.   As always, Phil Hartman knocks his performance out of the park, and Sinbad takes a vacation from not being funny to turn in a good performance.  All in all a good choice for a lighthearted Christmas movie.

Movie #8: Elf

My first experience with the movie Elf was just two years ago.  I was substitute teaching at a middle school on a three day assignment right before Christmas break.  Of course this meant that I had to show one of three movies to four classes a day.  Two of the classes chose Elf, which meant that not only did I watch the movie twice that week, but I watched the first half of it two times in a row, and the second half twice in a row.

Thankfully it is a very good movie, and watching it in such a disjointed and repetitive way is still enjoyable.  There isn't a better actor on the planet than Will Farrel for the part of a giant elf.  It doesn't hurt that I could watch Zooey Deschanel sit in a chair and stare at the camera with a bored look on her face for two hours, and I would probably pay to see it again.

Movie #7 Muppet Christmas Carol

It is a pretty safe bet that if you make a movie or television special that involves the Muppets, I will be head over heels for it.  Sesame Street was the only television show I watched for the first few years of my life, and one of my earliest memories of cable TV as a kid was watching reruns of The Muppet Show on Cartoon Network.  Hell, I even asked for a season of The Muppet Show for Christmas last year--season two, almost exclusively for the Steve Martin guest appearance.

Needless to say the Muppet's take on Dickens' Christmas Carol is an easy choice for this countdown.  The hard thing was keeping this movie so far down the list, but things get pretty heated from here on out.  More on that next week.

Today I promise to get up the last of the weekly posts (songs 25-21) that I have fallen behind on for the past few days.  Until then, enjoy.