Winter Holiday Movie Nights
A Christmas Story, Home Alone, The Legend of Drunken Master, and Encanto
We’ve spent the last couple of weekends at my parents’, first for Christmas and then New Year’s, but did manage to squeeze in a few Movie Nights around the holiday festivities. We watched Die Hard back in June, though, so had to dig a little deeper to find Christmas movies to watch.
A Christmas Story:
I missed the title card for this one, but caught a crucial scene. Somehow, the kids had never seen this all the way through, but they’ve certainly heard plenty of references to it through the years. Now they understand those a little better…
Home Alone:
In this case, I’m not certain I had ever watched this all the way through. I was a sophomore in college when it came out, so didn’t exactly rush to the theater to catch wholesome family fare. I’ve seen most of the key scenes at one time or another because it’s just been… on in places I was for some other reason, but I don’t think I’d watched this.
Anyway, The Pip is square in the target demo for this, and specifically requested it, so we watched it. It’s pretty much what I thought it was.
The Legend of Drunken Master:
(AKA Drunken Master 2). The Pip specifically requested a Jackie Chan movie, so I dug out our Blu-Ray of this and put it on during the week when we were at home. The kids loved the fight scenes (though SteelyKid complained that they didn’t have any music), but found the plot stringing them together to be a mix of boring and confusing. Which is actually a pretty accurate assessment— the fight scenes are awesome, the plot is kind of slapdash and incoherent. Jackie Chan is clearly older than the woman playing his stepmother, and that’s not the most ridiculous thing about it. But man the fights are good…
Encanto:
The kids stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve (I crashed about ten, having put in a bunch of work in the morning then spent the afternoon driving back to my parents’), so a very sleepy Pip accepted the suggestion of a new Disney movie. (SteelyKid asked for The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals, which I vetoed because “I’m in this video and I don’t like it”… Also, I doubt we could’ve gotten it to work on my parents’ TV.) Afterwards he reviewed it concisely and astutely as “Very Disney.”
Bonus Content: My sister was in for Christmas, and wanted to watch The Little Prince, which is one of her favorites, so we put that on one night. There wasn’t anywhere for me to sit with a view of the screen (owing to the honkin’ big Christmas tree in the middle of the living room), and I’ve seen it before, so I was mostly puttering around elsewhere in the house. It’s a charming adaptation, worth a look if you haven’t seen it.
And that’s the regular round-up of media consumption; a bit off its usual Sunday spot, but there was enough here that I didn’t want to let it go another week. Here are the usual buttons:
And the comments will be open.