Christmas with the Kranks (2004)

"You're skipping Christmas! Isn't that against the law?"

Part of your job is taking care of the customers. These are important guests.

Buzz - Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987)

Christmas with the Kranks (Joe Roth, 2004)

Christmas with the Kranks (2004)

Bad movies come in many varieties but usually, they either waste your time or leave you feeling angry. If you’re lucky it might be one of those “So bad it’s good” titles but they’re few and far between. Christmas with the Kranks is another kind of bad entirely, a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic miscalculation you (almost) have to see to believe.

When their daughter leaves for a year-long assignment with the Peace Corps, Luther and Nora Krank (Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis) lament the upcoming Christmas Holiday. That’s when Luther gets an idea. Instead of spending the money, time and effort going through the motions this season, he and his wife will go on a Caribbean cruise instead. When their co-workers and neighbors learn the Kranks are skipping Christmas, they desperately try to change their minds.

This scenario is only a few music cues away from being a horror film. While Luther and Nora act like aliens once they decide to forego the Christmas celebration - Luther goes so far as to write a memo and personally distribute it to everyone in his office - their neighbors are disturbingly obsessed with the holiday. Threatening phone calls, people observing them through their windows, dirty looks everywhere they turn… it’s like the Kranks walked into Midsommar or a holiday-themed version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Everyone is so creepy and obsessive about decorations up on the roof and other trivial things. The "Conform... or else!" message makes you wonder if the Communist Party didn’t secretly fund the picture.

What makes Christmas with the Kranks fascinating isn’t merely the tone-deaf story, it’s all the little details. At one point, Nora is uncertain about the holiday cruise thing. Her problem is that Luther doesn’t want to make the usual charital contributions. He asks her “Are you really going to let $600 stand in the way of our vacation?” You want her to turn around and ask him the same thing. Hey man, you’re saving $3,000 by going on this cruise rather than spending money on decorations, a tree, gifts, etc. Just consider that extra bit of money part of the investment. Then, after they make a big deal about the charity… several people - including the police with their calendars - approach the Kranks and are turned away. It doesn’t make sense but if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have the Kranks’ big dilemma in the third act: who can the Kranks ask for help when they’ve made enemies out of everyone in the neighborhood and all two police officers that make up the city's law enforcement?!

That was only one anomaly and it gave me enough material for an entire paragraph. Other memorable jaw-droppers are a scene in a tanning salon in which Nora is embarrassed when she walks out in a bikini and her priest stares at her cleavage, an extended gag about a Frosty the Snowman decoration that radiates evil, Luther getting botox injections that makes him unable to eat, and dozens of logical errors. It’s all tied together with horrible slapstick and an abundance of anti-cheer. You’ll hate everyone in this story at one point or another and the movie knows it but can’t tell its story without the Kranks being the villains in one scene… and the victims in the next.

The bow on top of the present is an ending so clumsy and artificial that it feels like it was taken from a completely different movie. You’re scratching your head, wondering if your eyes deceived you and then it hits you with another puzzler right before the end credits. There’s no way a 20-car pileup this fatal happens on purpose. Everyone involved thought they were achieving greatness but they couldn’t have been further from the truth. This makes Christmas with the Kranks a dreadful experience to watch but certainly never boring. It’s the kind of movie you could spend hours dissecting and discussing. I can’t think of any reason why you’d want to sit down with other human beings to watch it but if you do, at least it’ll get some conversations started. (December 4, 2020)

Movie Review | Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (Roth, 1987)

This review contains mild spoilers.

With most movies about characters in high school or college, it’s sort of a given that the actors will look a lot older than the characters they’re supposed to be playing. Movies like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club stand out all the more for having actual teenagers in Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall playing the part of teenage characters. I’m not entirely complaining, as a lot of the horseplay (in the general unruly behaviour sense, not the Emmanuelle in America sense) are not things you’d want to see actual teenagers partaking in. And that age-inappropriate casting can work well in some cases. In this movie, Donald Gibb’s Ogre is obviously not the brightest bulb and is probably taking longer to get through his credits than the average student, so Gibb’s age works in his character’s favour. And Robert Carradine’s age nicely accents his character’s fundamental dorkiness. But then you have the head of the evil Alpha Beta fraternity played by Bradley Whitford, who is supposed to be this hunky, clean-cut all-American type, but let’s just say that age has not been kind to him. (I assume he would have voted for Reagan a third time if he could.) His hairline compares unfavourably to the magnificent coiffure sported by Ted McGinley in the original Revenge of the Nerds, and it’s hard to believe that the other Alpha Betas, who are characterized by their cruelty, actually look up to him and aren’t instead cracking jokes about his overdue midlife crisis.

The plot here restages the age-old snobs vs. slobs conflict of the original, but on a national scale. The boys from Lambda Lambda Lambda (but sadly not the ladies from Omega Mu) are invited to a national fraternity convention in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I have never been in a fraternity, but what I’ve learned from movies is that it’s just a bunch of guys getting together to paddle each others’ asses, so I assume a national fraternity convention offers an opportunity to paddle asses across state lines. Hey, I have nothing against ass-paddling, but I’d appreciate if those doing the paddling would be nicer about it. And this is a kindler, gentler Revenge of the Nerds, saddled with a PG-13 rating instead of an R, meaning that while it gets in a few racy jokes and ogling gazes, it thankfully avoids the outright sex crimes of the original movie. (The raunchiest this gets is in the name of the motel the boys stay at, the Hotel Corral Essex, which with a few malfunctioning letters in the neon sign gets a lot more enticing.) Miraculously, the boys learn to see the hot blonde here as an actual person. She’s played here by Courtney Thorne-Smith, a few years before her appearance in the Carrot Top vehicle Box Office Poison (R.I.P. Norm Macdonald), and is generally an agreeable presence although I wish the movie gave her more to do aside from the occasional flashes that she might secretly be a nerd deep down. She compares unfavourably to the sweet female nerd played by Michelle Meyrink in the original movie. The movie seems unsure whether to position her as a love interest or one of the nerds, seemingly forgetting that Carradine’s character had a girlfriend at the end of the first movie (the less said about the circumstances under which they met, the better).

Aside from that, you get the returning cast doing weaker versions of the shtick they did in the original. Anthony Edwards only appears for a few minutes (apparently he wasn’t excited about appearing in this and used his paycheque to buy a new pool), although his sincerity is sorely missed, as the movie lacks the heart he was able to give the original (when it wasn’t busy celebrating sex crimes). Curtis Armstrong’s Booger gets to be unhygienic and obnoxious, although he finds a new mentor in a wise old bum played by the great James Hong, who teaches him the art of hocking a loogie. Timothy Busfield’s Poindexter says smart things and walks into stuff. Andrew Cassese is no longer four feet tall, so the movie doesn’t know how to handle him. Larry B. Scott’s Lamar Latrell’s flamboyant homosexuality is toned down (you get a quick shot of a magazine in his luggage and some fashion choices, but that’s about it), although he steps up in other ways, including taking the lead again in the musical number. (Apparently Scott also choreographed the scene as well.) To be honest, it lacks the pure joyousness of the performance in the original (switching the synth pop and electric violin for generic late ‘80s hip hop), and is also less pleasurable to watch (opting for closer low angle shots that don’t let you savour the proceedings the same way), although you do get Carradine channeling David Byrne on the poster of True Stories with his gaudy cowboy outfit.

This is one case where the movie isn’t exactly hitting the same beats as the original. The song and dance in the original was the climax, but it comes earlier in this movie. The real climax involves the boys, Gibb and Thorne-Smith getting stranded on a desert island. Their rescue comes at the hands of munitions hidden by anti-Castro Cubans ahead of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and our heroes make their gallant return to the convention decked out in full military gear. Do they violently execute the Alpha Betas and install a new nerd junta to control all the fraternities in the free world? I won’t reveal the answer, but like I said, this is a kindler, gentler Revenge of the Nerds.

I dunno, this is obviously not very good, but if you like hanging out with the boys enough, this isn’t unpleasant to sit through.

Netflix's 'The Gray Man' Official Trailer

#TheGrayMan trailer has arrived. Check it out insdie.

The official trailer for the Ryan Reynolds and Chris Evan’s led Netflix film, The Gray Man has arrived and we have it and all the details surrounding the release to share with you today. In select theaters July 15 & on Netflix July 22 DIRECTORS: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo WRITERS: Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely BASED ON THE BOOK SERIES:The Gray Man by Mark Greaney CAST: Ryan…

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