Why THE CHRISTMAS CLAUSE makes me want to ho ho holler!

   Christmas is one of my favorite times of year. Its one of the few moments where family can (usually) come together peacefully and enjoy one another's company. Of course, business people, marketers and retailers love it as it is the best time of year to make money, what with the commercialization of the holiday. One outlet where this is prevalent is film. Whether it be films such as Santa Claus or even horror based Christmas films like Silent Night, Deadly Night or Santa's Slay, one can always find some sort of film that exploits this time of year. Notorious for this, are networks such as Lifetime or ABC Family which show "original", "exclusive", or however they want to market them, Christmas films. Now that isn't to say that they are necessarily bad (most are made with at least some form of competence, which is a lot more than I can say for this past year's disaster known as Jonah Hex), but they do share a common trend: a lack of creativity.

   Being home for Christmas means spending time with the aforementioned family. Since we all enjoy watching movies, there is nothing better than a movie to bring us all together. Specifically I've found, me and my soon to be step sister enjoy watching movies together (though for every Blazing Saddles I made her watch, she made me watch a Titanic). It being my first day back, having just driven home after a week of final exams, I was not exactly picky in what film we would watch. An unoriginal Christmas movie called The Christmas Clause, showing on ION of all channels? Well... not exactly Die Hard, but it will do. The film itself is uneventful, slow paced, and just all around dull. Add in acting that is mediocre at best and just plain horrid at worst (and usually the average for this film), and you get a movie that is pretty bad. But I don't want to comment on the quality of the film as a whole, so much as the overwhelming lack of originality prevalent in it. Let me be clear, I realize that there are probably hundreds of movies just as unoriginal, and probably even more so than this. This film is simply the one that pushed me over the edge, if just because it was the first Christmas movie I've seen this year (with the exception of Die Hard in August).

   The first indicator would be the title. Obviously it is very similar to the hit Disney franchise, The Santa Clause. Remember that movie? The one that actually had a pretty original plot for a Christmas film and was highly enjoyable? Well this is nothing like that. To be honest, the name confuses me. With The Santa Clause, it gets its name from the clause in the contract to be Santa, that is actually referred to as the Santa Clause. And even if it weren't, the title fits as a play on words, as it does deal with a contract to become the replacement Santa. Here, there is no contract or anything similar. The only resemblance to anything dealing with a clause or contract is the mere fact that the main character works in a law firm. Other than that, nothing at all.

   The plot itself has been retread so many times, and in non-Christmas films as well. The best way to describe it, as I described to soon to be step sister Christy during the film, is that it is essentially a backward Family Man. For those unfamiliar with the plot, Nicolas Cage plays a succesful businessman who wakes up one day to find himself as the husband and father he could have been had he chosen his girlfriend over work. In The Christmas Clause, we find the main character is a wife and mother who wakes up one day to find herself as a successful business lawyer. The resemblance is uncanny to say the least.

   I understand that as we progress through time, more and more ideas will be used, meaning less and less original ideas can exist. Re-treads are not entirely bad if they are made to keep fresh. Just look at Toy Story 3 which takes a lot of inspiration from The Great Escape, but still manages to be its own film. Films like The Christmas Clause are almost like a factory assembly line. Take an overused plot, add in bland stereotypical characters (no one has ever done a gay personal assistant before, right?), and you have a recipe that is like most cafeteria food: hazardous bland. This is nothing that will change any time soon. As long as TV stations can get some form of ratings out of something they can show annually and multiple times within a single WEEK, we will continue to see the trends. Does anyone remember when the most unoriginal Christmas movie on TV were song adaptations like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or Frosty the Snowman? I fear that those days are long behind us, and The Christmas Clause is only one indicator of that.