#74 - My Favorite Festive/Cozy Vibes Media

It’s that time of year, when the world falls in love.

I think that the holidays are lovely. My favorite coffee shop (the coffees a little sour but the vibes are excellent) decorated for Christmas and this morning I went and got a coffee and even though it was raining and dreary, some twinkly lights and a red/green motif can really lift the spirits. I know Christians stole a pagan ritual to create the whole Christmas Tree thing but honestly, great call by the pagans to bring life inside during the winter!

Lights? Good! Intentional decor? Good! Red and green one of the all-time color combos being acceptable to wear? Gooood!

I mean, honestly this year I’m keeping it very low-key. So far my actual literal Christmas plans involve making these gochujang caramel cookies and that’s about all I’ve thought through. I feel like it takes me a hot second to really get into the ~spirit of it all, but I do love my annual tradition of looking through the Goop Gift Guide (sorted by price high → low for maximum comedy!) (also if you’re going to buy a $6,000 Chanel bag…ignore the Boy Bag. Get a classic! Or a fun tweed!!) and appreciate that “Gift Guides For Men” around this time of year are the single most ridiculous parody of what it means to attempt to market to men. According to listicles, men only drink whiskey with frozen rocks in it and wear a watch on each arm.

But! We’re here to get into the things that do make me feel all warm & cozy & festive & accepting of the weird “rules” people in movies seem to always apply to this time of year.

And on that note, I would just like to say that while Die Hard is a fine action movie with a v memorable protagonist and a scene of walking on glass in bare feet that still haunts my nightmares (sometimes I also have a nightmare about BooBoo breaking something and then injuring paws on the shards) it is such a lame and boring response to the “what’s the best christmas movie” question. It’s a joke told a million times over. There’s also just a light misogynistic flavor to it that overpowers any of the subtle points people are trying to make when saying it.

So, here’s my list of media that I love to imbibe this time of year that is not strictly Christmas but gives me that big-fuzzy-socks cozy vibe of ~the holidays.

Bridget Jones's Diary

Just an absolute banger of a movie, but especially this time of year!

Look, “I like you, just as you are.” is absolutely the best love scene confession of all time, but this movie also contains the runner up ~chills down your spine~ romance of Marc Darcy doing a perfect callback to the first time they met with the line, “Just stir it, Una.” while they fumble through cooking the blue string soup and you know what? It’s perfect. Perfect I say!!

There is nothing more British than a Turkey Curry Buffet at her Mum’s house on Boxing Day, I love the vibes of this movie, her friends are all pitch perfect, and yes she is calling herself unloveably fat for being 133lbs the whole movie but you know what…everyone in culture at the time agreed with that notion so it’s not fair to make the movie shoulder the relentless burden of reflecting the very real and incredibly damaging fatphobia of the early 2000s. And, I can give it the slightest modicum of grace for not putting Renee in a fatsuit, but instead letting her “gain the weight naturally” through the addition of a single Snicker’s bar per day to her diet.

Anyway, the movie begins and ends in snowy England and involves Boxing Day parties and mini-breaks and self-improvement montages set to Chaka Khan what’s not to love???

(Also realizing while writing this ‘stack that the entire plot of the movie is motivated by her determination to find/heal wounds via journaling and I love it EVEN MORE NOW!)

Currently streaming on Showtime!

Co-op episode of Documentary Now (S3, E3)

Documentary Now is officially back on Netflix! And while there are so many wonderful pitch-perfect episodes, by far my favorite (ready for the least shocking admission of all time?) is the Sondheim parody, Co-Op.

The original documentary of the Cast Recording of Company is actually on HBO right now and it’s only an hour and I highly recommend, but it has no Christmas vibes. Meanwhile, Co-Op has I Did A Little Cocaine Tonight is an all-time top-tier New Yorky Christmas song.

I think getting extremely talented people to sing funny songs should happen more often. Renee Elise Goldberry hitting the final note in “The Brown And The Beige” is actually just a top 5 musical theatre moment regardless of the fact that this musical is not real!

Jenny Nicholsons A Christmas Prince video

There’s been a major uptick in Christmas Movie content that are hollow echoes of the Hallmark originals they’re based on. See, the thing with schlocky movies is that when they’re made with sincerity, it’s fun to watch them. Whatever the fuck Netflix et al. are doing in terms of their own Christmas universes is…annoying.

I get that “big city career-obsessed woman finds love back in her small town” is a boring plot. But you know what’s even worse? An entire movie making fun of that plot while still hitting each and every note. Hollow pings of sincerity and a blatant mockery of the audience that enjoyed the pleasant banalities of a world in which everyone really is always making cookies with a swipe of flour on their cheek for the love interest to gently wipe away! And look, there are plenty of worse Princess movies out there (honestly one of the funniest ones I’ve ever seen is a classic “I didn’t know he was a prince but he doesn’t know that he now has a daughter” plot starring Tara Reid and in one of the scenes you can clearly see her slippers under the dress and they stay in that wide shot for an incredibly long time like how did no one notice??) (Also, Netflix has two separate “American Becomes a Princess” movies and I think the Vanessa Hudgens one is maybe slightly better if only because she’s a more charming lead. But tbh I don’t understand why that movie had such a brilliant set up—an international Great British Bakeoff judged by the royals—only to have 0 payoffs. The stakes didn’t even have to be a Parent Trap switch up it could have been the ethical dilemma of a judge falling for a contestant!!!)

But Netflix started their foray into the genre with A Christmas Prince, which employs the reporter-posing-as-tutor plot but somehow manages few hijinks and even less charm. The villain makes some good points and is the only actor who seems appropriately schmaltzy! The sequels are even worse. Anyway, I always think about the viral tweet that Netflix sent out making fun of their own consumers through very private metrics that feel weird to be shared/mocked in that way by a major media company.

Netflix is the worst offender in terms of “we’re making fun of Christmas content while still producing it” because their movies are so utterly devoid of romance/charm that it doesn’t even create a campy fun watch! The set decorators fill every last frame to the brim with Christmas Trees and somehow that barely makes a dent in the holiday spirit they so thoroughly lack. The Lindsey Lohan one this year is truly such a weirdly empty movie, she’s clearly a star but the cast and script are so devoid of effort that it’s kind of bizarre. Her throwing eggs into a pan is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen though, truly showing her 100/10 commitment to the bit, oh I have missed you on the big screen LiLo!

So, Jenny Nicholson has a perfect video that details all of the shortcomings and simultaneously pitches a much better franchise that I wish they would make and I prefer to consume that rather than the movies themselves.

Showgirls

Showgirls is a Christmas movie!!!!!

Say whatever you want about Paul Verhoeven (and I have a lot to say about the fact that he was 57 years old when he directed this movie and cast a 21-year-old Elizabeth Berkley to star in it and then…began a “romantic” relationship with her while directing the movie—in which she spends about 70% of her screentime without clothing on doing extremely vulnerable scenes) but Showgirls is an extremely intentional movie and while there is no canonical mention of the fact that it’s Christmas, every single background shot is littered with trees, wreaths, and gifts.

Also, Showgirls is possibly my favorite movie of all time and a perfect watch (just skip the gratuitously violent rape scene at the end which comes out of nowhere and adds nothing to the overall plot and is genuinely one of the most horrific depictions of violence against women in any film!) for a group. I especially enjoy showing it to dudes who have never seen it and seem to think it’s going to be a horny movie (the nc-17 rating feels scandalous) and it manages to somehow completely de-sexualize the concept of being naked by having so much nudity framed in such odd ways. Find me the human who gets turned on by the sex scene in the pool, the least sexual scene to involve sex in movie history.

The makeup is incredible though. Costumes A+!

Anyway, come on over, we’ll break open the deluxe box set and put on the campy commentary track (which, honestly, how do I get paid to do campy commentary’s over so-bad-they’-re-good movies? dream job!!!) and play Pin The Pasties—a real game that really is included along in this box (alongside shot glasses and trading cards?).

Showgirls is never streaming but it’s a purchase or rental that I think is worth every penny!

The Derry Girls Holiday Special of Bake Off

Look, I’ll be honest I haven’t been a fan of bakeoff since it went from the BBC to Channel 4 (and I was uh, correct in my feelings that the show had abandoned it’s lovely little educational roots to become a monstrous parody of what it represented and actually helped prove that consumers didn’t need high stakes and emotional breakdowns, we were actually perfectly happy seeing sweet people make nice looking desserts while the hosts joked around with them rather than about them) but the Derry Girls special is different, because it’s full of my favorite form of comedy: friends taking the piss out of each other!

So Irish! So Funny! Great cast, great bakes! On Netflix now!

Big Fat Quiz of the Year

I started marathoning this shit in college and have consumed it regularly ever since. Big Fat Quiz Show is a British Panel Show, a genre that never quite crosses over to America in the right way and one of my absolute favorite genres.

Some years are certainly better than others, but it’s a nice little recap of the major events (and some very specifically British shit that’s always fun to find out about). My favorite years almost always include Richard Ayoade and David Mitchell tbh.

(They’ve also abandoned the “one woman comedian per five dudes” thing they had going for “one woman who was on a reality tv show” in recent years and that’s been a bummer because they’re usually just there to be joke targets and boooo misogyny ruins everything for everyone booooo. Also Jimmy Carr’s a shithead and the name of the show is fatphobic so the opening joke usually is too. Okay! That’s it!)

Anyway if you’ve never seen it I would recommend the 2015 show (I’m a David Mitchell fan and his team with Claudia Winkleman is perfect) and 2016 (Romesh & Mel have great chemistry as a team and I would love to see them do more comedy together)! Most of them are solid, I avoid the David Walliams years though. The Big Fat Quiz of Everything goes a little more historical with the questions so, another great option there!

(Another great panel show is Would I Lie To You and James Acastor’s story about the Spice Girls debut CD Spice is perfect comedy. So quick. Love the British sense of television.)

Animal crossing (& Red Dead Online)

One day I’ll write a dissertation-length essay about the shortcomings of the newest Animal Crossing, but today is not that day.

I put way too many hours into the game at the beginning of the pandemic and then basically didn’t touch my island again for like 18 months. But recently I got back into it because the Happy Home Designer mini-game is everything I love in terms of video games that allow me to act as an interior designer. And then I got charmed again and realized that the gap between my expectations and the reality was creating the discord, and the game is still a lovely little oasis of a game that has changing seasons and friendly neighbors and endless landscaping possibilities.

The snow is on the ground and the festive trees are LIT and it’s cute to run around in various parkas and down coats and wear the best little winter boots that remind me of my favorite pair from college that I lost during a move at some point and still spend a few moments mourning their absence each winter.

I love video game immersion details, so I think it’s genuinely adorable that for a few days Red Dead Online gets a full snowstorm and the whole map is covered in it. It’s a cool new way to see the landscapes, but also Rockstar made some of the most incredible snow textures, soundscapes, and light effects with their snow and they should absolutely show it off as much as possible.

When will they make me a horse game where one of the tasks definitely involves rushing through the woods to find someone who’s injured on Christmas Eve or some shit?? (Wait I actually think that’s a plot of The Saddle Club books. Which were superior to the TV Show! I still don’t know what the end of that mystery barn video game they produced was though, the game went “missing” twice which, looking back, was definitely not a mistake. Having a lot of realizations right now tbh.)

When Harry Met Sally

It’s kind of more autumn vibes, but the New York of it all makes this a year-round watch for me. Plus the climactic scene (no, not the climax scene) takes place at a party on New Years!

Carrie Fisher remains one of the best to ever do the best friend character, the movie moves right along, and they have actual love stories as interstitials and they’re heartwarming every single time.

Also Billie Crystal is a wonderful leading man and his apology hug with Meg Ryan is one of my favorite tender moments in all of Film.

Plus, Meg Ryan!

« Cady Heron voiceover »How do I even begin to describe Meg Ryan?

Streaming on Netflix!

Actual Christmas movies & shows & things that I enjoy year after year:

The Holiday (find me a more endearing leading man than Jude Law when he’s putting on his glasses or doing mr. Napkinhead. Gotta love a Nancy Meyer’s universe where everyone’s homes are wonderfully decorated!)

Community S3 E10 Regional Holiday Music (“Oh, Britta’s in this?”)

30 Rock S2 E9 Ludachristmas (“Imagine Christmas wishes, shooting out of your eyes…”)

The Grinch (the animated one, obvs. Yes I will spare a moment and think fondly of the dude I had a crush on in college who sung You’re A Mean One Mr. Grinch during his acapella concert while I watch it!)

How Did This Get Made Podcast - The Spirit Of Christmas (I love listening to old friends be funny together and Jason Mantzoukas x Jessica St. Clair is excellent PLUS the movie they’re reviewing is bonkers and you don’t need to subject yourself to it in order to enjoy the pod!)

The Heat Miser vs Snow Miser song (I don’t think I’ve ever seen this claymation movie the whole was through but Freeform/ABC Family/Fox Family had an ad that looped this song and it was all I knew of it for years. Do they still do 25 days of Christmas and the Halloween marathons and stuff? They were a fun channel, watched all of Gilmore Girls at 4pm that way.)

I do really love the embrace of winter being tempered with garland and lights and velvet bows and couples attempting to carry their tree down a bustling street.

It’s the time of year when all the Starbucks holiday cups allow me to assume that everyone’s actually carrying around hot chocolate inside and the world feels a little more whimsical. I have been hunkering for some really good hot chocolate though so I’m hoping to get some this weekend. Steamed apple cider has also been a real treat I just love a fancy bev what can I say???

Okay well, that’s a wrap! I hope you all have been having a lovely December and enjoying the things that make you feel like winter has some upsides to it (for me it’s mostly getting to layer blankets without getting overheated)! Enjoy the lights, enjoy the season, make a paper chain because they’re truly so adorable, and enjoy the snow if you’ve got some wherever you are!