YouTubeConsider this an open letter to anyone who has made, or plans to make, a Christmas movie.
The genre is an important one; a genre that lives in the very fabric of our society as we know it. If it were not for the annual Christmas movie viewing tradition, millions of merrymakers would be forced to find their joy within or, even worse, from their families.
As such, we have a lot invested in holiday movies. We expect from them a certain amount of cheer, good feeling and wide-panning shots of the Rockefeller Center tree. But that doesn't mean that just any film will do during the most sacred season. Just think of Ben Affleck's post-Gigli vehicle Surviving Christmas or, God forbid, Deck The Halls starring Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick. Our memories of those "films" are bad enough to convince us to skip the holidays entirely.
Which is why, upon the final credit roll of this Friday's The Night Before, we breathed a huge sigh of relief. We just watched an actually decent Christmas movie! A Christmas movie that did not feature aging '90s stars or an entire script dedicated to Christmas lights. The flick stars Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie as three best friends (or, more specifically, three dudes, three bros, three ride-or-die homies) who are celebrating the last stand of their yearly Christmas Eve tradition—a tradition that involves playing Kanye West on the giant piano at F.A.O. Schwartz, eating egg drop soup and performing Run-D.M.C.'s "Christmas in Hollis" at a dive-y karaoke bar, naturally.
The custom got its start when Gordon-Levitt's character's parents died in his early twenties, and Night Before sees the three men calling an end to it because, well, they're in their mid-thirties (with a successful football career and baby on the way, to name other obligations) and it's just not that cute to be doing drugs in a karaoke bar bathroom on Christmas Eve anymore. But because this is a movie starring Seth Rogen, they go out with a major R-rated bang, even hitting a mysterious warehouse party (The Nutcracka Ball, a.k.a. the best party name of all time) they'd been trying to get into for years.
Our previously-mentioned sighs of relief at the movie's end got us thinking: Just what does it take to make an actually good Christmas movie? There's got to be some sort of formula or list of rules one can follow. And because we watch a disturbing amount of holiday flicks, we decided to make one. Christmas movie makers of America, take note.
1. Use Christmas tale traditions and clichés of year's past to your advantage. The Night Before knows how tired some of these can be, so they decided to turn them on their head and start the flick with an Elf-style rhyme...only with a few dirty twists.
2. The more pop culture references, the higher the nostalgia factor. Any good Christmas movie will be watched for years and years after its release, and while most of it may not hold up over time, audiences will always get a kick out of the now-hilariously-dated catch phrases and references. Take the awesomely '90s Playboy magazines in Home Alone or all the dick pic references in The Night Before (just trust us).
3. Pay homage to the movies that came before. There are only so many tropes one can include in a holiday movie, so you may as well admit it up front that you're borrowing from other tales. Put your own spin on the classics, like turning The Grinch into a kleptomaniac fangirl who keeps showing up at the bar and stealing the main characters weed, or The Ghost of Christmas Future into a drug dealer with a magic joint—if you're Seth Rogen, that is.
4. Be inappropriate. The kids have more than enough to watch, so the last thing the world needs is another G-rated clay-mation monstrosity. There's nothing funnier than thinking about little children nestled all snug in their beds...while their parents get super, super drunk downstairs.
5. Make the heart of the story about something other than Christmas. As heartwarming as it is to watch a movie about coming home for the holidays or whatever, audiences also want to be entertained with things besides sugar cookies and stockings. In The Night Before, the final Christmas Eve tradition is really just a vehicle to talk about three kind-of grown men coming to terms with the way our friendships and relationships change as we move into full-on adulthood. It's clearly a theme close to Rogen's heart (it's hard not to think about the parallels between his onscreen character and his own slowly-domesticating life). It makes for a few sappy moments, sure, but at least it gives the movie an opportunity for relatability.
6. Be quotable...really quotable. "Keep the change, ya filthy animal." That line might be single-handedly responsible for Home Alone's constantly increasing popularity each holiday season, and we think we can all agree that "You'll shoot your eye out, kid" is the only reason that anybody still watches A Christmas Story.
7. The shorter, the better. This is an important rule for all movies, but especially those around the holiday season. We're busy, people. Get in and get out and let us get on with our lives.
8. When in doubt, use British people. Please refer to: The only thing keeping The Holiday afloat. Without British people, it would probably just come off as an overly whiny movie about rich white people not getting love in addition to their giant mansions and their millions of dollars. But instead, it's a completely adorable treat filled with pithy dialogue that takes place in the cutest town we've ever seen.
9. Steer clear of twist endings. The Family Stone, we're looking at you here. There's a time and a place for family dramas that catch you off guard with some sort of terrible tragedy, but Christmas is not it. We came to that movie to watch a feel-good comedy about Luke Wilson getting stoned with his dad and Sarah Jessica Parker being the worst girlfriend (and strata-baker) in history, but instead we had to watch dead Diane Keaton. Major bummer.
10. Control the sentimentality. Some sap...good. A ton of sap...instant cavities. We as audience members understand that Christmas movies are a little bit more saccharin than the average tale, which is why generations of people will continue to love Elf. But Elf only works because it knows when to dial down the "Santa! I know him!" schmaltz.
11. Keep the content tolerable for watching even outside of the Christmas season. There's a reason that Love Actually is somehow still making money more than 10 years later, and that's because there's never a bad day to watch a bunch of couples in love. It's enjoyable on Christmas, it's enjoyable on Valentine's Day, and it's even enjoyable on random hungover Sundays in June. Please also refer back to rule number eight.
12. If you're gonna go dark, go really dark. Commit 100%. A few dirty jokes here and there just seem kind of creepy, but if one resolves oneself to be the most irreverent Christmas movie that ever disturbed young children and churchgoing moms, one makes Bad Santa. And isn't that a beautiful thing?
13. A Christmas movie isn't a turkey, so don't overstuff it. Anyone who tried to watch Best Man Holiday knows what we're talking about here—our brains are slightly more frazzled during the holiday season, so audiences aren't well-equipped to juggle approximately one dozen competing dramatic plotlines. Pick two or three, bro.