A Christmas Story (1983)
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A Christmas Story Movie Review
A Christmas Story is a 1983 family comedy film directed by Bob Clark. It is a pretty solid, but overrated holiday flick.
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“No, you’ll shoot your eye out“
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Now I have to say that I found watching this movie really odd owing to its structure. It has a main story but it wanders off of that course pretty regularly to present us a series of continuing vignettes. So in that way, the vignettes are bad and the main story is quite good leading to one good movie here and one bad film.
While watching the first half of A Christmas Story, I was really shocked. Not only disappointed, but honestly befuddled. Not only did I not see why people think it is great, but I also thought it was a very annoying, frustratingly cloying film that got on my nerves pretty quickly.
That is because those vignettes just did not work for me. They never did and thus they ruined the movie for me. The main story is so strong that it saved this film from being a total disaster, but still those detours were pretty insufferable. I disliked the lamp story, the dogs’ plot was also weak and every scene in the school was overly childish and highly annoying.
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But the second half fixed all that by getting back on track with the main storyline which is great. It is both charming, old-fashioned and highly endearing and even funny. The highlights are the two scenes that are so great that the film is worth seeing just for them alone.
One is the Santa Clause sequence which is absolutely hilarious and oh so truthful. I was scared of him as well and thus I found this scene very relatable and honest. The entire scene is so funny how bizarre it is. And of course the second great scene is the presents scene which is just lovely. It was wonderful seeing the whole family open presents and I adored those moments. The ending was so charming.
The film is weakly directed and edited, but definitely well acted and shot. I found its narration so annoying as that adult voice is very unappealing but the humor is great in the second half even though it was very bad in the first one. The characters are solid, but underdeveloped, Overall, it is a solid, but highly overrated, odd film.
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Watching the first half of A Christmas Story, I was utterly befuddled by what I was seeing and I found myself thinking – Is this really considered a Christmas classic? The narration is very annoying, the humor is odd, it felt too childish and those vignettes did not work for me at all as I found them very frustrating and mediocre. However, the second half fixed all of those problems by getting back on track with its main storyline and giving us two truly terrific scenes: one is that wonderful, charming presents sequence and the other is the Santa scene which is hilarious, bizarre and oh so relatable. So in the end, the film was saved by its second half from being a total disaster, but it still remains only solid and far from a classic deemed by so many people.
