5 minute read
FiLM REViEW
8-BIT CHRISTMAS
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8-Bit Christmas gets the 80s right
8-Bit Christmas HBO Max | 97 min. | PG
The year (as best I can recollect) was 1988.
I was failing math. My dad, out of desperation I assume, made me a bet: If I could get a B in math, he’d buy me a Nintendo Entertainment System.
It came as a surprise to me, since my dad never did anything like that before or after. I found out later he honestly didn’t think I could pull it off .
So all that is to say that I could identify with the plot of 8-Bit Christmas — a movie on HBO Max in which a boy in the 1980s plots and schemes with his friends to obtain the Nintendo Entertainment System none of their parents would buy for them. Kids today might have a hard time understanding — this was still somewhat new territory in the 1980s, with parents who may or may not have dabbled with earlier Atari systems.
Jake Doyle (Winslow Fegley) reminded me of, well, me at that age (minus my Fred Savage-like mop of hair). Th e fact that the fi lm takes place in Chicago lends a Midwest fl avor to it (just swap the Packers/Wisconsinite driver jokes in the fi lm for the Bears/Illinois driver jokes). It also made me immediately think of John Hughes; and being set in the 80s in the Chicago burbs, it could almost fi t into the canon though the characters don’t nearly jump out at you the way Hughes’ always did. (Unlike Hughes, the writer of the novel the fi lm is based on, Kevin Jakubowski, was born in the Chicago burbs.)
Doyle, much like me at that age and like all his friends, badly wants a Nintendo. And of course there was that one rich kid who not only had one but seemed to have just about every game made for the system. I knew someone just like that too, although he was much nicer than the spoiled rich kid character in the fi lm.
Of course, Doyle instead gets tasked with chores to fi ll his time, including pickup up dog poo. Seriously, this is my childhood on fi lm.
Th e whole plot is told through the adult Jake (Neil Patrick Harris) relaying the story to his tween daughter. His daughter badly wants her own smartphone and Jake likens it to his own insatiable desire for an NES, and how he ultimately obtained it. Th e story is, of course, “BOORRINNGG” to her, but before long she just can’t wait to hear what happened next.
Of course, it’s not lost on me that this is yet one more fi lm capitalizing on the current 80s nostalgia. Th at nostalgia seemed to start with Stranger Th ings and Ready Player One, and this is yet another movie milking it for all it’s worth.
Aging GenXers such as myself are clearly the main target audience here, or at least that’s my suspicion. But the 80s seem pretty popular with millennials and GenZers as well.
Th e latter, I’ve found, have a distorted view of the 80s which only those who lived through it can correct. One GenZer said to me “Wow, the 80s must have been awesome!?” Another tweeted a video clip from a high school in the 80s and said it looked like a dream.
Well, here is a splash of reality to wake you up. While I share the nostalgia for the 80s, let’s not forget nearly every kind of -ism — racism, sexism, you name it — was going quite strong in the 80s. If you brought up safe spaces someone would have punched you in the mouth. And teachers probably would have just laughed.
So what I like about 8-Bit Christmas is that the fi lm doesn’t necessarily gloss over those bits. Th ere’s a hulking bully that intimidates the other kids; there are exhortations about how kids oughta play outside more, even though one kid recently got frostbite (“it’s not even below zero!” Jake’s dad says, and something I probably heard in the 80s too.) Jake’s daughter at one point says “I thought you said the 80s was safer?” “It’s complicated,” he replies.
Although I’ve been a bit weary of the “hey remember the 80s?” fi lm and TV shows, I can honestly say I did genuinely enjoy 8-Bit Christmas. It was fun, a nice “Christmas” movie (kind of like how Die Hard was a Christmas movie, in the sense that it takes place at Christmas time but the plot doesn’t really focus on Christmas). And the decade is handled in a way that didn’t remember the era with rose-colored glasses. I guess it was just the right amount of nostalgia. Even if you didn’t scramble to earn a B in math to obtain your NES.
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