It’s hard to overstate just how barely the Kirk Cameron “materialism-is-good” explainer Saving Christmas qualifies as a movie. Meanwhile, Stuart talks about his gogurt buying habits, Elliott dramatizes Frank Sinatra’s sexual habits, and Dan is genuinely disturbed by this movie’s theology.
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Wikipedia synopsis for Saving Christmas
Movies recommended in this episode:
The Squid and the Whale
Arrival
Don’t Breathe
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Flop House Christmas opening theme by John M. Davis and closing theme by Jon Biegen.
REMINDER: Alamo Brooklyn LIVE SHOW tickets go on sale MONDAY.
Always great to get into the Clausmas season and celebrate the birth of Santa on the 25th.
So, on the presidents podcast, does Grover Cleveland get one episode or two, since he seems to count as two presidents — For some reason.
Curious about the Jonah Hex story Elliott mentioned in which his embalmed corpse kills somebody? You can find it it Secret Origins #21 (dated December 1987) – the comic also features the secret origin of Black Condor!
YES! I asked you guys to cover this when it was released! This is honestly the highlight of my week.
I don’t live a particularly productive or interesting life.
Thanks for covering this. You hit on everything that I thought was terrible about this…film(?): The overreaching of Cameron’s explanations, the coding of Christian as being a bit “Jewish,” and perhaps my favorite part, the “comic relief” scene where the actors put mugs in front of their mouths because they clearly hadn’t written any dialogue for the scene and wanted to dub it in later.
I wanted to point out a YouTube reviewer named “Say Goodnight Kevin” [I am not him nor do I know him] who is a “believer” but reviews Christian Cinema with the same standards as a regular Hollywood release. The results are not pretty but often hilarious. He is somebody with an actual stake in Christian Cinema and wants it to be good, but he is constantly frustrated by the preachiness, straw man arguments, and poor production values of the genre.
http://tinyurl.com/hjzz2sy
“Nobody puts baby Jesus in the corner!” –Christian
Elliott, you missed the best segue that would have been Segue Of The Year when Stewart mentioned Justine Bateman’s boyfriend died in Family Ties. In fact, it was Matthew Perry who was the boyfriend of the girl in Growing Pains who died. Growing Pains, starring Kirk Cameron who was in this movie. That’s how you do a segue.
Saint Nicholas slapping Arius (though possibly apocryphal) is a great part of Christian theological history for what it’s worth.
Elliot, you made a claim that you thought you might be the first non-Christian person to watch this film, but unfortunately, I was here first. I am Jewish and I hosted an “Exploitation Movie Marathon” featuring movies such as “The Hebrew Hammer”, “Shaft”, and “Santo And Blue Demon Vs The Monsters”. Part of this marathon also included Saving Christmas. I watched it with a group of my friends who are ALL Catholic.
Now granted, this film is not aimed at Catholics, it’s aimed at Protestants, but they still felt the need to apologize to me all the way through it. “I swear we’re not like this” “Well duh, I’ve known you for 7 years I think this would have popped up by now if you were”.
I like bad movies but oh my god is this movie truly terrible. There were redeeming parts such as fearing for the future of the human race during the break dancing to Christian hip-hop scene. Additionally redeeming was the part where I curiously asked my friends “So do all of you have a Christmas that extravagant? Because Kirk Cameron has 3 chickens and engraved chairs”. They seem puzzled and begged we move on to the next film (which turned out to be a Ralph Bakshi film so they regretted it).
Have you ever watched a film that made you uncomfortable because other people felt like they had to apologize to you for showing you it?