Four Christmases

Vacation plans imperceptibly tantalizing quickly approaching festive holiday breaks, time to spend relaxed and stretched out elaborately elongated upright tenements. 

Traditional visits to old school loved ones siblings and family and nieces and nephews, incrementally harmonizing habitual happenstance gregarious growth uproarious sentiments.

But some imaginative couples creatively manifest alternative arrangements, to sneakily avoid the routine remonstrance and inconsolable awkward confabulations.

To Fiji they furtively plan to gallopingly go sans limitations, to lazily bask in freeflowing sustainable enriching waters immersive acclamations. 

Yet when they reach the airport on Christmas Day in fact no less, ominous fog discourteously blankets the surrounding skies with opaque languor. 

To further frustrate their Scroogey mendacity a local news station suddenly broadcasts them live, their relatives witnessing the distressing surprising grouchy exchanges on their televisions. 

Soon it's off therefore to reminisce with emboldened blood and the next generation.

Neither member of the couple prepared. 

For what they're soon to learn about one another. 

Immaculate bliss once exceptionally adorning their perpetual ensconcement in each other's arms, far away from the orthodox torments unsettlingly facilitating unrestrained fury.

They are quite different people leading quite different lives from different points of view, but does that hardboiled multivariable eclectivity not also inspire romantic love!?

The film did seem dialectically dis/oriented to either champion or lampoon family, synthesizing the divergent concepts throughout with varying degrees of symphonic success. 

Was the spirit of Christmas beatifically bound to bring them wholesomely together, to optimistically unite, to generously generate raw animate excursions fluidly fuelled with maladroit mallow?

Offbeat ridicule flamboyant caprice rambunctious sincerity disconsolate diatribes, randomly revolving with road weary rubber gallantly peppered through a hard day's night.

Unpredictable fanciful variety.

At home for the frosty holidays.

Eggnog and shortbread and willow.

Endless timeless specials!

Baywatch

The perils and perplexions of illustriously lifeguarding are nautically fathomed in Seth Gordon's Baywatch.

Not only must leader Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson) ensure that the people frolicking upon his beach feel free to safely splish and splash, but he must also macroscopically contend with submerged monopolistic commerce intent on violently overwhelming the businesses in his local community.

One deep plunge at a time.

But his vigilant altruism is youthfully constrained as cocky new recruit and two time olympic gold medalist Matt Brody (Zac Efron) foolishly contradicts his discerning holistic guidance.

Not even the emotive real-time miniatures commentating within Buchannon's fish tanks can persuade young Brody to cast his cheek aside, and as his misguided undertow seditiously saturates reputations afloat, the rest of the team must unselfishly preserve.

Ronnie (Jon Bass) and CJ (Kelly Rohrbach) tenderly resurface.

While Summer (Alexandra Daddario) and Stephanie (Ilfenesh Hadera) boldly tread to thrive.

Periwinkle processions lathered in baleen, Baywatch cruises through coral to wind sweep serene.

Exalting teamwork thereby in athletic sea beds, marine life sleeps peacefully stretched out and spread.

But that could very same marine life in fact be sleeping more peacefully in an even more oceanic Baywatch 2?

One which takes on the worldwide problem of trolling the ocean with massive nets that wind up catching and killing far more than the sought after fish species?

While relating everything to protecting the beach?

Thousands of unwanted turtles, dolphins, octopi, sharks, and undesirable fish swim into these nets daily, a saddening loss of life that could be lessened by using smaller nets.

Could the Baywatch team arrest these clear-cutters of the sea by boisterously lambasting industrial bycatch?

That would be phenomenal.

With special guest Brigitte Bardot?

And a french lifeguard on exchange from La Rochelle who complicates Ronnie and CJ's relationship?

Plastic in the ocean is wreaking havoc on wildlife as well.

Identity Thief

Loved Planes, Trains & Automobiles growing up.

Arguably both John Candy and Steve Martin's best movie, it brought together two of Hollywood's leading comedic actors, set them up as a mismatched pair, simultaneously catered to bourgeois and working class sympathies, and used Thanksgiving to tie everything together.

By the end of the film, Neal Page (Martin) has been transformed from a cold representative of the bad bourgeoisie who have no social conscience to someone who will at least invite a lonely friend to his home for dinner.

Del Griffith (Candy) smiles, everyone's happy, the end.

26 years later, Seth Gordon's Identity Thief works within the same paradigm, but the cultural codes of the game have changed.

If we're to take the information provided in Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story as solid indisputable fact, unions had generated stable, prosperous bourgeois lives for many working Americans until their strength was weakened by the Reagan administration and many of their jobs shipped elsewhere, some, in the interests of capitalism, to at least one communist country.

Theoretically, a significant proportion of the American population were no longer able to maintain their suburban lifestyles (in the same location over a long period of time) and found themselves individually competing for new jobs in a pop cultural system that vilified anything besides the undeniably exceptional.

Does this theory resonate throughout little old unsuspecting Identity Thief?

I don't know, but here's my take.

Lead character Sandy Patterson (Jason Bateman) is struggling to get by, working for a corporation who only values the contributions of upper management, living with his wife and two kids.

He's played his cards right but at the end of the month only has a little more than 14 dollars of potential savings to show for it.

And trouble's a brewin.'

Diana (Melissa McCarthy) makes her living stealing peoples identities and using them to finance her freewheelin' acquisitive lifestyle (Patterson seems like he's too smart to have fallen for her scam, but that's another matter).

She steals that of Mr. Patterson just as he launches a career as the vice-president of a new company.

Naturally he's pissed, and sets out for Florida to confront and bring her back to Denver, due to infrastructural peculiarities that prevent the Denver PD from working with their Floridian counterparts.

But he's not the only one in hot pursuit, for she's run afoul of others seeking vengeance who track and attempt to overcome Sandy and Diana after Sandy captures her.

By the end of the film, Sandy's developed a social conscience at least to the degree where he cares about one of the proletarian characters who ends up in jail.

Most of the proletarian characters (likely) end up in jail.

Thus, as good jobs become harder to find than they were in the 1980s, working American people find themselves resorting to a higher degree of criminal activity, much more violent than John Candy's family friendly shenanigans, corporate upper management remains influential and unaffected unless those whom they disregard can out-compete them in the marketplace (hopefully without becoming like them during the struggle), wherein which these competitors might lose everything, as some seem to have even though they had stable unionized jobs, which possibly faltered due to their lack of a coordinated multidisciplinary international network.

Among thousands of other rather complicated factors of which I'm unaware.

Identity Thief's script contains a broader array of consistent characters than Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Melissa McCarthy's performance is strong enough to indicate that she may be able to function as a 21st century John Candy, there are some funny scenes which utilize sleaze as everyone chases, tricks, slanders, and/or shoots at one another, which seems to be the comic style of our time, but it's not attached to a holiday, and is missing a substitute for Steve Martin.

Jason Bateman's good. I love his work. Bold to compete with Steve Martin. I wouldn't even be able to order coffee for an extra's stunt double.

Genesis Rodriguez (Marisol) is my favourite real world name ever.

No mention of the Broncos.