Magnum Mania!

My list is fairly short, and offbeat . . .

- Die Hard
- Year Without a Santa Claus
- The Sound of Music (that's a Christmas movie for me)
- Lethal Weapon
- The Ref
- Operation: Silent Night
- Mad About You - Met Someone
- Scrubs - My Own Personal Jesus
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Amends
-

ConchRepublican wrote:My list is fairly short, and offbeat . . .

- Die Hard
- Year Without a Santa Claus
- The Sound of Music (that's a Christmas movie for me)
- Lethal Weapon
- The Ref
- Operation: Silent Night
- Mad About You - Met Someone
- Scrubs - My Own Personal Jesus
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Amends
-

I love both the Die Hard series and the Lethal Weapon series. I agree that LW1 works great as a Christmas movie.

And, I'm a Mad About You fan too -- I should add that ep to my annual viewing.

I ended up watching:

Three's Company: Three's Christmas (1977)
Scrooge (1951)
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
WKRP: Bah Humbug (1980)
Starman: The Gift (1986)

Surprisingly, I didn't see any Magnum. Oh well, there's always next year.

Mad Kudu Buck wrote: WKRP: Bah Humbug (1980)
.

"As God is my witness, I thought reindeer could fly."

I was watching a Christmas themed Honeymooners sketch called "Santa and the Bookies" on Amazon Prime and guess who shows up? Elisha Cook as one of the bookies! I swear he was in EVERYTHING!

This year I watched "A Christmas Carol (1951)", "WKRP: Bah, Humbug", and the perennial Christmas favourite, "Aliens (1986)" - a heartwarming tale of a family of aliens who eat a bunch of colonists and learn the true meaning of Christmas: nuclear annihilation.

Mad Kudu Buck wrote:This year I watched "A Christmas Carol (1951)"

I watched that this year too, for the first time. It was pretty creepy, but the original story is a little creepy and strange. (I read the book for the first time last year.) Even so, I thought it was a good version of the story.

MagnumsLeftShoulder wrote:I was watching a Christmas themed Honeymooners sketch called "Santa and the Bookies" on Amazon Prime and guess who shows up? Elisha Cook as one of the bookies! I swear he was in EVERYTHING!

Hi MagnumsLeftShoulder,
I don't recall seeing that one. Is it one of those "75 Lost Episodes" that Gleason culled from Honeymooner skits on his 1950's variety show?
By the way, do you or anyone else here have favorite New Years Eve set episodes? For the life of me I can't think of any other than "Blackadder: Back and Forth".
You would think it would be a natural setting for a drama, with characters reflecting back on the past year.
Around the year end holidays I try to watch the New Years set "The Horn Blows at Midnight"(1945) starring Jack Benny and WC Fields immortal "The Bank Dick"(1940).
The great comic character actor Franklin Pangborn appeared in both.
When I was a kid channel 5 in NYC would run the Benny flick at 2 AM on New Years Day. My brothers and I would sneak down to watch it and raid the fridge after our parents went to sleep. Though I was always assigned by my older brother Greg to "lay chickie" halfway up the stairs on the landing, in order to keep a sharp eye out in case our
father woke up.
I guess watching it yearly is sort of like having a permanent touchstone to a earlier time, with the family and friends you had then. Which probably applies to many of the movies/TV shows you other posters have listed on this thread.

My wife and I watch “Indiscreet,” starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, every New Years.

Hi guys,
My wife and I watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation every Christmas eve. This practise dates back to when our two sons were kids. So it brings back some nice memories. Now we watch with a few Christmas beers. Typically we giggle and guffaw right through the movie. I generally fall off the couch when Cousin Eddie in anticipation of the carving of the turkey says ..... " Save the neck for me Clarke".

This year I persuaded my wife to also watch "Operation: Silent Night" . Though chock full of great moments of comedy. My favourite scene is where Higgins remarks to T.C. "You called me Jonathan" and they walk out of frame together with T.C.'s arm around the shoulder of Higgins. One of the most touching moments in the whole series in my view.

(alphabetical order, not necessarily Christmas related)

Movies

- The Apartment
- Asterix cartoons
- Bad Santa 1+2
- Batman Returns
- Ben-Hur
- Bridget Jones 1+2
- A Charlie Brown Christmas
- Christmas Vacation
- The Curse of The Jade Scorpion
- Die Hard
- Down With Love
- The Grinch
- Home Alone 1+2
- How The Grinch Stole Christmas
- Irma La Douce
- It's A Wonderful Life
- Lethal Weapon
- Nightmare Before Christmas
- The Pink Panther
- Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
- Star Wars Classic Trilogy
- Uncle Buck
- various Disney Classics
- When Harry Met Sally
...
- (probably others I don't remember right now)

TV

- Magnum P.I. - Operation Silent Night
- Wonder Woman - Deadly Toys
- Various Friends Christmas episodes (most notably The One With The Holiday Armadillo)

My goodness, no love for: Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol...I guess you have to be of Baby Boomer age to appreciate the classics.....

Actually that was one of the "new entries" of this year (never seen before) but I didn't know where to find it.
It seems to be available online, I will give it a try.

To my previous list I must add When Harry met Sally.

I don't recall seeing that one. Is it one of those "75 Lost Episodes" that Gleason culled from Honeymooner skits on his 1950's variety show?

Yes, it's one of the "lost episodes". I watched it on Prime last year. The classic Christmas episode with the little toothpick (or was it matches?) box is much better.

My Christmas viewing this year was weird because I decided to watch some stuff I'd never seen before. BIG mistake!
1.Holiday in Handcuffs--Melissa Joan Hart and Mario Lopez in a Hallmark type movie. Somebody told me it was good, but that somebody was wrong because it was awful.
2. Nine Lives of Christmas--Brandon Routh Hallmark movie. It wasn't bad, but could have been much better. Basically, it's Superman gets a cat and a girlfriend, but that's probably being generous because the "girlfriend" was a lousy actress.
3. Holiday Affair--the Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum version. I've seen this before, but this time it irritated me. Guy with no job and no prospects puts the moves on some other guy's girl. What kind of message is that for Christmas??
4. Unlikely Angel--Dolly Parton and Roddy McDowell TV movie from the late 90s. I watched it when it premiered and remembered it being better than it was. It also starred the now infamous Allison Mack!
5. The Great Rupert--Jimmy Durante movie from 1950. This was probably the best of the stuff I'd never seen before. "Rupert" is a trained squirrel! It's a weird little movie, but sort of cute.
6. Bell, Book, and Candle--Jimmy Stewart's a book publisher and Kim Novak's a witch. I've seen this a bunch of times and I always try to watch it around Christmas because the first half of it takes place at Christmas and Kim says to her cat/familiar "why don't you get me him for Christmas?" referring to Jimmy Stewart. It's a great line.
7. The Knight Before Christmas--a really bad Hallmark wannabe movie on Netflix starring Josh Whitehouse and Vanessa Hudgens. It was a cute idea, but had some of the worst acting and dialogue I've ever seen. I can't even believe I watched the whole thing. Whitehouse was decent as the medieval time traveling knight, though and I could not stand him on Poldark.
8. Garfield Christmas Special--it's still awesome 30+ years later!
9. The Muppets Christmas Carol--Michael Caine is Scrooge. Seen this a couple of times and its my favorite version.

Basically my experiment with "new" stuff was a failure so next year, I'll be returning to the tried and true classics.

As for New Year's Eve, I've watched The Thin Man a few times because it's always on TCM. It's on again this year, too.

My wife and I watch “Indiscreet,” starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, every New Years.

This is one of a few Cary Grant films I haven't seen. Why is it a New Years thing? Does it take place on New Years?

MagnumsLeftShoulder wrote:

My wife and I watch “Indiscreet,” starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, every New Years.

This is one of a few Cary Grant films I haven't seen. Why is it a New Years thing? Does it take place on New Years?

Yes: at the end of the movie, they make a plan to toast each other at midnight on New Year's Eve.