Post by StevePulaski on Dec 17, 2012 18:13:58 GMT -5
This is a Christmas movie, mind you, with one of the most mean-spirited promotional images in years.
Rating: ★
What kind of Christmas movie is this? Christmas With the Kranks is not jolly, whimsical, wholesome, or humorous like the typical American Christmas film, but a wretched, loathsome comedy capitalizing on the things the holiday season isn't about such as competition, self-centeredness, cruelty, and worst of all, conformity.
The American Christmas movies fall in three possible categories, the great, the good, and the bad, like most films in specific genres, although it's quickly shortening to two, the good and the bad, with emphasis on the bad. Christmas classics are those such as A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life, and White Christmas, which cloud the networks annually, with their cherishable whimsy, and incredibly earnest presence. Christmas trash are films like Christmas With the Kranks and Jack Frost; films that take a contrived, corny idea and make the near-fatal flaw of not satirizing their material and taking them seriously, creating a forced and awkward atmosphere. But this is just a grain of salt compared to the number of problems with this film.
The films pairs Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis, two wonderful stars playing two horribly unlikable characters, Luther and Nora Krank. They're a suburban couple who has just sent their daughter Blair (Julie Gonzalo) on a plane after Thanksgiving for a Peace Corps in Peru, leaving both of them to contemplate how to spend the Christmas holiday alone. Luther has a proposal; after spending well over $6,000 on Christmas decorations, he feels they could take a $3,000 cruise and have plenty to show for it. The only catch is that they'd miss Christmas, not decorate for it, and completely overhaul plans to host a party and send Christmas cards.
Seems like a fine idea to me, but the film makes a controversial setup explode by having the neighbors (mainly the neighborhood "king" Vic Frohmeyer, played by Dan Aykroyd) overreact to the idea of the Krank's taking a year off. They are infuriated at their proposal, ostracizing them, manipulating them by excessive caroling, crowding around their house demanding they return "Frosty," an iconic staple of the neighborhood. Good lord, this is the kind of thing you do if you discovered noted hate-monger Fred Phelps was your neighbor. Not if you found out your neighbor simply wants to take a year off from Christmas by doing the kind, noble event of taking his wife on a cruise.
The Krank couple is content with fighting them off, until their daughter calls a few days before Christmas and says she can make it home for the holidays with her new Peruvian fiancee. This sends both Luther and Nora into a scurrying state, accentuating the character trait I hate seeing portrayed cartoonishly and that's desperation. Desperation as a form of urgency and poignancy, where one character is genuinely at a loss and trying to do right but is consistently barricaded by unforeseen, unforgiving circumstances is one thing, but being played for laughs is another.
In one terribly depressing sequence, we see Nora Krank, after being informed of her daughter's unexpected arrival, rushes to the grocery store to get hickory honey ham, because it's her daughter's absolute favorite. She races an old woman through the whole store (guess who gets the damn ham?), and then pleas a young couple with an infant to buy the ham off them for larger than the sticker price. Seeing Jamie Lee Curtis (In one what be her final starring role until 2010's You Again, which I hear was roughly the same degree of appalling as this one) desperately succumb to petulant beginning for a damned ham, as if the store didn't carry turkey or normal ham as a substitute, is incredibly unfunny. Then when she finally gets the family to cough up the ham for a large sum of money (after bringing up their kid's future), she is bumped and it rolls down the steep pavement into the middle of the road to be crushed by a sixteen-wheeler. Curtis then leads out a blood-curdling scream similar to the one she released in Carpenter's Halloween, when she had a better reason to shriek.
The nail that drops into the coffin for this film is that it takes the somewhat original idea of portraying the Krank's as non-conformists, but then collectively makes them into the enemy to the point where they give in to the neighbors' orders of celebrating the holidays. Since when did celebrating Christmas have to involve a tree, lights, ornaments, parties, cards, caroling, and neighborly devotion? Since when did the message of being an individual and being unique, things we've been told since birth, be traded for the message of conformity by force? It's appalling to believe this film got past the stage of production, let alone the fact that Chris Columbus found this material acceptable to be placed on screen during the season of love and jolliness. It's also incredibly saddening to hear Columbus was the same man who directed both Home Alone films and the wonderfully potent Goonies. And please don't get me started on the persistent incorporation of unnecessary, grueling animal cruelty. It's unwarranted in almost any movie, but here, it's simply unacceptable.
Christmas With the Kranks contains no laughs, humor, love, or anything resembling that of a competent holiday picture. It drains the talent of its two stars by making both of them succumb to something stupid such as Tim Allen's Luther getting botox, with a terribly unfunny sequence of him trying to eat something when it keeps falling out his mouth, and Jamie Lee Curtis' trying to get a tan in a mall tanning salon and finding herself exposed in the middle of the shop. Not only is this movie terribly not funny, but it's pathetically unconvincing; especially when it tacks on a mawkish ending that just oozes cutesy sentimentality.
Starring: Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Dan Aykroyd. Directed by: Joe Roth.
