Talking (Made for Small Screen) Holiday Films

Serious wintery or holiday films are no stranger to December at the Attic on Eighth. We’ve put Favorite Holiday Adjacent & “Kind of” Christmas film lists together along with Winter Favorites lists. We’ve discussed our love of seasonal content in our latest “What We’re Watching.” What we haven’t done is talk what is quickly becoming a staple of the holiday season: the “bad” holiday film made to air directly on our personal screens. With Netflix taking over the genre and working on adapting the genre to a more modern standard, the films seem to be more and more popular and really are everywhere. More people are watching them, fewer people are hiding them, and more and more money is going into them. So let’s talk holiday films…

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Zoë G. Burnett

Holiday films are what my grandmother likes to call “nice movies.” To quote, no cussin’ and none of that stuff. (She means sex.) Considering the calendar I’m giving her this Christmas, other big draws are the handsome, rugged male leads and the plots plucked from the pages of romance novels just spicy enough to merit a Medium salsa rating. With sometimes overly complicated storylines, relatively low stakes, and an overwhelming amount of heart, it’s not my preferred genre. There is something to be said, however, for a movie that I know will not cause Gramma to leave the room. It has happened.

That isn’t to say that I judge anyone for enjoying these movies, not at all. Much like books targeted at a largely female audience routinely dismissed as “fluff,” the new focus on this genre prioritizes those perspectives. Even though not a single female director was nominated for a Golden Globe this year, at least somebody understands that there is a demand for movies that don’t put psychopaths, religious figures, divorce, and war at the center of every narrative. Festive and light, these movies are fantasy brain candy. Even if kissing under the mistletoe isn’t your thing, two recent films show new ways to interpret the category without sacrificing any warmth or cheer.

Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever (2014) satirizes a specifically sappy strain of the genre, gleefully shredding it like the arm of an upholstered chair. Grumpy Cat (RIP Tardar Sauce, 2012 - 2019), voiced by Aubrey Plaza, is sprung from her tenure at a shopping mall pet store when a young girl discovers that she can hear the curmudgeonly kitty’s voice. While trying not to ruin her single mother’s date with the restaurant coworker she’s been crushing on, they uncover a plot to kidnap the shop’s prized purebred pooch for ransom money. Bamboozling the wannabe rock stars turned dog thieves and spreading general chaos in the mall, the unlikely pair finds the true meaning of Christmas with Grumpy Cat hating it every step of the way. It ticks all the boxes of your standard holiday movie, with the expectation that you’ll clean out the catbox afterwards.

Although the title of Pottersville (2017) references the beloved Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), this movie may also take thirty or so years to appear on most annual watch lists. Michael Shannon stars in an unexpectedly endearing role as Maynard, the selfless general store owner of a small American town hit hard by the reality of economic depression. Not normally a drinking man, Maynard goes off the rails one night, getting blackout drunk and donning a gorilla suit. Mistaken as a Bigfoot, he awakes the next day to find that sightings of him have attracted national attention. Struggling with the choice of coming clean and therefore quashing the town’s financial opportunities from the event, Maynard tries to keep up the charade. A rare Christmas comedy, the movie honors the season with important but not overbearing lessons about community, trust, and giving.

“Even though not a single female director was nominated for a Golden Globe this year, at least somebody understands that there is a demand for movies that don’t put psychopaths, religious figures, divorce, and war at the center of every narrative. ”

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Olivia Gündüz-Willemin

Watching this specific brand of holiday film is something new for me. I always had Christmas films growing up – Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, every claymation Christmas film ever, etc. – but the Hallmark film? Never. I watched one a couple of years ago as a joke – A Princess for Christmas – after it showed up on my Netflix screen and I saw it was starring a couple of actors I liked. It was… critically not great. Centering around a young woman raising her dead sister’s children whose also dead husband happened to be a prince of a faraway and made-up pseudo Alpine country, the story is as cliché as they come. But it also made me feel good. It was calming, it was cheerful, and it had something I missed in fiction – a happy ending.

Since then, I’ve allowed myself to watch a couple of Netflix Christmas specials a year, never looking for more than two hours of happiness in whatever I choose to watch. I’ve seen the bad (I’d argue that the hugely popular The Christmas Prince franchise amongst the worst, along, yes, with The Princess Switch), the deeply mediocre that’s blended away into my memory, and the decent (personally, I quite liked The Holiday Calendar, The Knight Before Christmas, and Let It Snow). I personally love that the films follow tropes and can be comfortingly predictable. I think the fact that they’re looked down upon while being targeted towards women is no coincidence – fiction that focuses on emotions and dares to have a happy ending is always derided as naive or inferior, after all. It may not be intelligent or necessarily thought provoking fiction in the case of the holiday film, but it does at least stir things up by reminding us that not everything in this world is bleak. Much like a cup of hot cocoa, the holiday film is becoming a staple that I appreciate.

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Raquel Reyes

I think there may have been a few Christmas movies rolling around my home growing up, but as a very cynical child I was never into them, no matter where they came from or what they were about. Even today, while I am definitely less cynical, my preferred Christmas viewing has remained on the more adjacent side than directly on the (FORGIVE ME) bright red nose. Still, I love a lighthearted watch, and the made-for-streaming variety has provided options to pique my interest. In the scope of what I watch from the genre, my requirements are one of either two categories: (1) sooo ridiculous I can comically snark-watch, hiding my eyes at the cheesiest of moments and shouting out inaccuracies at all times (WHY IS THIS PRESTIGE BAKER JUST RANDOMLY TAKING A JOB IN THIS SMALL TOWN?? WHY DO YOU NEED TWO PEOPLE TO MELT CHOCOLATE? You get it.) - or - (2) actually visually enjoyable enough that I’m not concerned with who produced it.

To be honest the second requirement applies to everything I watch, meaning I’m picky when it comes to most films. In the realm of TV movies this is harder to find, as budgets don’t always extend so far. Of course there are exceptions, and bigger films usually have the bigger budgets that allow for production and marketing that the public believes is necessary to ImportantTM content, but like everything in life, this can be a mistaken belief. Money doesn’t always guarantee quality, or taste, for that matter. When I find a film I love, I don’t discriminate, and on the larger scale I appreciate the growth in popularity that allows for bigger budgets making their way to direct-to-viewer films, giving more of them a fighting chance.

In regards to a sub-genre, purely because it’s Christmas and I want a happy one goddammit, I have to go for my standby, the Rom Com, that fellow underrated production. Sadly though, I haven't loved them all. I also watched The Holiday Calendar last year and actually kind of hated it. While visually fine enough, I just thought the characters way too pine-y (again, SORRY). A Christmas Prince I couldn’t even make through the first ten minutes (royalty is not my thing), but found youtuber Jenny Nicholson’s dissection of it hilarious and fascinating, and almost hope for a follow up now that a third in the movie franchise is out.

Still, I press on. One of my favorite things I’ve seen in the last year was the made-for-tv No Sleep ‘Til Christmas (on Freeform and Hulu), a romantic comedy with a very On-Brand Raquel plotline of two people falling in love because they suffer from an insomnia that only goes away when they fall asleep in each other’s vicinity. It’s far fetched, full of low level high stakes with witty sidekicks, karaoke, a New Year’s Eve wedding, and I love the whole dang thing. I don’t know that anything truly sets it apart, but perhaps that it’s set from Thanksgiving all the way to New Year’s could balance out the overwhelming Christmas elements that tire me out on other occasions. It reminds me more of other beloved films like When Harry Met Sally and The Holiday, which both include the more fleshed out lives of our characters and not just whatever dilemma they find themselves in come Christmas Eve. It gives me hope that as the genre grows, more in my own taste will come around, giving me more to love.

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M.A. McCuen

I have developed such a love for cheesy Christmas movies, mostly because they have become so rooted in my friendship with my roommates. Each year we set aside a day to curl up on the couch, sip hot cocoa, and indulge in the corniest made-for-TV holiday films. This year, we decided to invite our friends over to make a party out of it, complete with cookie baking and matching pajamas. It’s fun to have movies that are light and corny, but that also feel familiar. Similar to Olivia, I started with A Princess for Christmas, because 1) it has Sam Heughan and 2) I am definitely a sucker for all things modern royalty. I ended up making my roommates watch it, hence beginning our Christmas movie traditions. I still have such a love for all things modern royalty, so movies like A Christmas Prince, Royally Ever After, and The Princess Switch were definitely endearing indulgences for me, despite how ridiculous they are. I really enjoyed The Knight Before Christmas, though I kept laughing at how little research had been done on the medieval era. I also loved Let it Snow and I really hope that Netflix makes more YA-based holiday films. In many ways, made-for-TV films remind me a lot of the fanfiction that I consumed in-mass while in high school and college. They are both narratives based on familiar tropes that use cliches in the most comforting of ways. While there may be some twists and turns, there is something nice about knowing that your movie will give you a satisfying ending. And of course, it makes sense that both of these forms of media are mostly consumed and crafted by women. Likewise, they are both genres of media that are often condescended to by the patriarchal dominant culture. In a small way, watching cozy holiday films are a tiny act of revolution. In a world where everything needs to be serious and action-packed, holiday films argue back that films can be soft, sweet, and cliche in all the best ways.