My bosom is glowing. That’s what we used to call boobies when I was little: bosoms. Pronounced bazooms, of course. My grandmother told us that eating our sandwich crusts would result in big bazooms and I gobbled mine up greedily, and those of my sisters, if they left them.
Is it a digression if I lead with it? Back to my glowing bosom, which is a line I lifted from the movie itself. It’s the story of how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol. He’d gotten a taste of success with Oliver Twist and was determined to live 
henceforth like a gentleman, but his next three attempts were flops – poorly reviewed, scarcely read. He was really under the gun to write his next best-seller and you know what pressure does to a writer: it blocks him. He pitched a vague idea for a Christmas ghost story to publisher and was laughed right out of the office, Christmas being a “minor” holiday and all. He determined to self-publish and gave himself the daunting deadline of just 6 weeks hence – a release just barely in time for Christmas. The only problem aside from funding was that not a word had been written.
The film follows Dickens (Dan Stevens) on his frantic quest to write a wildly popular novel without the merest hint of a concrete idea. He agonizes over the creation of characters and then is haunted by them, literally. Scrooge (Christopher Plummer) mocks his attempts and grumbles when he isn’t given enough lines, or enough good lines. Dicken’s father (Jonathan Pryce) is visiting and provides constant distraction. If you have even a passing knowledge of A Christmas Carol, it’s kind of fascinating to watch its author draw inspiration from his own life and everything around him, turning ordinary things into ideas that have permeated our culture and helped to define how we celebrate our holidays. While director Bharat Nalluri of course takes some dramatic license, the spirit of the thing is largely accurate.
Dan Stevens is well-cast as Dickens, and it gives me great pains to send any praise his way because I’ve always held a grudge for how he treated Lady Mary when he left Downton Abbey the way he did. But in The Man Who Invented Christmas, he brings Dickens alive, a man for whom his characters were more alive to him than his own loved ones, and though Scrooge et al literally do speak to him (and offer criticism), his genius and vivid imagination are not to be discounted. But if the film merely existed to give us Christopher Plummer as Scrooge, that alone would be enough. About to celebrate his 88th birthday, the man still has performance in his bones. He won his first Oscar at the age of 82 for Beginners, and it is possibly not his last – he’s got 4 movies in various phases of production, including his hasty replacement of Kevin Spacey in Ridley Scott’s All The Money in the World. This movie is a perfect example of why Plummer is still in demand. He turns an invented character into a real, flesh and blood man.
again, this movie misses its mark with me. I think it’s pandering and condescending and incredibly obvious that was written and directed by MEN. But I’m not a Bad Mom, I’m a Good Aunt. And the role of Good Aunt is really easy: you buy lots of presents, you let them get away with everything three notches above murder, and you give them 100% of your time and attention once or twice a month. Being a mom, bad or not, is infinitely harder because parenting is about the details. So if carving out 104 minutes to sneak away to one of those fancy movie theatres that serve wine is all you can muster for yourself this holiday season, have at it.
Also uncomfortable: a singing telegram lady in a bonnet shows up daily to her door, singing the appropriate verse of The 12 Days of Christmas, and leaving behind the corresponding gift: two turtle doves, a partridge, a pear tree, etc etc. The problem is, the gifts are anonymous. It’s a mystery. A Christery, if you will. A Christmas mystery. And some pretty lame gifts that come with unwanted responsibilities. But Cynthia thinks it’s romantic, because she’s an idiot in a holiday movie and I guess she has to go along with it. I mean, do you realize how bird-heavy that song is? I did the math: it’s 22 birds by the end of the 12 days. That’s a lot of bird poop, and up to a 20 year commitment! Hope she likes omelettes, because birds are truly a gift that keeps on giving.
In it, a woman writes a contract between her brother Jack (Robert Buckley) and her best friend, Jolie (Hilarie Burton). Jolie is going home for Christmas, where she will be she will see her ex and his new girlfriend, and it’s left her feeling a little emotionally vulnerable. Jack has been contracted to tag along as her new boyfriend since she doesn’t have one. Jack is an aspiring writer who has just accepted to ghost-write a harlequin romance that just happens to be set in Louisiana, which is where Jolie is from, and where her family and her ex’s family have been intertwined for many years.
a +1 before the new year 2. her employee is going to be alone for the holidays so he gets invited along to her dad’s farm 3. her mother is recently deceased and it’s the first Christmas without her.
scenarios that used to make me want to ream someone with an unripe banana. Now when a workaholic refuses to acknowledge the meaning of Christmas, I rejoice: it’s by B12, or my I23. Hallmark movies are particularly fruitful for the purposes of Christmas movie bingo, although Matt achieved his high score by watching only Love Actually, and It’s A Wonderful Life.
feels like her death is just an excuse to have Della Reese belt out Amazing Grace in a church, but have a little faith, folks: Eddie Murphy wouldn’t have produced just any Christmas TV movie. Her death is also an excuse for evil family services to swoop in and revoke the adoption (a single father is unstable!), which in turn allows us to see a little boy penning this heartfelt letter to Santa:
Richards) at a distance. A weird teddy bear mysteriously shows up on his doorstep and is activated during a fight with this son. Before you can change the channel, the bear Freaky-Fridays them. Just a few short days before Christmas, “dad” has to go to school and confront the bullies and his nerves about starring in the big pageant and “son” has to take a witness’s deposition, throw the office Christmas party, and get tongued by more than one woman.
the last time I visited it was for 
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 