Christmas Capers and Comedies to Lighten Up This Shitty Year

The holidays are back with a vengeance, and the Grinch in me is enjoying the strangeness of this Christmas season in this the year of our lord Twenty-Twenty. Most of the time, Christmas prances in with all its stress and consumerism, and for some reason I’m called hate-filled for not ‘enjoying’ it. This year feels... different for some reason—gee, can’t quite put my finger on it—and I’m one hundred percent on that shakeup train.

My least favorite thing about Christmas is the oft-repeated phrase of “be nice to each other, it’s Christmas.” This rankles me not because of the suggestion but because of the implication that we should only love people around the holidays, and then when January second rolls around we can go right back to being raging buttmunches. Maybe I wouldn’t be so bothered by Christmas time if that sentiment permeated our society a little more; if there was less focus on being generous and loving during this particular time and we strove to be good people all year round. Fingers crossed.

On that note, let’s get to some fun time holiday movies that will, if nothing else, make everyone laugh. Even cold-hearted monsters like yours truly.

We begin with Trapped In Paradise (1994), an oft forgotten little movie that I’m pretty sure I saw in the theaters with my family. Or we might have just laughed at the trailer a lot—my memory is shoddy for reasons unrelated to drug use. Either way, it’s got Nicholas Cage, Jon Lovitz, and Dana Carvey as three brothers that are comfortable with criminal activity to varying degrees. Bill (Cage) is placed in charge of Dave (Lovitz) and Alan (Carvey) when he picks them up from jail where they were serving time for theft. Dave asks Bill if he’ll take them to Paradise, Pennsylvania to give a message to a fellow inmate’s daughter. Once there, Bill sees how little security the town bank has and is fighting the urge to rob it. He tries to get them out of town but Dave convinces him that they should go for it. Naturally, as this is a Kafkaesque farce-type movie, the plan hits a few snags, things get bumpy, and attempting to get out of town proves to be impossible. 

Throughout their misadventures, the brothers are treated with warmth and hospitality to a point where Bill (and Alan to a lesser extent) start to feel guilty about robbing the town blind. They try to return the money but when that plan fails, they leave it on the doorstep of the town reverend with a note explaining that they’re sorry, and it’s all there.

I have seen plenty of movies that merely take place at Christmas time, so starved am I for holiday entertainment not reeking of treacle that I sometimes claim these as holiday-appropriate films despite the obvious flaw in my flimsy reasoning. Trapped In Paradise, besides being a movie set around Christmas time, actually incorporates Christmas into its world. There are dramatically delivered messages about being honest and how people are able to forgive when they witness growth in a fellow human being. Aside from all that noise, it’s hard not to love the central trio of Cage, Lovitz, and Carvey as they bounce off each other with ease and the sort of hostile familiarity that exists between siblings. Richard Jenkins as the FBI agent tracking them also delivers a humorous and naturalistic performance. The scene where he reads a license plate that says “Duuuuh” and starts joking around with the agents in the car about it seems almost like an ad-lib, something that happened just because the cameras were still on.

One note on this movie before we continue: no one wants to say it but we all know Bill, Dave, and Alan don’t look anything alike. Mama must’ve been a rolling stone.

A Christmas Carol is a timeless and classic piece of literature, and the millions of versions it has spawned are mostly great. There have been a few with some head-scratching decisions (looking in your 2019 direction, Guy Pearce) but overall, they’re pretty solid because they have such great source material. And we all know how I feel about great source material.

Scrooged (1988) is certainly more rewatched than Trapped In Paradise has been. Odds are you’ve seen it or at least have an annoying relative who reminds you to watch it every year. You’re welcome for that, by the way. An updated Christmas Carol, set in 1980s New York Scrooged stars Bill Murray as Frank Cross, president of the soon-to-be-fined-by-the-FCC TV channel IBC. Instead of the spirits rousing Cross from his bed and doing it all in one night, as the famous line goes, they come to him through the course of Christmas Eve when he’s stressed about a live Christmas show the channel is doing. 

Since this is ‘80s New York, this movie makes sure to feature plenty of reminders that it’s the ‘80s in New York. For starters, the Ghost of Christmas Past (musician David Johansen) drives an old yellow taxi and has got a mug that can only be described as... a mug. My apologies to the New York Dolls. Ghost of Christmas Present, which is usually the most milquetoast of the ghosts and easily forgotten, is played with impish anger by Carol Kane. When she first appears to Cross, she pummels him and hits him in the junk. Y’know, because it’s New York. Even their helpful spirits are jabronis. There’s also Karen Allen at her most adorable as Frank’s do-gooder ex girlfriend, and Robert Mitchum as a cat loving station owner. This part makes the most sense to me. Robert Mitchum would love cats.

In a sea of remakes, Scrooged floats to the top. It’s right up there with the Muppets one. For one thing, its visual style is quietly striking in a way that sneaks up on you; it doesn’t get entirely noticed until the Ghost of Future Yet to Come segment where we get to see what the eighties thought the nineties were gonna look like. It’s funny without trying too hard and heartfelt without trying too hard. I genuinely don’t know which of those two tasks is more difficult but Scrooged manages them both. If you need a comedy that can appeal to most people, has something to do with the holiday in question, and gets kinda scary at some parts, Scrooged is here for you.

Get ready for this final movie because it’s a doozy. Some movies are made to be funny, some movies struggle to be funny, and some movies have funny thrust upon them. Behold Untamed Heart.

Untamed Heart (1993) comes from a time when it was considered brave to avoid necessary medical intervention that would prolong one’s life. Instead, there was a type of nobility in pretending not to be sick and then dying in Marisa Tomei’s car. 

Caroline (Tomei) is a young woman working as a waitress and having trouble with men despite the fact that she looks exactly like Marisa Tomei. When the quiet, odd dishwasher Adam (Christian Slater) saves her from being raped in the park (because he’s been following her home, which I guess is a fact we’ll all just shrug off) they fall in love during the course of a high school winter break. Not even college winter break, which would give them a few weeks in January. These two are an item before New Year’s.

What eventually comes to light is that Adam has a heart defect, and was told a story as a child that he has a gorilla heart in place of his own. This, shockingly, turns out not to be true. Instead, he’s just got a bad heart, and he doesn’t want to bother going through anything that might fix it. Like Julia Roberts character in Steel Magnolias, this is a character that makes stupid decisions with their health under the romantic guise of living freely. And guess what happens to both of them? Dead.

What part of this is a comedy? you might be asking yourself right now. Well, all of it actually. The film is painfully dramatic, not to mention painfully ‘90s. Christian Slater sports an unflattering haircut that was probably considered the style at the time, and nobody seems all that concerned that he was stalking Caroline every day since they met. Rosie Perez’s Cindy at least calls him ‘creepy’ and ‘weird’ but even she is won over by a truly ridiculous love story that will make you pee yourself laughing.

Just in case you’re wondering, I watched this with another person and we were both in stitches so if you’ve got this image of me as a lone, ableist asshole snickering at the heart patient, you’re dead wrong. Rhiannon was there with me too.

So we’ve got two comedies and a caper, and it’s up to you to decide which is which. If you need more holiday chuckles, may I also recommend the Trailer Park Boys short movie Dear Santa: Go Fuck Yourself. It features a scene where the main character gives a speech at Midnight Mass about how Christmas should be about getting drunk and stoned with the people you love, and that, my friends, sounds like the real reason for the season to me.