10 A&E | December 2020
Holiday classics worth the hype? Taking a deeper look into the movies you should watch Rosie Wilson |staff writer Alexis Moeschler| staff writer Nothing gets you in the spirit like a great holiday movie. Although there are thousands of them out there, we narrowed it down to four highly-loved Christmas classics to give you our take on them.
Lexi
Rosie
I watched this movie for the very first time because I heard from several friends that it was a good movie to watch around the holidays. A Christmas Carol is a Disney movie about a Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge spent his life focused on money. His obsession with money has ruined all of his relationships. Scrooge despises Christmas because he thinks that it is a waste of money. Things take a turn for the better when three ghosts come to show him how bad he is acting and the effects it has on people around him. At the end of the movie Scrooge loves to donate and be kind to everyone. I did not like this movie, although I think it has a great message, it was weird to watch. The animation was poorly done and they mixed realistic and cartoons which didn’t look right to me. The dialogue was also very hard to understand and I had to turn on the subtitles to be able to follow the movie. I would not recommend this movie to anyone.
Although A Christmas Carol has been told, filmed, and performed many times over, this is by far my favorite version. I love this movie for its great message about reflection and redemption. I would not necessarily consider this a feel-good movie, it’s more creepy than anything. However, that’s personally what I love about it. It’s realistic animation and immense detail make the movie that much more enjoyable to watch. I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone looking to add a little spice to their holiday movie watchlist.
Rosie
Lexi
Based on the book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story tells the tale of Ralphie and his desire for a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. This movie is nice in that it’s appropriate for children but is the type of slapstick and silly humor that appeals to all ages. There aren’t any deep messages in this movie - it’s just a funny, sweet story about a kid that you can really get behind.
Home Alone is an iconic movie and if you have not watched it you are seriously missing out. Home Alone is about a big family vacation and they are all rushed in the morning to leave, however they forget their youngest son, Kevin. Kevin is left alone at his house over Christmas and is left to defend his belongings against A couple of burglars. I absolutely love this movie because it is funny and it shows the imaginations of kids, you have got to watch Home Alone over the winter break.
Lexi
Rosie
This is a movie about a family guy, Clark Griswald, who only wanted a traditional family Christmas. He wanted to have all of his family members at his house and everything to go perfectly like he remembered. However, this was not the case, everything that Clark did went wrong. After a horrible Christmas Eve, Clark goes a little bit crazy trying to make everything perfect even though not one thing has gone right. Clark spends most of the movie waiting for a Christmas bonus from his company, but when he gets a delivery it’s not quite what he expects. A Christmas Vacation is a comedy and I love it, it has to be one of my favorite Christmas movies.
It’s rare for a movie to make me laugh, but it’s hard not to while watching this. The film is based around a dysfunctional family preparing for what they had hoped to be a perfect Christmas. Of course, that doesn’t happen and things go very bad very quickly. Although I found a lot of the movie to be predictable and cliche, I still think this is a solid, fun film if you want to get a few laughs in this holiday season.
