Christmas/holiday

You’ll produce a movie about how the humdrum lives of quiet desperation that the vast majority of people live aren’t really so bad after all. It’s not like it isn’t true — you do kinda miss your three-year-old daughter’s giggles, after all, and the smell of baking cookies. It’ll be a real feel-good movie celebrating the joys — honestly, there are some! — of ticky-tacky suburbia. And it’ll be a Christmas movie! Yeah! Christmas is good for making people feel all warm and gooey.

If you’d like to really scare a child out of the Christmas spirit, plop her down in front of Santa Claus, the Movie. Just be sure to set aside sufficient funds for a lifetime of therapy afterward. Truly, this is perhaps the mind-numbingest, most incoherent, most amoral Christmas movie I’ve ever seen, and that’s including Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Not only is the so-called story a disjointed mess — there are at least three different movies jammed in here — but this disgusting film turns Santa into an idiotic, heartless bastard.

Based on the children’s book of the same name, Olive, the Other Reindeer is the first animated Christmas special from the Fox TV network, and it’s chock full of the kind of quirkiness we’ve come to expect from the net that has given us The Simpsons and The X-Files. And Olive herself is the least of it.

And then I’m mad again. How does a waste of celluloid like Reindeer Games ever get greenlighted in the first place? Who on Earth anointed Ehren Kruger Hot Young Screenwriter? Did anyone actually read this script before shooting began, or not till after the point at which there was too much dough already invested to just write it off as a loss?

It’s no Braveheart, but while I wait for The Patriot, The Crossing is a tasty appetizer. Sure and steady, this stately original film from the A&E cable network focuses on a brief moment of the seven-year-long war for American independence: the Battle of Trenton, when the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, averted the imminent end of the colonial rebellion and handed the enemy his first defeat.