Holiday Movies: "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation"

It's time to implement your holiday movie marathons, boys and girls! Here's Matt with a tribute to one of his personal favorites:

Around Black Friday the first itch hits me.

They creep in, dull yet unmistakable, around the fringes of my Turkey coma, pulsing in the back of my brain. If I ignore them they grow worse by weekend’s end, evolving into a kind of withdrawal headache and a sense that something is missing.

There’s only one antidote: Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) stapling thousands of lights to his house and accidentally catching his own sleeve, or sledding down a mountain at 100 miles per hour, or being trapped in the attic while his family goes shopping, or watching Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) abduct his boss.

My name is Matthew, and I am a National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation addict.

This addiction began in the throes of my sixth Christmas (1992…it was a very good year). The film was in heavy holiday screening on NBC at the time, and my Dad was interested in seeing it (And, in the golden age of the VCR, recording it.).

I don’t remember my first viewing of the film as being something that was particularly revelatory, largely because I could only vaguely figure out what was going on. As a six-year-old, Christmas movies were things with stop-motion reindeer and sardonic, lasagna-eating cats. But it was on repeat viewings later that same season that I began to realize John Hughes and company were on to something.

These days I’m watching this particular holiday flick at least a dozen or so times each December (I’ve already been through five of my 2010 viewings as of this writing.), and it never loses its luster. The wackiness of it is an obvious appeal to someone of my…idiom, shall we say, but the love of the film has gone deeper than that. For all its comic mugging and slapstick irreverence, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is, at its heart, a film about the bittersweet peculiarity of the modern holiday experience.

It might sound like I’m attempting to project a false profundity onto relatively lightweight cinema fare, but go watch the film so many times that it seeps into your dreams and then talk to me about whether or not I’m wrong. I’m not arguing that Christmas Vacation is not a light film. It absolutely is. You can turn it on right now, watch it through several times, and do nothing but laugh at the unabashed zaniness of it all, from Clark Griswold’s desperate attempts to get his Christmas lights to turn on to Cousin Eddie’s unceremonious disposal of the contents of his RV septic tank. You can do this, quite enjoyably, while giving no thought to whether or not there’s a deeper meaning. In fact, it’s quite possible that the filmmakers themselves had no real inkling of what was lying beneath their comic flights, even as they were filming the thing.

But we are talking about a film written by John Hughes, the late, great pop auteur of the 1980s, the man who brought us The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Home Alone. Hughes had a knack for inserting deeper meaning even when things seemed at their most shallow. His films are of a kind so deeply associated with the American spirit: highly commercial, over the top, even slightly implausible, but packed with a yearning for a genuine sense of truth and emotion. People who think it’s just pre-packaged, supergloss box-office cash-in aren’t looking hard enough for what’s really going on.

Which brings me back to Christmas Vacation. It’s  a film about a man (Clark Griswold) who wants nothing more than to create the perfect Christmas for himself and his family. His overeager, often hapless pursuit of this, is largely selfless, even when it seems destructive. He wants to be that father, that husband, that son, who creates a holiday for the ages. His problem just happens to be that every single thing goes wrong. The lights don’t work, the tree catches fire, the turkey is dry, the Christmas bonus is nowhere in sight, the relatives are unappreciative, uncaring or just plain senile and the wife and kids are simply trying to dodge all of his well-intentioned misfires. 

It’s all very funny, and you can take it as just that, but it’s also a film about our constant yearning for the idealized Normal Rockwell glow that we all wish would materialize in our own living rooms. It’s a film about trying to build perfection out of what will always be chaos, and about discovering that sometimes that chaos is perfection. It’s that undertone, that snow-crested, holly-wreathed quest for a wonderful life, that makes the film so watchable, even when you’re someone like me who’s seen it 200 times.

Of course, if you don’t find all that there, you can always just wait for the moment when the dog chases the squirrel around the house.

Merry Christmas.

New on DVD: "Inception," the coolest movie of the year.

Inception, the mind-bending mega blockbuster from Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, hits DVD and Blu-Ray today. ITZ Managing Editor Matthew Jackson reviewed the film for The Huntsville Item when it was released in July.

Inception really is that good

Some flicks just have an air of destiny about them.

The idea sounds great, the cast and crew come together perfectly, the trailers strike just the right note of anticipation, and when the film finally rolls out for all to see, it turns out it really was the sublime experience everyone hoped it would be.

It’s rare that a film really does that. Films can be good, but not as great as you thought they would be, very often, but it takes something more for them to meet your every expectation. After all, in our minds there are no budget constraints, actors never make mistakes, and special effects look completely real.

It’s an even rarer occasion when a film exceeds your expectations, and rarer still that a film leaves you dumbfounded with a kind of gleeful sensory overload.

Inception, the latest offering from Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, is one of those films. In spite of a boatload of impossible expectations, this flick went far beyond my wildest dreams (pun definitely intended) of how great it could be.

It’s not just that this is a lovingly crafted, carefully designed and flawlessly executed exercise in filmmaking. This is a strikingly original piece of cinema, truly something you’ve never seen before, and that alone should be enough to get you marching to this particular drum.

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are thieves of a very particular order. They don’t knock over casinos or museums. They invade dreams in search of world-changing ideas buried in the minds of corporate honchos. They do this because they are handsomely paid by other corporate honchos.

The process involves a technology called “shared dreaming,” in which several people are hooked up to the same sedation machine and simultaneously transported into a pre-designed dream world that is inhabited by figments of the dreamer’s subconscious (this all makes more sense when you see it, trust me). Once there, they find a way to get to the deepest and darkest part of that subconscious, where the secrets lie.

Cobb is good at his job, but he’s also on the run from his own past, and when an Asian tycoon (Ken Watanabe) offers him a chance at redemption through “one last job,” he jumps at it. But the job is anything but ordinary. This time it’s not about taking an idea out, but putting an idea in, something that becomes far more difficult when ensnared in the trappings of the mind.

To pull off this ambitious reverse-heist, Cobb and Arthur recruit brilliant young architect Ariadne (Ellen Page) to design the dream world, and international charmer Eames (Tom Hardy) to rustle up a mass of deceptions, all to be placed inside the head of the heir to an international conglomerate (Cillian Murphy).

I’m stopping there, not just because I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but also because if I wanted to get into the intricacies of this flick’s plot, I’d need a whole book to do it. Nolan, already famous for his magnificently layered films (his breakout film Memento is a prime example) outdoes himself here, crafting a world that’s part reality, part dream, and part dream within a dream, each with its own carefully designed set of rules. 

It may seem a long shot, making a film built around the structure of a heist, which involves careful, logical planning, but set in the illogical and ever-shifting world of dreams. But the whole flick really does make sense, and Nolan achieves this by placing all the things we know about dreams into the context of his tale. Time moves differently, the subconscious intrudes on logic, and everything seems to revolve around the dreamer. All this not only grounds the film, but also makes it believable. Believe me when I tell you that this does not feel like science fiction. 

The realism is heightened by Nolan’s use of special effects. Though what you see is mindbending, never does it feel contrived or intended to impress. It’s all simply part of the world you’ve been pushed into. Cities bend in half, freight trains fly through taxi-packed streets, people spin through hallways in zero gravity, but never during any of that does it feel like Nolan is shouting “Look at me! Look at how cool this is!” It’s all woven into the fabric.

The acting is, put simply, top notch. DiCaprio manages to be psychologically complex without seeming melodramatic, Gordon-Levitt is super-spy cool, Page is alternately curious and wise at all the right times. You don’t feel like you’re watching movie stars cavorting about the blockbuster-scape, and that’s a miracle in itself.

But what’s most brilliant about his treasure of a movie is the way reality almost becomes a character itself. Nolan makes much of the difference between what’s real and what’s not, and is careful to note that as we’re dreaming nothing seems illogical. “Inception” is a film that plays with this concept like no other, bending and shaping reality in layers and shadows into a funhouse of the mind. Never once is the plot, the pace or the conceptual solidity lost in all the smoke and mirrors, and yet by the end you’re still left with a dizzying sense of openness, as if you’re still waiting to wake up. 

Matt’s Call: The best movie of the year so far by leaps and bounds, and nothing slated to come out later this year looks like it will even come close (The Social Network has since forced me to revise this opinion, but not much.). It’s as good as you heard it was, and better. All that’s left is for you to see it.