My wonderful wife and I have just thrown our second annual holiday day drinking party offering respite to shopping-weary friends in the form of ham, pie, microbrews, and cocktails, and the belle of our ball, the secret of our parties’ success, has been Videoport’s Yule log/snow fall video. >JackieO suggests a holiday movie alternative! You know what Christmas movie will NOT be checked out? Not Elf, not Scrooged, not A Christmas Story, no no. Thrifty Thursday! Rent one, get a free rental from any other section in the store! OR Get any three non-new releases for seven days for seven bucks! I could point to Donald Glover’s chance to bring his rap skills to the fore (he has a quite respectable rap career under the name Childish Gambino), or the disturbingly hilarious “sexy Santa girl” deconstruction by the ever-amazing Alison Brie, or the weirdly appropriate conflation of “Glee” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, but I think it’s best if you just let this episode, like all of ‘Community’ wash over you in a bubbly sea of giddy hilarity. It’s a (pardon) gleeful takedown of ‘Community’s longtime competition, ‘Glee’ sure, but it, like every ‘Community’ episode with a hook, is also a loopy, inventive, character-driven work of hilarious art in its own right. So, first up, I’m gonna steer you toward one of my favorite shows of all time, ‘Community.’ Apart from the absolutely indispensable ‘Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas’(season 2, episode 11), which I may have already pushed on someone else by this point, I’ll definitely suggest you take on season 3, episode 10 “Regional Holiday Music.”In this one, the gang, continuing the running gag that they despise Greendale’s glee club, sees those chipper, insufferable cover artists get busted for ASCAP violations, only to find themselves falling under the sway of the creepily-cheery glee club instructor ( SNL’s Tarran Killam). But we here at Videoport excel at finding alternatives to the same old stuff that everyone else wants. Might all have been taken, since it’s, you know, that time of year and other people thought of calling ahead and stuff. Fortunately, there’s a long tradition of movies set at Christmastime (or with their peaks at Christmas) but that aren’t what we traditionally think of as “Christmas-y.” The classic example, of course, is Die Hard, but there are a few more. Customer suggests that you might want a break from the holly-jolly without completely forsaking the season. Tough and Triassic Tuesday! Give yourself a free rental from the Action or Classics section with any other paid rental! OR Get any three non-new releases for seven days for seven bucks! Belzer and Braugher for Christmas? Come on, dummy. Did you know there’s a Christmas episode of “Homicide” (Psst: it’s season 3, episode 8: ‘All Through the House’)? Maybe more. >JackieO wises you up on a holiday rental. Both films take place in the bright bustle of December, and in both, the joy and fellowship of others is just a bittersweet background to the essential isolation of the individual. “The Conversation,” arguably Francis Ford Coppola’s greatest film, features Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, an expert surveillance artist obsessed with maintaining his own privacy - and plagued by the knowledge of how easily that privacy can be breached. Inexperienced, unarmed, and so little schooled in the finer points of espionage that he can barely stammer out his own code name (“Condor”), Joe has to scramble to survive on the streets of New York while he dodges the agents and assassins trailing him, not knowing who to trust or where to turn. In “Three Days of the Condor,” bookish government researcher Joe Turner (Robert Redford) is the sole survivor of an assassination designed to take out his entire office. For psychological thrillers and disaffected stories of disenchanted, disenfranchised anti-heroes, and two of the ’70s greatest tales of paranoid suspense take place in the midst of the bustling Christmas season, when the bright lights and cheerful crowds only emphasize our protagonists’ isolation and unease.
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