97: Christmas with the Kranks

I was trying to think of like how I could do this to torture Heath.

I would hire Carolers to come out and sing like the half of a chorus of his favorite 90s songs.

Like they'd come out and they'd say back streets, back, and then they'd just leave and he'd come out like half naked, wielding a bat, being like, if you fuckers don't sing all right in the next 10 seconds, I'm taking as many down with you mythmy as possible.

Okay, well, I'm an in-sync guy.

You know nothing about me.

God-awful

movie

movies.

Welcome back to the Gamecast Patreon-only bonus episode, where each month we sample another selection from secular cinema because this time I remembered to edit it on time.

I am your host, No Illusions, and sitting 700 miles to my immediate left is my good friend Heath.

And right, Heath, welcome back.

Tim Allentacular.

Let's do it.

And no, no, don't give me any ideas.

No, no, just bruno, right?

Sweet.

Come on.

It's 30 years since the last time that was funny.

And sitting 900 miles to my northeast is my bad friend Eli Boznick.

Eli, how are you this fine afternoon, sir?

I don't think it was funny 30 years ago.

No, I don't know.

It was.

It was one time.

It was funny in a stand-up routine one fucking time yeah okay if you say so yeah

it was before your time i get it i get it i was just dating i wasn't there was he still a coke dealer at that point or was it after no it was just post coke it was post coke i was still on coke though so maybe that has something to do with it

tell us heath what will we be breaking down today we watched christmas with the cranks it's the story of learning the true meaning of christmas and that would be fascism You have to celebrate Christmas, or you're evil.

And

Jewish, kind of, according to the movie.

Either or and.

Yeah.

So, Eli, how bad was this movie?

Well, if you love the things your grandma doesn't like are funny, comedy stylings of the 80s, but you wish they'd been filmed 20 years after they'd been not funny in the first place, you will love Christmas with the cranks.

Which is why nobody loves Christmas with the cranks.

Oh my God.

This is like truly difficult to watch every minute.

Like it hurt.

It hurt my cranks.

Cross the Rubicon.

Here's one of the things that we often say is like it's really hard to review bad comedy because the only note you can make, the only joke you can make is, I don't find that funny.

Right.

So that's nothing.

But this crossed the Rubicon into I have jokes to make because it's not, I don't, I do find it.

I find every moment of this not funny movie deeply funny.

In like an upsetting, sad, tragic, funny way.

Right, yes, exactly.

Yeah, right.

So, is there anything you guys want to nominate this one for being the best of being the worst actor?

Best, best turtlenecks.

It's okay.

If there's one highlight in this movie for me, it's most importantly Jamie Lee Curtis.

Jamie Lee Curtis.

Somehow, they got Jamie Lee Curtis.

She's a great actor, and she's in this movie, and she goes fucking hard on the like 90s turtleneck thing with the Christmas theme.

Sometimes they're aggressive, they get like they get bigger throughout the movie.

It's awesome.

Famously talented and beautiful actor Jamie Lee Curtis, and they think that if they put her in enough sweaters, we'll forget that she once carried an entire Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with a striptease.

Like it's the idea that they have fooled us into thinking Jamie Lee Curtis is like frumpy, right?

Is like a frumpy nobody because they put her in high-waisted pants is like top three craziest things this movie believes about.

That's so funny.

And this movie has no idea how important the LLB and catalog is to my sexual development.

So that didn't even work.

That's also crazy.

Yeah,

it was going the opposite direction.

This week, you are not alone, Heathen, right?

Yep.

Next back to a law.

Yeah, right, right.

Just

for the Christmas season.

So I was going to go with Best Worst vestigial title, right?

So this movie was originally supposed to be called Skipping Christmas.

It's actually based on a novella by John Grisham called Skipping Christmas.

Pretty much, yeah.

By John Grisham.

Yeah, it's a John Grisham.

It's based on a John Grisham.

Okay, wait.

I'm so sorry.

I know this is supposed to be a short form part of the show, but we have to pause and we have to.

Like, John Grisham, the firm, that guy, yeah.

Yes, that guy.

Yes, yes, the legal fucking drama guy.

Yeah.

So for those of you who don't know, John Grisham hasn't written a book in 75 years, right?

He pays poor writers to write the same fucking legal thriller bullshit that he's written.

But you know, he fucking wrote this.

Oh, yes.

You know he was like, oh, darn it, John.

Behind the typewriter, it's time for you to show the face of comedy.

I'm reading Skipping Christmas.

The minute we get off this record, I'm reading it out loud.

Oh, this was a passion.

project like the band that gets you know the one-hit wonder and they're like oh well now i can really get into my stuff my real stuff.

Like

Skipping Christmas.

The book.

Woof.

So, yeah.

So he comes out with this book.

He's a big book page.

It's a tiny little novella.

And he comes out with this book, and then they decide to make it into a movie.

They're going to call it Skipping Christmas, but there was a different bad comedy that was already coming out that same year called Surviving Christmas.

They changed the title to avoid confusion, but that's super fucking awkward because they'd already filmed it, and the movie movie contains something like 11 title drops.

It's so funny.

And they get increasingly insane now that that isn't the name of the movie.

And you're just like, why do you people keep saying skipping Christmas?

You say skipping Christmas.

What's that little numb of a tail of the title right there?

Yeah, right, right.

And I am going to go with best, worst, redemption.

Okay, so look.

Tim Allen's character spends this movie being unlikable in the way only men who voted for Trump and don't speak to their kids anymore can think is redeemable.

All right.

Yep.

And the way this movie chooses to quote-unquote redeem him is so pathetically emblematic of why an entire generation will never understand why their history's villains that the movie might as well end with an open letter to Dennis Prager about kids these days.

All right, well, I'll tell you what, we've got to figure out out how to make this isn't funny funny for the span of an episode.

Eli seems to have some ideas, so we're going to take a quick break to strategize.

But we'll be back in a minute with all the loathsome ass holery that is Christmas with the cranks.

A lot of our notes is just like, how would Tim Allen kill himself right now if he had to?

I wonder.

We got crazy.

I got Tim Allen's notes, too.

And so I said, I'm not doing cocaine at a funeral.

I'm doing cocaine in the bathroom.

Exactly.

No, that's totally different.

Different.

Guys, guys.

What's up, Chris?

Did a famous man get me too, and therefore needs us to chime in in the Facebook comments that people are innocent until proven guilty, technically?

No, no, that's super important.

But I have an amazing movie idea.

Oh, yeah?

Let's hear it.

Okay, so what are the six-best comedies ever made?

Why, the National Lampoon Vacation series, of course.

Of course.

So I was thinking, what if we made one of those movies now?

Dude, what are you talking about?

People these days aren't ready for the comedic brilliance of I don't care for the food I haven't tried.

Yeah, or slip and fall down.

They cannot have it.

Look, I'm not saying you're wrong.

Okay, maybe this generation will be able to take it.

Okay.

Maybe we'll be before our time.

But for the sake of posterity, for the sake of art, we have to make this movie.

Dude, you know what?

F it.

You're right.

Let's do it.

Heck yeah, let's do this thing.

Make the world demonstrably worse on three.

Ready?

One, two, three.

Make the world demonstrably worse.

We all voted for Trump three times.

Sure did.

Can't wait to vote his fourth time.

Yop.

Hey, we're back for the breakdown, and we're going to open up on a close-up of Tim Allen's ugly fucking head.

Right away, I was just like, okay, Tim Allen's a terrible person.

Let's do this.

Terrible.

My first note is, I see why cocaine gave up on this guy.

Yeah.

My second note is, I hate his face.

And then my third note is, I like that he's looking all sad.

Yeah.

So it's like him and Jamie Lee Curtis being like the kind of bored couple sitting in bed together, just kind of sad.

And you can see in his face that he's like, fucking Jamie Lee Curtis is so much better than me at acting.

God jealous.

She won't talk to me when the cameras are on.

Every time they say cut, she goes and sits in that special oxygen tent and she says, I'm not allowed in there.

And she's like, I'm so much better than Tim Allen at acting.

I can't

seem cast

this guy.

Right.

So, so the two of them are sitting in their bed, all morose and everything over something.

Whatever could it be?

And we get their stupidly cheap last-minute title.

And then we get them taking their daughter, their 23-year-old daughter, to the airport.

So I guess she's in the Peace Corps.

She's going to go to Peru and she's going to be gone over Christmas.

Yeah, because the Peace Corps usually keeps you for three to five years, not four and a half months.

Yep, yeah.

So, well, actually,

it would be even less than that, right?

Because they're leaving the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

We know that because Tim Allen says, well, you're the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the busiest travel day of the year.

It's not.

That's not a fucking thing.

We travel more in the summer than we do at fucking Thanksgiving.

But he says that anyway, just so that he can start the movie off being wrong about shit.

He's the worst.

And then the daughter, Blair, right?

Yeah.

She says goodbye.

She's like, I love you, mom.

And she hugs Jamie Lee Curtis.

And then she's like, okay, bye, Tim.

Bye, Tim Allen.

Yeah.

Bye, Tim Allen, a man who I will not hug, even when pretending he is my father.

Well, so here's the thing, though, is that like Tim Allen is supposed to be this like distant dad with his armor up and never shows any emotion or whatever.

And you keep thinking that at some point in the movie, they're going to like deal with that.

But they're not.

No.

In fact, at the very end of the movie, Jamie Lee Curtis will do what your mom does when your shitty, abusive dad behaves so badly that even she can't ignore it, where she's like, well,

now everything's quiet and I'm weird and sad.

Yep.

That's it.

That's the closest this movie gets to any kind of dealing with Tim Allen's behavior.

All right, what are you going to do, Protestants, right?

What are you going to do?

I don't know.

Poison your husband with one of the many household chemicals available to you

and then say it's a heart attack?

They'll believe you and be instantly believed.

They want Tim Allen to be dead.

Does anybody have a Ricin guy?

So

they're heading home from the airport.

It's very rainy, but they have to stop to get a few things.

And we're going to have this moment.

It's like it's rainy.

He's forgotten his umbrella, and now he has to go out and get wet.

And what's supposed to be happening here is we're supposed to be feeling sympathy for this poor every man

who's being like, you know, bossed around by his nagging wife or whatever.

But it's Tim Allen and fuck that guy.

So none of it works.

Also, fuck anyone who feels this way.

Hey, yeah, I don't want to go into the grocery store with you.

You go get wet and I stay dry.

Just kill yourself.

You don't have to be here.

You don't.

If you're upset about doing this favor for your wife, it's not going to work out.

You're never going to find a thing you like.

You're just going to keep finding dissatisfying experiences.

You should blow your tailpipe, like it's gotta end, it's gotta end.

There are kids starving in India, cut yourself up and mail yourself to them, do something.

Get the divorce and look up hoflation first and get into all the men's rights bullshit, but then definitely kill yourself.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, you can do you can pick up whatever hobbies you want along the way.

We're not here to tell anybody what to do.

Here's the thing: I so didn't relate to this viewpoint that when the camera followed him instead of her, I was confused.

Right.

Right.

I was like, but wait, he's not the main character.

He's the antagonist behaving like a big sack of shit.

Well, and to just make him even worse, there's a guy there selling umbrellas.

And I'm like, oh, how convenient.

That would completely eliminate, or not completely, but that would mostly eliminate the problems that you're having in the movie right now.

But he's mean to the umbrella guy.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

No, he might as well somehow believe that like, being mean to the umbrella guy and not having an umbrella will lower the price of the eggs that he's about to buy.

He's actually now a perfect metaphor for the country that we live in.

Yeah.

So, okay, so he comes back out.

He's soaking wet.

He gets splashed while he's out.

And mom's crying because she just got a phone call from the daughter she called from the plane.

And dad's like, oh, that's really expensive.

And I'm like, oh, in case I didn't hate him enough, they didn't add that.

Don't ask her her for an airplane.

It's like a couple hours.

Just call after, whatever.

I actually, for a second, I was like, that's a valid complaint.

Don't do that.

Heath, I had to erase so many notes that I had in here when I saw how sympathetic you were to Tim Allen's character.

Yeah, Heath, join me over here.

I'm here for a second.

They make me.

We defend Tim Allen throughout this fucking movie.

Did you just come over here for a second?

Hey, but can you just take a knee when we're just like, you just take a knee?

Are we in the whisper area?

Yeah, we're just over here.

The podcast listeners can't hear us.

It's just like we're going to villainize Tim Allen, and you're going to be like, what?

That's totally normal.

But if you just tuck in, tuck in.

You just tuck it in and say nothing instead?

3-2-1 break.

Okay.

I think I lost the audience already when I said that.

No, no, it's okay.

They can't hear us here.

They can't.

If we last too long, no, it will.

And we're back.

And we're back.

Hey, Amy.

Hey,

where are you guys been?

I was talking about this movie.

So, yeah, so, but he has to go back into the store to get more shit.

And then

he gets even wetter.

And the umbrella guy tries to sell him an umbrella again.

So, yeah, sorry.

All my notes are just what's happening in the fucking movie.

That and Kara notes.

Kara, I hate me notes.

Yeah.

I liked the rising action of this, though.

I thought by the end he was going to be like sealed in a magician's water tank, just actively drowning until I was like, okay, that one's bad, to be fair.

No, no, that would be annoying.

Did he be prestiged?

As he's doing all of this, he sees an advertisement for a Carnival Cruise.

And I'm like, yes, Tim Allen, that is what you deserve.

One of the worst things that I could possibly wish on anyone, a fucking Carnival Cruise.

But please, one that tips over and gets Norovirus or something.

I was going to say Carnival Cruise because they can't advertise Norovirus.

Yeah.

I don't like cruises.

Eli, can you join me in the whisper?

Come on over what's going on.

What's going on?

Is it cool to not like cruises?

Because I didn't like a movie once and everybody hated me.

Yeah, no, they hated you.

They hated you so much.

And you went over to my shitty show that four people listened to to take it back.

And it's like, it's like six guys.

Do you know what I redeemed myself during that?

I think you totally redeemed yourself, but they got to listen over to dear old dads.com slash Patreon.

I'm not a bad person.

Wait, they can't hear me right now.

And we're back.

I'm not a bad person.

Excellent.

Did I do my water tank joke?

Okay, so that evening they're having like hate each other dinner, which they're not, right?

I wrote that in my notes, but like it's just because Tim Allen is so fucking hateable that I can't imagine eating dinner with him without hating him.

That's not what's supposed to be happening at all, right?

Yeah.

Do you think they did a couple of takes where charismatic beauty Jamie Lee Curtis tried to vamp with Tim Allen and he was like, too many Mexicans.

And she was like, all right, you know what?

Why don't we just start the scene in silence and then you'll say your first line?

There you go.

So, yeah, so we have this, like, she asks about the plot.

He tells her about the plot.

And then we have this long moment where he's staring at her.

And the comedy beat they're going for is she thinks he wants to have sex now that the daughter's out of the picture, but he wants to sell her on the idea of doing a cruise.

Yeah, he's like, I've got an idea.

And he's kind of making eyes.

And she's like, all right, let's fuck.

Exactly.

And he like goes out to do his idea for a second.

And she's like, okay, I'm going to get drunk to fuck Tim Allen.

Burrows.

Drinks an entire glass of wine in one

two glasses.

She reaches over and grabs his, too.

Yep.

She needs to be drunk enough to fuck that guy.

But then he comes back in and he's like, no, no, no, not sex.

Shut up.

What are you doing?

We're not doing sex.

We're doing some accounting.

And he's going to introduce the plot of skipping Christmas now.

Yeah.

This is the first time that the movie expects us to think that Tim Allen would rather do anything except fuck Jamie Lee Curtis.

I was so confused.

I was like, but Tim Alice, Jamie Lee Curtis has indicated that she's willing to fuck you.

There's literally nothing short of a medical emergency that would stop you from fucking Jamie Lee Curtis.

One thing.

That should stop you from fucking Jamie Lee Curtis.

If Jamie Lee Curtis appeared in my weird recording studio right now and did a series of gestures, I'd just stop talking.

So yeah, but instead he brings out his ledger and he's showing her, he's like, hey, look, look at all this money we spent on Christmas last year.

$6,000.

For that money, we could do a 10-day Caribbean cruise with Carnival.

Yeah.

Okay.

Eli?

Yes.

Whisper area real quick?

Please come on over here.

Can I point out how to do it?

Can Noah come?

Can I?

Yeah.

I feel like he's falling off the bat.

Noah.

Come on over here.

Noah.

I'm not.

I'm editing this bit out of it.

See, this is why he's left out of the whisper corner.

So we try to open our hearts to him.

I would like to point out to everybody that this is a great idea to use your money.

$6,000.

No, I'm out of the whisper corner.

I don't

go back.

nothing happened so so here's the inherent conflict in this whole thing right because his idea is hey you know that money that we usually spend on other people every year what if we just spent that on us right yes eli and i wrote a lot of jokes about how like yeah that's the opposite of being a good person there but then heath was like his entire thing is just a treatise on why that's actually really a much better thing

and and this year it's um it's upsetting there's a spreadsheet in the center of it this is totally reasonable to go on a trip and maybe not be around at Christmas sometimes.

This is a great idea.

Absolutely.

Empty nesters want to just get out and do their own thing, maybe revive their marriage a little bit.

But the movie has to make this like the bad guy idea from Tim Allen.

So they have to add a little thing of like Jamie Lee Curtis being like, we could still donate to charity with a little bit of that money and still go on the trip.

And he's like, no, total boycott, which is a dick move.

Yes.

They have to add that to make the bad guy thing sort of work.

That's exactly what I was going to say is because there are reasonable versions of this, but every turn of this movie, he'll be like, and by the way, we're not giving the orphans new crutches.

Yes.

Exactly.

Well, right.

No, look, absolutely.

But the entire movie is ruined if they say, hey, you know what?

Being around the house without our daughter for the first time is going to be very difficult and everything's going to remind us of Christmas.

Why don't we just go on a trip and avoid that?

Like, if they just say that and then tell that to people, this movie has no conflict whatsoever.

Right.

But when people do that, they generally don't be like, and I'm also not sending Christmas cards because fuck all of you.

And I'm not getting any of my employees' gifts.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

It's shit like that.

So they argue about.

My first instinct is like, Christmas cards are dumb too.

No, but I actually, I've turned on this one.

And your Christmas card was a put together Christmas card with all of us and Bailey the Golden Retriever.

And it's my favorite.

It's on my fridge right now.

I was going to say that it's on my fridge, too.

So they argue about whether they can do the charitable donations and eventually agree that they can't.

So this is now the plot.

They're going to skip Christmas and go on this cruise, right?

Yeah.

So his first step in this is the plot of this movie is a phone call with my aunt where I'm playing video games.

Yep.

Yeah.

Just like, oh, you know what I'm saying?

Sorry, give me one second.

You're going to hear like beeping and booping in the background.

That's Max.

He's got AIDS or something.

I don't know.

Well, I didn't just yell fuck.

She didn't say that.

She's crazy.

So, yeah.

So, but then his first step, Tim Allen's first step, he goes to work the next day and he writes,

it's not even a fucking email.

He prints this out and hands it to everybody.

It's a little memo that says, Fuck Christmas.

I'm not getting you shit and I'm not going to your stupid fucking parties.

Yeah.

I thought this was a great idea.

Before we did this review, just a couple of days before this review, No Illusions got me a truly wonderful Christmas present.

But I can't help but wonder if that Christmas present's expediency was spurred on by me not having jokes at this particular moment in our life.

No one's watching the movie's like, ah, fuck, Amazon, Amazon, Tim.

Kaik will spend 27 minutes on this.

So, yeah, but

the whisper area?

Yeah, right.

No, I'm going now.

I'm going this time.

Maybe same idea, but, you know, without the slur.

Yeah.

And we're back.

Yeah.

so uh

we'll find out we'll see if you guys got it all out of his system and then i'll tell you if we're back uh but yeah so but this is the first of the title drops this is where his his memo ends with i am simply skipping christmas okay he's he says like i'm not doing gifts nor am i taking gifts it's just eminently reasonable to do this it's even it's fair it's it's better than the normal system for most people that exchange doesn't usually work this makes sense.

Yeah, but if you have employees, you're you have to give them a business.

This is a one-way.

That's the thing, is this a one-way gift relationship, right?

If he was going to all his coworkers and saying, hey, guys, I, you know, we're doing this trip and I'm not really going to be able to afford it.

And so I'm out on the secret Santa thing, that's nothing, right?

That's absolutely nothing.

But giving your fucking secretary a, I'm not buying you anything for Christmas this year so I can go on a trip memo

is a dick fucking Julie's never sent us a basket.

That's a one-way street, them baskets.

So

then we thank you.

Julie?

Fearless things.

Julie, join us in the wisdom.

So, okay, so then we cut to Jamie Lee Curtis salivating over the Christmas cards that she can't buy either.

Apparently, oh, by the way, we should also establish, I didn't mention this at the time, but when he did the math, they spent $6,000 on Christmas.

The cruise only costs $3,000, right?

So they have $3,000 extra dollars to match the money they spent.

Right?

So they could do the Christmas cards and buy the gifts for the right, like they don't even establish that as a financial need.

I just want to point out again how stupid the plot is that.

That cruise is going to ding you on a bunch of extras.

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, God knows.

Don't never think that an all-inclusive cruise is all-inclusive.

Oh, Dolphin swims $110 a person.

Oh, man.

So anyway, but she can't buy the Christmas cards.

And apparently, so her Christmas card salesman who knows her name chases her down on the street.

Yeah.

Right?

He's like, hey, you know, if you want those Christmas cards that you like, you're going to have to order them soon to get them out on time.

I get it.

Just so that we can have an awkward, I'm not doing Christmas this year.

I'm not doing it this year.

And he like sprints after her and tries to tackle her.

It's a lot.

He follows her into a restaurant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We might as well do a follow cut to like him carving his name into a pillar in his card shop.

He's doing pull-ups that say Christmas card on his knuckles.

Yeah.

So, but yeah, but he follows her into this restaurant where she's having lunch with her friends.

And he's like, you know, wait a minute.

How could you not be doing Christmas cards?

What are you not doing Christmas?

And all of her friends are like, wait, don't you have the big Christmas Eve party that we all go to every year?

Are you not doing that?

And she's like, no, I'm not.

Right?

Sorry, this is the fucking plot of the movie i've got nothing else the movie's got nothing else she's like hey obby card guy can you join me in the whisper yes right

i love the moment though where felicity huffman who plays one of the friends in just this scene um is like well what are we supposed to do if we can't go to your party and she very sanely is like anything you want to and they're like

But you're not having a party.

I want to go to your

party.

Right.

Okay.

But so here's the thing, though.

If you're the person who has the Christmas Eve party every year and you've decided not to do Christmas, it's incumbent on you to go to like reach out

now and say

hey I'm not doing the Christmas Eve party this year like and also when they ask her about this she doesn't say well you know without Blair there it really feels empty and sad in our house so we want to get away and everything at which point her friends would say oh yeah no we support you in that because we care about you and are your friends instead she has to be really angry about it or the movie doesn't work Yeah, Felicity Huffman is like, trust me, I get how hard it is when your kid's not home.

Have you tried posing her with just some starving kids and saying she went to the peace school?

Really hard for the kid when one of the parents goes to jail, too, as I learn.

So, yeah, but she says she's not doing Christmas, and the entire restaurant stops to stare at him like the bad guy just walked into the saloon.

Everybody in this restaurant hears skip Christmas, those two words, and they're like, Jewish, get her.

Just so mad.

I wrote in my notes, okay, they should have renamed this movie The Town Without Jews, apparently.

Yeah, right.

Well, this is a suburb of Chicago, so.

Yeah, no, that's fair.

They are Christmas fascists.

They are

crazy.

Clearly.

So, okay, so then we get Tim Allen at home when the door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen show up, just like every year, right?

These stupid manufactured fucking controversies, but they're not buying a tree this year, which means that they're ruining the Boy Scouts.

Yeah, and I just have to go to the bottom.

I don't support the Boy Scouts.

That was a bad move by the movie.

Support the Girl Scouts.

But at the same time, they have this physical bit that I just have to point out, right?

So when Tim Allen finally breaks it to the Boy Scout guy that he's not going to buy the tree, he dramatically tips it over.

But the person who wrote this movie has the memory of a goldfish, so then he just has to pick it up and take it away.

They just wanted that bomb bomb sound effect that comedies from the 80s did where something fell over.

That was the purpose of the entire scene.

Yeah, right.

They're just like, guys, we're like almost 30 minutes in and nothing has fallen over yet.

Yeah, the center of this writer's visions board is just a trumpet going, whamp, whamp, wham, whamp.

All right.

I thought the drop thing was going to be impactful.

Grab it.

We have to, because otherwise we're just giving him a free treat.

We have to take that now.

We'll walk away.

But yeah, so he's ruined the fucking Boy Scouts' Christmas and shit by not getting a tree.

And then, and of course, he has to explain it like an asshole again.

He can't just say, well, we're actually not going to be in town for Christmas, at which point everybody would be like, oh, right, it would be weird to get a tree then.

Yeah.

And we learned that it is okay to go out of town for Christmas later in the movie.

It's not that everyone's trapped in their homes like that thing where Scarlett Johansson and that guy give birth to a nerdbird, right?

Like this is something else.

I don't think it was Scarlett Johansson.

I think it's a different actor who I don't remember.

You get there's a neighbor who goes away during Christmas and it's fine,

but it's only because that that neighbor left all the lights on of their, you know, outside their house, did the whole decoration thing, got a tree, and like kept a fire hazard going for a week with nobody there.

And they're like, okay, that's cool.

I have a theory about why I think they're okay with that.

Why?

What do you think?

We'll get to it.

We'll get there when we get to it.

Yeah, we don't need to.

Yeah, I was just saying, we don't need to poach the content in this

skeleton of a fucking movie.

Like racially?

So then we cut to

without context, that's even better.

So

So yeah, but they go inside and after telling the Boy Scouts that they're not going to get the tree, and now they're worried because the Boy Scouts are telling their neighbor, Dan Aykroyd, who is the fucking fearer of Christmas fascists, apparently.

I fucking love Dan Aykroyd.

He's awesome.

He's been doing the same performance in every movie his entire fucking career.

It keeps working.

He's completely unaware that he's in a movie.

And every time I'm like, yep, adore it.

He's almost never funny, but he's just managed to be synonymous with comedy somehow.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

They just picked a guy

in Ghostbusters.

It was

remotely in keeping with sort of the theme they were going for.

But he's like, no, I'm getting blown by a ghost in this fucking movie.

And they let him do it.

This man's entire comedy career is based on talking like someone trying to get the intention of an entire marching band at once.

and it has carried him for 30 years, 40 years, and that was him.

Yeah,

it's maestro energy.

It works.

As far as I can see from a brief Google, not problematic.

So, hey, I'll take it.

I mean,

from a skeptic's perspective, he's at least a bit problematic.

Oh, no, what did he do?

Oh, he's just woo all the fucking way.

He believes all the shit he said in Ghostbusters.

It's just.

Yeah, he's compared to some.

I mean, you know, he's no Chevy Chase, but yeah.

If a ghost offers to blow you, you say yes, though.

That's true.

So

is that what it is?

Did the ghost come forward?

He did one of those iPhone note things.

All right.

So that night,

Tim's taking out the trash when Dan Aykroyd comes up to give him some shit for skipping Christmas, right?

And we see like everybody putting up Christmas decorations except for him.

Also, there's for some reason there are sound effects like aliens are racing their photon bikes somewhere behind.

I never figured out what the fuck that was supposed to be.

That would be Dan Aykroyd's mom, his character's mom, and she's got a t-shirt cannon device that she's firing into their yard to spread big clumps of tinsel.

Yeah,

I was very confused.

That seems like an environmental nightmare.

Okay.

Just a terrible idea.

And then we also got these other neighbors out there doing like putting up lights in an infomercial slapstick.

Yeah, man.

I kept being like, oh, I wonder how that's going to turn out to be funny.

And then I realized, nope, that's the joke.

That happens to me like seven times throughout the movie.

I'm like,

he did fall down.

I wonder what they're setting up with this guy falling down.

And I'm just like, oh no, that was

all they were hoping for.

Yep.

Yep.

So, but Dan Aykroyd's kind of giving him like, you know,

it's a great,

this entire neighborhood does Christmas.

It would be a shame if somebody was to not do Christmas.

It'd ruin the neighborhood.

And

he's described as the ward boss of the street.

So they make this like, he's like the HOA psychopath of the street.

Right.

And they make him into the good guy just because he likes Christmas.

And that's like automatic good guy status.

I hate it.

I wrote my notes, like as inherently douchey as what Dan Aykroyd's character is doing here, Tim Allen still manages to be the bad guy by just being Tim Allen about it.

Yeah, it's good casting in that sense, I suppose.

Imagine how hard it is to be worse than a guy whose entire purpose is making other people put Christmas decorations around their house.

Yeah.

So, okay, so now it's the next morning.

Well, so there's some fucking thing.

I don't even get this, but everybody in the neighborhood puts a Frosty the Snowman out.

Yes.

On the same day or something, and this is some grand tradition that everyone is going to be like really super upset about if they don't do it.

Now, Now, to be clear, they already own the Frosty.

Yeah.

Right.

So the purported purpose of this movie, which is saving money, it saves them nothing to put up the Frosty.

Even worse, we get Dan Aykroyd and his kids out on the porch yelling to him that, hey, we'll put it up for you.

We'll actually do the work of putting it up.

And they still won't do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But wait, guys, is there something Tim Allen could do to make sure that No Illusion hates him for the rest of this movie?

Why?

It's stepping on a cat.

Oh my God, it gets so much fucking worse.

Yeah, okay.

So now we have to introduce the neighbor that he doesn't get along with, Walt, and Walt's cancer wife, Bev, right?

Yeah.

So Walt and Bev live across the street, and they have this adorable long-haired Persian cat, and Tim Allen steps on its tail over and over again.

That's a comedy beat, right?

Like, again, Eli's, like, yeah, Eli's like, what are they setting up with him stepping on the cat over and over again?

Nothing.

Him stepping on the cat is the joke.

Were I a trickster god trying to convince no illusions to fight an individual human on the planet?

Having them step on a cat over and over again is my like third runner up, and that's only if I can't fit Lucinda under their foot.

All right, so like,

for those of you who don't follow me on social media, about four different fucking times this month, I've posted videos of like the street cats that I come across on my walks and me giving them belly rubs and shit like that.

Yeah.

I wrote my notes.

Oh, his neighbor's cat doesn't like him.

He must be a terrible person.

That's the only explanation.

Exactly.

All cats hate him because cats are liberal.

Everyone knows that.

Yeah.

So yet another reason why they're better than dogs.

Okay.

Cats are definitely all in real life hating Tim Allen.

Like they see him and they prick a lot and they get the thing going because they can see evil somehow in that other dimension.

They know.

Yeah.

You know when your cat like hisses at a random spot in the wall and you don't know why it's Tim Allen.

Somewhere they are pointing exactly at Tim Allen.

Tim Allen's personality is on the wall.

He's singing him like mecca.

He's like the anti-mecca for cats.

Yeah.

So

hate mecca for cats.

Wait, I'm going to buy Tim Allen as the hate mecca for cats.

Yeah, no,

sometimes you got to take a break before I get it.

Okay.

So, okay.

$11.

So then it's already owned.

Buy a cat.

So, okay, so he goes to work where everyone hates him for not Christmasing.

And then we've got his wife at home, right?

Like Jamie Lee Curtis is stuck at home while everyone in the neighborhood hates them for not putting up their Frosty.

So we have this whole long bit where the kids are all screaming, give us your Frosty.

We don't know why they won't give them the Frosty.

She starts hiding under the blanket from them because I guess she thinks maybe there's some humor under there somewhere.

Oh, God.

Just

what an awful thing to do to Jamie Lee Curtis.

To be like, I don't know, like, what do you think would be funny?

Because that's obviously what happened, right?

Yes.

She looks out the window and she was like, what do I do?

And he was like, I don't know.

Like, what if you like hid under the bed?

And she was like, I don't fit under the bed.

And he was like,

I don't know.

What do you think?

Well, that's exactly right.

There's just nothing.

There's no funny premise or setup anywhere to be found in this stupid fucking movie.

So now she has to drive away from her house, but she has to drive as though she's sneaking.

Yeah, because of the Christmas fascists that are going to attack her, but they actually do attack her.

So she like tries to sneak out in her...

delightful 90s Ford tourist wagon and she's all bundled up because it's cold but her driver's side window is open which makes no sense except that it's going to set up a physical violence bit when she gets attacked by Ackroyd.

Right, right.

It has to be open so Dan Ackroyd can hang out of it and get the finger or the window rolled up on his fingers.

Exactly.

All right.

Well,

these are the only stakes this movie will ever have, really.

So we need a quick break to cope with that, but we're going to be back in a minute with even more of Christmas with the Cranks.

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I'd like to try therapy now.

No, not too late.

Yeah.

And we're back for more of this shit, and we're going to rejoin the action with Tim and Jamie Lee Curtis meeting at the restaurant to talk about the plot some more.

Yeah.

They're talking about gender roles and invisible labor, and it's going as well as you imagine that conversation goes with Tim Allen.

Yeah.

It's such a weird cell phone in the movie.

Yeah.

Jamie Lee Curtis is pointing out that like Christmas decoration shaming is like a real thing that happens, and it's kind of a feminist issue because the woman in a couple in this case is the one who's taking the brunt of all that.

And that's like very real for sure.

Right.

And then Tim Allen's response to that is: counterpoint: look at this skimpy bikini I bought you.

Literally, like, what a weird cell phone.

So, but, but the, but the bathing suits are so that they can go tanning together.

Hey, hey, podcast listener, this is one of those times where I, too, sat there and was like, I can't wait to see how this joke pans out.

That's it.

They just go tanning.

I'm just going to spoil it for you right now.

Jamie LeGurdis bonks her head at one point.

So that's what I'm saying.

Now we have nothing to do.

Spoilers.

Yeah.

Damn.

so they get the bonus episode was only 28 minutes long this one

yeah that's mostly because i had to cut out all of this fucking going off into the whisper room shit

that's true podcast listener you don't know but it's been the the perceptions you've heard they are they are the last remaining vestiges

so okay but she doesn't want to do it which makes it funny so then they go to the tanning place and there's one girl that has way too much tan and that is is a bottomless well of humor.

You don't even have to make punchlines.

That setup that good is just already funny enough.

She's way too tan.

And she works there, so she probably got too tan by using the thing where she works.

Yep.

You guys remember when comedy was just stuff your grandma didn't try as a girl is funny?

I guess.

Yeah, that must have been in the.

Raw fish.

No, thanks.

Call me when you cook it.

Lesbian sex.

Oh, no.

Your grandma tried that with Amelia Earhart.

I know.

The great-grandma.

Did she?

Yeah.

My great-grandma had sex with Amelia Earhart, everybody.

That's canon.

That's canon.

That is the coolest thing about me.

Yep.

It would be the coolest thing about most people, though.

But then we have Jamie Lee Curtis in the tanning booth.

She's changed into the skimpy bikini, and she sure isn't comfortable now.

But she lays down in the tanning booth, right?

And then some perv comes in and she hits her head when she tries to sit up.

Right.

Class.

A lot of setup for that.

Yep.

But now she has to go out in her skimpy bikini to get a band-aid.

And how embarrassing.

And who should be there but the priest?

The priest and a gang of mall walkers that are going to shame Jamie Lee Curtis now.

Well, and the priest is just going to openly stare at her tits the whole time.

I don't know.

And like, Father, I get it, right?

Like, I was also, but also, like,

it's a bathing suit.

Right.

People wear it in this movie.

And she's a grown-up, so it doesn't even fit with your character.

Right, exactly.

Right.

Well, and then, so, and then Tim comes out to see if she's okay, and he's wearing a skimpy bathing suit, too.

But here's the thing is that, like,

these two people were in way too good a shape for this bit to work, right?

Because, like, there's a way that this is funny, right?

Where it's like, oh, I'm so embarrassed to be out in public

and this and I and whatever.

Like, in sort of the, like, you know, like you said, the 90s, early 2000s, body-shame-y comedy kind of way.

You could have made this funny, but not like these two, like, they look pretty fucking good in the bathing suits, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whisper him for a second.

Can I say Tim Allen's dad bot is looking pretty good?

Jamie Lee Kevin.

I hate him to admit it.

Yeah.

I wanted a lot more like flaps.

Yeah, would have been nice.

Yeah.

But yeah, they were in way too good a shape for the fucking bit to even work, and it's a bad bit to begin with.

That's the kind of shit we're dealing with.

Okay.

Yeah.

Again, the comedy baseline that this audience is aimed at is someone might see me in a bathing suit.

Yes, yes.

Well, and now they're in the newspaper in their bathing suits because the newspapers run a front-page story

about the fact that these two are skipping Christmas.

Okay, as someone who had a small

corner of a neighborhood shitty newspaper, I empathize with this moment very deeply.

Yeah, I guess probably.

As someone who's scraping up his dad's car once made front page of said shitty corner newspaper,

I felt this moment was very realistic in its depiction.

So

very accurate.

Anyone who might say otherwise.

We'll move on.

We'll move on.

I I don't want to dredge any shit up.

So, okay.

So then we cut to Jamie Lee Curtis volunteering at a soup kitchen, and you're like, oh, well, at least she.

And then you see it's the Salvation Army, and you're like, God damn it.

God.

It's the fucking Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army now are the charities we're representing.

Fuck.

But then just in case this movie was in danger of being funny, one of her friends comes in and goes, oh dear, Bev, the neighbor you don't like from across the street, her cancer is back.

And you could just see Jamie Lee Curtis' face go, oh, comedy gold, thank you then.

What a weird tone to include in this film.

Well, it gets even worse, right?

Because the next scene, we have Tim L and he gets home and he's mad because he can see that the newspaper, like to get the picture that's in the newspaper, they would have had to step, like stand on the neighbor's.

House or whatever, so he would have had to give him permission to take the picture.

So he goes to confront this guy who we just learned his, his wife's cancer is back,

right?

Just in case there was any potential humor here.

Yeah.

And they do this bit.

This is a big bit, everybody, gear up where he, the older guy, keeps calling Tim Allen old man, and he's like, stop, don't.

But he does.

That's the comedy.

Yeah.

That's what.

That's what boomers argue about, apparently.

This is what boomers apparently think it is okay to hold against somebody.

Not if they vote for a fucking fascist, but you know, if you give them a nickname they don't like, that's a real reason to part the ways and step on their cat.

Yeah, and so Tim Allen and the neighbor guy, Walt, they're about to have like a fist fight, and Jamie Lee Curtis has to come over and stop that and be like, hey, I heard about Bev and the cancer.

I'm really sorry about that.

What is like the purpose of the cancer in the movie?

Is it on like Team Christmas?

Like the cancer?

Yeah.

Good question.

I couldn't help but be struck, not to get bummery, right?

But here we are.

I couldn't help but be struck at the realism because I've known so many bevs in my life, right?

Women just married to grunting, oafish monsters, and then their cancer hits, and he just uses it as a reason to stand in his front yard staring into the middle distance.

Like, I deeply, deeply felt the like Beth's death and illness not being about bevness of this

right.

Sorry, hon.

I know I should probably be inside helping you confront the wolf as it was known to the ancient people, but I'm outside having a fight with Tim Allen about what his nickname should be.

Just so many women silently dying, never knowing what it was like to be loved back.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Well, he put the tissues out of reach.

I'm probably going to drown.

Hey, Eli.

Yeah.

Can you join me in the whisper?

Yeah, let's go to the whisper room.

I don't want to go to the whisper room.

I'm leaving you in the whisper room now.

Just more important

timeout.

Avoid shuffling off this mortal coil.

I should not have jerked off last time we were in there.

Jesus Christ.

I got bored.

At least it was the whisper room.

So we pan across the neighborhood, and we see like all the houses are so over-decorated except for theirs, which is the first time I wrote, boy, does this movie have a fuck the Jews and J-Dubs vibe underneath it all, right?

Yeah, this is the first time I wrote, How is there an hour left in this movie?

Yeah.

No, shit.

So, okay, so now there's a the doorbell rings, and there's a couple of cops there selling their annual charity fundraiser calendar.

This needs to be like super illegal, right?

Right, yeah.

You said

our bribes as a cops get out of here.

Yeah.

Is one of those cops, Cheech?

Yes, it's Cheech Marin and Jake Busey.

Yeah.

It took me a minute to pick up on Jake Busey, but yeah, yeah.

It's Cheech and Jake Busey.

I was like, it's Gary Busey's teeth.

What is this?

Oh, it's his son.

It's his son.

Jake Busey, I'm okay with.

Cheech, what's going on, my man?

What happened to Cheech that he's in this movie?

It's so sad.

He's such a fucking sellout.

Cheech is a cop.

Come on, give me a fucking.

Come on, Cheech.

But they're collecting money for their calendar, and he's like, oh, we're skipping Christmas, so we're not going to buy one this year.

And they're like, But you always buy one, and this isn't Christmas,

this is just a calendar.

That's a completely unrelated thing.

He's like, Right, I'm gonna be a dick about this too, though.

No, I'm just a dick for the month of December.

That's the plot of it.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's a porn calendar, it's like a hot cops calendar that they're selling.

I wanted to see Cheech's page, which they don't show us.

Full gape, by the way.

Yeah.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

See, that you

need to buy that motherfucker, Tim.

Exactly.

You got to buy the DVD.

It's in the cuts.

So then, so, yeah.

So they don't buy the calendar either.

Why?

We don't even fucking know at this point.

They can't afford a fucking calendar.

I mean, I get why I wouldn't buy it, but apparently they normally do.

And it's, you know, how they bribe the cops in this world.

Yeah.

So, but just then, outside, some carolers, like a truck full of carolers, show up.

And the lead caroler lady turns to Walt, the neighbor, and she goes, hey, is this, this the actual line in the movie?

Is this house, are they Jewish or what?

I wrote in my notes, okay, movie.

I'm intrigued.

Unmarked white van, Christmas-themed gangsters.

All right, things are still the temperature is arising.

Yeah, right.

Are they Jewish or like lukewarm Christians?

It just determines our strategy right now how much we can punish them.

Yeah,

how we hurt them.

Did they kill the Savior or are they disappointing him?

Yeah, right.

But they're like, nope, nope, they're not Jews that are like Muslims.

Nope, not Muslims.

All right, well, what the hell?

And they're like, well, you know what?

They just don't have enough Christmas spirit.

So then, like, the weaponized carolers carol at them.

Right.

And

Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen react to said carols like it's incoming gunfire.

Yeah.

Again, like, what is this even supposed to fucking be?

Right?

They start ducking and like they're moving from cover to cover now.

yeah tim allen was clearly like oh this is perfect i could do my navy seals thing i know a lot of the you know the hand signals i know a lot of the hand signals for dive wreck

record

jake beusey's been showing me a lot in between takes so

yeah but but then they they get sung at a bunch and again like you know the if the idea is we're trying to save money like

People singing outside of your house, that doesn't cost you money.

Does not cost you any money, it turns out.

You know, you can give them money.

I mean, you should give them money.

Yeah, sure.

Well, it depends on what they're collecting.

I don't think you should give them money.

Yeah.

I was trying to think of

how I could do this to torture Heath, and I've come up with several options, but I'd like to use my strongest one, which is that I think I would hire Carolers to come out and sing like the half of a chorus of his favorite 90s songs.

Like, they'd come out and they'd go back streets, back, and then they'd just leave, and he come out, like, half-naked, wielding a bat, being like, if you fuckers go sing all right in the next 10 seconds, I'm taking as many down with you with me as possible.

Okay, well, I'm an in-sync guy.

You know nothing about me.

Foiled again, damn it, foiled again.

Yep.

So, yeah, but so they do that.

The guys are singing at them really hard.

I guess they go to hide in the basement from the singing.

Yep.

And the thing is, is that this movie is behaving based on its own weird rules that we're not privy to.

So they go down to the basement to hide from the caroling.

And damn it, if the Frosty that the kids want them to put on the roof isn't there glaring at them.

I don't know.

I don't fucking know.

So the issue is that they feel judged by

the Frosty?

Is where we are now.

Yeah.

I guess.

All right.

So we cut to the next day.

There's kids out on their lawn chanting Free Frosty.

And I wrote my notes.

I was like, I have no comprehension of anyone's motivations here, right?

Like, I don't know why they're skipping Christmas to the degree that they're doing it.

I don't know why they're violently resisting it.

And I don't know why these kids give a fucking shit

whether they have a snowman in their yard.

Yeah.

Right?

None of this makes any fucking sense.

There's a point here where they show Jamie Lee Curtis.

She's walking by and a kid has a big stack of Christmas presents.

And I half expected her to just smack them out of the kids' hands like a nerd's books or something.

Right.

Or for him to pull a Tommy gun out of the bottom one.

We said free for offspeed.

And then in case you didn't hate Tim Allen's character enough, we cut to him spraying water on the sidewalk, on his sidewalk, so it'll freeze and people who walk by will

get hurt.

Right.

And the first person who slips and falls and hurts themselves is the mailman who has not been in the movie yet.

No, and we see Tim Allen like celebrate.

Ha ha, got one.

But it's the mailman.

It's the mailman who hasn't been part of the movie, right?

You could have had the mailman be like, where are your Christmas cards this year?

You could have had the mailman do something besides be a random public servant that Tim Allen celebrates the injury of.

Yeah, and you could have not done this scene at all.

That would be even better.

Especially because while he's spraying down his sidewalk, we see him spray the fucking cat that lives outdoors sometimes in December.

It's cold enough for the water to freeze instantly.

He probably killed that cat, y'all.

Yeah, I wrote my notes.

He sprays the cat, and there's now literally no physical harm Noah is not okay with them undergoing.

If the rest of this movie was just them living out funny games, it's a comedy that's no little reason.

He's like, yeah,

just an hour of a cat club eating Tim Allen's eyes after he died in the night.

Yeah, yeah,

more enjoyable.

Eyes, the asshole, the genitals, yeah that's that's that's where they go so yeah then i would request that my cats not eat my asshole first

that's why he doesn't have a cat actually third

like seventh i want it way down there yeah okay that's what if judaism's true and you're around your corpse for 48 hours oh okay yeah no that would be awkward that would be where's the penis on the list first first okay first yeah because that's complimentary right when they say that you know the animals feasted on his penis or whatever it's like like, you know, feasting.

It's taken an awful long time for him to eat my dick, other ghosts.

I don't know if you've noticed.

You've all died in this mess shooting, too.

I don't have to tell you.

Oh, God.

Why is my cat?

The cat rate is boring.

Don't worry about it.

Jesus Christ, dude.

So, okay.

So everybody slips around on the ice and shit and falls down.

We see the cat frozen.

just so I can hate him more.

And then we caught Jamie Lee Curtis, and she's reading Christmas books to kids at a cancer ward.

And then Tim Allen shows up, and we're like, somehow he's going to fuck this up.

Right.

He side-tackles her mid-read.

I said, no,

no, no, no, right.

And he's wearing this white suit at this point.

I wrote in my notes, even his suit is an asshole.

But that's okay, because this is all just to set up that Tim Allen got Botox.

Well, that should be funny, right?

Honestly?

Have you heard of this?

Honestly?

Have you seen this?

Watching Tim Allen

gargle a fruit cup for the remaining eight minutes of this scene is the punishment I deserve.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

So, so here's the thing: is that like he starts this bit, because this is a bit that, like, you know, you give this to fucking Jim Carrey or somebody like that, who's a physical comedian.

Like,

they could probably do a lot with this whole Botox bit, right?

But all he can think of is, I can't chew because my face is numb or whatever.

So, every time I put stuff in my mouth, it falls out.

And so, he does that.

I'm not exaggerating here.

Seven times.

It's so many times.

Like, the one time he thinks of something else to do, he leans his head back and he starts like chewing like that.

So we get to watch Tim Allen chew a pineapple with his mouth open.

Yeah.

Tim Allen was like, no, this is perfect.

Remember when I did the Navy Seals bit and that was amazing?

I've got this other bit where I do a fruit cup and that.

And that's it.

I just, I have a fruit cup sadly.

How much room do you have left on your camera?

67 hours?

Okay, that should about cover it.

Yeah.

You might want to buy a second deck.

And also, this interacts with the movie in no fucking way, right?

This exists for its own sake.

They're like, oh, you know, it would be really funny.

We'll just give Tim Allen a Botox bit.

Yeah.

Right.

And then we're done with this.

The Botox doesn't come back.

The Pineapples don't come back.

We weren't getting anywhere.

We weren't setting anything up.

It's like an improv troop forcing their way to like a Bill Clinton impression that one of them has that makes no sense.

And and he's just like

I did the voice so yeah right name a former Democratic president that's not the president now and isn't that isn't Jimmy Carter

or Obama who's white white he has to be white John F.

Kennedy god damn it and a life and a life

John F.

Kennedy

all right Dan Aykroyd

I want to be the head of healthy human services All right, all right, we'll see.

So now it's Christmas Eve, and they're getting packed for their big trip, and we watched them kiss for a really long time, which is even grosser to watch.

Like, watching Tim Allen kiss somebody is just gross to begin with, but he also just did all that dribbling food down my fucking chin shit.

Guys,

whatever else happens to us, and I know we've been through some hard times.

Noah had his heart attack.

But we didn't have to kiss Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis did.

Jamie Lee Curtis did nothing to deserve kissing Tim Allen.

No, she seems like a good person.

She's so personal.

She made a yogurt commercial seems nice.

Freaky Friday.

Yep.

Always gives it her best.

I love that Freaky Friday is where you went.

I'm just saying she did a good job in Freaky Friday, too.

So, okay.

So, but they're like...

They're trying to make out, but the kids keep calling them about the Frosty.

They keep getting prank calls.

And then they get a call from Blair,

who you'll probably have already forgotten is the daughter.

She's going to be home for Christmas after all.

And that.

And she's engaged to Enrique, which is a new thing.

He's Peruvian.

And then Timan's like fucking communist, probably.

Literally.

Probably.

It's literally the joke that it gets.

Oh, that is.

Yep.

Yep.

Peru is not a communist country.

Chain

gets close.

But yeah, so, but she's like, yeah, me and Enrique are coming home and we're engaged.

And Tim Allen isn't happy for them being engaged because he's the biggest possible asshole at every fucking moment.

And she's like, I can't wait to see the house all decorated for Christmas by the time I get there in six hours.

Bye.

God, it's so stupid.

This is now this is like the stakes of the movie.

So she, she calls them from Miami airport, not from Peru, because, you know, Peru is communist and doesn't have fucking things.

It wasn't her week at the phone.

Yeah, so this sets up like a ticking clock of her, whatever many hours before she, like, arrives and needs to see the Christmas Eve party or else something.

But it's bad.

But there's, there's no, they have established no reason why they wouldn't just say, oh, well, you know, honey, we actually weren't doing a big thing this year for Christmas because you weren't going to be here, but we'd still love to see you.

And boom, there's no tension in the fucking movie.

Right.

There's no stakes.

But can i say i would actually love for this to happen to more bad comedies right just three quarters of the way through we brought a zoo blair calls and she's like i'll be home for christmas and that's what the movie's about

i think you should get a blair card where if you just if as long as blair calls and says she'll be home for christmas you can still have a movie when it's about i guess comedy just a whole bunch of movies that the last half hour is this movie instead of the original exactly the godfather is this at the end.

Yeah, exactly.

Godfather 3, the bad one.

They could just be like, Blair had called three quarters

and been like, Willem DeVoe, I'm going to be home for Christmas.

And he had been like, oh, I got to get ready.

I don't have a William DeFoe.

Willem Defoe?

What's his name?

Robert Duvall.

Robert Duvall.

There you go.

I don't have a Robert Duvall.

You just talked to me.

Well, you also don't have a Willem DeVoe.

Oh, I have a Willem DeVoe.

He's in there.

I'm something of a scientist myself.

Oh, you do have Willem Defoe.

My bad.

Yeah.

All right.

So, yes.

My wife went to jail for doing

things.

Jamie Lee Curtis, she gets off the phone and she's like,

now we have to.

It's all coming together.

So, okay.

So now, so Jamie Lee Curtis gets off the phone and she says, oh, we have to like pretend we've been doing Christmas this whole time.

She'll be here in a few hours.

And we're all like, but why would you do that, though?

And she's like, because then there's tension.

Shenanigans will ensue.

The writer assures assures us.

Yeah, right.

So

Tim Allen heads out.

He's got to get an emergency Christmas tree, but apparently the Boy Scouts are the only fucking game in town.

The rest of this movie, I know we're going to talk about it, but podcast listener, the rest of this movie is just revisiting the first half of this movie and Tim Allen going,

can we do it now?

Yep.

Yes.

Yeah, so now that he's trying to get a tree and they don't have any good trees left, and because he didn't buy the tree that they wanted him to buy, they're going to charge him extra for this tree.

Got him.

So he gets the tree, but it's a bad tree.

And by the time he gets it home, it has no leaves on it.

And so he just throws it away.

Which makes no sense because he spent $75 on it.

Why wouldn't he at least use it?

Why would he have bought it?

If he was going to throw it away, why would it...

Also, it wasn't tied down in any way.

He just picks it up off of his car and throws it.

He might as well throw it and the last six pages of the script away at the same time.

That scene doesn't matter anymore.

Yeah.

He throws himself over a fence.

Yeah.

Al Borland's there.

So, but now Wilson looks from across another fence.

Yeah, right, right.

So, but now his new plan is that he's going to borrow the tree from a neighbor that we've never met in the movie.

That we've never established in any way.

No.

He runs up to his neighbor.

He says, hey, I see you're going out of town.

Can I borrow your tree once you leave?

And the guy says, yeah, no, that sounds like shenanigans heaven.

Absolutely, you can do that.

Well, he says, sure, you can, but don't tell my wife.

And because this is an 80s movie made in 2004, they're both like, we're keeping secrets from your wife.

It's inherently funny.

Yeah.

Our divorce rate is 55%.

This is the first time I wrote, I know my job's going to be hard when I look back over my notes and it's all just the shit that happens in the stupid fucking movie.

But yeah, so, so, but he agreed, the, the neighbor agrees to that, and then he

goes back to his house.

The kids are still chanting Free Frosty

on his lawn,

and he

tackles one of them.

He, like, scares him away, but he needs their help.

So he, like, side-tackles one of the kids.

Yeah,

he decides that Spike, that's Dan Aykroyd's kid, is going to help him, like, move this Christmas tree across the street from neighbor Wes's house to his house that he's borrowing.

But the kid starts running away, and he violently tackles this kid

way too hard.

Way too hard.

And then hits him again, like an extra late hit after the kid's down.

Once the kid's down, he tackles him again like he fucking plays for the Texans or something.

Oh, Travis Lawrence.

Hey, never forget.

Never forget.

But yeah, but then I think that Texas.

Hey, Noah.

that was Noah's 9-11

slash Holocaust slash Alamo all at the same time.

Absolutely.

Fuck yeah.

I mean, we weren't going to do much with this season anyway, but still,

dirty fucking hit.

So, okay.

So, meanwhile, so mom is at the market trying to get all the things that she needs from the store, and that'll be complicated because, you know, there's not enough of them, and it's very soon

just to have them.

Watching, then at this point, I had sort of sunk into the insanity, and I was like, you know who I'd like to be the other actor in this scene about who gets the honey-baked ham?

Meryl Streep.

I want them to be racing, and

I want Meryl Streep to be the other lady, and I want

Anthony Hopkins to be the ham.

I would just like to win.

How much talent and humanity can we waste on the celluloid of this fucking film?

Could we take a million dollars cash and just blend it in front of starving children for the last few minutes of this movie?

That's what I'd like to do.

Oh, my God.

And then, like, we have this whole bit where the neighbors see Tim Allen taking the other guy's tree and they think that he's stealing it or something.

And no, not setting anything up there, really.

Then we cut back to Jamie Lee Curtis racing this lady for a ham.

And she loses.

Okay, she could have won, though.

I was like, kick the lady's cart.

Kick the cart.

Kick the cart.

She's

The lady she was racing had a cart and she didn't.

It's so easy to win that race.

There are so many ways.

Without playing dirty, but.

Yeah.

The one time we unified as a podcast during this movie is that we all agree she should have pointed that woman's cart into a nearby display and gotten her victory.

Yeah.

Tackle her.

Are you in it to win it or not?

Yeah.

Damn it.

So, but then she goes out and she buys a ham from somebody who just got the last ham at the checkout or whatever.

And then we cut to, we cut back to Tim and the kid.

They've got the tree on their wagon now.

They're going to wagon it across the street.

I hope they don't lose control of it.

Oh, I literally wrote in my notes, I hope they don't lose control and wacky shenanigans ensue.

Oh, sorry.

That might nearly be a film.

Yeah, right.

Jesus fucking.

This could lead to a tragic slapstick accident.

Let's see what happens.

I'll start playing Yackety Sacks and we'll see what happens from there.

But here's the thing is that nothing fucking happens.

Nothing does fucking happen.

They lose the track.

They lose control of it.

That is the joke.

They regain control of it.

It doesn't even fall over.

Eli's just like, oh man, if Kenneth Branagh could be the tree and is giving a soliloquy right now.

Gets it by Kiefer Sutherland.

The cops.

Kiefer Sutherland.

What?

Yeah, you guys remember that?

For the great actor?

Are you guys not remembering when Kiefer Sutherland

tackled a Christmas tree?

Because look, there's 28 seconds seconds left in this film and nothing happens.

And I need both of you live on air right now to Google Kiefer Sutherland Tackles Christmas tree.

Was it in 24?

Jack Bower has to tackle the tree.

Is that a thing?

Yeah.

Kiefer and the Christmas tree.

Oh, I got to watch an ad, apparently.

Well, when the ad's over.

You see?

Jesus.

You see?

That's real.

All right.

Well, that was worth grinding everything to a halt for it.

Listeners, that was worth grinding everything to a halt for it.

I hope you kept that in real time.

Don't edit around that.

Oh, I will edit around it.

I want the seven seconds of silence while YouTube loaded.

Damn, well, he then goes for the full body block of the tree.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

No,

that was funny.

So that has no place being compared to this fucking movie.

For the rest of the review, I'm just showing you guys viral videos I think you haven't seen.

So then she goes to the Charlie Bit My Finger.

We saw Charlie bit my finger.

Sorry.

Sorry.

So then

Mu Dang predicts Donald Trump is coming over.

So then, so Jamie Lee Curtis, she's walking out.

She's got her ham, but she drops it and it rolls away.

I sure hope a truck doesn't run over it.

It does.

When she screams after the Halloween ham, you guys had a moment where you were like, oh, yeah, she was really good in Halloween, right?

Because

she does a horror movie scream for it, and you're like, right.

She's in that too.

It's just one more time where you're just like, oh, look at all the talent that we're using for

this movie.

Yeah.

And now Tim Allen is getting arrested for stealing his neighbor's Christmas tree, Cheech, and Jake Busey show back up.

And they say, should have bought a calendar.

I mean, we wouldn't have arrested you if you bribed us.

Yeah, I mean, look, there's not a single non-white person in this film who we won't just use as a vehicle to borrow a tree from.

But in in a world where people of color do exist and they do, that's a pretty terrifying sentence.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Wes definitely bought a calendar.

Oh, yeah.

He bought several.

Yeah, he's got some.

One for each kid.

But Spike,

the kid that was helping him, shows up and exonerates Tim Allen.

So nothing has happened now there.

And then now Jamie Lee Curtis gets home.

She doesn't have ham.

And the tree isn't good enough.

What a disaster.

Yeah.

And she got smoked trout instead.

She couldn't get the canned ham, which is supposed to be this giant prize in this movie.

The hickory honey ham in a tin.

It looks terrible.

But she's got smoked trout.

And that's bad because, like, fish is gay or something.

I guess.

Yeah, I would much rather have smoked trout.

She could do the Feast of the Seven Fishes, like from the bear.

Oh, that would be awesome.

Yeah.

So

she looks at the tree and she's like, oh, there's not enough ornaments.

He's like, yeah, they fell off.

So I was bringing them over and I'm like, but you guys have ornaments.

Amuse her.

And decorations, right?

Like, you didn't, you don't have to buy those new every year, do you?

Flash cut to me on my Game Boy.

Oh, that's crazy.

You don't have enough ornaments.

What are you going to do, Ann?

So, and then just to make matters even worse, Blair calls and she's like, hey, mom, you're going to make the caramel cream pie that I like so much, right?

And she's like, of course I am.

And now she has to go out again.

And we have to do the same fucking scene again.

Yeah.

Now, see, I would have actually been super psyched if they had done the beat-for-beat same scene again where she's running for the caramel, gets hit by the same truck.

We realize we're in like a repeating hell dimension.

Tim Allen keeps turning to camera.

We can't get out of the movie.

We can't get out of the movie.

Oh,

Bill Murray punches him in the face.

Tim?

Tim?

Tim Alec?

Sold me a light bag.

I wrote in my notes.

Like, I know what the steaks are.

I just don't know why the steaks are now.

Like, she can't tell her, oh, no, I'm not making that pie.

Why?

Why are they lying to Blair?

Just be like, oh, no, that's one part that's not going to happen.

Or just tell her the truth of the whole thing and nothing matters.

There you go.

Yeah, okay.

Well, this movie is desperately injecting steaks like Eli trying to spike Heath's dinner with Aphrodisiac, so we're going to give it a minute.

Catch its breath here.

But first, let me give Act Three the hard sell.

Will Tim Allen's character ever do anything selfless to redeem himself?

Will he receive some sort of come-uppance for his inexplicable assholery throughout the movie?

Will their ruse all unravel at once in classic farce fashion?

No!

Just no, no, and no.

None of that.

See See what they do instead when we return for the unconscionably lazy conclusion of Christmas with the cranks.

They just end the movie.

They do.

And you know what?

They don't even ever get to Christmas.

The movie's called Christmas with the Fucking Cranks, and it ends on Christmas goddamn eve.

The film might as well do that like sputter, sputter, sputter thing.

It would be better.

Brad Pitt's dick.

That's his real dick.

You guys know that?

Oh, is it?

Yeah.

Wait.

Let's pause the game real quick while we're talking about it.

Do you have a video for that?

Yeah.

Wait, hold on.

Seriously?

Yeah.

All right.

I googled Brad Pitt's dick and I got different stuff.

I'm stopping now.

Hey, hey, movie writer, guys.

He's here.

Hold your applause.

Oh, hey, Tim Allen.

That's the Tim Allen to you.

I'm sorry, you want us to call you the Tim Allen?

Yeah, you guys.

I'm not gonna do that

okay so anyways i was looking over the script and i i had some thoughts on the comedy let me stab him mike mike we had a whole meeting fine fine okay what are your what are your thoughts there tim okay so i love physical comedy as much as the next guy i mean home improvement

yes i was i was on that show yeah no we know right yeah anyways i just wanted to go over some of the physical gags you guys have written like um right here on page four uh luther slips on the ice Yeah, that's a classic.

Sure.

But then in the action line, you put, and we can't use a stunt man.

It has to be Tim Allen, and we need at least five takes.

I don't think scripts are supposed to say how many takes it's going to be.

We're very hands-on with this particular piece.

Okay.

Well, there's this second moment on page 18.

You've written...

Tim Allen gets hit in the nuts.

You didn't even write the character name there.

You just wrote Tim Allen.

Oh, well,

that's a typo.

We can fix that.

Okay, but on page 33 in the mall, the action line is just whatever kills Tim Allen.

That feels unspecific.

Well, we're open to collaboration on that.

Well, can I not die?

No.

Yeah, firm line.

Okay.

Do it now.

While we watch.

Let's do a practice day.

And we're back for still more of this shit, and we're going to rejoin the action with Tim Allen putting the snowman on his roof.

Okay, this is my favorite Chekhov's gun that doesn't go off in the movie, right?

Because this whole movie is just, I guess that's the joke.

He's putting Frosty up on the roof with a noose.

Yes.

A very clear...

Noose.

Okay.

Seems like you don't need specifically a noose.

Like, he's using a rope.

Like, the movie thinks that, like, if a rope touches a neck, it has to be in a noose.

It has to be

noose-shaped when it does.

But I thought that this was setting up a moment where he's caught in the rope and people think he's trying to hang himself, or Frosty falls off the rope, actually hanging Frosty.

Or that would have been great.

But

it seemed like a really lazy way to have the snowman hanging from a noose later when the daughter showed up.

Right.

Something.

But they did absolutely nothing.

It's just like, it's just like Dave from Props was hanging himself when they came in the room.

Yeah, and they were like, oh, is that the thing for later in the movie?

And he was like,

yep, it's for the snowman,

I guess.

Yep.

This is NASCAR driver who's, he's,

we don't really like him.

Well, also.

Just let me borrow his Christmas tree.

And also, like, he's, this is apparently something he's done every, he does this every year.

So him not knowing how one would do it is a weird beat as well.

Yeah.

And many people must fall off the roof every year doing dumbass Christmas stuff.

Oh, yeah.

Like, all iced up, and they're using pulleys and ropes for heavy shit.

It's a terrible idea.

Yeah.

Yep.

Well, I mean,

there is a survival of the fittest advantage.

That's what I was saying.

Thank you very much.

That's fair.

No, you're right.

Code was pretty good if you think about it.

Thank you.

So then we have Jamie Lee Curtis running into the stuttering lawyer from my cousin Vinny at the liquor store.

Yep.

And the bit here is that he knows her, but she doesn't remember where she knows him from, but she's trying to convince people to come to her party anyway, so she invites him to the party.

Yeah.

Now, our assumption at this point is that this is in classic farce fashion.

He's going to turn out to be some kind of drunk that was in love with her and her kill or whatever.

Something, yeah, to make it really awkward later.

It'll be worse than anything you can imagine.

It's nothing.

It's so, it's somehow the dumbest version of nothing you could conjure.

Exactly.

Hey, if you want to play along at home, podcast listener, go ahead and pause the show and write the dumbest denouement that could be for this character that also made the entire movie meaningless.

Right.

It's that.

Yep.

yep.

The movie will outdo you.

So, okay, so Tim's dragging his snowman onto his roof.

Dan Aykroyd sees him doing it because he stares out his window with binoculars on a regular basis.

And he says, kids, let's all go help Tim Allen.

So they run out there and Tim Allen's wrestling with the snowman and he can't get it up.

And Dan.

So that's

impossible.

No dick joke.

Okay, yeah, no.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I had to pause long enough for the dick joke to come out.

So

when you get to be my age, sometimes it takes a little longer to get to the dick joke than it used to take.

But the actroids all come out to see, and they're like, Can we help you?

And he obviously needs help, and he goes, No.

And they're like, Why not?

He's like, shenanigan purposes, and then falls off the roof.

So hard.

Yeah, so hard for Tim Allen to get hanged by this news.

Like, I've been

even showed us.

Blair shows up just as the post-mortem erection starts.

I mean, there's lots of funny stuff they could have done.

He's like, God bless us, everyone.

Yeah.

And Rike's like, I see where Joe get it.

It's literally better than this movie.

I wrote a better movie just now.

So, so, yeah, but now he's all caught in the rope.

The snowman's broken.

He's caught in the rope.

The ambulance and the fire truck show up within seconds.

They were just hanging out watching Tim Allen being like, I really hope he hangs.

They drive around the block really slow.

Oh, we'll be there in a second.

I was just going to rain there.

A lot of blood running into his head right now.

You think, no, okay, let's.

He's got a few more calendars to sell.

So they cut him down.

He falls, but not in a humorous way.

He just falls.

And then this is the part where they now have to explain, like Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis explain to the neighbors that Blair's coming home after all, and that's why they're trying to decorate their house at the last minute.

Right.

So then, like,

Dan Ackwright's like, well, all right, everybody, abandon your Christmas Eve plans to help these people who have been assholes to everyone throughout the entire movie.

And everybody's like, hooray.

Yeah, and one guy, one guy in the movie is like, hey, maybe bad behavior should have consequences.

And then

no.

No.

No.

Your mom loves you even if she voted for you not to have rights anymore.

Right.

You gotta, it's not about who you.

You have to vote in the next election.

You have to.

So, but yeah, but the neighborhood agrees that they'll do it for Blair.

Damn it.

He has to add a bunch of fictionalized shit to make us care.

And wasn't Blair there when your houses caught fire?

And wasn't she...

She's secretly Superwoman.

She fought off Doomsday that one time.

Come on.

He might as well say, come on, people.

This is what the movie's about.

Right, yes, right.

So, yeah.

So, but everybody agrees to

abandon whatever plans they may have had and do do this instead.

And then he turns to the cops and he's like, hey, you guys go to the airport and get Blair.

And they're like, well, we're on duty police officers.

We can't do that.

Relax.

You're in like a fancy suburb of Chicago.

Cops should have to do Uber stuff when there's nothing else.

Dan Aykroyd pulls out a handgun, shoots one of the neighbor's dogs.

There, all right, your job's done.

Can you give this guy a ride?

Wes is out of town.

You've got plenty of time.

You're fine.

Oh, no.

Get him on the way back.

Yeah.

But Akboy is like the fucking boss tweed of Christmas in this town.

I guess.

And that's made out to be a good thing here.

He gives this big speech and everybody's like, yeah, Christmas.

All right.

Right.

And the cops are like, I don't think we can go get her.

And he's like, do you want me to call the chief of police?

And then they're like, oh, well, I guess we have to shrink away from boss tweet.

But like.

Why would he be able to make that threat?

Look, the movie could have done anything they wanted.

They could have established that he's the mayor.

They could have established that he's the chief of police.

He could be the chief of police.

It doesn't fucking matter.

He's the head of a corrupt Christmas political machine with like the Daly family.

Weird.

Clearly.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So now everybody helps him put up his snowman and it starts snowing and people are showing up for the party and they're decorating as they go.

And then, like, it's hard for me to feel sorry for Tim Allen, but they clearly, they told him, hey, man,

let's make the everybody putting up decorations thing funny.

Just ham it up, and they pointed to the camera at him.

And the best he could come up with is pretending that these cinnamon things were blunts.

Oh, those were cinnamon things, like

sticks of cinnamon.

What are you supposed to do with those?

Stir your drink, your cider with them, I think.

But here's the thought that I had when he was doing the like pretending these are blunts thing.

He was a Coke dealer, which means he's done enough drugs.

I bet if you could go back in time and show Coke dealer Tim Allen that someday he'd be in a 2004 Christmas film called Christmas with the Cranks, where he pantomimes smoking a cinnamon stick, he'd kill himself to disrupt the time loop.

So, okay, and then we inject some of the dumbest and most meaningless stakes that this movie actually has.

In a movie with no stakes, this is probably the dumbest thing.

Blair recalls, her plane has landed early,

55 minutes early.

Now, the last time we heard from them, they were in Atlanta, right?

They were flying from Atlanta to Chicago and arrived 55 minutes early.

This is an hour and 55-minute flight, right?

So they lost, like, they got half the flights early.

Well, they ran into a really good wormhole about the house.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, right, right.

Right, but now the ticking clock is

slightly shorter.

Ticking early.

Right, but again, it doesn't make any fucking difference.

Yeah, right.

So, but Dan Dan Aykroyd has an idea.

He'll tell his son to call the cops and stall them, right?

Tell them to stall.

So, okay.

So, we cut to the airport.

Blair and Enrique are there, and they're like, you know, where are your parents?

And I wrote in my notes, you're an hour early.

Your ride just isn't there.

Chill at the fucking Cinnabon or something.

Yeah.

Why would you think they would already be there?

You just called them to tell them you would be an hour early.

From that airport.

Yeah, exactly.

And in fairness, my my mom's in the cell phone lot, like four hours ahead, ready to go in case there's a

really good picker-upper.

Yeah.

Because she loves me.

If she was a really good picker-upper, she wouldn't be in the cell phone lot.

She'd be in the airport.

Okay.

That's right.

When you really love somebody, you're at the fucking airport.

You're in the airport.

You buy a ticket to somewhere else so you can go inside.

So you can get inside.

Right, exactly.

Be in the airport.

That's what I do.

When I picked up Kelly, I was in the airport.

So, okay.

Jacksonville Airport.

Well, yeah, no, that's true.

That's really easier.

Push a fucking cow out of the way or whatever the fuck they have going on.

Do they even have security at the Jacksonville airport?

I bet when you go through security, they're like, put your laptop in the bag or don't fucking do it, jihadi.

And you're like, Trevor Lawrence, George.

And they're like, all right, go ahead.

Yeah.

How bad could it be?

Well, pretty bad.

So, okay.

Get tackled by a guy from Texas.

D'Amico Ryan's comes out and says, well, actually, I thought, you know, it's got good sportsmanship on that play.

So, all right.

So, then they look around, and the cops are standing there, and they've got a sign up for Blair and Enrique, but they don't know how to spell Enrique because that's a foreign name.

Classic.

One of these cops is Cheech Marin, by the way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

And why do any of this?

Why speed up the thing with the police escort?

Like, just don't.

Right.

Now the movie has to, they do that.

And then the movie's like, fuck, we sped up our own movie.

We have to slow down our own movie now.

Right, yes,

they're stalling into the plot.

Right.

Spike calls the cops on the copyright deal and he's like, hey, you have to stall them for a little while now.

And we're all like, the movie has to stall the movie now?

So

the next scene is a stalling scene.

Yes.

Yeah.

Dan Aykroyd steps in front of camera.

Hey, folks, would you mind putting your movie player at 0.25 speed?

We know you're probably watching this on Hulu with ads,

so we'd really appreciate it.

Yeah, his solution is to drive very slowly.

And I wrote in my notes, boy, is slow driving funny.

I hope we watch two full goddamn minutes of it.

Don't worry, we do.

God, and we watch Cheech Marin be sad visibly about being in this movie because he's now doing, like, I don't know, stalling work is all it says in the script.

and he has to do that.

You remember when I did other comedy in a vehicle, right?

Like, that was funny.

Like, Cheech Marin, like, he was clearly told, okay, so your character is going to drive slow, but you know, make it funny, ham it up, ham it up.

And he's like, it's just drive, I would just be driving.

Can I do it?

I usually do a lot more sophisticated.

I do like character-based humor in my movies.

It's a lot more sophisticated than this, usually.

That's fun.

So, okay.

Oh, meanwhile, at the party, my cousin Vinny Lawyer shows up, and nobody knows who he is.

Pin in

that.

At this point, I wrote in my notes, please be Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

Please be Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

He's not.

But I want you to know,

if he had been, this would have been your main feed episode Christmas Eve.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

So, but yeah.

And then, so now they've got all the lights set up on his house now.

So they try to plug him in, but there's too many lights and it shorts the whole neighborhood out.

Not how that works at all.

But here's how stupid this fucking movie is.

All the power goes out and then Dan Aykroyd's like, I know a guy from Con Ed.

And then we see the guy from Con Ed and then all the power's fixed.

The movie, what?

They're installing it.

Nothing.

That's it.

That's the whole thing.

Yeah, is Blair coming home to the movie?

We might as well watch

like, all right, Con Ed's going to be here late on next Friday, so we'll just stand here.

Yep.

Wait, when you say next Friday.

Okay.

So then then we cut to.

Honestly, that would have been great if there had just been like a lip-smacking, hand-swinging four minutes of the film.

Yeah.

Where you've just been like, so why do you get a blowjob?

It was originally a whole scene.

It was a whole separate sequence in the movie.

I thought the blowjob part was funny, and I asked them to keep it.

Oh, all right.

It was fun.

Interesting.

Behind-the-scenes fact.

Were you in second?

So then is Bill Murray nice?

Yeah, he's okay.

So then, so we cut to

Cheat and Jake.

They're pretending, now they're stalling by pretending to check out an imaginary crime, right?

We also,

we have this dumb fucking, I guess this is supposed to be humor.

So Jamie Lee Curtis, in order to keep Blair from knowing they were planning on going on the cruise, doesn't want Tim Allen to have such a tan.

So she's going to use makeup to reduce his tan, but she accidentally just painted his face white

with cream.

And then they take it off and they never reference it in the movie again because you're not tan anymore.

Yep.

Yeah.

So this movie's so fucking dope.

They might as well just be tearing pages out of the script going, and now that doesn't matter.

Yep.

And now that doesn't matter.

And now that doesn't matter.

When he sees himself with his face all white, he's like, oh, I look like my dead mother.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, he's making jokes about his dead mom in case there was any chance at redeeming qualities of this fucking character.

Opens up the window.

Looks like I'll be looking like Bev pretty soon.

Am I right?

I got Walt.

I don't like Walt very much.

Bev, you have cancer.

Bev, you're going into a void, Bev.

There's nothing.

There's nothing.

Eli.

Do you miss your dad?

Yeah.

Join me in the whisper corner.

Yes.

So then, so the cops are like they're checking on a pretend crime when they see a real crime.

God, this is so fucking lazy.

There's a.

It's like a theory of mind at this point, right?

It's just like crimes, criminals, windows, breaking,

brochuk, test,

love, window, brochures.

So yeah, but so but they tat they they catch a guy that's trying to steal a VCR.

That dates it a little bit, I think.

And then horse TV VCR.

So but they tackle the bad guy.

Blair screams for reasons that I don't understand.

And then we cut to Tim and Jamie Lee Curtis getting ready for the big party.

Jamie Lee Curtis turns to him and she says, Blair is never to know about the cruise.

And I'm like, why?

And she says, to me, she turns straight to the camera and she goes, for farce reasons.

For the movie.

Yep.

So the stakes are Blair coming home and seeing a tan, becoming suspicious and being like, wait, were you pre-tanning for a cruise that would block Christmas, but you did this anyway?

And here we are at a party, but you were gonna?

That's the stakes.

Apparently, those are the fucking stakes.

Because then Blair gets there and she's like, Dad, you have a tan.

And he's like, fuck you.

You have a tan.

Again, like, if it was a, I can't help but make it funnier.

So now they're reuniting.

The party's going off without a hitch so far.

But VCR thief is outside freezing to death in the cop car.

And he catches Spike on the way in and starts feeding him a bunch of bullshit about how he's starving and they should really let him go.

Yeah.

So he calls Spike over to the cop car.

This criminal's in the back of the cop car.

And apparently they let you control the power windows when you're in the back of the cop car.

And he rolls it down.

Yeah, you know.

And he's like,

I would abuse that for sure.

I'm just.

stop it.

Stop it.

Stop.

Stop resisting.

I'm just figuring out whatever two-note song I could do in that cup cart.

They're escorting me like Luigi Mangione.

You have no idea what this guy did with the windows.

We play jingle bells on it.

Eric Adams is here.

So

he's getting pardoned.

But he explains, though, that he's starving to death and the kid should let him go.

And so then the kid suddenly has the keys to the handcuffs, which is convenient.

And the kid says, okay, go in there and get some food, but then you have to come back to your cop car.

And he's like, yeah, no, sure, I'm totally going to do that, kid.

Now, look, that's a ruse by the burglar because this movie was made by Republicans.

But, like, even if it was true, you wouldn't go into the holiday party and grab some food.

You'd get away from the jailing that you're in.

Right, exactly.

Right.

So, yeah, but so we cut back into the party.

Fucking, we have this weird moment where the cousin, the lawyer from my cousin Vinny, this character's name is now Marty.

He

speaks Spanish and used to live in Peru, so him and Enrique become friends.

And they talk in Spanish 101 for a second.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

He goes, and I wrote my notes at this point, like, why the fuck do I care?

There are 15 minutes in this stupid movie.

Right?

But then, so they make friends.

The burglar goes off to steal some shit at the party.

And then

Cheech Marin and Jake Busey play the guitar

and they sing a

Christmas song.

You know, at some point it was like, Cheech, hey, you know the, like, you know mariachi guitar, right?

Because, like, you're

and he's like, yeah, I do.

Yeah, I do, but that's not the point.

I, it's, I do, that's, there's coincidence.

The car was made of.

Made American asshole shit.

So, yeah, so they sing, I wrote in my notes, who the fuck thought that this was what happened next in the movie?

Yeah, she's like, I was like, hey, I don't fucking care.

Right, right.

So, okay, so they finish the song, and Enrique proposes a toast, and he toasts to his new family or whatever.

And then everybody turns to Tim Allen, who's supposed to toast next.

But he can't think of a good toast.

He can't come up with a good toast because he's an ordinary old cuss who knows about the dung dung.

And you know your dad loves you.

He was knowing that.

And it sort of bad things out for.

Why does everything have to be so political?

Why can't we just talk about something else?

We're always having to talk about something else.

Hey, bud.

And you can do it, Hey, there's a noose outside.

Do you want to check it out?

So, yeah, so.

I did a lot of space work on my side of the mic.

I hope some of that came through.

I was really moving.

Well, the distance between your mouth and the microphone changed quite dramatically, so we assumed that there was something going on.

Yeah.

So, okay, but Jamie Lee Curtis tries to give a toast in his stead, but it's not enough because she's a woman.

And the true meaning of community is for there never to be consequences for bad behavior clearly yeah and this is the new conflict of the movie tim allen couldn't think of a nice follow-up toast and jamie lee curtis covers for him but she's a lady who shouldn't be really doing any toasts let alone important follow-up toasts so now that's the movie now that's that is the plot yeah yeah so then okay so we go we cut to the kitchen where tim allen's drinking champagne all by himself all mopey because he couldn't come up with a good toast is the plot.

And then J.B.

Lee Curtis is like, hey, you should have come up with a better toast is the plot.

And then they talk about what a prick he is.

Apparently, he still wants to go on the cruise, damn it.

He got this whole tan and everything.

Why would you not go on the cruise at this point, though?

I don't understand.

Like,

you did the Christmas Eve party for Blair.

Yes.

You're good to go.

You paid for that shit already.

Yeah.

Well, it's, well, now, fool that you are, Heath, this is so that we can see that he's a good guy after.

No, it's not.

That's not why he's a good guy.

We never see that.

It doesn't matter how you behave as long as you do a nice thing at the end.

But he said that.

It wouldn't even work.

And it's dumb.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So speaking of which, right, so he looks across the street and he sees that his neighbor Walt and

his cancer wife, whatever her fucking name, Bev,

are not at the paradise.

Marty knows

across the street in his field of vision.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And so he's like, I should bring them something.

He looks around, and there's a ham that they didn't end up using.

So now he's going to just re-gift the ham that Marty brought.

Okay.

Okay.

So, first of all, why are they not at the party?

Why are Walt and Bev across the street by themselves being all of them?

They're bummers.

You don't invite people to be able to get them.

They're all cancer across the street, right?

Yeah, no, he explains it.

He goes across the street

and he's like, so, hey, why aren't you at the party?

They're like, Well, you know, it's snowing, and

you suck.

You just fucking suck.

It's a whole

Bev can't cross streets anymore.

Yeah, yeah, well,

yeah, pin in that, right?

Right, yeah.

Keep in mind that we're about to establish that Bev isn't up to crossing a street because it's snowing, yes, right, right.

But he's like, Yeah, so I'm having a moral redemption arc asterisks.

No, I'm not, but uh, I'd like to re-gift you a ham here.

Have a canned ham to make up for your cancer death that's impending.

Yeah.

Well, and then just to make this even fucking worse, Walt is like, well, actually, I'm allergic to pork.

And, you know, my wife doesn't really eat a lot of meat.

Just fucking take it.

Anyway, I'm doing a thing.

I'm redeeming.

I'm redeeming.

It's the thought that counts.

Exactly.

He's like, but it's your problem anyway because I gave it to you now and I'm redeemed.

And they're like, I don't think it's.

Like the climate.

It's like what my generation did with the climate.

I wanted Walt to grab the ham and just lock eyes with him, walk to the garbage, and throw it in the garbage.

Throw it in there, team.

Thank you.

Now I threw it out for you.

Right.

It's a thoughtless gift that was just lying around anyway.

He was awkward about giving it to him.

He made them do all the work and shit.

It's just shitty.

So then he turns around and he sees like everybody in the house having fun at the party.

And there's this moment where, like, I thought it was supposed to be like, ah, everybody's a lot happier when I'm not around.

Boy,

sure is a noose already hanging from my house.

Gently puts the barrel in his mouth.

Yeah, right, right.

But no.

Or not gently.

It goes upwards.

We just get a drone shot up towards the stars.

Maybe he cracks a chip and he puts it in there.

Credits.

Yeah, oh, there you go.

So, yeah, so, but, but then he turns back to Walton Bev's house and he goes back over there and he decides to give them the cruise.

And he has to walk back across the street.

And I was like, please get hit by a truck or something.

I don't care.

Just shot by Luigi.

Whatever.

Any death is funny here.

So

Tim Allen, the real person.

The real human being.

Yeah, right.

Well, of course.

So, but the idea here is that now he can't go on the cruise.

So he gives it to his neighbors that he doesn't really like so that they can have a great trip one time before she dies, right?

That's supposed to be where we're going with this.

But as Eli just pointed out, she can't walk walk across the street.

I feel like parasailing is out.

Yes, even if she could walk across the street, none of this would work.

You can't just switch the names with like a crayon on plane tickets and whatever.

This is post-9-11.

That's not happening.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, there's no fucking way any of this works anyway.

Just cut to Bev with a chemo bag getting held up at the TSA.

Like, no, your name's not on it, and we can't do this.

You got to put it in the bag.

You have to have a bunch of really small chemo bags.

I have to have a bunch of really small chemo bags or a big plastic bag that goes on.

Why would that make it any different?

Super.

Bev is like, well, you know, I don't think my doctor would want me to be away from my treatment for 10 whole days.

And he's like,

stop making excuses.

Bev.

It's literally fucking all the stupid shit plays out.

Come on, Bev.

We both know that you've got no chance.

You've got no chance, Bev.

Yeah.

Let's go fucking see some dolphins because you're going.

You're gone.

And he's like, look, I didn't.

You're a corpse.

I'm looking at a corpse right now.

And I'd like to be next to one on a boat.

That's all I'm asking you.

Yeah.

40 years of marriage, Bev.

That threesome with our son and this cruise.

This is all I'm ever asking.

Jesus Christ.

But that's

the other thing that's what they said.

Hey, Eli.

Okay.

Yeah.

Whisper him?

Whisper him?

Whisper him?

So, but they decide that ultimately that they're going to go.

And

this is, I guess, supposed to showcase his humanity,

but he's literally sacrificed nothing.

Yeah.

He could not

do the thing no matter what.

He's sacrificed nothing.

He's inconvenienced people who probably can't go on the cruise.

It is the perfect emblem of a generation that thinks they can redeem themselves by like chucking you on the shoulder after a lifetime of abuse and homophobia.

Yep.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

There's a great bit where like as they're leaving, Walt is like, hey, on balance, balance, you're still an asshole.

You don't expect me to start being nice to you at this point, do you?

And he's like, no, I'm fucking terrible.

Are you kidding me?

No, no one would ever change in this movie.

There could be no change or difference or anything.

Right.

So he goes back to his house.

And hey, guess what?

Ned is stuck on the roof.

He's freezing to death.

Who's Ned?

Who the fuck?

Why was he on the roof?

Who's the roof?

Fuck you.

That's why.

Yeah.

So then we cut back inside.

The burglar is upstairs robbing the house, and Spike comes into apparently Tim and Jamie Lee Curtis's bedroom.

Not sure what he was looking for there.

Looking for some JLC panties.

I get it.

Okay, all right.

But he catches Spike stealing from him,

and then he runs downstairs to get the cops.

So the burglar tries to get out through the window, but damn it if Santa isn't there to hit the burglar with an umbrella.

Made of an anvil, apparently.

And then he's like, remember?

Yeah.

Because

an umbrella is the beginning of the movie.

You remember earlier there was a guy selling umbrellas?

He was dressed like Santa.

Remember the second scene in the movie?

Yes, right.

And

apparently that Santa was

the

stuttery lawyer from my cousin Vinny, who is now dressed like Santa.

We haven't seen that happen in the movie, though.

Right?

Like, he showed up at the party dressed like just a dude, and now he's dressed as Santa.

Yes.

One is left to assume that he dresses like Santa to fight crime.

Right.

Yeah, right.

Like he went into a fucking phone booth and came out dressed like Santa.

Yeah.

But then he leaves.

The cops get the burglar again.

And Jamie Lee Curtis comes out and she's like, hey, I heard what you did in that last scene.

You're totally redeemed.

And we're like, is he?

Because I don't think he is.

Yeah, I once read a tweet that said everything boomers think is a firmly held belief is lead poisoning.

That's how I feel about this movie.

It's lead poisoning the movie.

Yep.

Yep.

And then as

they stand out and they look back on their house and everything, and Jamie Lee Curtis says, skipping Christmas.

What a stupid idea.

And title, apparently.

But then she's like, maybe we skip next year, though.

She has like a quick switcheroo right at the last second.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wanted the director to run out and be like, with the cranks.

So yeah, but then they back away and we see that Marty is Santa Claus.

What?

The whole time.

Like the literal Santa.

He literally flies off in his car sled.

Yep, with a, with, with reindeer and everything.

Leans out the window.

Fuck you trying to understand this movie.

I guess.

Yeah, right.

So with that bizarre goddamn moment, and again, no actual Denuan, like there was no point where anybody ever had to deal with a consequence to their their decision or grew as a person or as a character nothing that ever nothing ever fell apart the daughter was fooled there was never a reason to fool her with nothing having been resolved we're gonna bring bonus episode number 97 to a merciful close once again a huge thanks to all of you for helping make the show go if you have questions comments or cinematic suggestions you can email godolphmoviesgmail.com tim robertson handles our social media our theme song was written and performed by ryan slotting movie drafts on mars all the other music was written and performed by our audio engineer, Morgan Clark.

If you like what you hear, hear more by following the link in the show notes for this episode.

Thanks again for giving us a check of your life this month for Heath Enright and Eli Bosnick.

I'm No Lucious, promising to work hard to earn another chunk next month.

Until then, we'll leave you with a breakfast club close.

Jake Busey went on to star in Roadhouse 2 Last Call,

and Jamie Lee Curtis focused on yogurt for a while because she hated this experience.

Ned died of exposure a few hours later.

Luther died of COVID when he refused to get a vaccine.

Yeah.

All right, so I just want to point out that I am doing this one in protest, this first interstitial in protest, for the

unfounded relation that you draw between this movie and National Lampoon movies.

They're the same movie.

How many of you are that meme that's like they're the same picture?

Yep.

Well, three of the six of them.

Corporate.

Three of the six of them.

Chevy Chase and Tim Allen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, no, Chevy Chase sucks.

It does suck.

It doesn't suck like Tim Allen sucks, though, right?

Like Tim Allen, we can at least agree, sucks on a completely different level than Chevy Chase sucks.

In both cases, I don't get why everybody loves that.

They're like, that's so funny, though.

Like, especially Chevy Chase, even more so, I don't get why he's like revered so much.

I think it's like advanced astronomy to me, which is that I've reached the limits of my understanding.

I just know that they both suck.

So the differences between them is beyond what I can comprehend.

It's like dividing by infinity.

Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah, exactly.

Sure.

0.999.

No, zero.

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