Fan Forum - View Single Post - Bad Santa #2 ~ "F*ck me, Santa!" It's the new catchphrase of the Christmas season!

brie · 12-05-2003, 08:31 AM

Not much Lauren, but I liked this review in my local paper. It made me look more forward to the movie as a whole since before Lauren was the only thing dragging me into the theater. I didn't get a chance last weekend to go, so I'm planning on it this weekend although I'm gonna have to brave a pretty nasty snow storm to get there.

Quote:

Bad Santa
Red alert: a crude Kringle
By Ty Burr
Boston Globe
Published: 11/26/2003

Parents, I'll only say this once: Look at the name of the movie. Check out the reasons for the R rating. Consider that the film's title appears over the image of Billy Bob Thornton in a Santa suit vomiting in an alleyway. "Bad Santa" is, without question, not for the children.

It is, however, just the cup of rancid black-comedy eggnog for anyone fed up with holiday cheer in all its manifestations. At last there's a Christmas movie for people who hate Christmas, and the fact that Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney (which owns Miramax, which owns Dimension, which is releasing the film), has publicly gone on record to disparage it is proof that "Bad Santa" has the courage of its own bile.

If only it were a better movie. Directed by Terry Zwigoff, who gave us the twin art-house beauties "Crumb" and "Ghost World"; written by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa ("The Truth About Cats and Dogs"); and executive produced by the Coen brothers, "Santa" truly believes that cynicism is its own reward. That may be true, but a plot occasionally comes in handy.

Thornton plays Willie T. Stokes, a snarling malcontent of a safecracker so in thrall to the bottle that he rouses himself from his besotted stupor only once a year -- to don a raggedy Santa suit, hire himself out to a mall, and rob its vaults. Willie isn't even the brains on these jobs. That would be Marcus (Tony Cox), a dwarf who offers himself as an elf in a package deal with Willie to mall manager Bob Chipeska (the late John Ritter, playing prissy and passive-aggressive in his final film role).

Bob has his suspicions that his new Kris Kringle doesn't really feel the role. Perhaps it's the way Willie bellows at the kids waiting in line, "Next, goddamn it! This isn't the DMV!" Or maybe it's his habit of having sex with women in the plus-size dressing room. Either way, Bob puts his sleazy security chief, Gin (Bernie Mac), on alert, with the result that Marcus and Willie find their share of the potential take sharply diminishing.

Willie does have his human side. He's not averse to the charms of Sue (Lauren Graham), a bartender with a fetish for Santas (which Willie acknowledges is very much like his thing for breasts). And as every movie in the Scrooge genre brings on a tyke to warm the withered soul of its antihero, so "Bad Santa" lets Willie meet Thurman (Brett Kelly).

This being unlike every other movie in the Scrooge genre, Thurman is a porcine, unattractive cipher with Harpo Marx hair and zero social skills. He lives with his senescent grandmother (Cloris Leachman) and is so desperate to believe in Santa Claus that he invites the scrofulous Willie to move in, peppering him with such questions as: Why are you driving a stolen car when you're supposed to have reindeer?

Having set all this up, "Bad Santa" proceeds to go nowhere, slowly. Willie eventually thaws toward Thurman, but so leery are the filmmakers of the tiniest iota of Hollywood sentimentality that they stall for time, treating us to one scene of the character's personal degradation after another. When Willie does at last perform one good deed, it quite properly does not go unpunished -- but the film's final scenes suggest that someone who wasn't the director has hastily re-edited matters to provide a soupcon of holiday cheer. Sorry, wrong movie.

Mac and Graham have little to do, sadly, but this may be the bravest acting Thornton has ever done, so complete is his refusal to play to our sympathies. Willie is a lush, a jerk, and a horndog; he swears at everyone, especially small children (the film's dialogue is an acrid and often very funny symphony of four-letter words). A reviewer for this newspaper once infamously called Bobcat Goldthwait's "Shakes the Clown" "the `Citizen Kane' of alcoholic clown movies." "Bad Santa" bids fair to be the "Birth of a Nation" of drunken Santa films.

Sure, it's not for everyone. Maybe it's not even for 98 percent of the viewing public. But in a world where multiplexes are filled weekly with bright and disposable toys, a little coal, no matter how lumpy, is occasionally welcome.