I must be a terrible grouch…er, Grinch…this season.  I’m not into Christmas movies at all, though I do have a soft spot for A Christmas Story (you can thank or blame me and my former TNT colleagues for the 24 hour ACS marathon stunt which continues to this day, but on a different network).  I also used to enjoy watching It’s a Wonderful Life, before it was purloined by NBC amid copyright squabbles and now has virtually disappeared from any real popular consciousness.  It used to be a ubiquitous presence during the holidays, played on every station that could get hold of a public domain copy, and people fell in love with it.  Now that it’s securely all nice and legal, it’s gone back to being only a movie for film buffs, and that’s a shame.  NBC won the battle, but they lost the war on that one.  (The photo is a neat Xmas sign my Dad put up one year on our front porch — Bugs’ arm hoisted one up, too!)

I guess I prefer to think about movies that make me happy, pleasing me inordinately, and they’ve got nothing to do with Christmas, really.  It’s just that I feel a little more like extending goodwill towards men after I’m reminded about humanity’s capacity for creativity.  I started early with this feeling; as you can see from this framegrab from a very old family home movie, I’ve been in love with Forbidden Planet‘s Robby the Robot since I was a little girl.  That movie has everything — awe and mystery, humor, bravery, intellectual curiosity, a scary monster and a gentle girl who loved animals.  How could I not still be excited by this extraordinary movie? 

And then I need something funny, something absurd, something timeless.  Something like The Marx Brothers, maybe, as stowaways trying to sneak off an ocean liner by all pretending to be Maurice Chevalier, in Monkey Business. 

Or maybe it’s just Groucho in Horsefeathers, silly, sexy and seductive singing a song to a lady as they canoe down a river, followed by a duck.  (Is a duck ever NOT funny?).  The song starts about half a minute into the clip.

Favorite line:  “Is that you or the duck?”

And of course I also feel nearly giddy after watching The Three Stooges’ Curly battle with the oyster stew.

Another delight for me is Peter Weller as the coolest surgeon/rock star/superhero ever, in the under-appreciated cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.  With a loopy science fiction plot and chockful of interesting actors — Jeff Goldblum, John Lithgow, Clancy Brown, Ellen Barkin, Carl Lumbly, Christopher Lloyd — TAoBB is amusing, exciting and energetic, with a calm center provided by Weller’s Buckaroo.  He’s calm and empathetic when he admonishes a nightclub crowd who are starting to razz a down-on-her-luck patron — “Don’t be mean.  We don’t have to be mean.”  And of course there’s his inscrutably brilliant “No matter where you go…there you are.”   The movie closes with the incredibly addicting end theme music and the entire cast walking together in a deserted aqueduct.

These and other movie moments help me feel like a kid again, and I think that’s about the best thing we could ever get from the holidays, don’t you? 

Here’s to a great 2009 for all of us!