Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: christmas

  • 8-Bit Christmas (2021) Review – A-Z Hidden Gem Film-a-thon Day 1

    Nothing says “I might actually enjoy this movie” like watching a Christmas movie in March.

    8-Bit Christmas (2021)

    I am an 8-bit kid. I don’t really play NES games anymore, but I do fall asleep most nights to YouTube videos of young people playing video games that came out before they were born. So when I saw the title 8-Bit Christmas, I brought a lot of hope with me. I could easily imagine a version of this movie I would have loved. That is not this movie.

    Instead, 8-Bit Christmas is basically a family-channel Christmas movie dressed up in Nintendo nostalgia. Neil Patrick Harris plays Jake Doyle, an adult reminiscing about how desperately he wanted an NES as a child in 1988. He tells the story to his daughter to explain why she cannot simply get everything she wants.

    That setup could have worked. The problem is that the movie never seems to understand what made Nintendo feel magical in the first place. When Jake finally shows his daughter a game from his childhood, he picks Paperboy on NES—not Super Mario Bros., not Contra, not Bubble Bobble, or anything a normal child would use to explain why the system mattered. It is such a strange choice that it almost feels revealing. The movie is not interested in what kids actually loved about Nintendo. It is interested in using Nintendo as a generic symbol for “back then.”

    And that leads to the movie’s real message, which turns out to be much drearier than the title suggests: You want a cell phone, kid? Get a job. For a Christmas movie about parents sharing the past with their children, that is a surprisingly joyless lesson. It is not even wrong, exactly. It is just hollow. The real issue with kids having cell phones was never simply that they were expensive.

    The movie is basically A Christmas Story rewritten around an NES, but without the same specificity. That older film understood how completely a child could fixate on one object and make it feel mythic. 8-Bit Christmas keeps reaching for that feeling, but it does not seem to trust the reality of its own subject. The period details are shaky, the game choices are odd, and the whole thing feels assembled rather than remembered. For instance, the parents are up in arms over violence in video games. This did not happen in the 1980s. All that did not happen until the Clinton Administration in 1993. This aspect about the movie felt particularly false to me.

    There are things I liked. I loved the costumes and casting all around. Everyone looked very stylish, though period appropriate. Jake winning an encyclopedia and then getting bookends for Christmas “because they have baseballs on them” is genuinely funny. Some of the parental details work too. But the spirit of the movie feels wrong. With a title like 8-Bit Christmas, this could have been several kinds of movie I would have happily embraced. The one it chose to be did not work for me.

    4.5/10

  • The A–Z Hidden Gem Film-a-thon Returns

    27 days, 27 movies—one for every letter of the alphabet, all chosen because they might secretly be great.

    Last year I attempted something maybe ridiculous: I watched 27 movies—one for every letter of the alphabet (with an extra number entry)—all pulled from my IMDb watchlist. The idea was simple: pick movies I had been meaning to see for years but probably wouldn’t get around to otherwise. These were all well reviewed movies, that had 80 or higher on Metacritic.

    This year I’m trying a different angle. Instead of clearing out the backlog, I’m hunting for hidden gems: movies that the world seemed to ignore, dismiss, or misunderstand, but that might actually speak to me. Some will be under-appreciated oddities. Some will be cult favorites. Some might be fascinating disasters (think Showgirls, or Joker: Foie a Deux, maybe. The only rule is that they are movies I suspect I might genuinely enjoy—even if almost nobody else did.

    For the next 27 days, I’ll watch one film for each letter of the alphabet and write about it here.

    We begin with not A, but a numeral. The # 8, specifically.

    The first film is one I know almost nothing about: 8-Bit Christmas. Yes, today is St. Patrick’s Day, and yes, it is definitely a Christmas movie. But the title alone is enough to intrigue me. I grew up in the NES era, and the idea of a movie about childhood Nintendo obsession has enormous potential.

    What I’m hoping for, honestly, is something stranger than the trailer probably promises—maybe a world where Neil Patrick Harris and June Diane Raphael somehow get rendered into chunky 8-bit sprites and have to fight their way out of a video game.

    Hopefully that’s what I am getting with this one. Fingers crossed. Wish me luck.

    The A–Z Hidden Gem Film-a-thon Returns