Christmas at the Movies - First Season

Christmas is... Well it's about the best time of the whole year.

No matter when they take place, modern era or period,

Christmas movies and television specials are always about someone

who has lost their faith in humankind, regaining it,

saved by other people being kind because it's Christmas.

Christmas is the landscape that everybody wants to paint on.

Everyone who tells stories is attracted

to the heightened emotions that it brings.

Nostalgia plays such a huge part in Christmas

because it is part of so many people's childhoods.

And being able to go back and relive those feelings

every year by watching holiday movies is just...

..joy.

Christmas Story is one of the best movies about nostalgia,

family and Christmas.

# Jingle bells, jingle bells

# Jingle all the way. # A Christmas Story

I watch it every year at least twice.

It's like the script of my life.

Can we go now? Can we go now? Yes.Yes, we can go now.

It brings out every childhood wonder and hurt

that you can imagine.

Good morning, Mrs Shields.

I can't think of another movie that gets childhood so perfectly.

That weird sort of age where he's, like, nine years old.

Hey, listen, smart ass.

Where Ralphie swears and uses bad words, but still believes in Santa.

Yeah, oh, that's Santa.

It taps into a universal kid experience of Christmas,

writing essays about the thing that you want, like a Red Ryder BB Gun.

I want an official Red Ryder Carbon-action 200-shot range model air rifle.

It really does capture wanting that gift

that you know your parents don't want you to have.

No, shoot your eye out.

Ralphie is facing resistance from all corners.

His teacher.: "You'll shoot your eye out."

The department store Santa. You'll shoot your eye out, kid.

It's a great simple story mostly told from the kid's point of view.

Ho, ho, ho. Noo-o-o.

It's funny and sweet, but cinematically, really original.

God, it's hard to beat Home Alone for me.

Macaulay Culkin, iconic performance.

This house is so full of people, it makes me sick.

Home Alone is about what if you've gone away for the holidays...

What else can we be forgetting?

..and you forgot your child.

Kevin!I made my family disappear.

Just the fun and the high jinx of that film.

It is on the Mount Rushmore of holiday movies.

I remember just thinking that I was fully transported into like,

"This could actually happen to me as a five year old."

It was terrifying that idea, but also so exciting.

Ah, woo!Being liberated from family responsibilities,

but at the same time, taking on family responsibilities

to protect the home and repel the bad guys.

It becomes basically a Looney Tunes cartoon.

You guys give up or ya thirsty for more?

At the same time, you're also seeing his mom, desperate,

trying to get home.I have been from Chicago to Paris to Dallas

to... Where the hell am I? Scranton.

Finally, Kevin's walking alone in his neighbourhood,

and he realises that it used to be home alone in celebration,

and now it's home alone missing his family.

And that really is what makes it such a great Christmas movie

and not just a kid-attacking-the-bandits movie.

Home Alone really established John Hughes

as somebody that had the holiday Christmas theme down.

What we're looking for today is the Griswold family Christmas tree.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is essentially

about how being around family makes you crazy.

The stress of your extended family, making sure the lights are right...

..making sure all the kids are getting along,

nobody could do that the way John Hughes could.

It's a very relatable movie

because there is so much pressure

that we all put on the holidays.

And of course in Christmas Vacation,

it's just one catastrophe after another.

Oh, hey.

Is he drunk?

The Best Man Holidays is the second film within the Best Man franchise.

No dessert yet, not until we do our talent show.

And that Christmas talent show shows just how

within the culture that movie was.

# Can you stand the rain?...#

of course you'll do the new edition classic Can You Stand the Rain?

It was emotional, but it was funny.

It was like a box of holiday chocolates.

Christmas comedies run the gamut of different kinds of stories

and different tones. Can you help me?

Er, Yes... Merry..Mary...had a little...

No, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.

And I think what people come to a Christmas movie

to find is the humour plus the heart.

Buddy, I think there's something I probably should tell you.

I consider Elf to be a modern Christmas classic.

I mean, even trying to describe it makes me laugh.

It rides this fine tightrope

between this sweetly magical movie

about someone who wholeheartedly believes in the Christmas spirit.

A lot of people down south don't believe in Santa Claus.What?

But it also is a movie about this big tall dork

in an elf costume making his way through Manhattan with no idea what's going on.

You look like you came from the North Pole.

That's exactly where I came from.

It's a very traditional package for a Christmas movie,

built around like the subversive heart

of Will Ferrell. There's something delightful about that.

Good morning, 10am. Santa's coming to to-Santa!

OH, MY GOD!

Santa here? I know him.

He found the edge in a very innocent character

and to me, that's what's so fun about it.I know him.

The movies I grew up with, like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, that to me seemed like a hook.

Bye-bye.

Let's treat this movie like it's a guy

who grew up in a 1960s Christmas special.

Kirby!

And it was also an opportunity

to explore visual effects with forced perspective.

There's room for everyone on the nice list.

And stop motion, all very old techniques.

This might be the golden opportunity to find out who you really are.

And like Rudolph, it's a classic kind of fish out of water story,

but Will Ferrell just brings so much to it.

Come with me. Right.

All he wants is to be accepted and believed.

And at the end of the movie, we get to see all these people

who come to believe. There is that consistent Christmas element

in Elf of change, of realisation.

Merry Christmas, ho, ho, ho.

Santa Claus in the movies is kind of the direct result

of obviously centuries of history, of mythology.

He is a jolly man. He lives in the North Pole, and his cheeks are rosy,

and he brings this kind of magical place where anything is possible.

# Jingle bells, jingle bells...#

The best of these movies used Santa to raise questions of faith,

and in Miracle on 34th Street,

this question of faith is put on trial.

Before you go up on the floor, I just wanna give you a few tips

on how to be the good Santa Claus. Go right ahead.

They have Santa Claus convince you that he is in fact, Chris Cringle.

You have to go on a faith journey.

There goes Santa Claus.

Oh, don't even mention the name.

A young Natalie Wood in one of her first screen appearances

has been raised to be a clear-eyed realist.

No Santa Claus, no fairytales,

no fantasies of any kind.

Is that it? That's right.

This movie is reflective of a very specific time in American history.

This is the end of World War II.

Many people are scarred emotionally and otherwise,

and the country's trying to find its way again.

Oh, Christmas isn't just a day, it's a frame of mind.

The Christmas spirit is in trouble. It's waning.

Would you please tell her that you're not really Santa Claus?

The idea that a child would be raised in a world without fantasy

is not unheard of. Children, like everyone else,

had just lived through this horrifying world-spanning conflict.

I'm sorry, she doesn't speak English,

she's Dutch. She just came over.

This young girl is a war refugee. She's an orphan.

Hello.

Chris Cringle starts speaking in colloquial Dutch,

and Natalie Wood witnesses this remarkable moment.

You can see her kind of starting to go, "Oh, maybe...

"Maybe he is more magical than I'm giving him credit for."

It's one of the most moving moments of the film,

but it's also very specific to that era because there were war refugees

and it was incumbent upon us, the viewer,

to make them feel welcome and to give them a Merry Christmas, too.

They said you wanted to see me, Mrs Walker?

By the end of the movie, Edmund Gwynn, as Santa Claus,

changes not only little Natalie Woods' mind but her mothers.

He's not like anyone else. He must be Santa.

I think perhaps you're right, Susie.

When I first saw, it landed with me because I was at that age where,

you know, the cat was out of the bag,

but I was nostalgic for the belief.

And I lost myself in Miracle on 34th Street.

This idea of magic that we've come to forget

and not believe in and that kids still have.

I believe.

Part of it is the ability to believe that a lone man

can travel across the world in one night

and magically, from a sack that fits on a sleigh,

produce gifts that he puts down chimneys

that they wouldn't fit in every house all over the world.

And the kid goes, "I'll buy that, that sounds good."

Hey, you. Wh... Whoa!

The biggest twist of the film, The Santa Claus,

is if you happen to find Santa,

there is a clause that says...

Yeah, right.And it's almost like a horror movie.

This guy starts to gain weight

even though he's not eating anymore.

He gets white hair.He doesn't know what's happening to him,

but he eventually realises he really is Santa Claus.

Annie, nice.