What movies are you watching this Holiday season?

Our favorites are

• It’s a Wonderful Life. The actually incredibly dark (upon reflection) family classic about George Bailey, a man driven to literal insanity by an inhumane and crushing capitalistic system. He sees visions of the world as it really is, minus the warm sentimental delusion he has lived his life under: a cold hard, heartless world of juke joints, bitter alcoholics and washed up probably drug-addicted hookers; of homeless ever-drunken child-killers brutally preyed upon by mean-spirited blue-collar thugs. 
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• Finally, Bailey decides (SPOILER ALERT) to take advantage of his neighbors’ sentimentality by taking all of their money, thus taking his rightful place at the top of the Bedford Falls semi-feudal foodchain.
  
   One of the darkest and greatest movies every made. Seriously.

• Home Alone 2: A comic romp in which an psychopathic youngster uses his formidable imagination to attempt to murder two down-on-their-luck simpletons just trying to get by in the dog-eat-dog world of early nineties Manhattan. Featuring everyone’s favorite president, Donald Trump and tragic Hollywood icon McCauley Culkin.
  
  My son laughs and laughs and laughs at this, which brings the Christmas spirit to me.

• The Polar Express: A weird-looking fantasy about a cynical kid who has a dream that allows him to buy into a variety of Christmas myths; it ends with his admission that he hears sounds that no one else hears. He literally spends the rest of his life pathetically believing in Santa Claus.
  
  Featuring a Tom Waits-esque Nighthawks in the Diner snow-ghost and a super creepy talking puppet. Also featuring a character called Know-it-all, who sounds like someone attempting to sound Jewish, but who apparently is not. Tom Hanks plays literally everybody in the film except the little black girl.

Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer: An stop-motion animated fantasy about a highly unusual reindeer who learns a valuable lesson: freakishness is tolerable, as long as you can prove you can provide a useful contribution to society. Or as long as the fantastically capricious, narrow-minded red-suited grump who rules your kingdom with an iron fist decrees you are. "Then all the reindeer loved him..."

Otherwise, you are free to go out in the cold wilderness to either freeze to death or get devoured by a terrifying roaring snow-monster. Features really scary “talking toys” and a prospector from the Yukon territory so stupid that he looks for gold on drifting icebergs.