It's a very long article. The rest is at the link.
It's not A Wonderful Life anymore. It hasn't been since 1983, the year of A Christmas Story—the now classic film about nine-year-old Ralphie Parker's thwarted desire for a forbidden Christmas present: an official Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time. A sleeper of a movie, A Christmas Story forever changed the cozy, sentimental holiday-movie genre.
When we think of pre-1983 holiday movies, we think of plum puddings like Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (the best of several incarnations being the 1951 version, in which Alastair Sim plays Ebenezer Scrooge); the 1942 Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn and its 1954 cousin, White Christmas; the rather dark 1946 Frank Capra drama starring James Stewart, It's a Wonderful Life; Miracle on 34th Street the following year—saccharine despite the bracing skepticism of an eight-year-old Natalie Wood, who refuses to believe in Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. (She's wrong, we're told.)
So when A Christmas Story premiered, in 1983, we suddenly had a new kind of holiday movie, one that acknowledged—even relished—the "unbridled avarice," the commercialism, the disappointments, the hurt feelings, and all-around bad luck that, in reality, often define the merry season. In other words, what real Christmas was like in real families. It brought a bracing blast of satire and realism, wrapped up in a hilarious, pitch-perfect tale of a middle-class family negotiating the perils of Christmas, recalled through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy.
Wars later, when he was moving his acting career in another direction, Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie, took Robert McKee's famed three-day crash course in screenplay writing. McKee—aptly portrayed by Brian Cox in the satirical Charlie Kaufman film Adaptation—is something of a gruff guru in the art of storytelling. Billingsley recalled how McKee told his screenwriting hopefuls, "Don't tell me you're going to create a new genre for your movie. Everyone's always saying there's a new genre. There is no new genre. There are comedies, dramas, and tragedy." But then Billingsley was surprised to hear McKee say, "There's only one movie that I can argue has been a new genre in the modern era, and that movie's a little movie—I don't know if you guys have heard of it—called A Christmas Story."..
It's not A Wonderful Life anymore. It hasn't been since 1983, the year of A Christmas Story—the now classic film about nine-year-old Ralphie Parker's thwarted desire for a forbidden Christmas present: an official Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time. A sleeper of a movie, A Christmas Story forever changed the cozy, sentimental holiday-movie genre.
When we think of pre-1983 holiday movies, we think of plum puddings like Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (the best of several incarnations being the 1951 version, in which Alastair Sim plays Ebenezer Scrooge); the 1942 Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn and its 1954 cousin, White Christmas; the rather dark 1946 Frank Capra drama starring James Stewart, It's a Wonderful Life; Miracle on 34th Street the following year—saccharine despite the bracing skepticism of an eight-year-old Natalie Wood, who refuses to believe in Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. (She's wrong, we're told.)
So when A Christmas Story premiered, in 1983, we suddenly had a new kind of holiday movie, one that acknowledged—even relished—the "unbridled avarice," the commercialism, the disappointments, the hurt feelings, and all-around bad luck that, in reality, often define the merry season. In other words, what real Christmas was like in real families. It brought a bracing blast of satire and realism, wrapped up in a hilarious, pitch-perfect tale of a middle-class family negotiating the perils of Christmas, recalled through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy.
Wars later, when he was moving his acting career in another direction, Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie, took Robert McKee's famed three-day crash course in screenplay writing. McKee—aptly portrayed by Brian Cox in the satirical Charlie Kaufman film Adaptation—is something of a gruff guru in the art of storytelling. Billingsley recalled how McKee told his screenwriting hopefuls, "Don't tell me you're going to create a new genre for your movie. Everyone's always saying there's a new genre. There is no new genre. There are comedies, dramas, and tragedy." But then Billingsley was surprised to hear McKee say, "There's only one movie that I can argue has been a new genre in the modern era, and that movie's a little movie—I don't know if you guys have heard of it—called A Christmas Story."..
