The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Frank Capra’s adored 1946 Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and Gloria Grahame.
The Butcher hates Christmas…all that good cheer and positivity, little brats singing shitty Christmas carols, shops trying to gouge even more money out of you, images of that fat shit Santa Claus everywhere…bah, humbug! And the only thing worse than Christmas is the bone-headed tradition of “Christmas in July”…seriously, who the hell made that up? This stupid tradition also means Christmas movies…twice a year! And there’s one that The Butcher really hates…
I don’t know whether it’s George Bailey’s grating cry of “Merry Christmas Bedford Falls”; Clarence the irritating homeless angel; or the ridiculously cast Gloria Grahame as Violet Bick, but I hate It’s A Wonderful Life. Or if you want to give in to the director’s egotistical requirements, I hate Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.
Whatever you decide to call it, and even if it’s your favourite film, you have to admit that this is melodrama, pure and simple. Typically for the period, the actors ham it up, and not a single person puts in a realistic or believable performance. Jimmy Stewart, playing everyman loser George Bailey, displays a tenth of the acting prowess that he brought to bear in his various Hitchcock thrillers, yet this might be the role that he is best remembered for. Ridiculous. Donna Reed, playing his wife Mary, throws in a similarly under par performance, though she’s certainly sexier than the singularly unappealing Gloria Grahame…
Capra, for his part, does nothing special. A few stars here and a Norman Rockwell-type portrayal of America there…he’s the kind of director that people say is great without ever having seen more than two of his films. He’s not great. He’s astoundingly average.
It’s A Wonderful Life is loosely based around The Butterfly Effect (the theory, not the shockingly bad 2004 film starring Ashton Kutcher), and shows what life would be like in Bedford Falls if George Bailey never existed. Now, to say that there are one or two gaping holes in the premise would be like saying that Uluru is a little bump in the landscape. Clearly storyline and plausibility weren’t high on the agenda. It’s the little things, however, that annoy me most about It’s A Wonderful Life. Namely the dialogue, specifically the whole “You want the moon?” debacle, where Stewart tells Donna Reed that he’ll throw a lasso around it, and bring it down so that she can swallow it and shoot moonbeams out of her toes and fingers. Give me a break! First of all, that’s logistically impossible, and secondly, it’s horribly trite dialogue.
So I implore you not to be sucked in by the sugary characters and over-the-top sentimentality of It’s A Wonderful Life. Instead, take a step back and see it for the poor-to-mediocre effort that it really is. They should change the name of this monstrosity to It’s A Pointless Boring Crappy Life. Or, even better, The Butcher’s It’s A Pointless Boring Crappy Life.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against X-Men, Game Of Thrones, Jurassic Park, The Hurt Locker, Raging Bull, The Castle, Amelie, The Social Network, Argo, Gravity, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, The Artist, Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
