It’s an unmitigated movie-fest this week as Dara goes deep into his love of Christmas movies and of watching movies at this time of year. He revisits his childhood exposure to Hollywood classics and reflects on how the unlimited access to content and devices nowadays means that the home movie watching experience has lost its allure for modern children.
He argues that the best Christmas movies require a genuine threat that results in the highest possible stakes for the characters we are being asked to invest in. Dara believes Dickens’s A Christmas Carol set the template that has been adhered to for better or worse over the subsequent years and that the best Christmas movies tap into crises of faith, love, compassion, status, credibility and humanity. Redemption hard won is all the sweeter! The worst Christmas movies on the other hand, are clunky contrivances designed to accommodate forced and barely believable sentiment.
Dara takes you through his list of cherished Christmas movies, which he divides into lesser and greater categories, and peppers the titles with lots of background information that will enhance your viewing pleasure. The episode concludes with a beloved Christmas song that he hopes you’ll enjoy.
If you don’t like movies, this episode isn’t for you, but if you do, you’ll love it!