Tonight's festive holiday trio at our house

1. Bad Santa, in our annual viewing

2. Spiral cut ham, because nothing says holidays like ham

3. Sandwiches, just the way granny would make them--or even better

It's Bad Santa time again

Yup, the Christmas season is upon us, so of course I had to hold my annual viewing of this holiday classic.  So you can enjoy it, too, here's just one of my favorite scenes.



Many years of therapy.

Bad Santa and writing

As I've mentioned in several previous entries, one of the two movies I re-watch every Christmas season is the black comedy, Bad Santa.  Last year, I gave five good reasons to watch the film.  This year, I want to offer, intentionally without context, five lines--among many, many great ones--that always work for me.

Warning:  Bad Santa uses all the words and is full of coarse scenes.

Now, to those lines.

1. I'm going back upstairs.  I need a melon baller and a loofah.
2. No, I love the hat.
3. She lives in God's house with Jesus and Mary and the ghost and the long-eared donkey and Joseph and the talking walnut.
4. What a man does with his own penis--Oval Office, Women's Big & Tall--it's not for the American people to say.
5. I want a gorilla named Davey for beating up the skateboard kids who pull on my underwear. He could take his orders from the talking walnut, so it wouldn't be my bad thing.

In context, they're both odder and funnier than they are here.

As long as you can stand sex and violence and trigger words and foul language, Bad Santa is an amazing comedy.

The top five reasons to watch Bad Santa

every year at Christmas, as I do.

5) John Ritter's performance

I was never a fan of Ritter's, but in this, his last film, he turned in an amazing portrayal of an uptight store manager caught in a very bad position.

4) The many great lines

If you haven't seen the movie before, I won't ruin it for you, but this one is full of wonderful lines. 

3) Billy Bob Thornton's performance

With a role this broad, it would have been easy to overplay the character and turn him into someone silly, but Thornton goes the other way and keeps his performance tight and, most of the time, low-key.  A picture of dissolution, he is never appealing, and yet ultimately he wins you over.

2) You have a great excuse to make sandwiches

If you have a granny who will make them for you, so much the better, but even if you don't, a make-your-own-sandwiches dinner is always a treat.  Buy great meats and cheeses and breads, and it's even better.

And, the number one reason to watch Bad Santa every year is,

1) The writing

The screenplay by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa tells a tight, fast-paced, darkly funny, often gross, and, in the end, ultimately redemptive story.  Jokes thread through the fabric of the tale, popping up at just the right times, so that even as the protagonist is crawling toward personal growth, you're laughing.  It's a beautiful piece of work. 

Bad Santa sums up the worst of Christmas

As is our tradition, tonight a small group of us watched the unrated version of one of my favorite holiday films, Bad Santa, and ate sandwiches. (The sandwich part makes sense only if you've seen the movie. If not, go watch it.)

Though foul in language and tone, the movie really does have at its core a soft heart and an attempt at redemption. It also comments perfectly on the dark side of a commercialized Christmas. Near the end, Marcus is about to kill Willie (the Santa character, Billy Bob Thornton) and says the following:

It is Christmas, Willie.
But this is what we do.
We get the shit.
Christmastime, we get the shit.

Whatever one's religious beliefs, I think it's good to remember that this is not what Christmas is all about.

See: another reason to watch Bad Santa!

It may not sound good

but a sandwich with fried bologna, bleu cheese, roast beef, muenster cheese, and ham is a tasty concoction indeed, particularly after you heat it up in a panini maker.

I'm just sayin'.

No one else seemed to appreciate my magnificent creation, but when are artists, even sandwich artists, truly appreciated in their lifetimes?

Yeah, it was make-your-own-sandwiches night here as we indulged in the annual viewing of the unrated cut of Bad Santa.

Every Christmas

I watch Love Actually and Bad Santa. Tonight, in a wild and crazy move, we watched both on Blu-Ray. Damn, but they do look better in high-res.

Every year, the first fills me with emotion, and the second cracks me up. I am such a sucker for these two films.

I am also such a sentimental fool. The same scenes in Love Actually make me tear up and choke up each year, though I know them as well as old friends. I cannot recall another movie that makes me as happy as Love Actually.

Tonight, after watching it, I was thinking about why that was, why this film can affect me so strongly after so many viewings, and I decided it was this: Curtis, the director and writer, commits fully to a vision that he knows goes too far but that he invites us--nay, entices us--to share nonetheless. He is not saying that everything always works out, or that love conquers all, or that all romances will last forever. What he is saying is that love is out there, every minute of every day, happening in big ways and small all over the world, and that's it so powerful and so real that we should take hope from it and never forget it and know that always, always people will love no matter what.

My other essential Christmas movie is

Bad Santa, well, actually, the unrated Badder Santa version. It's crude, rude, offensive, and outrageous, but by the end it shows its heart, and along the way you laugh madly. We gathered tonight to watch it, eat sandwiches (if you don't know the film, Granny in it is oblivious to most of the world but always offers to make sandwiches), and then ate amazing desserts from what in my opinion is the best bakery in Raleigh, Hereghty.

While grocery shopping I indulged a whim and bought a lot of bacon, which Rana was nice enough to cook. We consumed 2.5 pounds of it in our sandwiches! Everything's better with bacon.

And now back to plotting.