Jingle All the Way (1996)

This is one of my favourite Christmas movies. Sinbad reminds me a lot of a cook I used to work with in a kitchen.

Not so bad.

Because there's no God.

Society needed to balance Madea's Christmas movie with something redneck.

Classic.

I watched this movie once, because it had the boy would would be playing Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace.  Once was more than enough.

My idea of a Christmas movie is Die Hard (already have my tix for Christmas Eve), or pretty much anything from Shane Black that isn't The Last Action Hero.

Die Hard is about a man who is trying to reunite his family at Christmas by overcoming near insurmountable adversity, and manages to not only save Christmas for himself, but for almost everyone else who worked at Nakatomi Tower.

Jingle all the Way is about a thoughtless father who was too preoccupied with himself to take half an hour out of his day to buy a toy when he was supposed to, and is now in a panic because his son is going to be upset and his wife is going to blame him.  He lies to his customers at work, he lies to his wife and son at home, he lies to the police when trying to buy a black market toy.  

As someone who worked five Christmas seasons at Toys R Us, I encountered the IRL version of Arnold a great many times on Christmas Eve, and it never ended happily ever after.  There were usually five or six of them wandering the isles in the delusional hope that the Green Dragon Zord or a Nintendo 64 had been hidden behind the stacks of black Barbies, board games or even the diapers.  They wouldn't leave until we told them the registers were being shut down, or in a few extreme cases, threatened to call the police and have them arrested for trespassing.

RIP Sinbad.