Christmas – demis lyall-wilson

Articles Tagged with: Christmas

December 17, 2013

Top 10 Reasons Why ‘Die Hard’ Is A Better Christmas Movie Than ‘Love Actually’

There comes a point during every Christmas holiday where an inevitable war for the remote is fought – a battleground nobody wants to speak about at any other time of the year, one which divides families, ruins relationships, and regularly results in bloodshed. You know what I’m talking about: The Die Hard vs Love Actually Christmas Movie Stand-Off. Naturally, I have my own feelings on the matter, and despite you likely having yours, I’ve decided it’s time we all put this matter to bed for once and for all, proving (most decisively) that Die Hard is by far a more superior Christmas film than Love Actually:

Case in point : the two very different Rickmans…

1. The Rickman Factor

Both films are blessed by the inclusion of Alan Rickman, but he’s WAY cooler as Hans Gruber than as weak, womanising Harry. Also, Hans is far more Christmasy – he even performs a memorable Santa impersonation at one point.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

I can’t even… I just can’t…

2. You (Mostly) Get A Break From Ridiculously Insipid Child-Actors

Christmas entertainment is vicious time where practically everything on television is packed full of horrible child-actors. There are only a few insignificant seconds of terrible child-acting in Die Hard, as opposed to Love Actually, with entire sub-plots, musical numbers, and several minutes packed full of children dressed up as cute animals. Eww.

3. Die Hard Embraces Multiculturalism

In McTiernan’s opus, characters with English as their second language went to a lot more effort to ensure they could directly communicate with people of other cultures (even if it happened to be down the barrel of a gun). In the Kurtis film, the same rely on shrugs, sheepish grins, and don’t seem to care about blatant mistranslation and the significant cultural offence this may or may not cause those around them. I’d call that “naughty” not “nice”, as opposed to Die Hard’s foreigners who took the time and came prepared.

4. “The Quarterback Is Toast”

The only toast you ever get in Love Actually involves cheap, miserly-poured sparkling, often accompanied by depressing moaning or attempts at infidelity.

5. Die Hard Has Better Retro Value

While Love Actually may have Bill Nighy, it does not contain any actors from legendary 80’s classics including The Breakfast Club, Ghostbusters and Magnum PI. It doesn’t even try. That’s just not in the spirit of the season.

6. Love Actually Isn’t Actually A Christmas Movie

The complete chronology of events in Die Hard take place during the one, long Christmas Eve. Love Actually is spread all over the calendar, some of the earlier scenes quite possibly taking place closer to Halloween than late December, the final airport montage obviously taking place the following Easter*

( I can’t back this last point up, though I swear there’s someone holding a toy rabbit in one shot.)*

7. Die Hard = Less-Questionable Casting

The producers of Die Hard managed to cast actors far more believable at playing authority figures and Americans. Also, the new associations between Hobbits and pornography invoked by Love Actually doesn’t sit right with me at all – Christmas gets enough midget action as it is.

8. More Explosions

There are no explosions in Love Actually. Not one. There isn’t even a helicopter crash.
Seriously. It’s like they’ve completely forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.

9. Stronger Female Role-Models

Love Actually is brimming with old-school 1950s female stereotypes, whereas 100% of Die Hard’s major female characters represent a much more modern approach to gender roles (eg. Holly and her high-powered executive position within Nakatomi, versus Natalie who doesn’t fight back at all after being sexually harassed and unfairly dismissed from her job).

Okay, okay… to be fair, while there is only one major female character in Die Hard, she still kicks more ass than half the Love Actually women. Further, I’ll put $50 on the table right now that says Bonnie Bedelia would beat Keira Knightly in a straight-up fist-fight. Think about it.

10. Die Hard Has A Better Ending

In its closing minutes, Love Actually (disrespectfully) brandishes a Denise Richards cameo, a terrible non-Chrismas Beach Boys song and truly horrendous and tacky heart-shaped graphic montage. A travesty, as opposed to Die Hard – a classy ‘Let It Snow’ Christmas play-off as the camera pulls out over the mist, mere seconds after this shot :

In Conclusion…

I think that’s all settled then, don’t you?

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December 23, 2012

The Day After The Night Before

Hangovers are glorious poetry; the ultimate display of causality if ever anyone needed a lesson on the topic. You drink hard : you suffer.

The
end of the year is always the best time for observing this wondrous
beast. Emotions running high. Departures. Reflection on the year that
was and the one to come. Plenty of chances too – every Friday and
Saturday and often at least two or three of the others booked out for
something end-of-yearsie for all of December.

Example: my Friday night. After eleven months working on The Great Gatsby at Animal Logic, I not only had my final day at work, but it also coincided with the last working day before the holidays: people were thirsty,
myself very much included. I won’t bore you with the blow-by-blow
account of what followed – we’ve all been there – but suffice to say the
night ended shortly after I stumbled quietly out of a crashed party, at
least five different alcohols in my system (“Don’t mix”, they say…)
having just completed a stirring karaoke rendition of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper“.
Others were less fortunate to have finished up at such dizzying
heights. Reports are only still just coming in on the three guys who
legged it back to work to pick up their cycles, foolishly riding home
drunk at 1am, deciding to do a few jumps off one of the granite-lumped
cliffs in Centennial Park. Naturally, this ended up pretty much as
expected, provided you expected one of them to end up being rushed to
hospital, unconscious, where he’s been receiving cosmetic surgery on his
face ever since (having tried to eat a mouthful of face, dirt and
handle-bar during the inevitable it’s-all-fun-and-games-until moment).

His
Saturday hangover was definitely worse than mine, I’d bet, but I still
took my punishment in the form of a killer headache from late-morning
through til when I started on the wine again before dinner. (Fair enough
– mixing drinks was bad enough, but butchering a George Michael classic
in public is unacceptable.) Of course, I ate through the tail end of it
without any further whining.

If only everything was as
simple as that: mix your drinks, take the punishment, eat an egg and
move on. It’s much murkier waters when you start looking at the other
stuff. Like how to move on from the post-gig hangover. You work on a
creative project for that length of time and no matter how you felt
about it at the time, once you’re suddenly on the outside there’s that
momentum of habit that still has you waking up thinking you’re heading
back to your desk tomorrow to open up that shot with the curtain issues
in it again. Or how you escape the lingering dark emotions that come of
deciding to cut a lot of ties and move cities: no matter how fun the
adventure, you’ve still got the fee of the guilt or the sense of loss or
the revoltingly poor timing (as you discover you’ve only just made a
couple of the greatest friends ever right at the point that you’re
putting an ocean between the lot of you). A bacon-and-egg roll can cure a
lot of ills, but not those.

And I like a hangover because
there’s punishment where it’s due. Fair’s fair. Not like someone in
their mid-thirties contemplating perhaps never meeting Mr-or-Mrs Right.
Or six-year-old kids gunned down in a classroom. Or my three unrelated
friends who’ve parents have died of cancer in the last few months, with
two others’ currently on the staying-strong-but-counting-down
waiting list. Cancer is swift justice for what, exactly? It’s
depressing, because it’s unfair, and unfair because it seems to be an
effect without a cause.

That’s why you really have to respect a
good, pounding hangover. At least – eight hours down from shooting
straight tequila after a few rounds of beers, wine and a neat Glenlivet – you know where you stand.

And you’re (mostly) cool with that. Especially if there’s bacon.

December 12, 2012

On Hating Christmas…

A few days ago I casually mentioned to a friend that I did, quite passionately, dislike the festive season. I hadn’t set out to shock, just throwing it in there to add a bit of context to the additional stress it’ll no doubt bring to these next few busy weeks, mostly spent preparing for an impending move overseas. But the depth of the horror displayed on her face – mouth hung open like I’d taken a swipe at the core of her very being – reminded me again that perhaps I shouldn’t let that tidbit slip so freely. The conversation stopped, I was forced to explain.

I think the annual loathing boils down to a few basic points of personal history

1. It’s somebody else’s holy day – why am I celebrating it?

My family isn’t religious. We don’t even pretend to call ourselves religious but then not practice. Religion wasn’t actively discouraged during my childhood; it just never came up. Once Santa was out of the way, and once we’d all grown to an age where we’d essentially agreed not to give each other presents anymore (mostly borne of the lack of teenage finances) then suddenly all that was left for December 25th was an opportunity to bicker. Add alcohol, bickering turns to open warfare. No thanks.

2. The pressure to get the day right far outweighs the payoff.

Every Christmas-celebrating family has it’s own traditions, rules and regulations as to how the day (or days) must proceed. We must be awake by 6am (no matter how much we drank last night). We must eat a hot roast for lunch (no matter how much we ate yesterday, or no matter how hot the Australian summer is for such a summer-inappropriate menu). We must be happy and nobody must spoil the day (no matter how many big personalities are shoved under the same roof, or their brattish children). There’s too much expectation. Some years it’s met, sure, but I find myself sitting there each year feeling imposed upon by Christmas like it’s some freaking-out Bridezilla making unrealistic demands on the wedding planner at the last minute and having a full-blown hissy fit.

3. I have major baggage about those bloody carols.

This is by far the worst offender for me. In a former career as a professional piano player, some of my fragmented income required rehearsing local choirs several nights per week. It came as no surprise to me that these groups wanted to get in early and learn a few decent choral arrangements of the popular carols in the weeks leading up to Christmas. That would be fine, but in reality it wasn’t weeks. Months. Seriously. One year, the Christmas repertoire rehearsals started – and I kid you not – on August 10th. The other choirs followed one by one, and by mid-September, I was rehearsing Christmas material on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights, three hours at a time. Insanity. Then of course, the other corporate/commercial work kicked in around late November as you’d expect, filling up all the rest of the days with various other Christmas functions, parties, televised performances (live AND pre-taped), so that by Christmas Eve itself, I’d quite easily heard and played the same twenty regular carols several hundred times each. At least. (And I’m not even going to start tallying all the other times and places you hear carols – shops, television, films, door-to-door, people whistling in cars…) And that’s only one year. Next year, the same twenty songs. Over, and over. I wouldn’t mind so much if they rotated the carols the way the Chinese rotate their Year Of The animal each year. But that’s not how it works, and now, years later, no matter how many years there are between me and professional piano playing, I’m scarred.

I don’t mean to go all Bah! Humbug! on people. Mostly, I keep it to myself, except for the rare moments where I meet a kindred spirit intent on sharing. To so many people – my wife included – the day itself holds so much magic, religious or not, and I certainly don’t want to be the one to crush that in them.

But what about us: the Christmas-hating minority? What are we supposed to do? Destined to block our ears to all the rampant fa-la-la-la-la-ing, chomping down on a hot, fatty roast in 32-degrees-Celcius, and plaster on those smiles each year wishing people Merry Christmas like you’re actually feeling merry?

There’s an island that I’m sure many will want to round us all up and dump us on; so long as it’s got a pool, a bar, and somewhere to read a secular book, sign me up!