![]() ![]() In spite of this, Rogen and Mackie have convinced their buddy that this year’s event will be the last hurrah. Gordon-Levitt, though, has no life, no prospects, and no joy, and these Christmas blow-outs have sustained him when he is otherwise running on fumes. ![]() However, people tend to move on, even if they don’t necessarily grow up, with Rogen and wife (the plucky Jillian Bell who nearly saves the film and steals every scene) expecting their first child and Mackie ascending as a football hero (albeit a steroidal one) and social media star. The boys have convened for a night of drug-fueled debauchery every Noel for the past 15 years to help Gordon-Levitt’s character cope with the fact that his parents were killed in a car accident during the “hap-happiest season of alllll” in 2001. The film depicts one final Christmas Eve rager for a trio of Manhattan-dwelling friends (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and Anthony Mackie). The latest in a long line of sad/funny attempts to capture this cold, clammy Christmas truth is director Jonathan Levine’s ( 50/50, Warm Bodies) holiday farce The Night Before. These films, in their episodic tedium, work when they nail the debilitating guilt we all feel as adults that the “special day” never lives up to its materialistic hype, that the whole month of December is cluttered and cramped – with decades of detritus from prior Decembers, with the tears of holiday heartbreak, with the thorny angst of broken promises, with too many ephemeral demands of time and money, and with the laughter of feverishly fun Christmas Eves nearly-forgotten. Hollywood knows this too, and they return to Dickens’ inkwell time and again, for the best (and the worst) of their seasonal cinematic output: It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, Home Alone, Four Christmases, A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas, The Polar Express, Love Actually, Scrooged (and every other overtly Dickensian swipe/homage/remake), Bad Santa (my favorite), and on and on. ![]() Charles Dickens understood this, and that’s why A Christmas Carol, which is as gothic a horror story as they come, has become a timeless template for the best holiday stories in the canon. If we’re really honest with ourselves, Christmas is less about a magically mysterious birth, less about “new beginnings,” and more about exorcising the ghosts and specters of the past that haunt us all. ![]()
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