Home is where the harm is
The Parker Family Saga is the franchise you didn’t know existed. You are probably familiar—likely over-familiar—with the crown jewel, Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story (1983), cementing his reputation as a purveyor of perennial Christmas classics. If you are a little more film-savvy (and you are on this website), you might be aware of the multiple attempts to profit from A Christmas Story’s success. Clark himself set off this chain reaction of failure, cementing his reputation as a purveyor of failed sequels to his own movies. The 1994 release It Runs in the Family (aka My Summer Story), features the same characters but none of the same cast and, crucially, a different American holiday. Subsequent attempts over-corrected for this error, and the most recent entries—2012’s reviled A Christmas Story 2, 2017’s forgotten A Christmas Story Live!, and the present subject—have reduced the franchise to “A Christmas Story, but again!”
Now, real Parker Family enthusiasts know that the original Christmas Story fell smack into the middle of a run of adaptations of humorist Jean Shepherd’s semi-autobiographical (or, if you are an optimist, semi-fictional) childhood memoirs, the most famous of which is In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, the textual source for A Christmas Story. The stories in this volume were first told on Shepherd’s radio program before being written down at the behest of Shel Silverstein and published in the children’s magazine *check’s notes* Playboy. They were the basis for several television movies of varying length and quality in the 1970s and 80s and sported colorful titles like The Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976), The Great American Fourth of July (1982), The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski (A Tale of Gothic Love) (1985), and Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss (1988). A Christmas Story, at least, was the first theatrical release.
The franchise does not follow a single continuity and is as gnarled as fellow holiday franchise Halloween. In fact, A Christmas Story Christmas is to A Christmas Story what Halloween (2018) is to Halloween (1978). That is, it is a dreaded legacy sequel/reboot, one that wipes the slate clean and recognizes the original (“original”) entry as the one legitimate predecessor. Also like Halloween (2018), I came into A Christmas Story Christmas having only seen the celebrated original and none of the intervening (or preceding) movies.
This did not prevent me from hating every single moment I spent with the movie. Frankly, I don’t know how it could have succeeded, given that it had several things working against it. The main one is that A Christmas Story, while a holiday classic (if by “classic” you mean “plays eleventy billion times during Christmas season”), is not my idea of a great movie. It is a series of sketches, some of them funnier in concept than execution (the atrocious lamp, for one). The humor is more of the “wry smile” than “laugh out loud” variety, and, to be frank, the only scene I love is the one with the grotesque mall Santa. It ends on its worst scene too, with the Parker family eating Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant with ghoulishly caricatured proprietors. Not only is it racist, it is blatant cultural appropriation of one of the pillars of American Judaism.
So, the first problem is that the new sequel is a retread of a film that isn’t that great to begin with. The second problem is that Jean Shepherd (not just the creator but the original narrator) and MVP Darren McGavin (the “Old Man”) are both long dead, removing two of the key nostalgia-bait charms a legacy sequel could have provided. Instead, we get Peter Billingsley reprising the role of Ralph Parker, but as an adult. And there’s our third problem. Every other entry in the Parker Family Saga features Ralph as a child or an adolescent. I think a key aspect of the original Christmas Story—the reason it is remembered but the other films aren’t—is that it takes a younger child’s perspective, even if it’s technically the recollections of a foul-mouthed adult. The new film features adult Ralph talking to himself in real time and engaging in the same wish-fulfillment daydreams he had as a kid, but it makes him look pathetic.
Here's our plot: Ralph Parker is now a forty-something struggling writer with a wife and two boring kids living in 1970s Chicago (a date mandated by the original, which pointedly takes place in 1939). He receives a phone call from his mother (now played by Julie Hagerty), who painfully reminds us that Darren McGavin will not be in this movie. He packs up the family and takes them to Hohman, Indiana—one of the great fictional Indiana cities, alongside Pawnee, Hawkins, Durnsville, and Eerie—to spend the holidays with her so she won’t be alone.
They then re-enact different scenes from A Christmas Story, but this time everyone is all grown up! Ralph goes to the attic to get Christmas decorations. What kinds of things do you suppose he’ll find there? He goes to the local watering hole (replacing the school; think about that for a moment), where Flick (still Scott Schwartz) doggy dares Schwartz (still R. D. Robb) to do something stupid. Ralph has an altercation with his brother Randy (still Ian Petrella). Ralph goes to the mall, where the mall Santa still lurks. Ralph eventually has a run-in with Officer Scut Farkus (still Zack Ward), who has learned to productively channel his bullying. And so on.
On the plus side, the movie is not actively painful. It is mostly just there. But it trudges along mirthlessly. Even worse, it is, incomprehensibly, longer than the original Christmas Story. That still amounts to about 100 minutes, but those minutes crawl. The constant callbacks to the original are an unwelcome reminder that one could be watching that movie instead. The spine of the plot—Will Ralph manage to become a published writer?—is dead on arrival. If you do not know how it will resolve itself, you are too young to be reading this website (we say “fudge” a lot).
Don’t waste your time on this movie. There is surely much better programming on HBO Max. For the moment, at any rate.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.
Now, real Parker Family enthusiasts know that the original Christmas Story fell smack into the middle of a run of adaptations of humorist Jean Shepherd’s semi-autobiographical (or, if you are an optimist, semi-fictional) childhood memoirs, the most famous of which is In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, the textual source for A Christmas Story. The stories in this volume were first told on Shepherd’s radio program before being written down at the behest of Shel Silverstein and published in the children’s magazine *check’s notes* Playboy. They were the basis for several television movies of varying length and quality in the 1970s and 80s and sported colorful titles like The Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976), The Great American Fourth of July (1982), The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski (A Tale of Gothic Love) (1985), and Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss (1988). A Christmas Story, at least, was the first theatrical release.
The franchise does not follow a single continuity and is as gnarled as fellow holiday franchise Halloween. In fact, A Christmas Story Christmas is to A Christmas Story what Halloween (2018) is to Halloween (1978). That is, it is a dreaded legacy sequel/reboot, one that wipes the slate clean and recognizes the original (“original”) entry as the one legitimate predecessor. Also like Halloween (2018), I came into A Christmas Story Christmas having only seen the celebrated original and none of the intervening (or preceding) movies.
This did not prevent me from hating every single moment I spent with the movie. Frankly, I don’t know how it could have succeeded, given that it had several things working against it. The main one is that A Christmas Story, while a holiday classic (if by “classic” you mean “plays eleventy billion times during Christmas season”), is not my idea of a great movie. It is a series of sketches, some of them funnier in concept than execution (the atrocious lamp, for one). The humor is more of the “wry smile” than “laugh out loud” variety, and, to be frank, the only scene I love is the one with the grotesque mall Santa. It ends on its worst scene too, with the Parker family eating Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant with ghoulishly caricatured proprietors. Not only is it racist, it is blatant cultural appropriation of one of the pillars of American Judaism.
So, the first problem is that the new sequel is a retread of a film that isn’t that great to begin with. The second problem is that Jean Shepherd (not just the creator but the original narrator) and MVP Darren McGavin (the “Old Man”) are both long dead, removing two of the key nostalgia-bait charms a legacy sequel could have provided. Instead, we get Peter Billingsley reprising the role of Ralph Parker, but as an adult. And there’s our third problem. Every other entry in the Parker Family Saga features Ralph as a child or an adolescent. I think a key aspect of the original Christmas Story—the reason it is remembered but the other films aren’t—is that it takes a younger child’s perspective, even if it’s technically the recollections of a foul-mouthed adult. The new film features adult Ralph talking to himself in real time and engaging in the same wish-fulfillment daydreams he had as a kid, but it makes him look pathetic.
Here's our plot: Ralph Parker is now a forty-something struggling writer with a wife and two boring kids living in 1970s Chicago (a date mandated by the original, which pointedly takes place in 1939). He receives a phone call from his mother (now played by Julie Hagerty), who painfully reminds us that Darren McGavin will not be in this movie. He packs up the family and takes them to Hohman, Indiana—one of the great fictional Indiana cities, alongside Pawnee, Hawkins, Durnsville, and Eerie—to spend the holidays with her so she won’t be alone.
They then re-enact different scenes from A Christmas Story, but this time everyone is all grown up! Ralph goes to the attic to get Christmas decorations. What kinds of things do you suppose he’ll find there? He goes to the local watering hole (replacing the school; think about that for a moment), where Flick (still Scott Schwartz) doggy dares Schwartz (still R. D. Robb) to do something stupid. Ralph has an altercation with his brother Randy (still Ian Petrella). Ralph goes to the mall, where the mall Santa still lurks. Ralph eventually has a run-in with Officer Scut Farkus (still Zack Ward), who has learned to productively channel his bullying. And so on.
On the plus side, the movie is not actively painful. It is mostly just there. But it trudges along mirthlessly. Even worse, it is, incomprehensibly, longer than the original Christmas Story. That still amounts to about 100 minutes, but those minutes crawl. The constant callbacks to the original are an unwelcome reminder that one could be watching that movie instead. The spine of the plot—Will Ralph manage to become a published writer?—is dead on arrival. If you do not know how it will resolve itself, you are too young to be reading this website (we say “fudge” a lot).
Don’t waste your time on this movie. There is surely much better programming on HBO Max. For the moment, at any rate.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.
Categories: joyless mediocrity, needless sequels
