The Worst Idea Of All Time - REVIEW: Christmas With The Kranks

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

This was originally a pay-walled episode available only to Patreon supporters. Please consider if you can #PayTheBoiz at patreon.com/join/TWIOAT.Jamie Lee-Curtis? Sure! 3/4s of a scene dedicated to Tim Allen not wanting to donate to charities on Christmas? WHY NOT! This is a movie brought to you by the mind of John Grisham(!) and starring a man who thought it'd be a brilliant idea to do a massive coke trade inside an International Airport. It also featuring Worst Idea's own Arden Myrin, fellon Felicity Huffman and Ghostbuster Dan Aykroyd. Plus that old yuletide trope, a woman dying of cancer. What’s not to love?! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this friendly little town, there lived an enchanting family named the Cranks. Every year, they would celebrate Christmas together. Merry Christmas! Until the year their daughter Blair left for the holidays. Won't be the same. Then, Luther got a brilliant idea. We skip Christmas. Christmas with the Cranks.

Hello Patreon pals and welcome along to this, the Patreon pal Christmas Treehouse, where we cobble together a homestead for those of us who want to get away from friends or family or maybe ourselves to climb on into the hut and talk about the best and the worst of what the holiday season has to offer. I am Guy Montgomery broadcasting to you live from New Orleans, Louisiana, joined as always by our nearest and dearest, Tim Batt. This is pretty good, man. Well done.

You really grabbed the reins on that thing i did uh not unlike santa would gray grab the the reins on a reindeer is that why they're called reindeer because you grabbed the reins it could well be reins is spelled with a g i believe and reindeer does not have a g or is rains not spelled with a G? These are the questions that we dare to ask and answer. Do you know rain is R-E-I-N? Reindeer, a deer that can be corralled and ridden or driven. What is this?

You've gone to New Orleans and there's like Christmas-flavored scat poetry just falling out. Yeah, I'm embracing the spirit of Christmas and the spirit of the Big Easy. And what better way to embrace the spirit of the Big Easy than by holing up in my accommodation to watch the 2004 American Christmas comedy film

Christmas with the Cranks, a Tim Allen and jamie lee curtis vehicle based on a novel written by uh john grisham yeah dude yeah in 2001 so there was a lot of stuff going on ripe terrain for john grisham to write about being an american author famous for like international espionage novels but he's like you know what what if an older couple had their daughter move away from home their one begotten child and then they decided to be assholes to everyone around them it oh well i'm glad that this is your take on the film um because i thought that for as much as i did not enjoy the movie and thought that like my god i've i've sat through some films where the the leads lack chemistry but tim allen and jamie lee curtis yeah they get off to a cold start and

things did not improve from there it's like yeah they are obviously in the same movie but their dialogue when they're the scene opens with they say goodbye to their daughter and then they're in the car and he's got to pick up some Christmas things for uh Tim Allen does for Jamie Lee Curtis in the driving rain and like you could drive a goddamn bus in between their lines of dialogue when they're meant to have sort of is it playful bando just it just seemed like a pretty unhappy relationship at that point it was no good eh which kind of um in a weird unintended way i think really strengthens the storyline of why they're so bummed that their daughter left because you know you read about these couples that sort of

hang together because the child's there, and then as soon as the child's gone, it's like, oh, fuck, you again. I feel like that's what was going on here. But to be fair, I mean, this is a Tim Allen movie. Jamie Lee Curtis shouldn't be here. And I was quite baffled by the budget of this film, which was $60 million. And I just hope and pray and think that probably she got a lot of that to get across the line to do this flight i feel like that went into uh quite

a lot of stunt work the stunts don't come off but um i felt like they were also for when the movie was released which is 2004 they were playing around with quite a lot of cgi so you've got to imagine like i mean i guess the cgi people they earn their money same as anyone does but i feel like in the earlier days of cgi they're going oh yeah we're gonna need 20 million dollars to to make that frozen cat's eyes blink and it was the worst thing i've ever seen yeah and the studio goes that is so much money the idea is it's a really small thing surely couldn't you do it for 10 million you can't can't make the cat's eyes blink for 10 million

um i reckon you're dead right that's good and i reckon somehow it's an animation studio that tim allen started with a couple of nights i yeah i like i was so interested watching it because i was thinking of home improvement and how i i suppose like it's their nostalgia tinted memories but how i enjoyed watching home improvement i sort of thought to me i was a pretty good time then and then you learn more about the man himself and you're like this guy's no good but i didn't have that context when this movie was released and so accordingly sort of tried to watch it without it but your idea that these guys decided to skip christmas and become assholes to those around them um i at the risk of upsetting the apple cart here sided initially with the cranks i was like

good on them fucking 23 years of abiding these christmas traditions putting on a party their daughter leaves they finally have license to to take control of the holiday and do what they want and it's just like spurned by i know it's in indiana like a biggish city but spurned by this you know small town small-minded like uh passive-aggressive peer pressure where they're like oh and i i felt sympathetic for them i was like just put someone else through a christmas party on christmas eve these guys don't have to do it i've done it for 23 years yeah just literally take responsibility accept that other people will make decisions that don't you know allow for exactly what you want and say have a great cruise guys you've earned this you've raised a beautiful daughter who by the way

plays an outsized role in the community like everyone in the community wants to get close to blair um we love blair we like yeah and then eventually like eventually while the entire neighborhood is sort of turning the screw on the cranks and they're being mean to them because they're skipping christmas the cranks respond in kind and like tim allen's meant to have this sort of lovable everyman quality but it's hard to to watch him on screen now without thinking that he's an arsehole as soon as he heard as soon as he heard his daughter was uh dating a peruvian who she meets uh with the peace corps in peru he he looks at jamie lee curtis and he goes a communist yeah and uh knowing his present-day political allegiance uh you know it's it's hard not to let those lines

jump off the the screen at you um i mean where did you sit on your sympathies with those involved the characters the actors i take your point you're actually you're not wrong at all i mean tim allen's character becomes a real asshole but so just to get people up to speed the plot of this movie if i uh deign to call it that this flick is about um yeah tim allen just decides they're gonna go on a cruise and skip christmas because he likes some kind of crazy modern day um combination of scrooge and scrooge mcduck sits at his work desk uh busts out a calculator and adds up every cent that he spent for christmas last year and it comes out he has breath over six grand and he goes hey you know it's less than six grand? A cruise to the Caribbean. And because he doesn't have the obligation of a daughter to sort of time to all the family traditions,

pomp and circumstance of Christmas, he's like, let's do that instead. And he even calculates that it's going to save the money because the cruise is three grand. But then this is like, I don't know why this was such an issue for me, but it was. This movie's so

fucking weird with its pacing there's um three quarters of a scene where tim allen will not get past the fact that jamie lee curtis wants to give 600 to charity and it threatens to derail the entire plot and then he's just like all right i guess we'll play it and it's like what would we what was that yeah they get hit he gets really bogged down and hardline absolutely no like he's sort of this is where his his thinking does start to unravel because he's like no when i say no christmas i mean no christmas we're not going to abide very basic like they're just ordinary social niceties that everyone follows year round they're not christmas specific they're dressed up as christmassy because it is christmas but yeah he refuses to give to charity like just very normal social decisions he spurns and then the movie

leans on them i guess that's what they're trying to do the movie leans on them hard enough where he has to occasionally bend but it it's yeah you know what i to your to your earlier point about this small-minded town just not being able to handle the jandal for the first half of the movie all i was thinking was what do jews in this town do and what do they have to go through every december this is so fucked everyone's complete like non-acceptance that it's even possible to not celebrate christmas yeah and other people it's so unabiding there's one acknowledgement of the notion that christianity isn't an all-conquering and ruling religion where some uh i believe lutheran is it the lutheran church carolers they um they show up and the sort of curmudgeonly

neighbor that um tim allen is somewhat at war with uh they he says is anyone in there and he goes yeah they're trying not to celebrate christmas this year but i think they could use a little christmas chair and she says are they jewish and that is the only moment in the movie which would suggest that not being christian and uh worshiping at the altar of both jesus and capitalism and center yeah is uh an option available to any of the characters they have built out the cast um with a pretty like they've got a pretty strong supporting cast of comedy players and also serious it was like dan akroyd is i guess he's meant to be the what's the you've got the the protagonist antagonist yeah uh as a sort of like very forceful neighborhood watch style uh you know he he runs the neighborhood essentially.

And then Jamie Lee Curtis's best friends are both criminally underused, played by Felicity Huffman, famed felon Felicity Huffman, and Caroline Ray, who's a very good actor. You've got a cameo from Andy Daly in there. Did you pick that up?

I didn't. I missed that. Where was it? When Jamie Lee Curtis is frantically trying to buy a different family's Christmas ham at the checkout. He's the dad. Oh, fuck. Oh, that was Andy. Oh, wow.

Crazy. Yeah. TV's Andy Daly. Well, I never. Exactly. You've got, you have Matt Walsh, the comedy actor. Yeah, I saw him. Yeah, he showed up for like A-Line.

Cheech from Cheech and Chong was one of the police officers. I did not realize that. That's funny. Also, friend of the podcast, Arden Mirren, she appeared on a Thrilling Adventure Hour crossover where we had a cast of Hollywood stars read our version of Grown Ups 2. Arden Mirren,

she was the fake tan, the salon lady. Oh my God. I didn't connect that. Shit. Yeah. True. The stars were out to play,

but they weren't given enough. I didn't like the stunts. I didn't like the plot. I couldn't buy into the movie because it didn't... Also, Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle? How can I forget Dewey? It was at the peak of his powers as well.

It was peak Dewey when this movie came out. You know what's crazy about this film as well? Tim Allen did the Santa Claus trilogy, right? And this movie came out in between the Santa Claus 2 and 3. So he took a little breather from his Santa Claus franchise to make this other Christmas movie. He just couldn't handle not being in one one year. That's crazy.

I guess Christmas movies are, you know like they're they're money makers oh I've got a theory about this actually why Tim Allen's got such a hard-on for Christmas movies it is because of course Guy Montgomery Tim Allen real name Timothy Dick has a real affinity for snow because as uh some people will know this is a man who had a successful career after a brief stint in a federal correctional facility in minnesota namely two years and four months served of i think something like a four-year sentence and And Tim Allen is a snitch, right? He is a snitch. So he got caught at the Battle Creek International Airport in Michigan with 650 grams, or about one and a half pounds, of coke. And get this, the fucker wasn't even flying on a plane that day.

He picked an airport as the drop-off point to make this exchange and the reason why he picked it is because he saw it in a tv film once oh my god in a scene on the tally and so he made his exchange of one and a half pounds of cocaine in exchange for 42 000 in cash at a fucking international airport got caught um the feds took him down and uh he basically had this like plea bargain i don't know if those are the words you use he he snitched on a whole raft of people something like 20 different drug dealers and it's a miracle he's still confident enough to pursue a career in the public eye like absolutely that's a lot of people to cross absolutely well he was looking at life in federal prison um like that's him all done and dusted and this was in his 20s and so he

ratted out 20 guys and the judge took a real shine to him and it's got if you read the court reports the judge like says this guy's going to be a really successful comedian so shaves like all of this time off the sentence i think gives him something like four years and then he serves um two and a bit and they actually move him to a correctional facility in um minnesota rather than michigan because they kind of fear that he's going to get shanked or something in prison by someone connected to all the people he snitched on so they were very cognizant of the fact that this guy has a big old target on his back i that's um that's crazy because he wasn't even like a big star when he was a snitch was he he'd

only been doing comedy a few years yeah that's my understanding there's actually um he references it quite a lot in different interviews but he never goes into depth so i had to do a bit of digging to get all those deets oh you did quite funny eh the fact that he picked a fucking airport needlessly that is absurd he like yeah so yeah but the the the original uh thread there is that uh tim allen is a fan of snow and that was the setup you can't see me but i'm i'm winking and i'm doing quite a cool face um yeah i just quickly also I know it's not relevant, but for all of the problems he throws up, his work as Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story is academy-worthy fucking hell. The guy's got a hell of a set of pipes,

and in the right environment, they sing. But that was not the case. Yeah, you're right about that. Not the case in Christmas with the Cranks. So should we continue to sort of fumble our way through their version of a story? Like, it's absurd to me that John Grisham wrote this book. I guess maybe he wanted to take his foot off the gas. Like, you know, he felt like maybe the world needed a silly and sort of wry, Christmassy story

that is divorced from the ills of society. Look, we typecast writers in our minds, but M. Night Shyamalan wrote Stuart Little, didn't he? People do different shit outside of their wheelhouse. If that is true, that is the ultimate M. Night Shyamalan twist. You tell me the guy from The Sixth Stint wrote... I don't know. Maybe I got that wrong.

Have you got a Google box in front of you? He did. I'm pretty sure it's true. He did. There you go. What's the twist in Stuart Little? Actually, there's a very funny Twitter account that offered a variety of twists on Stuart Little.

Oh, okay. Someone speed us to the chase. Yeah, namely that Stuart Little is a pedophile who kills children. Oh, boy. It's dark. It's too early in the morning for that, for me. Yeah, it's 2.30 in the afternoon in New Orleans here, so these sort of recycled

twitter jokes are fair game in my book um but yeah so i i mean it seems absurd and then even more absurd i guess maybe the book's good you know movies don't always capture the essence of the book but for someone to be so excited to buy the rights and spend three years developing this into a film and for this to be the outcome 60 million dollars went into this and it made money tim it did not a lot but it did make money the uh the book is skipping christmas and i can totally appreciate how it would fly off the shelves especially like man in 01 you'd be wanting a bit of escapism eh you think about yeah the hell that that year was for americans and if you're at like an airport in december wanting to um you know get into the christmas spirit and stuff and just fucking disconnect you buy a little paperback a little john grisham um a little bit of escapism for you on the flight. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. A breezy read.

It makes sense. I, yeah, I don't know. I just, I couldn't get on board with the premise. And then, so it was just laboring through an hour and a half. And then at the end, so it's pretty much, you've got Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis battling against the neighborhood. Dan Aykroyd is leading the charge.

He rallies this entire community of brainwashed Christmas fiends into really forcefully peer pressuring this family into continuing to celebrate Christmas, even though they don't want to. And eventually they've sort of, Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis

haven't won out, but their will has won out in that they have managed to barrel through the weeks leading into Christmas. They're prepared to go on holiday and they get a phone call from their daughter, Blair, who's gone to Peru after leaving home, saying as a surprise, she's flying home. She's bringing her new Peruvian boyfriend, who's never seen Christmas before.

She lays it on pretty heavy as well. Oh, actually, he's never seen Christmas before. She lays it on pretty heavy as well. Oh, actually, he's never seen Christmas in America. He's never seen the bastardized Coca-Cola-flavored Christmas that America celebrates. And really, he's obviously sold this to the poor boyfriend. Anyway, so they freak out. There's no world in which they could say, Hey, darling, actually, we're taking Christmas off this year

and going on a cruise. Like, I don't understand they have literally more or less destroyed their standing in the community and lives to take this holiday and then just tell her right yeah like then the person who you would trust the most to accept this information they yeah it totally undoes all of their hard work and also all of the first half of the movie this is why i imagine you had such a hard time and i uh getting on board with the movie is that the two linchpins of this are a it's it's sort of conditional on the fact that um you just have to accept this community absolutely cannot tolerate someone not going maximum christmas every year

and number two you have to accept the fact that you're not allowed to reveal to your adult daughter um that you've made other plans for christmas this year when you have yeah and those two things you have to take as like this is absolutely normal and we're not going to think about either of these two things we're not going to interrogate those they're given and now we're going to stack the shit sandwich on top of that foundation and it happens in a world that is otherwise

vaguely ordinary or recognisable so it's like it's sort of trapped between two worlds the world of fun frivolity and slightly exaggerated reality and like i just i felt like it couldn't make up its mind and yeah i mean i'm not gonna lie there was an element of frustration that i sitting uh in this apart really wanting to get out into the the big

bad world and sitting with these characters meant that they had a lot of work to do for me to like them in the first place. Pretty breezy duration time though. Was it 94 minutes? Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it is a breezy 94,

not including credits. I think 98 with credits, which I didn't watch. If you're curious, I thought, uh, Dan Aykroyd was, he was a bit of fun.

I didn't have any issues his reveal was so great and then they kind of fucked it from there on in because he's got his back turned and they're setting it up and i think there's a big dramatic musical cue to like reveal who this big bad neighborhood villain is and the face turns around it's dan akroyd and you're just fucking stoked to see him i was was like, yes. Awesome. All right. Now we're cooking. But then he's vastly underutilized and kind of confused as an enemy.

Yeah. And then, like, I mean, what were your laugh lines? What were the bits that got you? Anything? Fuck. Well, the only thing I wrote down that i liked was dan akroyd's introduction ah that was oh okay well like is a strong word but i was absolutely disgusted by the scene where tim allen has gotten a botox injection in preparation for the cruise and he's just trying

to put food he's trying to eat and food just keeps falling out of his mouth to his credit a pretty good bit of physical comedy that i was absolutely disgusted by what i was saying that was also number one on my list i thought it was fantastic um he looked like john travolta in that biopic gotti or whatever i haven't seen that i didn't either but the internet went crazy for it because it was so bad but it was yeah like that was a funny reveal but they didn't like Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen didn't

they're not a couple that even though I was geared towards rooting for them they're not a couple that you could root for because they didn't seem like a happy couple you just kind of wanted they they wanted different things and they shouldn't been married and that's fine but that you gotta take that for what it is i felt bad for the actor jamie lee curtis in this movie because there's like particularly this um what is it called the like fake tan scene um that was kind of difficult to watch because they just sort of had to i guess they had

jamie lee curtis right she's got a phenomenal body they were like we've got to have her in a bikini somehow how do we do that for a christmas movie so they put her in a tanning bed and then a priest comes and she's just bikini clad engaging in this awkward um neighborhood conversation for a while engaging in this awkward um neighborhood conversation for a while and the script sucks and the joke is that everyone's ogling at her and it's just like oh this has gone on too long and i feel yucky i feel like a um peeping tom just in how the scene is set up because it's like it's a it's a family movie and it's just the tone's very it's just, the tone's very, it's gross. Yeah. It's for the dirty dads, you know? It's for the dirty dads who got dragged along to the cinema

to entertain the kids for an hour and a half. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm not here for you dirty dads. I'm not one of you, and I don't appreciate you. It didn't make sense in the movie either. Why, like, I don't even understand. She banged her head a little bit and was bleeding and had to run out oh yeah i forgot that that was the other joke uh she got a bit hurt yeah

and so she's got she's getting a sunbed they're getting tans for the crew so they'll blend in and uh she's not done it before and she's sort of begrudgingly going along with it and then she someone accidentally comes into the room when she's lying in the uv bed and she bangs her head gets up to get a band-aid and the only place to get a band-aid is with our friend arden mirren uh at the front of the counter just out in a mall with a tiny little towel yeah it's it's not good i am trying to think of something fun or um different to say just honestly communicating that i didn't enjoy the movie go ahead tim yeah good good on you guy way to tread water um do you know it was legit funny in in a way that they intended so i applaud them for this that guy who got stuck on the roof at the

end so they're kind of all the movies this is again a weird pacing thing everything's leading up to one event but it happens at the three quarter mark and then there's another quarter of the movie to go which is very weird but so um what's your name again Blair is coming they've they're now on this like eight hour time frame and the community spoiler alert pulls together and forgives the sins of this horrible um Tim Allen character to do his house up so that blair which everyone loves who everyone loves um can enjoy like this you know classic uh neighborhood christmas that she's used to growing up with so they all rally together to put the christmas party on and get the lights up and get a big um frosty the snowman on the roof and everything and that tim allen got across the

road from them and this is a weird thread there's another kind of neighborhood antagonist character for Tim Allen who is this guy who's demonstrably about 15 years older than Tim Allen but keeps calling him old man which was funny and he's got a wife who's dying of cancer

which was not funny but the movie keeps reminding you of this fact that there's this woman dying of cancer across the road and it's like all right i guess that's part of this too very well but tim allen is consistently a massive dick to her husband which i feel is super callous and a really stupid thing to do with the lead of your movie because it makes it very hard for you to sympathize with him but then um when he keeps going in and out of the house because he's popping over there at one point, he ends up giving them the cruise,

he hears Frosty the Snowman talking to him and he gets really confused and then it turns out they just left a guy on the roof and took the ladder away. And that was funny. I didn't even put those pieces together. It was when the community was putting Frosty on the roof for it and they just left the dude up.

I thought so little of this movie that when Tim Allen is crossing the threshold to go and see this couple who he's having these disagreements with and he's saying his name, Luther or whatever, and Tim Allen looks at his champagne glass like, oh, I've been drinking too much of this champagne. You know when you get so high on on champagne you start hallucinating and he throws it down and i thought that was the entirety of the gag it didn't occur to me that the the writer is it chris columbus had the forethought to later connect that to the fact that there was a man stuck on the roof credit where it's due that is um storytelling in some shape or form i would like to also give a shout out to one of the very bold editing decisions that was made which was when dewey was on the um dewey from malcolm in the middle who's this dan atcroyd's son who when they're all rallying together to get the house ready for this big christmas party so that they don't embarrass themselves in front of their

daughter who's decided on an absolute whim to come home and demand that everything be exactly as it would be if she was there. Dan Aykroyd says to us, he says, they're going to be home an hour earlier and the house won't be ready in time. And Dan Aykroyd says, I've got an idea. And then doesn't say anything to anyone and just goes and whispers something into his son's ear, which is such a funny move. Like, can you imagine there's a room full of people with one shared problem and someone has a solution to the problem and instead of sharing it with anyone else

just whispers it to a boy and sends the boy away and sort of clamps his hands together like fixed it but then uh dewey runs away and gets on his like walkie talkie in his bedroom whatever and he's obviously it's implied his backstory that he's been mucking around on the police line on the radios before and the editor at the same time was like I hope no one from the studio is watching this because I'm

going to edit this like a first pass at a Michael Bay action movie and like probably packs 12 cuts into like 15 seconds of movie but the action is just a boy on a police radio talking to some police officers i thought that something was wrong with the version of the movie i was watching it was so high octane do you know what i'm talking about dude i am absolutely devastated to report i do not know

what you're talking about oh so sad i kind of want to bring it up yeah i mean i can see what's happening here it's almost worth it but not quite um and that was that was fun i've just to sort of try and jog my memory i've gone to the quote section on the christmas with the cranks imdb page who chooses what quotes go in these it's anyone isn't it it's just anyone here it's uh it's like wikipedia here's some of the quotes from jamie lee curtis what are you doing it's not even saturday night without any context right that's when they're um trying to fuck each other by the way folks at home well it's a misunderstanding tim allen's trying to pitch the the holiday cruise and jamie lee curtis is getting horny yeah but then there's a real role reversal later on where they flip who wants to fuck i know

it seems like they've got a very strict rule that they only fuck on sat night. I respect that. Do you? Yeah. The old regimented sex life? Absolutely. Keep it once a week and on that regular day. Hey, you want to know what's terrifying? I know that you're leading up to something. So I started the movie silently

so I could try and find the scene and now it's disabled. Like every... I've never had this before. Christmas with the Cra cracks has taken over the tablet and it will not respond to anything i can touch anywhere on the screen it doesn't bring up a damn thing there's no controls i can't rewind i can't exit out of it but the movie plays on i love that so much and i left quotes because they were so infuriating i hope that by the way that your

tablet is forever cursed by the spirit of tim allen for you yeah snitches get stitches tim and snitching on a snitch is still a form of snitching he's oh shit so i'm the baddie no you're right but uh i clicked on the goof section instead and i mean i'm blown away by the fact that someone's bothered to observe and share this observation uh but there's something called an anachronism which is when something is like chronologically incongruent or inconsistent with the film so uh what they've written is lou the crank which is tim allen's character sees the advertisement of a carnival ship then books passage on what he refers to as the luxury ship jubilee the carnival jubilee was one of carnival's smaller holiday class ships that

first sailed in 1986 shortly before this movie was made the jubilee was transferred to pno lines of australia and became the pacific sun there is no way luther could have sailed on the Jubilee in Christmas of 2004. Therefore, the entirety of the movie does not need to be taken seriously because if a film isn't willing to research one of the vehicles by which it prompts its characters to action within the first quarter, how are we meant to take the rest of the action seriously?

I rest my case. Fucking sloppy filmmaking it's absolutely sloppy this is a film which uh freezes a cat and then animates the blinking of the frozen cat statue by using about two frames a second and then just kind of twinks the eyes shut and then reverses that process for them opening again. And that CGI shot cost $10 million thanks to Tim Allen's animation company. Because no one knew what the fuck was going on. Hey, here's a theory, guy.

What do we know about Blair? Everyone's very sketched out that she's going to have a bad time, like everyone in the community. We also know that she was everyone's babysitter. I reckon this town has a very dark secret, and I think Blair knows it, and i think it's why she left and i think it's why everyone's very fucking nervous about her coming back and not having a sensational traditional time all very actively like oh blair wow like on their best behavior

i don't know i it's um it's very base of me but an assumption would be uh like everyone rallies around blair in a way that i suppose maybe she's meant to be just a pillar of hope and decency in the community but and i hate to say this and this reflects poorly on me but it feels sexual to me it feels like she um has access to a lot of nefarious secrets. Maybe she has... Maybe she, in a non-discriminatory fashion, is this pansexual babysitter who goes around tearing up marriages

by having sex with anyone. A pansexual babysitter. In a Tim Allen Christmas movie. That's right. In 2004. Based on a delightful John Grisham novel from 2001. Yeah, and so she sort of wields these secrets. And the thing is, and this is where the movie could become more interesting,

these families could realize that if they share their secrets and shortcomings, it could unite them and they could be set free from being ruled under the iron thumb of uh blair they wouldn't have to celebrate christmas so forcefully every year because as soon as they said hey i'm sorry i have been unfaithful then that would also open up the opportunity for their partner to say i've also been unfaithful and then they both say it was with blair and they both realize that they've been unfaithful with blair and blair has been blackmailing both of them and it sort of lifts this whole cloud of forced chair from the community and then they can all rally together and you know blair then comes back from peru with her fiancee and uh she's confronted by the

community in front of the love of her life and then you've got stakes you've got something that's genuinely interesting to watch i i reckon that um what is his name enrique the peruvian uh fiancee because they do they get engaged to be married in this film they get engaged um engaged yep you heard me uh theyaged, which is where you promise that at some point you're going to co-own a carport together. And it's a huge commitment because people don't realize this, but even a carport, you need to make sure you sweep it every now and then. Because if the leaves build up in there, you've got a fire hazard.

It's unsafe for kids. You could get hedgehogs, rodents sleeping in the piles. All manner of stuff. It's no good good so when you agree that you're going to co-own a carport that's for life baby um enrique i think would totally know i think that blair would open up to him uh like instantly not even open up because it wouldn't even be a revelation okay that's her character she's like i'm a pansexual babysitter of this very no but you can do that.

But I feel like she's left for the Peace Corps. Like, 23 is quite an interesting age. Because I guess maybe she's finished college. But it sounds like she's lived at home that whole time. And why now? Why all of a sudden now, Tim? Because the flame's getting too hot. And, you know, feet to the fire.

The vultures are circling her like the community is getting too close to finding out that she's played everyone off against each other and so she she has to escape town and leave and the first thing you do when you meet enrique down in peru is not you know confess to all of the things you've done wrong and the problems you face back home, but embrace this fresh start and new life. Peru is where you go when the heat is on. But then she comes back.

This is the problem. She brings him with her. Maybe it's a bit of a power play. Yeah, it's a power trip. Hey, no one fuck with me. For sure. a bit of a power play yeah it's like hey no one fuck with me for sure um what a dark undertone for this film yeah uh with this in mind i would elevate my review uh from being one out of five stars to two out of five stars uh a christmas film brave enough to flirt with serious themes of sex. Fuck, I don't know.

Yep. Intrigue. Refusing Christmas. That's a theme. What would you give this film out of five stars? Five Christmas ornaments. I would give it two stars because i didn't find it painful per se but it was hyper mediocre but it also made me very sad it was a movie that made me very sad

because it reminded me of a time which thankfully we're not in anymore we're like there's this whole flavor of american cultural exports that go this is how everyone lives it's such a sure-footed um christian uh bleached like white teeth hyper conservative and and stuck and just a really gross specific tone that doesn't accept that anyone could be different I don't think there's, I can't, apart from Enrique who is, it's kind of almost the point that he is othered

I don't know if there's any black people in this town There are No that's inaccurate, there are two black couples in this town Is one of them a cop? No No, that's inaccurate. There are two black couples in this town. Is one of them a cop? No, the cop is Cheech of Cheech and Chong fame. I'm mixing it with Ernest because I saw them back to back.

That's a different conversation for a different podcast. My God, aren't we consuming these Christmas films at a rate of knots? No, allen borrows a christmas tree from a lovely black couple but uh within that the husband is sort of this cool devil may care guy and the the wife is a christmas shrew who is protect you know like they still abide um conservative rule within the movie even in their attempts at inclusivity. That's good. Everyone sucks in this town. And it's important to remember that. Even Matt Walsh, who we love. They don't pull any punches.

I have nothing to say beyond this. I can tell. You have been doggy paddling through half of this. Very deftly, but I can hear it. I resent the accuracy of the accusation well um thanks for joining us for we can't remember what we're calling these chris the patreon pal christmas treehouse fun zone uh edition two um this has been it's been really weird and really sad, to be honest with you. And I am devastatingly hungover from a party that I went to last night because it's early.

But that's on me. And you know what? It bears bringing up as well that the internet buffer thing, we've done very fucking well over the last couple of years to contend with this because not everyone could put up with that one and a half second delay. It really fucks with the convo yeah it makes it hard but here we are valiantly battling out conversations with one another for the troops that's what i love you guy uh listeners the troops i love you too tim and can the troops, I love you too Tim And can I say to you

In the spirit of Christmas with the Cranks Happy Hanukkah Feliz Navidad Feliz Navidad Feliz Navidad Tim Allen Your face And Jamie Lee Curtis

Christmas Tim Allen Your face! and Jamie Lee Curtis Christmas with the Cranks What are you doing, Walter? Whoa! Easy!