The above picture has nothing to do with this post. Other than the fact that I used the word ‘renaissance’ in the title and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are all named after Renaissance artists. I know very little about art but I do know a fair bit about 80s cartoons.

Mrs Proclaims, however, is very much an aesthete.

Which is not necessarily evidenced by the fact that she married me.

She knows very little about 80s cartoons, but has managed to expose me to a few of the great works of art over the years. We used to enjoy a city-break in the early years of our marriage and, having taken in Rome, Amsterdam, Vienna, Madrid, Copenhagen and of course having originally met in Paris, I have been exposed to a fair few of the world’s more renowned art galleries. There are also some art galleries in the UK, believe it or not, and she’s dragged me around quite a few of those too.

We haven’t been to any for a while because, back in August 2018, our first daughter, Little Proclaims, arrived and having children tends to alter how you spend your free time. Various well-documented political, economic and pandemic related issues may also have curtailed art-appreciation opportunities in recent years, but I still feel that parenthood has been the main limiting factor in the Proclaims household.

In April 2022 our second daughter arrived and since then the concept of free time has been extinguished from my world and there have been very few opportunities to explore art galleries and even fewer opportunities to watch 80s cartoons. Although I have reluctantly become an expert in Peppa Pig, Bluey and Cocomelon in that time.

Little Proclaims has featured a fair bit on this blog over the years and, insofar as I have readers, she has proven to be something of a hit. Her younger sister has not featured much at all. Mainly because I haven’t really blogged prolifically since her birth. This cannot entirely be blamed on my youngest daughter. Her addition to my life would best be described by a metaphor involving the dried yellow stems of crops and the vertebrae of a humped animal. If only such a metaphor existed. And is that one hump or two?

In her brief exposure to these pages, I have referred to my younger daughter as Littler Proclaims, which I thought was a clever way of differentiating her from her older sister. On reflection, it isn’t all that clever because, assuming that anyone does still read this blog, I fear that it would be all too easy to get confused between Little Proclaims and Littler Proclaims, were I to write a long missive featuring both of my offspring. And being honest, my life is now so devoid of anything other than my two children that it’s highly likely that both will feature quite heavily should I manage to return to something approximating regular blogging.

But a return to regular blogging is what I am hoping to achieve, as insanely ambitious as that may seem to be. On the off-chance I do succeed in that laudable goal, it may make things a little easier on both of my readers if I now refer to my youngest child as Mini Proclaims. So that is what I shall do.

And so the renaissance of James Proclaims begins.

And it will have very little to do with art or turtles.

It is not Halloween as I write this, but I expect this will be published on Halloween. Ideally Halloween 2023.

As I write this, I am enjoying the sound of the washing machine in the background, having also recently enjoyed the delights of washing up the dishes. I don’t normally enjoy either of these things, but thanks to a recent plumbing crisis, having a functioning washing machine and hot water coming out of the kitchen tap are luxuries not to be scoffed at.

The plumbing crisis was caused by a burst pipe in our neighbourhood a few days ago. The ensuing repair by Thames Water resulted in a lot of silt appearing in our water supply. Which is fairly unpleasant. Despite being a murky brown for much of the first few hours of this crisis, we did maintain a steady supply of cold water to the property but the silt managed to clog up both our combi boiler and our washing machine.

Cursing one utility company, I was forced to rely on another to repair the boiler. Unfortunately, despite waiting in all day for British Gas, when they did arrive it was a five minute visit, during which time the engineer announced he couldn’t repair the problem because he didn’t have the right part. We had to wait another two days for the return of hot water, which does seem like quite a long time to have to wait, particularly as it had taken them two days to tell us this information.

In the meantime silt continued to appear intermittently in our cold water, to the extent that Mrs Proclaims decided to contact Thames Water to see if this was something that was likely to be ongoing. Aside from the fact that it’s not especially nice to drink sandy water, we were also concerned that when British Gas eventually deigned to repair our boiler, it would only get clogged up again if the silt situation was likely to continue.

Thames Water were not inclined to offer a phone number on their website, but did offer a handy online chat facility, on which Mrs Proclaims spent two hours telling someone that she was concerned about silt in the water, and not, as the representative kept interpreting, a ‘split’ in the water. It was not two hours well spent.

Fortunately, as things stand, we appear to have neither silt nor a split in our water and the boiler has been repaired.

The washing machine was also clogged with the aforementioned silt. This turned out to be quite easy to fix, but for some reason, despite knowing that our washing machine fills with cold water, I had assumed that the reason it wasn’t working was linked to our boiler problems. So we went as long without a washing machine as we did without hot water and indeed it was only when the hot water had been restored and it appeared that the washing machine was still not working, that I consulted the oracle that is YouTube looking for a solution, YouTube, as it so often does, delivered a DIY solution that I could manage to follow and now the washing machine is tackling the substantial backlog of laundry.

Hygiene has been rather dubious in the Proclaims household in recent days. I have been showering at the gym, because I am currently on one of my, often short-lived, fitness kicks. Mrs Proclaims, who regards all physical exercise with suspicion, has been suffering cold showers. Our children have largely been disgusting. Mini Proclaims is 18 months old. Even with fully functioning plumbing she is quite spectacularly gross most of the time. Still, the levels she has sunk to in recent days have been impressive. Little Proclaims is now five. She is less inherently disgusting than her sister, but she still has her moments, and is not quite old enough to feel any kind of shame.

Fortunately all has been restored to normality.

So our Halloween might well be less horror-filled than the days which have led up to it.

As I write this, Little Proclaims is in the process of ‘being put to bed’ by Mrs Proclaims. My eldest daughter was never a great sleeper, but has improved over the years, and now, incentivised by her new ‘rewards chart’ is beginning to turn in at a time of day which is quite reasonable. The rewards chart has been specifically designed to help Little Proclaims make positive choices. Because good behaviour can be purchased and I’m not above bribery.

However her younger sister comfortably fills the evening void she has left. Mini Proclaims is far more amenable to bedtime than her older sibling, but the Proclaims girls currently share a room. Mainly because we live in a house which only has two bedrooms.There is the potential to improve our abode via a loft conversion or similar, but finances are less than optimal at the moment due to the fact that I am the only member of my household in gainful employment. This is mainly down to my wife’s endeavours to obtain her PhD. Which she has been doing forever, because she elected to complete her doctoral studies alongside our venture into parenting. Two bouts of maternity leave can really eke out a PhD as it turns out.

Also, someone called Liz Truss claimed she would be a good Prime Minister last year, and it turns out she was overshooting and she broke the economy. So the mortgage is quite expensive at the moment. As is everything else.

So as things stand our daughters have to share a room. Which is mainly fine and something they are both happy about. But sometimes they are a little too happy about it and were we to try and send them to bed at the same time, we might as well remove all the bedroom furniture and install a bouncy castle.

There is, therefore a routine of sorts. Little Proclaims goes down first, and Mini Proclaims gets to enjoy an hour or so of ‘daddy-time’. I say enjoy. That may be overstating things. Little Proclaims has always been a ‘daddy’s girl’. Mini Proclaims is quite open about how much she prefers her mother. She doesn’t dislike me, but she is quite clear that I should not get ideas above my station.

Indeed, the current arrangement of Mrs Proclaims putting the older child to bed, while I occupy myself with the younger one, is specifically designed to convince our children that we’re both competent and they don’t need to have a favourite parent.

Any more that we would have a favourite child.

And I don’t have a favourite child. I love them both.

But as I watch Mini Proclaims filling my shoes with Rice Crispies, it’s hard not to take that a little personally. Little Proclaims has never put any food in my shoes.

I suspect Mini Proclaims is addicted to Rice Crispies. As well as occasionally putting them in my shoes, or decorating the carpet with them, she does seem to genuinely enjoy eating them. Almost at the expense of anything else.

Generally when I, or Mrs Proclaims are in the kitchen, it’s not unusual to discover our youngest daughter, who is still very much below knee height (on me at least, Mrs Proclaims is considerably shorter so perhaps knee height has been achieved there – I’m not sure it matters really but I’m happy to check and update any interested readers) gripping firmly onto a parental leg with one arm and emphatically gesturing with the Rice Crispies box with her other arm. She is a child of few words (unlike her older sister who was fairly quick on the uptake with the spoken word from an early age and hasn’t stopped talking since) but very good at making herself understood in spite of this.

I have no problem with her love of rice-based cereal, and she’s generally quite happy when we eschew the Kellogg’s variety in favour of the supermarket own brand equivalent, so it’s quite a cost effective meal. But she used to be a good eater, insofar as she would eat a fairly broad and balanced diet. Little Proclaims has also always been a fairly good eater in this respect. As parents we are often the subject of envy from other parents, in terms of just how broad a palate our little ones have. I’m not sure I can take too much credit here genetically – as much I am very much the sort of adult who will consume anything and everything, I was, as a small child, quite picky with my food and and my parents were very much akin to the aforementioned envious parents.

As I tend to be the main meal maker in the house, perhaps my daughters’ enjoyment of food stems from my culinary skills. Although I suspect not, as Little Proclaims, while fairly adventurous in her dietary habits, will often describe the meals that I make for Mrs Proclaims and me as ‘disgusting’.

To be fair, she describes a lot of things as ‘disgusting’. It’s one of her favourite words. And, as previously mentioned, she knows a lot of words, so it is possibly of some concern that ‘disgusting’ finds itself in such regular use.

Mini Proclaims knows far fewer words so would never describe any food as disgusting. She prefers to communicate her disgust by throwing the food on the floor. On balance, I do prefer my older daughter’s method of communication in this respect.

We didn’t really do anything for Halloween this year. That’s mainly because we don’t really do anything for Halloween any year. In my head, it’s not that big a thing in the UK. At least it never was when I was a child and my entire world view is generally shaped by how things were in the 80s and the 90s rather than how they are now. In fact my world view is shaped by my rose-tinted recollections of those decades rather than any true understanding of how things really were back then. Which is why I don’t really understand anything about anything for the most part.

As I recall though, Guy Fawkes night was always a thing when I was a kid. Although we didn’t call it Guy Fawkes night. It was generally known as ‘Bonfire Night’, but in some circles it was also known as ‘Fireworks Night’. There may have been a class distinction in terms of which nomenclature one chose. I wouldn’t know which class would associate most with which name though. But whatever name you used, it was always a fairly big thing.

Halloween was less of a thing. I do remember dressing up as a vampire once or twice, but I don’t remember it being something that always happened, whereas November the 5th (or the nearest weekend to it) was pretty much enshrined in the annual list of things to get excited about.

I am notionally aware that Halloween has always been a significant date in other parts of the world and it does appear, if my supermarket is to be believed, to have taken on more significance on these shores of late. Certainly Little Proclaims seemed to be quite excited about it, but in the end was placated by a Halloween-themed head-band picked up in the aforementioned supermarket, for a very reasonable price. She did ask if we might take her ‘trick or treating’, a suggestion which I immediately vetoed, on the basis that harassing my neighbours to encourage obesity in my five-year-old daughter does not seem like a path I wish to follow. Plus the neighbours have generally left us alone on that score since we moved in a decade ago, so I feel it’s only fair to reciprocate.

Little Proclaims was upset at my rejection of her plans, so I found a compromise, which entailed delivering ‘The Tin’ to Mrs Proclaims, who was working on her PhD in what we laughingly refer to as an office and then allowing Little Proclaims to ‘trick or treat’ her mother for her post-dinner dessert. All parties seemed happy with this arrangement, though I imagine this will not be a solution that stands the test of time.

‘The Tin’ is the container in which we keep all the chocolate-based snacks that we occasionally use to bribe Little Proclaims into eating her main meal. On this score it works quite well. However the existence of ‘The Tin’ has proven a little problematic for Little Proclaims’ parents and if we’re brutally honest, most of the time it needs replenishing because of us rather than our offspring.

Anyway, that was it. Halloween was done and dusted. Except that it apparently wasn’t, for Little Proclaims is due to attend her first ever school disco this evening. And it is Halloween-themed. A costume is not obligatory, but on the other hand, if she’s the only one without a costume then what would that say about us as parents? It’s not a question I want an answer to.

As fate would have it, although I work in a school, my half-term holiday is not entirely lined up with Little Proclaims, so although she has been in school all day, I have been off. So Mini Proclaims and I set out on a mission to obtain suitable attire so that Little Proclaims can go to the ball without Mrs Proclaims and I being subject to the judgment of other parents. Because other parents can be quite judgmental. I imagine. Certainly if they’re anything like Mrs Proclaims and I, then they are incredibly judgmental.

Mini Proclaims was not entirely invested in the mission, but she always likes an outing. Even if that outing is to nowhere more interesting than a supermarket. And she’s pretty good company for the most part. She does tend to sing loudly when we’re out in public, but she’s at an age where most people seem to consider it ‘cute’ rather than ‘antisocial’.

As it happens, there were still some Halloween-themed dresses in the store, and now, because the ‘big day’ has passed, they were reduced in price and I picked up what I thought was an absolute bargain of a dress, which has pictures of Minnie Mouse, dressed as a witch and holding a pumpkin. But when I got to the till, it turned out that it was even cheaper than advertised, and I picked up a brand new dress for Little Proclaims for a single, solitary pound.

Given the cost of living crisis, I am now wondering if it is appropriate to use the strategy of only buying ‘holiday-themed’ outfits for my children, immediately after said holiday has passed.

And I’m feeling pretty good about adopting that strategy.

As December rolls around again, thus begins my annual homage to movies, which are not exactly Christmas movies, but which nonetheless have some Christmas(ish) elements. This is my seventh consecutive year of doing this and if it was ever worth doing (which is wasn’t) then any merit ceased to be obvious by the end of year 3. And yet as long as I am able to compile a list of movies with references to Christmas in them, I will no doubt carry on doing this in perpetuity in spite of it, statistically, being the least popular thing I do on my blog. The fact that I have managed to post little else this year makes this annual endeavour even more bizarre, but the reality is that the vast majority of my advent calendars from 2020 (until around 2026) were completed during the increase in spare time afforded me by the pandemic years and so, however productive I may or may not be on these pages the rest of the year round, 24 pointless posts about Christmas(ish) movies will continue to appear on this blog for the foreseeable future. In the unlikely event you are interested in which movies made the cut between 2017 and 2022, the full list can be found by clicking here.

But now we must proceed with Door 1 of the 2023 edition:

Over the years the odd rom-com has made it into my festive countdown, though it is not a category of cinema that I willingly frequent often. However, if I discover one with Christmas(ish) credentials I do feel obliged to watch it in the name of research.

And so it was that I finally got around to watching Sleepless in Seattle, which is a movie I had hitherto avoided given my absolute certainty that I would not enjoy it in the slightest.

As is often the case with the classic rom-coms of the 90s though, I found myself rather liking this 1993 staple of the genre.

Objectively the whole thing is largely nonsensical and in many ways the plot, when summarised, makes more sense as a horror movie or a thriller than a rom-com. Essentially Meg Ryan plays a journalist who abuses her role to relentlessly stalk a bereaved father as played by Tom Hanks. It is definitely credit to the the two leads that a fairly shoddy premise actually ends up being quite a charming 100 or so minutes of cinema.

Score for Christmasishness

Aside from the initial few scenes, almost the entirety of the first third of the movie is set over the Christmas period and visibly so. Indeed, some quite pivotal moments in the exposition of the story take place on Christmas Eve. Ultimately the film concludes on February 14th, which, given the overall theme, might make this more of a Valentine’s Day film, but I think enough of the narrative takes place over Christmas to make this a reasonably Christmas(ish) movie.

2010’s Little Fockers is the third and (to date) final installment in the Meet the Parents series. Like many such movie franchises, Meet the Parents appears to be one of diminishing returns. I quite liked the 2000 original and even if the 2004 sequel was a shameless cash-in predominantly made up of recycled jokes from the first movie, I didn’t hate it.

Like its predecessors, Little Fockers has a great cast.

And that is the only positive thing I can say about it.

I can only assume the assorted star names got paid a lot of money for this abomination.

Score for Christmasishness

I only watched this movie because I thought it was set at Christmas time. But it isn’t. So that’s 115 minutes of my life that I won’t be getting back anytime soon. The very final scene does, however, depict a Christmas gathering, so it just about makes the cut for my festive countdown. But that is scant consolation for having had to sit through such a dreadful film.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is not a movie that is meant to be take too seriously, and is at least partially intended to be a spoof of the spy movie genre. But while it is most definitely tongue-in-cheek, it is actually a pretty good action movie in its own right.

Like so many of the movies it appears to be sending up, Kingsman is best enjoyed if you switch your brain off at the outset. Hardly anything makes sense and the violence is nothing less than gratuitous throughout. But if you enjoy that kind of thing, and I very much do, then it all makes for a pretty entertaining couple of hours.

Score for Christmasishness

As with so many of the films I include in these pointless countdowns, this is not remotely Christmassy for the most part. But there is the slightest hint of Christmas right at the beginning, albeit in a scene when the news of a minor character’s death is being reported to his family. I’ve included movies for more spurious reasons than this, so Kingsman: The Secret Service makes the cut by the narrowest of margins.

2011’s adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo initially seemed to me to be a pointless endeavour. There was already a pretty good 2009 screen-version of the novel, and indeed of the whole of Steig Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, so this seemed like a redundant attempt at making an English-language version of the movie for people who can’t read subtitles.

But actually David Fincher’s version is pretty good. The purported sequels never got made, but from what I recall of reading the novels and watching the 2009 adaptations, the first one was the best anyway so it’s perhaps serendipitous that the 2011 movie is a stand-alone affair.

The cast are all excellent as befits their collective reputations but, perhaps not surprisingly, it’s Rooney Mara who stands out as the eponymous anti-hero Lisbeth Salander.

Score for Christmasishness

I re-watched this in the belief that Christmas played quite a significant role in the narrative, but it doesn’t. At least not in this version. Perhaps it is more significant in the novel and in the 2009 Swedish-language adaptation, or maybe I just imagined it. Nonetheless Christmas does feature a little bit. The movie opens around the New Year and there are occasionally Christmas decorations in sight and the film rather more explicitly ends at Christmas time, with a Christmas gift symbolically bringing the narrative to a close though not in the cheeriest of ways. Added to that, there is a fair amount of snow throughout the film, which is largely irrelevant, but certainly gives the movie a wintery feel.

Postman Pat was a childhood favourite of mine, so it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch his 2014 cinematic debut. Obviously I didn’t watch Postman Pat: The Movie in an actual cinema, nor did I watch it in 2014. I discovered it in more recent years when it was available on one of the streaming services that I subscribe to on a day that I wanted Little Proclaims to sit quietly for an hour or so.

In silencing my daughter it was not without success so it deserves some credit because she (not I) was it’s target audience. She wasn’t completely sold on it but she definitely didn’t hate it.

I didn’t hate it either. I suspected it would either be a desecration of beloved memories from my infancy or possibly a charming reimagining of a classic that appealed to young and old alike. It was neither. I didn’t find it offensive at all, and it was mildly entertaining in parts but it all felt a little bit lazy. It certainly could have been a lot worse, but with a bit more effort it might actually have been pretty good.

Score for Christmasishness

It’s not a Christmas film at all, although an animated film about a postman will never seem entirely out of place in a festive viewing schedule. There is a recurring theme about a letter to Father Christmas which is not essential to the plot but which is referenced a few times throughout the running time with the payoff that Father Christmas does make a brief cameo at the end. You could remove all of the aforementioned scenes and no-one would notice, but they are there, which means that Postman Pat: The Movie has as many Christmas(ish) credentials as a large percentage of the movies that make up my annual festive countdowns.

1995’s Toy Story was a game-changing movie in many respects. The first feature length computer-animated movie, the first feature length release from Pixar, and of course the first movie in a franchise which has, to date, spawned three sequels and a spin-off on the silver screen, as well as a number of animated shorts and TV specials. But, despite the high bar that Pixar has established for the majority of its output and the critical acclaim attributed to all of the Toy Story movies, it would still be a brave person to suggest that there is anything in Pixar’s output that is better than their debut.

Indeed, although the computer animation was the element that many fixated on back in 1995, when no-one had seen anything like it before, it would be fair to say that Toy Story would have been a good movie had it been produced using more traditional forms of animation, which is possibly why it still holds up in spite of the animation perhaps looking a little dated in comparison with many of today’s offerings.

To be fair it does still look pretty good even today, and the voice cast is nothing short of stellar, but it’s the writing that lifts this head and shoulders above most movies (animated or not)

Score for Christmasishness

There is only one reference to Christmas, which happens right at the end of the movie, after the denouement of the main story. It’s more explicit than many a movie that has made the cut for my Christmas countdown, and, lest we forget, this is a movie about anthropomorphic toys, which is already pretty Christmassy by anyone’s standards.

End of Days is a perplexingly bad movie that fails to work on almost every level. Even as a mindless action vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger it doesn’t really work. My recollection of action movies from the eighties and nineties was that if Arnie was playing the lead, it was predominantly so he could beat up the bad guys in increasingly violent ways. But in this he mainly seems to be the person getting beaten up. Which presumably means he was cast in this to act. I’d be the last person to ever criticise Schwarzenegger’s acting, I always felt that he knew his limitations and took on parts that played to his strengths. But it would have taken an actor of peerless genius to make the material on offer in End of Days seem anything less than abysmal. Alas Arnie quite possibly makes the whole mess even worse. Although that may actually be giving him too much credit.

Still, if you set your expectations low enough and consume a few glasses of your favourite tipple beforehand, you may well find that End of Days falls happily into the category of ‘so bad it’s good’. That’s certainly how I consumed it.

Score for Christmasishness

As the plot, insofar as there was a plot, seemed to be about the attempted conception of the antichrist, then you might almost call this an anti-Christmas movie. But that would be giving the narrative far too much credit and I judge the Christmasishness of a film on far more simplistic terms. This film is set during the week between Christmas and New Year (specifically Christmas 1999, which apparently has some spurious bearing on the plot) which means there are a lot of Christmas trees etc. on screen for most of the running time. So, in spite of the subject matter, it does all look quite Christmas(ish).

I used to have a house mate, back in the late nineties, who described Oliver Stone’s Platoon as his favourite movie. Given that we agreed on pretty much everything related to cinema, you’d have thought I’d have watched it straight away, but for some reason I waited over two decades. As pointless as this annual countdown might be, and as many awful movies as I may have watched, it has meant I’ve righted some of these wrongs.

Because Platoon is an excellent movie. Not a particularly joyful one admittedly but compelling from start to finish.

It’s often credited with giving a realistic portrayal of the Vietnam war. I can’t comment on that because I didn’t fight in Vietnam what with not having been born. I’m also the wrong nationality, but I think the not being born thing probably trumps that. But if it is realistic then war really doesn’t look like much fun at all, so I’m glad I wasn’t there.

Score for Christmasishness

It’s not very Christmassy really, but a significant part of the narrative does take place on New Year’s Day. There are scenes that precede that which may therefore be set around Christmas time and certainly it looks like there might be some Christmas decorations up in the scenes at base camp. But it’s not really clear when those scenes are supposed to be taking place, so the New Year’s Day element is the only proof we have that Platoon, in its own harrowing way, is a bit Christmas(ish).

There were 12 years between the release of the second and third instalments of the Bridget Jones franchise but the extended break appears to have had no ill effects. 2016’s Bridget Jones Baby is no less charming than its predecessors and, if not quite as good as the 2001 original, which would be a tall order, is arguably a big improvement on the first sequel.

Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth both reprise their roles, as do many of the original cast, though Hugh Grant’s roguish Daniel Cleaver is notably missing. Whether that character would work within the narrative is perhaps a point for debate, but Patrick Dempsey, while doing nothing inherently wrong, does feel like a somewhat underwhelming replacement.

The Bridget Jones movies have always been about Zellweger’s performance though, and having had her own hiatus from the silver screen she proves here that she’s as gifted a performer as ever, switching from physical comedy to more poignant moments with apparent ease.

Score for Christmasishness

Not as Christmassy as the original and indeed not really Christmassy at all for the most part. The third instalment doesn’t follow the January-December diary format of the first two movies so is not bookended by Christmases, but Christmas does feature in the later stages of the story. It’s not significant to the narrative but it is visibly Christmas on screen for long enough to make Bridget Jones’ Baby a bit Christmas(ish)

Michael Bay’s 2001 movie about the bombing of Pearl Harbor is exactly the kind of movie we’ve come to expect from Michael Bay. Spectacular special effects, but rather light on anything resembling narrative, acting and credible dialogue. Throw in an abundance of clichés and an excessively long running time and you have formula that has served him well over the years. In the case of Pearl Harbor though, Bay managed to add historical inaccuracies to his already impressive arsenal.

It was deservedly critically panned and the cast, though undoubtably stellar, do very little to redeem the clunky dialogue. Nonetheless, I think if you go in expecting to see a Michael Bay movie, rather than a faithful adaptation of real life events, then it is hard to be too disappointed. It’s objectively quite a bad movie, but if you switch your brain to a suitably low setting, then it can still be entertaining.

Score for Christmasishness

The real life attack on Pearl Harbor happened on the 7th December, and in this point (if in not much else) the movie is quite faithful. It’s not overtly Christmassy, what with all the explosions and carnage, but there if you squint hard enough, you will see some signs that the season is upon us. So it’s a little bit Christmas(ish), and if watching Pearl Harbor as a Christmas movie is largely missing the point, then it’s no more missing the point than Michael Bay was when he made the movie in the first place.

Despite claiming to not be a fan of the genre, it has become apparent that rom-coms have featured multiple times in my annual Christmas countdowns and, more often than not, I’ve actually enjoyed watching them. That said, I probably wouldn’t have watched many of them if I weren’t so committed to compiling this pointless annual list.

And that sentiment is definitely true of You’ve Got Mail which is a movie I had managed to intentionally avoid for many a year but whose Christmas(ish) credentials ultimately forced me to succumb to its charms. Reuniting writer/director Nora Ephron with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks who helped her to render Sleepless in Seattle delightfully diverting, lightening proves it can strike twice (or arguably thrice given that Ryan also starred in the the masterpiece that is When Harry Met Sally, which Ephron also wrote) as the combination is just as winning this time around.

It’s formulaic and entirely improbable fare for the most part, but if you are prepared to suspend your disbelief, it is entirely charming throughout.

Score for Christmasishness

Although not all of the movie is set during the ‘season’, quite a large part of the narrative does take place around Christmas and it does seem to be fairly pertinent to the plot for the most part. And when it is Christmas on screen, it’s really Christmassy, so this would be a more than appropriate movie to add to any festive film schedule.

1995’s Strange Days seems like it should have been a success. Directed by Kathryn Bigalow, co-written by James Cameron and starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis, it appeared to have all the ingredients of a sure-fire hit. But it was, in fact, a commercial failure and critical opinion was divided to almost polar extremes.

I saw it circa 1996 in the form of a video rental, back when such a thing was the norm and I didn’t hate it. Set in (what was then) the near future of the last days of 1999, its slightly dystopic take on the denouement of the last millennium seemed fairly plausible at the time. Of course that perception hasn’t aged well, and much more recent re-watch required much more suspending of my disbelief.

That said, I still didn’t hate it. It’s slightly too long, and occasionally slow-moving, but it still seems quite innovative and it’s entertaining enough, with some solid performances from the leads.

Maybe not an all-time classic, but it’s definitely a movie that deserved to fare a little better at the box-office than it actually did.

Score for Christmasishness

Set in the last days of 1999, in the period between Christmas and New Year, it definitely doesn’t ignore the festivity of the time of year. There are Christmas decorations and trees aplenty in various scenes throughout. We also see a store Santa Claus being mugged in the background as Fiennes character drives through an anarchic LA early in the movie. It’s never especially cheery, but it’s fairly Christmas(ish) nonetheless.

I was a little bit too old for the Harry Potter novels when they first came out, but I’m always one to jump on a bandwagon, so by the time the movies started appearing, I was well-versed in the world of wizardry and witchcraft. I quite liked the books in the main – I can certainly understand why the generation who were the target audience seemed to be so enthusiastic.

The movie adaptations were fairly well-done for the most part too. 2001’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (also known as Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone depending on where you reside) certainly arrived to much fanfare. It hasn’t aged as well as it might – the CGI looks very 2001 in places. And while the cast is undeniably stellar, the main trio of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, though impressively adept for child actors, are nonetheless weaker than some of their adult co-stars in this entry. The movie is also a little too long, which is something the series does manage to rectify in later movies by daring to be a little less faithful to the source material than the debut outing.

It’s still not a bad effort though. If I’d grown up with this instead of Star Wars I might love it as much as Star Wars.

But I didn’t.

So I don’t.

Score for Christmasishness

A blockbuster movie about magic is entirely the stuff of Christmas viewing schedules. But if we purely stick to the plot then only a bit of the film is set at Christmas. It’s relevant to the plot and there are some very Christmassy scenes. But most of the movie is not set at Christmas. So we can only consider Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to be a bit Christmas(ish) in reality.

1997’s Boogie Nights is something of a genre-defying tour-de-force. Certainly it defied any expectations I had prior to watching it, and, for a movie that is ostensibly about the pornographic film industry in the late seventies and early eighties, it is surprisingly heart-warming at times.

Indeed it oscillates seamlessly from moments that are hilariously funny, to emphatically bleak, and from poignant melancholy to life-affirming joy, without ever missing a beat.

An early entry in the almost peerless filmography of Paul Thomas Anderson, with excellent performances from an impressive cast, Boogie Nights is never less than entertaining in spite of a hefty running time of two and half hours.

Score for Christmasishness

The timeline of the movie is roughly seven years but it does manage to incorporate a few festive scenes on the way. Notably a New Year’s Eve party, celebrating the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties, which is full of festive merriment until it abruptly ends in a less than cheerful murder/suicide. The latter part of the movie is also quite festive, at least in the background, though again not without a number of harrowing moments. Boogie Nights is definitely not a Christmas movie, but it is certainly a bit Christmas(ish) in parts.

2007’s Alvin and the Chipmunks has, to date, spawned three sequels (the first of which was ingeniously entitled The Squeakquel). I haven’t seen any of them, and I’m not in any hurry to do so.

Not that I hated the 2007 outing. Objectively I can’t imagine anyone would really think this is a good movie, but it’s harmless enough childish fun, which doesn’t try particularly hard to be anything other than harmless childish fun.

There is perhaps an element of nostalgia here for anyone that grew up with the novelty high-pitched albums that were the original home of the singing chipmunks and I do recall not hating the 80s cartoon as a child (although I didn’t really love it either), but taken on its own merits the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie is a by-the-numbers cynical Hollywood cash-in, which doesn’t deserve too much attention one way or another.

Score for Christmasishness

For the first half of the film I genuinely thought I was watching a Christmas movie. The eponymous rodents start the film living in a Christmas tree, and there is general sense of festiveness for the first 45 minutes, including a recurring Christmas song, which is fairly essential to the plot. We even spend some time with the characters on Christmas Day, but then the film deviates spectacularly from the festive theme and the rest of the story is not especially Christmassy at all. So it’s probably best to split the difference and give the whole thing a rating of three out of five on the Christmasishness scale.