The Christmas Chronicles

Year 15, Day 357 - 12/23/23 - Movie #4,599

BEFORE: Perhaps you spent your pre-Christmas weekend hanging up lights, or decorating your tree, or even baking some pies or cookies.  We spent part of today picking up 2 large (60 lbs) bags of sand from Home Depot, and then finding out that the store does NOT sell empty sandbags to fill, or even filled ones.  Because we had a big storm last week that caused a small amount of water in our basement, we decided to finally do something about that, in addition to the garbage bag that we've taped up to seal the door to the backyard.  Before each storm this fall we took time to clear the stairwell of leaves, but if enough rain falls and flooding starts, then more leaves get dragged down to the backyard drain and it inevitably clogs up, then the water fills the stairwell and eventually comes into the basement, either a little or a lot.  So we bought the sand today and ordered sandbags online, when they arrive next week we'll have to spend a day filling sandbags and blocking the door on the backyard side, and hopefully that will keep the water from coming inside, once and for all.  We're tired of staying up until 5 am during an overnight rainstorm, and I'm just upset that it took us years to come up with sandbags to solve the problem. We can't get it done by Christmas, but perhaps before the next big storm, and since it doesn't seem to snow in NYC any more, that could be in December or January. 

I've said it many times, that I don't take suggestions for what films I watch and review.  Well, that's not exactly true, because I pay attention to reviews and how other people feel about certain movies, even if that's sometimes an unconscious process.  In the case of "The Christmas Chronicles", my BFF Andy recommended this film to me, probably sometime in 2019 or so, and, OK, sure, I'll put it on my list, maybe I'll get to it someday, and maybe I won't.  Time went by and I watched "The Grinch" in 2019, "Bad Santa 2" and "Klaus" in 2020, "The Man Who Invented Christmas" in 2021 and "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" and "Last Christmas" last year.  Finally, I got down to just a few holiday-themed movies on my list, and I had the slots and the linking opportunity to work this one in.  

Darby Camp carries over from "Clifford the Big Red Dog", and that was always how I planned to get HERE, so, well, at least my plan worked out.  So I'm going to try very hard to forget that there might have been a better way to get here, through an additional Christmas movie, and now that movie is stranded out in the cold, and maybe I can work toward including it next year, and maybe that will work, and maybe it won't.  But hey, it took me four years to include THIS film, so all things are possible over time, except for the things that aren't. 

THE PLOT: The story of a sister and brother, Kate and Teddy Pierce, whose Christmas Eve plan to catch Santa Claus on camera turns into an unexpected journey that most kids could only dream about. 

AFTER: Well, this turned out to be rather a fun, action-packed movie about what I think is one of the most ridiculous topics possible, the Santa Claus legend.  God, these stories have been done to DEATH, haven't they?  All those stop-motion holiday specials about how Kris Kringle got his red suit and his flying reindeer, how he flies all around the world on Christmas Eve and delivers presents to billions of children in every time zone, despite logic and physics all telling us that this is an impossible feat for anyone, except perhaps a magical Saint who is also king of the Elves and lives at the (quite uninhabitable) North Pole, making electronic toys in a woodshop somehow.  There's absolutely nothing in that story that makes a lick of sense, but if you point that out to anyone under 12, then suddenly YOU'RE THE BAD GUY who HATES CHRISTMAS, when really, all you were trying to do was to get your nieces or nephews to think for themselves, question everything and maybe use a bit of logic to determine what's real and what isn't. 

(I posit that maybe older people would be less likely to fall for the lies and half-truths of certain politicians if they were trained at a younger age to question the stories they were told, and maybe taught to use that gray matter between their ears to figure out when they're being fed a giant pile of B.S.  But I digress.)

So if you're going to go and make a modern version of the Santa Claus story, you might as well lean into it, I suppose, because there's no sense in half-assing it, or by maybe saying Santa's magic has really been advanced technology all this time, like he had a super-sonic sleigh before there was the Concorde, and he used computers to track holiday requests before most of us had laptops at our disposal.  Nope, the only way to go here is to depict old-school Christmas magic, and that means that Santa can basically teleport, can turn into "coal dust" to slide down tiny chimneys, and that his toy sack is essentially a "bag of holding" that has infinite space, and also uses some kind of portal to connect to the North Pole, so he doesn't have to keep stopping back at home base to pick up more presents - instead his bag is constantly full because it's drawing from the gift-verse, which is multi-dimensional and restocked by the elves.  

The elves have their own language here, and they're small, more like the house-elves from the "Harry Potter" movies than the elves we saw in "Lord of the Rings", or the elves seen in every Christmas special ever, like that one that wanted to be a dentist. (Hermey! I had to look it up...)

I'd say that maybe the elves here look a bit more like gnomes or tiny dwarves, but what do I know?  It's a design thing I think. They also remind me of those mechanical dolls from "Barbarella" with the sharp teeth. Don't mess with the elves, that's all I'm saying. When Santa gets in a jam and crashes his sleigh and loses his reindeer, he knows that he's going to need the help of the elves to get Christmas back on track.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, the film focuses first on two kids whose father passed away a year or two ago, and their Christmas is now very different. Their mother has to work all night at the hospital just to make ends meet (leaving the kids unattended at home, which I'm pretty sure is unsafe and illegal, just saying). Kate's going through old camcorder tapes of Christmases gone by (where her mother conveniently announces the YEAR in every bit of Christmas footage, which I think nobody does IRL, just saying) and when she pauses the footage, she sees a hand in a red jacket putting a present under the Christmas tree.  It just has to be Santa, right?  So Kate convinces her older brother, Teddy, to take a night off from stealing cars (umm, yeah) and wait up with her to get more camcorder footage of Santa Claus.  (Another NITPICK POINT, simply nobody in 2018 still used a camcorder for anything. Again, just saying.)

Since it is Christmas Eve, and this is a movie, sure enough, Santa Claus does come to their house, and Santa doesn't notice that these kids aren't in bed, sleeping.  But wait, I thought he knows when you are sleeping, and he knows when you're awake, so WTF?  After just missing him with the camera, the kids run outside to see him leaping from rooftop to rooftop, but also, they see his sleigh and reindeer hovering over the street, so naturally they find a way to climb up and jump in.  After all, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Well, it turns out a lot, because when Santa realizes that there are two kids aboard his sleigh, he loses his concentration, his hat, his sack of toys and his reindeer, I think in that exact order.  The sleigh crash-lands in a bad part of Chicago, and the race is on to get the sleigh fixed, the reindeer and the toys back.

During the process of saving Christmas, we learn that that Santa's got some skills, for starters he knows every street in the world, and he also knows every KID or former kid in the world, he remembers them even after they became adults, and he remembers what they wanted for Christmas every year.  The script has to bend over backwards a little bit to make these skills very important, but there's a certain backwards logic to that, especially if these are the skills that he NEEDS to have to not only save Christmas, but also teach these kids a little life lesson about believing in Christmas again, after the tough year they've had.  And I suppose once you've ridden on a flying reindeer or watched the names on Santa's list being magically crossed off, then yeah, I suppose you'd have to be a believer again, right?  

Things do not go well in Chicago, though - attempts to get help from the diners in a pub prove futile when nobody quite understands this is the REAL Santa, and it's easier for everyone to assume he's a homeless man who somehow knows their names and what they wanted for Christmas when they were kids.  Santa's knowledge of who's been naughty and who's been nice means that he also knows the bartender served time for grand theft auto, and so Santa and the kids get chased out of the bar, however they also jack the stolen car to go look for the reindeer. But this means that the police are now looking for THEM, and when the police track them down, they bring Santa to jail while Kate and Teddy ride off on the flying reindeer to find the toy sack and somehow contact the elves for more help.

This leads to the best scene in the film, BY FAR, which is Santa Claus in jail, magically producing instruments for every other prisoner (who just happen to be members of Steven Van Zandt's side band, the Disciples of Soul) and performing the song "Santa Claus Is Back in Town".  Remember that this Christmas song was made famous by Elvis Presley, and Kurt Russell once played Elvis in a movie, so the whole time I was thinking, "Oh, I get it, he's Elvish Presley!"  Kurt Russell filled the Santa role very well, playing a grandiose character that also reminded me of his role as the planet/god Ego in "Guardians of the Galaxy vol. II" which was released the year before this one. 

Yeah, I've still got issues with the depiction of Christmas "magic" because it's just going to feed that desire in young kids to believe in impossible stories, and I'm not sure that does society any favors as a whole.  Like, come on, kids, you know that those Christmas presents you want come from a STORE, right?  Like, if presents come from Santa's workshop then why all the commercials on TV telling your parents to go to Wal-Mart or Marshall's or Macy's, right?  Put. It. Together. Please. Because I don't want to have to be the bad guy here.  There was footage a week or two ago of some U.S. senators or representatives debating the values of whole milk over almond milk and oat milk, which apparently was an attempt to reverse some Obama-era edict against whole milk.  And this older Representative from North Carolina, Virginia Foxx, championed the benefits of whole milk, which were that the proteins in whole milk give Santa Claus the energy he needs to deliver all the Christmas presents and jump from rooftop to rooftop.  I can't believe this speech is now officially part of the Congressional record, but this 80-something year old woman was completely serious, that it's whole milk that gives Santa Claus his magical powers.  Man, is that dumb, because everybody knows that it's really all the sugar in those cookies he eats at every house that gives him his energy.  Really, it's not that complicated, sugar makes kids hyper, so logically it would do the same for Santa, plus also give him diabetes.  But good news for Santa, we have Ozempic now, so he can control his A1C levels and maybe also lose some weight, just watch out for those side effects, Santa, which could include nausea, diarrhea, constipation, dizziness, blurred vision, fatigue, kidney damage, headaches, flatulence, difficulty swallowing, and irritability.  

I've never seen any of the "Santa Clause" movies, and really, I have no intention (as of this writing) of adding them to my list.  Maybe someday that will change, but right now, they're banned from consideration along with the "Transformers" and "Fast & Furious" franchises. I mean, anything is possible but some films are just SO FAR down on the list that I'll be 100 years old before I could even get to them, so essentially never. 

Also starring Kurt Russell (last seen in "The Mean Season"), Judah Lewis (last seen in "Demolition"), Kimberly Williams-Paisley (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Martin Roach (last seen in "The Man from Toronto"), Lamorne Morris (last seen in "How It Ends"), Oliver Hudson (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Goldie Hawn (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Tony Nappo (last seen in "In the Shadow of the Moon"), Vella Lovell (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Lauren Collins (last seen in "Charlie Bartlett"), Steven Van Zandt (last seen in "The Irishman"), Jesse Gervasi, David Kohlsmith (last seen in "Shazam!"), Kaitlyn Airdrie, Jack Bona, Jameson Kraemer, Sofia Park, Seth Mohan, Kayla Lakhani, Glen McDonald (last seen in "Goon: Last of the Enforcers"), Danielle Bourgon (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Chai Valladares, Ish Morris, Jeremy Raymond, Chris LeBlanc (last seen in "Trumbo"), Marc Ribler, Jeff Teravainen (last seen in "Hollywoodland"), Elizabeth Phoenix Caro, Stan Harrison, Clark Gayton, Ravi Best, Ron Tooley, Eddie Manion, Anthony Almonte, Jack Daley, Andy Burton, Lowell Levinger, Richard Mercurio, Maureen Van Zandt, 

and the voices of Debra Wilson, Kari Wahlgren, Andrew Morgado, Debi DerryBerry, Michael Yurchak (last seen in "Are You Here"), Jessica Lowe (last seen in "Blended"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 cellmates with hidden musical talents

Clifford the Big Red Dog

Year 15, Day 353 - 12/19/23 - Movie #4,598

BEFORE: Well, here goes, just two films left after tonight, so I'll definitely make Christmas on time, then comes a couple weeks of inactivity during which I'll have to re-total up all the appearances from the year and write some kind of wrap-up post.  I've got about a month of down-time at one job, and the other one could close up shop at any time, so umm, Happy Holidays?  This is the kind of thing that not only stresses me out, but sends me right to the job-hunting sites to look for some kind of way out.  Hail Mary plays only, though, for some reason, I guess I'm just not good at job hunting.

Regrets, surely because although this film was advertised with "This Christmas..." on the poster, I think the film itself has nothing to do with Christmas.  So getting to the end through "Christmas in Paradise" would have been a better fit, I just didn't have enough slots to do that.  Bummer.  But really, this "Clifford" film was put on the list last December, and I couldn't get to it even though it linked to "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms", so that means today's film got postponed from one December to the next, and if I can do that, I can postpone "Christmas in Paradise" the same way.  That film becomes the goal for next December, so let's see if I can get there in 12 months - I guess this is just how things work here at the Movie Year. 

John Cleese carries over from "Father Christmas Is Back". 

THE PLOT: A young girl's love for a tiny puppy named Clifford makes the dog grow to an enormous size. 

AFTER: Sure, I know this film is based on a beloved classic children's book, but I don't know, it kind of made for a weird film.  The story is all over the place, it feels like they didn't want it to devolve into a chase scene where everybody just drives all over town, but yet that's exactly where it ended up going.  What's the story structure here?  It's just girl gets puppy, puppy gets big, problems ensue, girl loses giant puppy and then girl gets giant puppy back.  But that's just too simple somehow, so they had to keep throwing more and more obstacles in the way of that storyline just so we'd feel more relieved at the end when everything works out OK.

So the obstacles that exist for very little reason include the irresponsible uncle, the evil CEO of the corporation trying to solve world hunger, the building super who doesn't allow pets, the magical illegal pet dealer who keeps setting up shop in different places around town, the bumbling veterinarian, the neighbor who's a wanna-be magician, the other neighbor who has an artificial hand, the other OTHER neighbor who's an older Russian woman that obsessively drinks condensed milk, and the other other OTHER neighbors who are ethnically diverse and in mixed marriages and are all along for the ride but given very little to do.  

Look, I know it's a KIDS movie and therefore it doesn't have to make much sense, but it's just so damn clunky, and if you're an adult then it kind of offensively doesn't make any sense at all.  I need answers for why things happen - like how did the puppy grow so damn big overnight?  Supposedly it's because Emily loved him SO much, but come on, how is that a thing?  The false narrative from the chemical company, that the dog is their property and escaped from an experimental lab almost makes more sense.  If the dog was being given radiation treatments or got bitten by a radioactive, umm, bigger dog, that seems more plausible to explain his rapid growth - only NITPICK POINT, how does creating a giant dog in a lab solve the world hunger problem?  Are they suggesting that hungry people should start eating giant puppies?  Wouldn't it make more sense to create a giant chicken or a giant turkey before you move on to making giant dogs?  So the evil company CEO's rationalization that the dog belongs to him isn't believable, but then again, it doesn't have to be, because he's lying, as all CEO's do. 

Then there's so much family drama in this young girl's life - her mother is English and has the kind of job where she has to go to Chicago on business trips, so her John Krasinski-light screw-up of an uncle who lives in a delivery van has to take care of her for a few days, but hey, at least he gets to live in a real apartment while he does that and sleep in a real bed.  And all he has to do is take care of Emily, which he's apparently terrible at doing, and has no real personal connection with her, also no authority over her behavior.  She's also being bullied at school by the "mean girls" who call her out for being white trash or "discount store" or something.  Sure, this is the kind of life led by a little girl that could really be enhanced by a puppy from a magical exotic pet dealer that suddenly becomes 10 feet tall.  

The rest of the film is then filled with futile efforts to HIDE this giant animal, which, let's face it, just isn't going to happen, and then dealing with the after-effects once they all realize that there's just no way to get around town unseen with a giant puppy, not in these days of social media when everyone posts photos and videos of what they see on a constant basis.  Then the whole thing devolves into one big chase scene, and also it's determined that putting Clifford on a container ship to China is somehow the answer to all of their problems, forcing a tearful goodbye that gets reversed five minutes later, so what was the damn point?  But everything gets solved when Emily finally finds her voice to explain to the police and the crowd of followers that it's OK to be different.  Umm, sure, that was the answer all along, why not just explain the problem again to the curious mob, and they'll understand it this time, and then you get your apartment back and your deadbeat uncle gets a job and the bullying stops, only that's not the way the world works. 

Well, I suppose things could have been worse - I could have watched "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile".  I don't have kids, I don't enjoy most movies made for kids, so why the hell do I keep watching movies made for kids?  I really should stop doing that. 

NITPICK POINT #2: The mother's trip home makes no sense, she calls from her taxi and says she's "headed to JFK" when she really means she's coming HOME from JFK, as she's in all of the scenes in NYC after that.  Didn't anyone notice that her dialogue on the phone call is wrong?  Also, do we really want to teach kids that they don't have to explain to their parents where they are or what they're currently doing, and that the best plan is to always hang up on your mother when she calls to check on you?  

NITPICK POINT #3 & 4: The whole movie takes place over just a few days, during which the main characters get evicted, and in real life, any eviction process takes months, not days. (Don't ask me how I know this...). But in those same few days, Clifford the Giant Puppy never eats, and you would think that a giant dog would have a very big appetite.  We never see him poop, either, maybe because he never eats anything?  We do see him urinate, though, and that's a giant mess, then they address the fact that there's going to be another problem with poop later, but thankfully we never see it happen.  But at some point it's inevitable, right? 

Also starring Jack Whitehall (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again"), Darby Camp, Tony Hale (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Sienna Guillory (last seen in "Love Actually"), David Alan Grier (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Russell Wong (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Izaac Wang (last heard in "Raya and the Last Dragon"), Kenan Thompson (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Tovah Feldshuh (last seen in "A Walk on the Moon"), Paul Rodriguez (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Russell Peters (last seen in "Supercon"), Keith Ewell (last seen in "Trust Me"), Bear Allen-Blaine, Horatio Sanz (last seen in "Zeroville"), Rosie Perez (last seen in "Fearless"), Alex Moffat (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Jessica Keenan Wynn (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "The Professor"), Ty Jones, Mia Ronn, Madison Smith, Madison Morris, Yasha Jackson, Mateo Gomez (last seen in "In the Heights"), Khari McDowell, Raymond Neil Hernandez (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Neil Hellegers, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barney Fitzpatrick, Jackson Frazer (last seen in "Maggie's Plan").

RATING: 4 out of 10 very loud and aggressive sheep (a very common NYC fixture, of course)

Father Christmas Is Back

Year 15, Day 351 - 12/17/23 - Movie #4,597

BEFORE: Well, it's time for Christmas movies, but I think I might have screwed this chain up a bit.  I've got three yuletide-themed movies on the docket, but if I'd paid a bit more attention to the cast lists, I could have had FOUR.  I had my eyes on the end-game, but there was actually a better path to get there, and I missed it.  Maybe there's a life lesson there, something about endings because every year ends, every life ends and there's only so much we can control about it, except for what we do on the way there.  

Anyway, there's another film called "Christmas in Paradise", and it's got about 5 or 6 of the same actors in it as today's film does, including Kelsey Grammer and Elizabeth Hurley.  But I didn't see a way to get from THERE to my planned last film, so I tabled it.  But there WAS a way, through a different Kelsey Grammer film, which only recently came on to my list.  Mea culpa.  But now I don't have enough slots left, and I can't go over my self-imposed limit of 300 films in a year.  I can't go back and un-do a review either, that's against the rules too.  So I have to proceed as planned and not go back on my word, my only excuse is that I've been so distracted by the stress of my job(s) and the threat of losing one that I haven't had the time or motivation to double-check my chains.  So my apologies to Mr. Grammer and Ms. Hurley and anyone else who won't make the annual wrap-up this time around. 

But who knows, maybe this is the chain's way of telling me that "Christmas in Paradise" is a terrible film.  Maybe it's telling me I need to save it for next year, that it could play a vital role in connecting two films in December 2024.  There's just no way to know.  But also maybe four Christmas films could have made me feel more festive than three, and I really could have used that.  I didn't make a Christmas mix playlist this year, for the first time in like 30 years, I just wasn't feeling up to it. 

Kris Marshall carries over from "The Four Feathers".  

THE PLOT: Four sisters re-unite for the Christmas holiday in a Yorkshire mansion, and misunderstandings uncover the long-buried secret that tore their family apart many years ago. 

AFTER: I'm listening to my last two Christmas mixes - from 2021 and 2022 - trying to get inspired. It's not working well, I don't feel inspired to listen to more holiday music and try to get a new mix together.  Clearly it's time for a break - maybe I just pass on the holidays this year, for the most part.  We'll make lasagna and maybe go shopping at the outlet stores, but I can't see shopping BEFORE the holiday, it's just too stressful. During the pandemic we went and did shopping AFTER Christmas, like a few days later, and that was fine, the stores were close to empty.  Of course, during COVID we had such a great excuse to just stay home and be shut-ins, close out the dangerous world, but we did that because it felt comforting to do so - cue up another episode of "Christmas Cookie Showdown" on the Food Network, please. 

Of course, we WANT to celebrate, but that just adds to the stress, to put a party or a big family meal together, then there's the traveling, and that's a whole other nightmare because everybody else is traveling somewhere at the same time. Nah, I think we played it right at Thanksgiving this year, we didn't fly or drive anywhere, except to a restaurant about 45 minutes away on Long Island, where we had an excellent buffet meal.  So I can justify picking a nice restaurant to have dinner a few days after Christmas, maybe getting together with a couple select friends in the week between the two holidays, since my nights will all be available for the first time in months. And if my wife and I exchange one or two good presents with each other, and mail-order some gifts for my sister's family and my parents, that should probably do it.

So tonight's film kind of proves my point, because it's one of those films where a family tries to gather and celebrate Christmas, but just about everything that can go wrong goes wrong, much like this year's Thanksgiving films "Pieces of April" and "The Myth of Fingerprints", to the point where you may wonder WHY the family continues to get together every year, when it's so stressful and some of them hate each other so damn much.  I have no constructive answers there, except that this family's last name is "Christmas", so perhaps they feel obligated - just look at "Hubie Halloween", it's the same concept I suppose, that dude's going to REALLY be into his namesake holiday.  NITPICK POINT, though, is there anyone in the U.K. that really has the last name "Christmas"?  Hmm, apparently there are a few - a Canadian saxophonist named Art Christmas, an English footballer named Cecil Christmas, and a cyclist and runner named Dani Christmas - plus those famous people had family members, no doubt.  So it's possible.

So the title "Father Christmas Is Back" has a double meaning here, because in the U.K. they call Santa Claus "Father Christmas", so it could stand for the story of Santa coming around each year, or it also means here that the family patriarch, James Christmas, has come back to his family after being absent for nearly three decades.  Of course, three of his four daughters have no idea he's coming, and really, that's a party foul that the fourth daughter set up.  Caroline, the host of the party, probably deserved a little notice!  More surprises come about when sister Joanna, brings her new boyfriend, Felix, instead of the expected one, Hamish.  Vicky, the one who backpacked across America and found their father in Florida, also takes up with the local bartender while she's visiting, and good old reliable sister Paulina just goes back to work on her thesis about the Beatles and comes out to her family, but apparently she does this every year. 

(NITPICK POINT: Who works on their master's thesis while visiting the family at Christmas?  Does her sister's house contain some kind of Beatles archive, or is that just where she stores her research?  Also, who uses a manual typewriter instead of a laptop in 2021, for God's sake? Also also, wouldn't you think that everything that COULD be written about the Beatles would have been already written, at this point?)

So the family patriarch arrives unannounced, to the shock of his wife and 75% of his daughters, and so the holidays become a time for forced reconciliation and awkward celebrations.  Boy, we've got a lot of loose ends here, this film seems to delight in starting up plot threads and then taking its sweet time in getting back to them.  Vicky steals Joanna's boyfriend's Rolls Royce and half of her wardrobe (though we never really find out WHY these two sisters hate each other, do we?) and we don't learn where she took these items for a very long time.  Also, it's clear from the beginning of the film that Peter took the WRONG bag of presents to the senior center - because if he didn't, then why even introduce the possibility? - and this joke doesn't pay off until the final few minutes of the film.  Well, since the film covers four days leading up to December 25, I suppose this makes some kind of sense.

Speaking of long set-ups and delayed punchlines, we see near the beginning that James's ex-wife is carrying on an affair with his brother, John Christmas.  Though I suppose it's not really an "affair" if she's no longer married to James, and they're doing very little to keep their trysts secret.  Yes, old British people get horny, too, or is it "randy" over there?  More power to them, but why not let the rest of the family know about it?  I guess then it wouldn't be fun any more, right? 

The family eventually does work out many of their problems, so they can all go to the pub together and sing a holiday song, and eventually they also learn why Dad left in the first place - and perhaps this sort of thing was inevitable, who's to say?  Anyway, the important thing to know about the Brits here is that just like some Americans, they stress out over hosting the PERFECT Christmas party, they have quaint church Christmas fairs with swap meets, pie-tasting contests and raffles, just like us!  And they bicker and disagree with each other while they sit in their large English mansions and eat giant holiday meals, and they tolerate the visiting Americans who don't eat meat or gluten or refined sugar or large amounts of caffeine.  God, Americans are so annoying, right?  First they demand their independence and then they hit you with their dietary restrictions.

Last year at Christmas-time I watched "The Hundred-Foot Journey" and "Last Christmas", both were sort of about the immigrant experience in the U.K., one had Indian immigrants running a restaurant and the other had a Serbo-Croatian family at its center.  Those were both rather charming little drama/romances, both being sort of multi-culti as a bonus.  But tonight's film seems like a mess by comparison, sorry to say, since it rapidly turns into a bedroom farce surrounded by holiday disasters. Maybe that's Christmas to some people in the U.K., I don't know, but it's not really my experience with Christmases.  

NITPICK POINT #2: Elizabeth Hurley looks great for her age, sure, but that means the actor playing her father is only 10 years older than her in real life, and the actress playing her mother is only 4 years older.  Something doesn't quite add up there.

Also starring Elizabeth Hurley (last seen in "The Weight of Water"), John Cleese (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Kelsey Grammer (last seen in "Like Father"), Nathalie Cox (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Talulah Riley (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Caroline Quentin, April Bowlby (last seen in "The Slammin' Salmon"), Ray Fearon (last seen in "The Protégé"), Naomi Frederick (last seen in "The Aftermath"), Katy Brand (last seen in "Nanny McPhee Returns"), Amelie Prescott, Oliver Smith, Janie Booth (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Bryan Samson, Ania Marson (last seen in "See How They Run"), Jamie Roche, Lauren Dickenson, James Kay, NIcholas Cooper, Lucas Livesey, Laura Bowes, Nikita Lund, Mick Liversidge. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 toilet-paper roll ornaments