Required Christmas Viewing 3
3. You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out, Kid.
If you’ve never seen A Christmas Story, I’m sure you’d know what movie I was talking about if I called it the You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out movie. And since I’m sure you’ve seen it, I won’t bore you with the details and just say that you need to see this movie every Christmas. The more you see it the funnier it is.
We watched this movie tonight with my parents and my sister and my brother-in-law and their year-old kid, Ava.
Here are my favorite parts:
Schwarz creates a slight breach of etiquette.
During the triple-dog-dare, the narrator says, “Schwartz created a slight breach of etiquette by skipping the triple dare and going right for the throat.” The kid’s face during the breach of etiquette bit is perfect—-for a second, he looks just a little bit sheepish, as if he’s embarrassed for not following proper daring procedure.
The mom’s freaky mop hairstyle.
She was halfway to being Cousin Itt. Was this a popular hairstyle in the 40s? Please tell me no. No, no, they had those cool iron things back then so that girls could have glamorous straight wavy hairstyles, didn’t they??? But the mother opted for the frizzy Star is Born Barbra Streisand look.
At least on Christmas Day she fixed it up really nice, by keeping it exactly the same, only putting a pink ribbon in it. This is the equivalent of putting a Cadillac grill on the front of a 1973 VW Beetle in order to “class it up”.
And finally, The Old Man.
Darren McGavin is absolutely the best part of the movie. I love his look of absolute wonderous rapture when he’s opening the crate containing his Major Award, 
and he finally pries off the wooden top and discovers to his great joy that it is filled with—-packing straw. “There could be anything in there!”
And his dramatic reveal when he bursts in from the basement when he hears what sounds suspiciously like a lamp breaking, almost as if he has been waiting for this to happen, black billows of smoke swirling behind him.
And his obvious horror and panic as he rushes up to the lamp, broken in the arms of his jealous wife after the “cleaning accident”. Even though the lamp is destroyed, he still reverently removes his sooty gloves before he will allow himself to touch the sacred relics of his Major Award.
And then his tragic look of dignity as he tries to piece together his shattered Major Award, 
hoping beyond hope that it will stay together (without glue). When it inevitably collapses, he turns, slowly, to glare at his wife, trying to hold back her giggles, then solemnly “gathers up the sad remains of his major award” and buries it in the yard.
But most important of all, his constant barrage of nonsensical cursing. Clearly the filmmakers had Darren actually curse up a storm while shooting, and then they intentionally dubbed in ridiculous substitute nonsense curse words, badly. Such as “Hostickle fifer!” or “Mundane noodle!” or the cryptic “Notta fingah!” Or the one that always makes us all laugh out loud; when the dad’s tire blows: “Dadgummit, blaaah!!” (The subtitles on the DVD translate this as “Dadgummit, blowout!!”. And to be honest, it may actually be that, but “Dadgummit, blaaah” is so much funnier, let’s just go with that.)
But what does “jeezerie” mean? And that reminds me, what is ‘Simoniz’?
Here are the girlfriend’s favorite parts:
The Chinese Restaurant.
I love it when oh look at Ava now, she’s being cute again.
Randy under the sink mourning the imminent death of his brother.
But he’ll still take a glass of milk, thank you very—awww look at Ava now, she’s bowing. That is so adorable.
Darren McGavin getting a bowling ball as a gift.
“Thanks a lot!” AWWWWW now look at Ava playing peek-a-boo! Where’s Ava??? Where is she? Wheerrrrrre is she???
Etc. etc….okay I may be exaggerating. But not by much.
By the way, it is interesting to note that Ava was wandering aimlessly around the room all night, totally obvlivious to anything going on on the television–with one notable exception. Whenever the yellow-eyed bully Scut Farkas—-
yes, his name is Scut, not Scott. I watched the movie about 400 times before I found that out, and when I did it kinda ruined something for me. What the heck kind of name is Scut? The kid never had a chance. —-
whenever the bully was on the screen, Ava would stop whatever she was doing to stare intently at him, fascinated, and laugh gleefully at him.
This worries me.
Note: If you’re a big fan of this movie, you might want to read the book the movie’s based on, called In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, by Jean Shepherd. It’s not all about Christmas, it’s more about life back in the 40’s, but it’s worth reading once. And here’s a bit of trivia for you: Do you remember when Ralphie and Randy get in line to see Santa? Do you remember the guy who says, “Hey, kid!” and yells at Ralphie not to cut in line? Did his voice sound familiar to you?
It should have, it was the same guy who’d been narrating the movie all along. And also the author of the book I just mentioned, Jean Shepherd, in a nice little cameo.
Another bit of trivia: Did you know there was a sequel? Well, don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything. It was called It Runs in the Family, and absolutely none of the original actors had anything to do with this. Macaulay Culkin’s brother Kieran was Ralphie…Mary Steenburgen played the mother (I guess the most important thing was to match the hair)….and going from Darren McGavin to Charles Grodin is about as big a plunge as going from the TV version of The Wild Wild West to the Will Smith version. Not exactly the same thing.
But feel free to watch it if you dare. (Assuming someone had poor enough business sense to release it onto DVD.)
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