Something happens to me every December wherein movies and music that are objectively kind of bad suddenly become irresistible simply because they are “about Christmas.” By this I mean I’m spending entire days listening to Michael Bublé and that one Zooey Deschanel album and entire nights watching whatever drivel Netflix has most recently produced — namely, movies in which hot people kiss in towns called “Snow Falls.”
This is how, recently, I found myself pressing play on the 2004 comedy Christmas With the Kranks, streaming on Hulu and starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Aykroyd, and the kid from Malcolm in the Middle. Of course I’d already seen it, and of course the only thing that stuck out to me was, “How could any college-aged woman love ham that much?” (a key plot point, somehow). Anyway, it was fine. It succeeded in doing its job, which was to turn my brain into a snow globe for an hour and 34 minutes.
This was before my fiancé, an unrepentant Letterboxd snob, decided to look up reviews for Christmas With the Kranks and found that it has a 5 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Five! Meaning that out of 100 reviews, only five of them were good. Incredibly low, I thought, for a movie that I’d consider at the very least watchable. And the reviews themselves were mean: Robert Ebert called it “a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end,” while the Washington Post said it was “a leaden whimsy so heavy it threatens to crash through the multiplex floor.”
My first thought was not anger at the critics of 20 years ago for ripping apart a film I had just spent 94 precious minutes watching. It was the overwhelming suspicion that, if Christmas With the Kranks were to come out today, it would have a significantly better critical reception than it did 20 years ago.
So I looked up reviews for similar mid-budget Christmas movies from the 2000s that remain popular on streaming (Kranks is the seventh most popular movie on Hulu right now). Turns out, critics hated many of them, too. 2008’s Four Christmases, starring Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn, has a measly 25 percent rating and was called a “miscast mess” by Empire magazine and “egregious” by the Guardian.
Ron Howard’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, at 49 percent, was dubbed “a dank, eerie, weird movie.” Most shocking of all, The Holiday, an objectively perfect Nancy Meyers film despite the fact that Kate Winslet ends up with Jack Black, was called “soggy, syrupy” and “bloating” by the BBC and was criticized for not “saying much.”
Do you remember the last time you read a review of a Christmas rom-com that complained that it didn’t have enough to say? I don’t. That’s because nobody expects them to say anything anymore. And that’s bad for the current state of pop culture.
Consider the sorts of reviews that the legions of made-for-streaming Christmas movies are getting these days. Comedies that manage to nab actual A-listers and decent-sized budgets like Spirited and The Christmas Chronicles receive mostly positive reviews for being “fun for the whole family,” while middling romances like A Christmas Prince, Falling for Christmas, and Hot Frosty are praised for being simply passable. One LA Weekly critic called the bafflingly terrible Lindsay Lohan Netflix joint Falling for Christmas “perfect background noise for wrapping presents, or a good reason for a cackling friend-watch and group activity (while getting jolly and juiced).”
It’s worth asking what the point of reviewing a movie is if the conclusion is “Sure, it’s bad, but throw it on if you don’t plan on paying attention.” This isn’t a dig at that particular critic (who, to be fair, only included it as a part of a roundup of 2022’s Christmas movies). It’s rather an indictment of the way we’re now expected to engage with film — and TV and music, too. It’s now taken for granted that when we click “play” on a streaming platform, it’s probably not the only thing we’re paying attention to.
The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka argued that homogenous, predictable vibes-based “ambient TV” (think Emily in Paris, Dream Home Makeover, and basically any show about food) that keeps users watching, even when they’re not, is the backbone of the streaming economy. “Like earlier eras of TV, ambient television is less a creative innovation than a product of the technological and social forces of our time,” he writes.
It’s worth asking what the point of reviewing a movie is if the conclusion is “Sure, it’s bad, but throw it on if you don’t plan on paying attention.”
The effect has been to diminish the quality we now expect from our film, television, and music. Yet it’s only part of the equation. At the same time that streaming platforms proliferated, so too did social media, which dramatically increased the amount of content people consume that is produced by amateur posters as opposed to creative professionals. Meanwhile, algorithmic social media platforms force-feed the most mediocre content to their users. Now, we’re also contending with the problem of an endless font of AI slop, which synthesizes everything that came before it and churns out versions that are worse.
Bad movies being praised as “good enough” isn’t just a film industry or algorithmic problem, though. In the late 2000s, social media ushered in an era of poptimism: If critics openly trashed a movie or artist who was popular, they were seen as a snob or out of touch with the millions of people who suddenly had just as much power to publish their own opinions. “Now, when a pop star reaches a certain strata of fame,” wrote Chris Richards in the Washington Post in 2015, “something magical happens. They no longer seem to get bad reviews. Stars become superstars, critics become cheerleaders and the discussion froths into a consensus of uncritical excitement.”
Poptimism isn’t all bad. One of its effects was that critics suddenly had to take seriously the underrepresented opinions of nonwhite people, young people, and women. But there is also something inherently cowardly about trying to match the tastes of the masses, afraid of being left behind.
Perhaps because social media democratized the role of the culture critic, or perhaps because of the wider collapse of local journalism (and journalism writ large), but today, we have fewer professional critics who are writing film reviews. Which means that critics aren’t going full Roger Ebert-reviewing-Kranks mode like they used to — with one exception. This year’s action-comedy Christmas movie Red One, starring The Rock and Chris Evans, was dubbed “a distinctly joyless execution of a premise” by critics, who mostly seemed annoyed by the gigantic budget ($250 million) and Marvel-wannabe plot.
The reviews are almost refreshingly nostalgic — a sign, maybe, that not every corner of media has devolved into the current state of everything: a culture industry where both producers and audiences would rather obsess over charts, follower counts, and profitability over engaging with the subject matter.
I realize now I’m part of the problem. I was treating Christmas With the Kranks like a film viewer in 2024: something to throw on while looking at my phone, then look up its Rotten Tomatoes score as though its algorithm could synthesize all of the infinite nuances of what a good review entails. I have no interest in litigating whether Kranks is a good movie or not, but reading its terrible reviews reminded me that even the most mediocre Christmas comedy should be taken seriously. We should demand more than just-okay films where recognizable stars follow predictably soothing tropes — even when all you’re looking for is to have a brain that becomes a snow globe.
