A Frizzy Christmas

Steyn On-line ^ | December 15, 2018 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse...

At which point, Sylvester the cat looks up from his long fruitless vigil outside the mouse hole in the baseboard and sighs with feeling to the narrator, "You're not jutht whithlin' Dickthie, brother."

"Gift Wrapped" is like every Looney Tune or Merry Melody - a mere six minutes long. But with Christmas movies that's a good thing. The western and the musical may be dead, but the charmless Xmas movie is now a genre all of its own and doing gangbusters. Do they teach it in film school? In fact, it's really two genres: there are intentionally charmless Christmas movies like Bad Santa 2, and then the accidentally charmless ones, like that Ben Affleck flick where he's some heartless yuppie who rents a bluecollar family for the holiday season so he can enjoy the authentic down-home Yule he's never known. In such pictures, the great American Christmas, once the ne plus ultra of e pluribus unum, appears on celluloid an utterly exhausted seam.

So, besieged my such horrors, I thought I'd retreat to short-form holiday entertainment, or alternatively short-form holiday entertainment within long-form non-holiday fare. Any thirty seconds of "Gift Wrapped", for example, is more rewarding than all three-and-a-half hours of Bad Santa 5 or whatever it is: six minutes of pure Looney Tunes pleasure in which Sylvester determines to land the only Christmas present he really wants — Tweety.

[colorado tanker]

Steyn is such a good writer, even when his subject isn't politics.

And the Fritz (Friz?) Freling cartoons were and are great fun.

[Twotone]

Yes, it’s a nice relief from the politics.

[Rummyfan]

A great Steyn piece for Christmas!