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Lists, Movies

Happy Holidays-ish: The Top Six Best Christmas-Adjacent Movies

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Sara
Sara
Sara is big into reading and writing fiction like it's her job, because it is. That doesn't mean she isn't real as it gets. She loves real stuff like polka dots, indie rock, and underground fight clubs. I may have made some of that up. I don't know her that well. You can tell she didn't just write this in the third person because if she had written it there would have been less suspect sentence construction.
Sara
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First, a confession, which may not seem immediately related to the subject at hand: until December 3rd, I had never seen a Batman movie in full. Not a Nolan, not a Keaton, only dim memories of Val Kilmer clips interrupting Seal in the “Kiss From a Rose” video. But that night I gathered with some fellow SportsAlcohol-ics to watch Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, in a thinly-veiled attempt on Jesse’s part to (a) get me to finally watch one of these things and (b) put forth the argument that Returns is part of one of my favorite genres: not unequivocally holiday-themed films like A Christmas Story or Elf, but what I’ll call the Christmas-Adjacent. These are films whose plots do not revolve around, say, getting the family together for a big dinner, taking over for Santa after accidentally killing him, or having your marital infidelities exposed with poorly hidden gifts intended for your mistress. Rather, they use the holiday, or holiday season, as a motif or backdrop for other stories, variously invoking the warmth, loneliness, and occasional homicidal rage the season brings. You can also watch them any time of year and it doesn’t feel too weird. Having now seen Batman Returns myself (Ed. note), I absolutely agree that it fits the genre, and is fun to contemplate as one of the strangest studio tentpoles to exist. But the following, in my opinion, are the best, and the ones that most often end up in my holiday-watching rotation.
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Movies, Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Saturday Night Live at the Movies

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Jesse
Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse
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Hey, have you guys heard about the new Ghostbusters movie coming out this week? Many of the film’s cast members have one obvious thing in common… that’s right, many of them were on Saturday Night Live (is there some other difference you were thinking of?). The casting of Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and (in a supporting role) Cecily Strong establishes a clear lineage with the 1984 original, which featured Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd acting out (and riffing on) an Aykroyd-cowritten script. The first film remains one of the most successful to star Saturday Night Live alumni, which got your SportsAlcohol.com crew thinking about how cast members on that program have made the transition into movies. Nathaniel, Sara, Marisa, Jesse, and Jon got together to talk about this rich history for roughly the length of a Saturday Night Live episode to talk about official SNL movies, unofficial SNL movies, and a whole lot of actors.

Listen and find the answers to the following questions, and more!

  • Does Mike Myers work without makeup?
  • Which one of us saw Bordello of Blood in the theaters?
  • How young is too young to watch Beverly Hills Cop?
  • What movie is an even less distilled expression of Aykroyd-ness than Ghostbusters?
  • Have Tina Fey and Amy Poehler really made it in the movies yet?
  • Which SNL players do we want to see star in their own movie?

How To Listen

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast: