Christmas movies predictable, but entertaining
Nothing Like the Holidays starring Alfred Molina, Elizabeth
Pe
ña and Freddy Rodriguez
Christmas is almost here and that means by the time this column
comes out in print on Dec. 19, I will probably have watched nearly
two dozen Christmas-themed movies. I mentioned it last year in a
December column
– my mother has an addiction to Christmas movies. The addiction
has gotten worse with the advent of Tivo. Now she can do searches
using the keyword
”
Christmas
”
and find everything that is playing on our DirecTV satellite
dish. It’s no exaggeration to say there are probably hundreds of
movies that play each season.
Christmas movies predictable, but entertaining
Nothing Like the Holidays starring Alfred Molina, Elizabeth Peña and Freddy Rodriguez
Christmas is almost here and that means by the time this column comes out in print on Dec. 19, I will probably have watched nearly two dozen Christmas-themed movies. I mentioned it last year in a December column – my mother has an addiction to Christmas movies. The addiction has gotten worse with the advent of Tivo. Now she can do searches using the keyword “Christmas” and find everything that is playing on our DirecTV satellite dish. It’s no exaggeration to say there are probably hundreds of movies that play each season.
The Christmas-movie-watching season started for us long before the turkey was in the oven for Thanksgiving. My mother did a search for several Hallmark holiday movies she’d seen advertised. This nabbed us “The Christmas Choir,” a true story about a rich accountant who gets involved at a homeless shelter, and creates a choir for the men.
Next she trolled the ABC Family channel, which does a countdown with at least one Christmas movie each day starting Dec. 1. Most of the movies that play are made-for-TV ones from 20 years ago. This got us “Once Upon a Christmas” and its sequel “Twice Upon a Christmas.”
In it, Kathy Ireland stars as Santa’s daughter. In “Once,” she has to convert a naughty family to true believers in order to save Christmas. In “Twice,” she has become mortal but has forgotten her past. She has to remember in time to save Christmas from her scheming older sister who is selling off the North Pole one piece at a time.
We rounded out these Christmas movies with offerings from premium channels, Netflix and at least one movie playing in theaters.
Nothing Like the Holidays
Director Alfredo De Villa, and screenwriters Alison Swan and Rick Najera, strive to bring viewers a slice of life in a Puerto Rican enclave of Chicago. In Humboldt Park, Edy Rodriguez (Alfred Molina) and his wife Anna (Elizabeth Peña) are anxiously anticipating the return of their three children for the holidays.
Mauricio (John Leguizamo) is the oldest, and is a high-powered lawyer in New York. His wife Sarah (Debra Messing), a red-headed Jewish woman, struggles to fit in with his loud, Latino family. Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito) is home from Hollywood where she is waiting for her big break. And Jesse (Freddy Rodriguez) is home from Iraq where a close friend has died.
Though Anna and Edy are happy to have their children all home with them, the trouble quickly starts when they are all under the same roof. The trouble with the plot is that there are so many characters with so many individual problems, that most of the tension that should be created falls flat.
At the very beginning, Anna announces that she is going to divorce Edy because he has been unfaithful – he has been sneaking around taking private calls, leaving his bodega market in the middle of the day and she is sure he has a woman on the side. This sets in motion a tense couple of days as the adult children each take sides on whether or not their parents should work it out.
In the meantime, they all have their own individual problems. Mauricio and Sarah argue about when to have a baby. Jesse, after a few-year stint in the military, still doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life and he is still pining for an ex-girlfriend he broke up with before he enlisted. Roxanna holds on to the hope that she will get cast in a television show, even if it is for the seventh lead.
The movie is interchangeable with many other holiday movies about homecomings, but it does show an interesting glimpse of Humboldt Park.
Fred Claus
If you can get over the improbabilities in the movie “Fred Claus,” and the weird-looking elves, the movie is surprisingly funny. The movie begins in the middle ages. As a small boy Frederick (Vince Vaughn) is excited when his little brother Nick (Paul Giamatti) is born. But the little brother soon outshines the older one as he constantly gives to others and becomes increasingly selfless. Their mother (Kathy Bates) begins repeating the mantra, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”
To get us to the modern-day, the screenwriters come up with one line about how Nick became a saint so Nick and his entire family were frozen in time so they don’t age anymore. Cut to the present. Fred hasn’t seen his family in ages, and he works as a repo man. And he hates the holidays and Santa Claus.
When Fred needs some money from his brother, his brother agrees to give it to him if he comes up to the North Pole and works on the naughty or nice list. What ensues is plenty of physical humor and lots of laughs as Fred works out his resentment of his brother.
As with most Christmas movies, it ends predictably but it is funny.
