I write to you on Boxing Day 2025, meaning yesterday was Christmas Day, traditionally a quiet and restive (as opposed to festive) pause after our mad partying the night before. Yes that was a joke.
Christmas Day is also important in a non-traditional way because it’s the only day you can justify watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) for the fifteenth time.
But no. Not this year. Instead, we (as in she) decided we should “watch something different” unquote.
Kneading all the positive reviews for The Holiday (2006) into a sticky-sweet cookie-dough-like paste, this is a feelgood romcom with a stellar and swoonworthy (?) cast of Hollywood heavyweights: Cameron Diaz; Kate Winslet; Jude Law; Jack Black; Eli Wallach; Edward Burns; Rufus Sewell.
Mashing all the negative reviews into a bitter-sweet acerbic-acid icing, this is a corny, wallowing, self-indulgent chick-flick (with a stellar and swoonworthy cast … etc.,) that vacilates between “harmless cheery confection” and “insipid seasonal trash”.
But — of course and as usual — the critics are outvoted by the plebs.
My initial reaction was: “There’s probably a better way to spend 132 minutes of my life”.
But the I remembered that I have spent 142.7875 days IN REAL LIFE wandering the post-apocalyptic ruins of Boston, Massachusetts, centuries after a fictional nuclear war.
What do I know about time management? Zero.
But I do know what I don’t like, and the sight of that bloated toad Jack Black making bedroom-eyebrows at delightful-at-all-ages Kate Winslet made my toes curl.
Cameron Diaz gets to pash Jude Law — who convincingly plays the most fictional male character ever created — but at least he’s swoonworthy accoding to my mother-in-law.
But poor Kate gets, what, a frog with no prospect of turning into a prince if she kisses it? Maybe that’s why she doesn’t. This is as close as they ever get:
Ugh. Poor Kate, right? I bet she scrubbed that forehead afterwards.
But what this has done, like the brief stab of a needle going into your arm, is to vaccinate me against any more bright ideas. The next time my wife says, “Hey, maybe we should–” I will shut her down with “Jack Black”.
I’m not being unreasonable or cruel because (as a shiftworker) I give my wife ample opportunity to watch whatever whets her whimsy — whole seasons of ‘Emily in Paris‘ or ‘Selling Sunset‘ or whatever asinine nonsense she wants.
What’s actually unreasonable and cruel is the fact I’ve had the director’s cut boxed-set of Game of Thrones sitting there for bloody months, and have not been able to persuade her to watch a single episode.
It’s not about the boobs, honest.
And for the record its ‘penes’ not ‘penises’, even if the latter is what the hoi polloi prefer. Dumb people also call a tangle or consortium of those famous soft-bodied marine mollusks with eight arms ‘octopi’ instead of octopodes.
The dummies.
Which (dummies) somehow segues me back to The Holiday (2006).
I hear variously that — probably because Cameron Diaz is emerging from retirement — the dummies are considering a sequel! Netflix-dumnmies have even suggested a series!? The original cast is being reassembled.
Quick! Somebody warn our Kate!
Jack Black!
For fucks’ sake, “Jack Black!”
