The Chicago Christmas Movie Hall Of Shame

By Stephen Gossett in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 18, 2016 3:34PM

Surviving Christmas is tough with 'Surviving Christmas'

Anyone with a soft spot for seasonal entertainment and a baseline sense of pop-cultural civic pride already knows that a good number of the all-time holiday film classics were either filmed in the Chicagoland area or take place here.

Home Alone arguably leads the pack, with both criteria checked; and the LA-filmed National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and the Ohio-shot A Christmas Story—set in a fictionalized version of screenwriter Jean Shepherd’s nearby hometown of Hammond, Indiana—are undeniable contemporary staples, even if their sense of localism is movie magic. (The underappreciated, Humboldt Park-set Nothing Like the Holidays—one of the few in the pack to acknowledge the existence of people of color—is also a keeper.) Whether it’s due to the snow, the architecture, the financial breaks or some Midwestern sense of center-of-the-universe palatability, Chicago remains a preferred destination for holiday-minded filmmakers.

But, whoa boy, are there ever some lumps of coal in this tradition’s stocking; and since this bummer year has us feeling a little Grinchy, we decided to shine the Christmas lights straight into the abyss. What we found ain’t pretty, or festive, or cheer-spreading. But if you find yourself in need of penance options to get removed from the naughty list, a marathon of the locally-raised turkeys below should provide absolution and then some.

Home Alone 3 (1997) — Rotten Tomatoes: 27%

With the original cast, director (Chris Columbus) and composer (John Williams) all exited, the only nominally positive holdover for this past-the-expiration-date second sequel is the screenwriter, the legendary John Hughes. But Hughes had already firmly transitioned from his days as poet laureate of teen angst and neo-Rockwellian optimism into writer of forgettable kids-fare product (Dennis the Menace, Baby’s Day Out, Flubber); and the sense of creeping cynicism is hard to shake. Whereas Home Alone 2 succeeds despite retreading plot and theme (and also despite Donald Trump), the third time through scrappy-neglectee-booby-traps-the-baddies is a case study in how photocopying ultimately always fails the original.

Fred Claus (2007) — Rotten Tomatoes: 21%

This Vince Vaughn vehicle—in which the Chicago-area native plays an older, black-sheep inverse of his brother, Santa Claus himself, who must thaw his selfish heart as a Chicago repo man in order to save Christmas—seems to aim for an ill-advised hybrid of Bad Santa and Elf, both of which were released just four years prior. But in place of the former’s subversion and the latter’s sweetness, it’s a noxious combo of Frat-Pack smugness and treacly sentimentalism. Before Fred ditches Chicago for the North Pole, after Act One, it sadly takes little advantage of the city either, doting on familiar sights (Water Tower, Marina City) more often than neighborhoods. The fact that Rachel Weisz’s parking-meter officer character speaks with a full-on British accent, despite having the uber-Chicago name Wanda Blinkowski, is symptomatic of Fred’s head-scratching streak.

Christmas with the Kranks (2004) — Rotten Tomatoes: 5% (!)

While his ironic-not-ironic last-alpha shtick sits even less well in the current climate, Tim Allen once seemed poised, after the Santa Clause series, to be the amiable face of pleasantly anodyne holiday film. But this screechy-toned endurance test slammed that sled to a grinding halt. Set in the west suburb of Riverside (but filmed in LA due to unpredictable weather) and adapted by Hughes acolyte (and Harry Potter vet) Chris Columbus from a John Grisham novella, Kranks bizarrely takes the side of the titular family’s hostile neighbors, who antagonize them after, post-empty nest, reasonably calling a tropical-vacation audible over rote traditionalism. The set-design team went to absurd lengths to recreate Riverside, but everything about this face-plant feels phony.

Surviving Christmas (2004) — Rotten Tomatoes: 7%

Lastly, it’s the king of the Chicago Christmas movie tire fires, mercilessly released the same year as Kranks. In fact, this one’s high in the running for all-time duds, regardless of qualifier. Filmed while Ben Affleck’s notorious Razzie magnet Gigli sat on the shelf, this critically and commercially loathed flop-in-kind stars Affleck as a semi-sociopathic Chicago ad exec. He pays the current inhabitants of his childhood home (the woefully wasted James Gandolfini and Catherine O’Hara) to playact a happy, family Christmas with him at the house.

The intended black-comedy transgressiveness just feels like queasy, free-floating antipathy (starting to see a pattern here?)—which apparently spilled over onto the set and even into the Forest Glen/Edgebrook neighborhood where filming partially took place. According to a New York Post autopsy ten years after the film’s release, even the studio hated it so much that the toxic Affleck was originally kept off the poster, and the lemon went to video a mere two months after release—rather than the traditional 12 months for a holiday film. If you’re looking for weapons-grade seasonal sadism, consider this the nuclear option.