NEW YEARS PARTIES ON THE SCREEN:

Toronto
2011 kicks off on a high note with the 26th annual Citytv New Year’s Bash LIVE from Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto at 10pm on Citytv.
One of the biggest New Year’s celebrations in Canada, this year’s special outdoor, free-concert is hosted by Citytv personalities Gord Martineau, Tracy Moore, Kevin Frankish and Dina Pugliese. Be part of the fun and festivities from your very own living room starting at 10 pm on Citytv. The Citytv New Year’s Bash is also available LIVE online at Citytv.com/newyears2011 and streaming live on the Citytv iPad app.
The biggest night of the year heats up with performances by some of the hottest names in music including platinum selling, Juno Award winning singer, song writer, producer, Shawn Desman; MMVA Award winning pop music star, Danny Fernandes; fresh-faced quintet and Juno nominees, Stereos; music sensation from Chilliwack, These Kids Wear Crowns; soulful songstress, Divine Brown; and triple threat – singer, dancer, choreographer, Blake McGrath. Plus, holiday messages from the casts of your favourite primetime shows.

New York
Under other circumstances, squeezing more than 1 million people into a few blocks on a frigid night would turn ugly. But this is Times Square on New Year’s Eve, where the mood is electric, and for the most part, people behave. For 10 seconds everyone is united, as teenagers sneaking drinks, visitors from all over the world, and natives who swear they will never do this again count backward.
Familiar faces will lead that countdown from New York on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2011.” Clark, who’s been at this since 1972, stays inside ABC’s newsroom overlooking the jammed streets.
Seacrest, who began in 2005, is on a stage in the street.
Fergie hosts the L.A. segment, which features Jennifer Hudson, Drake, Natasha Bedingfield and Train. Willow Smith, La Roux and Far East Movement are also in the lineup. For Avril Lavigne, last New Year’s Eve was “a mellow dinner” with friends. Lavigne’s launching a single, “What the Hell,” on the show.  “This will be the first time in public, and to have it be on Dick Clark’s New York countdown, I am stoked.”

Vegas
Nancy O’Dell already knows 2011 will be big for her, so she might as well welcome it in a big way. The former “Access Hollywood” co-host – and Miss South Carolina – will return to weekday television by succeeding Mary Hart as co-anchor of “Entertainment Tonight” when it ends its current season in May. One way O’Dell is revving back up is by hosting Fox’s “New Year’s Eve Live” celebration from Las Vegas’
Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino.
“I’ve never brought in New Year’s Eve on a television show, so it will be new and different for me,” O’Dell says. “For the past 10 years, I hosted the Rose Parade, so I’d gone to bed at 8, because I had to get up at 3am. I just hope I stay awake!”
O’Dell knows she needs to get at least one thing perfect her first time.  “I just want to make sure I get the countdown right,” she notes of the traditional descent of the illuminated globe in Time Square, which Fox will cut to New York for. “That’s a huge deal. I’m used to people telling me countdowns in my ear, but what if I miss it by a second?”
Musical guests for “New Year’s Eve Live” include Travis McCoy
(”Billionaire”) and “American Idol” alum David Archuleta. “It would be really cool if they also grabbed some of the Vegas acts,”
O’Dell says. “The crazier and the bigger a circus it is on New Year’s Eve, the better.”

ONE-TWO PUNCH FOR A YEAR THAT DESERVES TO DIE The Air Farce is dropping F Bombs all over the place, Ron James is out there getting “T-boned at the crossroads of life,” and the rest of us would be happy just to break even.Sounds as if another year is about to pass into history. As it has done for countless years – at least for those of us too lazy to count them – CBC Television is sending the year out with a Bronx cheer and a big mess. First up on Friday, Dec. 31, is “Royal Canadian Air Farce: New Year’s Eve,” followed by “The Ron James
Show: New Year’s Eve Special.”
It says something about our national outlook – or at least that of the national broadcaster – that instead of counting down to the new year, we like to spend New Year’s Eve sending the old one packing with a kick in the pants.
“The Italians have a custom,” says the Air Farce’s Roger Abbott by way of explaining. “I think on New Year’s Eve, they do a little housecleaning and throw stuff out the window. Before the new year begins, you throw out all the baggage you don’t want to carry into the clean new year.”
That, he says, is more or less what Air Farce New Year’s celebrations are about. For the first time since the weekly show went off the air, Abbott and Air Farce co-leader Don Ferguson have reassembled the entire troupe – Luba Goy, Jessica Holmes, Penelope Corrin, Alan Park and Craig Lauzon – to perform the public, ritual cleansing of the crap for Canada.  “It’s a little bit in the Catholic tradition of going to confession and starting out with a clean conscience,”
Abbott says.
“Maybe that’s what we do on New Year’s Eve: purge the crap from the year and step out smartly with a clean where-do-we-go-from-here. “On Jan. 1, we’re all optimists, but by Dec. 31, we’re all pessimists again.”
Meanwhile, James plans to “get beneath” the events and take “more of a poetic deference for the heart and the soul of the country.”
If Air Farce’s role is to shoot down the big shots, James’ mission is to shake a fist for us all at the dark forces that are beyond our control and out to get us. “What I always found to be the common denominator, no matter where you travel in the country, is how the seasons affect our sense of self,” he says. “This country’s foundation myths and its major psychological motifs have been honed by the weather and the seasons. So that’s what the New Year’s monologue is
about: how these four seasons affect us, and our different rituals and rhythms. So I’m coming at the year from a different perspective.”
The Air Farce gang, on the other hand, is content to make a large mess. However, Abbott admits they may have to reach a bit for material on the federal front – beyond the obvious pouring of scorn over the G-8/G-20 disaster. “The most exciting thing in federal politics in the past six months has been Harper wearing glasses,” he says.
Last year, when they returned for New Year’s after a year off the air, the troupe members decided they didn’t want to “wheel out the old stuff,” Abbott says.
So they retired the Chicken Cannon – which served so proudly over the years to launch disgusting substances at pictures of the powerful and famous. In its place, they brought out the “F-Bomb” (F for “Farce”) a deadly combination of gravity and semi liquids that turns the 10-story CBC atrium into a weapon of ridicule.  “Basically, we went vertical instead of horizontal,” Abbott says.  “Now we’re looking for ways to improve the firepower of that.”
Short of adding stories to the building, there’s only one way to add
firepower: come up with more sickening mixtures.  Abbott says he and Ferguson have been experimenting with “another 10-story building with a roof and an empty parking lot.”
“We wanted to try watermelons, but our special effects guy calculated some combination of weight and velocity down the length of the 10 stories and figured it would do irreparable harm to the floor of the atrium. He must have passed physics in high school. It’s too bad, too, because they would explode beautifully. But mess is our middle name. So we will keep on experimenting up until New Year’s Eve.”
Though he doesn’t intend to zero in on events, James says he can’t resist picking one spectacular high and a low from the past year. On an up note, there were the Vancouver Olympics, and for national shame, it would be hard to beat the G-20 riots in Toronto, he says.
“Vancouver gave us the best that we can be, and Toronto and the Conservative party gave us the worst. Those are the two stellar moments we should measure the country by what we’re capable of at our best and our worst.”

CAT CRAZED

Maureen Palmer’s new CBC TV Doc Zone project – an irreverent take on the world’s cat over-population crisis, was supposed to air on February 24th, but now Doc Zone has decided it wants to air it first up in the new season, Thursday, January 6th!  This a perfect subject for that first week of January because, for Canada’s animal shelters, this is not “the most wonderful time of the year.”  They know Santa will stuff a cute, cuddly kitten into thousands of Christmas stockings. But by New Year’s Day, that little ball of fur is will be one giant nuisance. And so it will be dropped off at the shelter, or worse, dumped on the side of a rural road and left to fend for itself.
Why do millions of cats live, quite literally, in the lap of luxury, while tens of millions more are abandoned to lead short, miserable lives as feral cats, foraging for food and killing an estimated one billion birds a year in North America. CAT CRAZED answers that question in a most entertaining way. 
Cordell Barker, the Oscar-nominated animator of The Cat Came Back, delivers biting social satire in a series of editorial cartoons throughout the film.
Filmmaker Maureen Palmer (Vancouver), animator Cordell Barker (Winnipeg) and various other (real live) people who appear in the film are available for interview. And great clips available, both live & animated.
Note: there are 5 million cat owners in Canada, with cats now curled up in their owners’ laps, who will be more than a little interested in hearing about the serious subject dealt with so entertainingly in this film. Not to mention the interest (OK, a better word would be concern) from the legions of worried Canadian bird-watchers and bird fanciers!

CANADA A SUPER POWER? GET SMART!

If you want to parody spy shows and movies, reimagining Canada as a world power goes a long way toward establishing the right tone of insanity.
As series co-creator Kevin White says, “InSecurity” – debuting Tuesday, Jan. 4, on CBC – is set in “a superpower that is tricking the world.”
“We all thought that was a pretty funny idea,” he says. “Instead of going the route of Canada being underfunded and not very good, which we kind of know to be the norm, let’s go the other way.
“So Canada’s a superpower.”
We may be a superpower in this world, but the characters of “InSecurity” will be painfully familiar to anyone who has followed some of the crazy goings-on in Canadian security and intelligence over the years.
Set in Ottawa, it follows the exploits of a team of superagents charged with protecting some of the country’s top secrets – such as the “fact” that we have one of the world’s most powerful military establishments.
They include an overweight Quebecois agent (Remy Girard) who’s really a typical bureaucrat waiting out his time to retirement; a forensics geek (Grace Lynn Kung) who acts as if she’s slumming whenever she leaves her lab; a “Ligerian” refugee (Richard Yearwood), who is a strange blend of affability and menace; and an all-Canadian guy (Matthew MacFadzean) who thinks he’s Jack Bauer but is really Maxwell Smart.
And at the center of it all is Alex Cranston (Natalie Lisinska), a top agent who “fancies herself as being Farrah Fawcett when really she’s Liz Lemon.”
“She really loves the hair and the tights and the boots, but really, she’s a bit of a dork,” Lisinska says. “But she is the only sane man, which is not saying a lot. The people she’s surrounded by are challenging at best.”
Born in England and raised on Vancouver Island, Lisinska studied drama at Toronto’s Ryerson University before graduating into a few small TV roles, which led her into a featured role in the 2006 miniseries “At the Hotel” from Ken Finkleman (“The Newsroom”).
“The people I worked with on that, I look back on it and it just blows my mind,” she says. “I was doing scenes with Don McKellar and Martha Henry.
“Ken Finkleman really took me under his wing.”
Since then, she appeared in the miniseries “Above and Beyond,” the film “Young People F—-ing,” and such TV thrillers as “My Neighbor’s Secret” and “Flashpoint.” The last are exactly the kinds of shows she says “InSecurity” is out to parody.
“As far as research goes,
I studied the American procedurals that we’re parodying,” she says.
“And then I just let myself riff on being Jack Bauer (‘24’) or Sydney Bristow (‘Alias’).
“The thing with those shows is that if you watch them long enough, you almost start to watch them as comedy, because they take themselves so seriously.”
White and his co-creators – Virginia Thompson and Robert De Lint – started throwing around the idea of doing a “Get Smart” for the 21st century when they were working on ”Corner Gas.”
The Ottawa-raised White, it turned out, had a natural affinity for the subject matter: “Mother was a spy,” he says.
“My mother’s response was, ‘You want to make a show about that? A comedy?’ ” he recalls.
“But it’s not really of the world my mother was in. She was into communication tracking. This is much more TV spies: a group of people out to get bad guys.”
Originally, White says, the idea was to delve into the warped world of the federal bureaucracy, to create a “ ‘24’ meets ‘The Office.’
“But then, we thought it would be a lot more fun if they had guns and just weren’t very good at it. In the end, for this kind of series to work, it has to be about bumbling.
“We take our stories not only from the newspaper – like Maxime Bernier leaving top-secret files in hotel rooms. We try to riff on those headlines when they come up. But we also try to riff on the genre and the conventions of ‘24’ or ‘Law & Order’ or whatever.”
Two years ago, they put together a pilot episode, also starring Lisinska, called “The B Team,” which evolved into “InSecurity.”
Yet as White says, when we read about Canadian security issues in the paper, they usually come closer to being comedy than drama, which makes parody kind of a tall order.
Given that all espionage shows are about lies and suspicion, that leaves “InSecurity” to plow new ground by taking this paranoia into the realm of the surreal, Lisinska adds. “The show is riffing on the reputation that Canadians have of being supernice is all a cover, and we’re really one of the major players in worldwide espionage. And perhaps we are.”

A TOWN SLIMS DOWN: ‘VILLAGE ON A DIET’

Ali Zentner doesn’t like the F word (”fat”), but she has to say that we are a country in need of a diet and exercise plan. A weight-loss doctor from Vancouver, Zentner is one of several experts enlisted to help the town of Taylor, B.C., work off a ton of weight. The result of that experiment is the series “Village on a Diet,” debuting Monday, Jan. 3, on CBUT.
The show is the centerpiece of the CBC healthy living initiative “Live Right Now.”
“It’s over a period of 10 weeks,” Zentner says. “And it’s an indicator of weight loss in general. There are people who do really well and lose 5 to 10 percent of their body weight.  And there are those who make small changes.”
Taylor is a town of roughly 1,400 people in the Peace River country.
It’s remote, it’s 14 kilometers from the nearest city, Fort St. John, and it has very long winters. In other words, it’s an ideal place to gain weight if you don’t watch yourself. Yet, Zentner says, it’s also something of a model of the Canadian condition. “About 60 percent of Taylor is obese,” she says.
“Our statistics are from 2006, and they show that 27 percent of Canadians are obese, but almost 50 percent of Canadians are overweight. And in Taylor, the numbers are more than twice the national average. But that’s not extreme in terms of what we’re seeing in Canada.”
Taylor was the winner of an online call for communities volunteering to lose a ton of weight in three months. But don’t even think of calling it the fattest town in Canada.  “Several towns were vying to be the town to get healthy,” Zentner says. “The reason I’m not a fan of the F word is that it denotes all the negative social connotations of this disease. This is a town that should be proud of itself, because this town asked for help.”

LIVING IN PICKUP TRUCKS AND ON HORSEBACK

There is a subculture that a lot of us never see, inhabited by old-fashioned individualists who travel thousands of miles and risk life and limb almost  daily on the outside chance that they’ll win a championship and maybe make a little bit of money.  That’s the world of “Rodeo: Life on the Circuit,”
debuting Tuesday, Jan. 4, on History Television.
“These cowboys and cowgirls are real athletes,” says executive producer Guy Clarkson. “What I was interested in was their competitive passion, why they drive 17 hours to one rodeo and get in their truck and drive 10 hours to another one, and carry on for months.”
Clarkson isn’t so very far removed from the people he filmed for this show.
In addition to being a filmmaker, he’s a helicopter pilot and mountain guide. Perhaps his best-known work is a series on the northern Rockies, “Shining Mountains,” which aired on History in 2005. “Rodeo”
grew out of that project, he says. Over the course of making “Shining Mountains,” Clarkson and his crew shot at several ranches in Alberta, “observing their way of life, the old Wild West, a firm handshake and look them in the eye, and that’s your word. That historic culture that sort of built the West is very much alive,” he says. “The young people in those families are often third-generation rodeo cowboys and cowgirls.”         

The series follows 14 competitors – 12 men and two women – through one season on the circuit in Alberta.  “I really respect their passion for it and the integrity of that way of life, watching cowboys competing with each other and helping one another,” Clarkson says.
“There’s no guaranteed paycheck.  They drive insane distances to go to all these rodeos. They pay to play, with no guarantee of an income, and they barely make enough gas money through the season to hopefully get to the Canadian finals, the national championships and, maybe, the mother lode.”
The show avoids the controversial events such as the chuck wagon races and calf roping and concentrates instead on horse racing and bareback, saddle bronco and bull riding. The main criterion for the characters in the series was that they all had at least the potential to go all the way to the national championships, Clarkson says. However, considering the dangers involved – especially in bull riding – it was something of a gamble that any of them would get through the season in one piece.
One competitor, Davey Shields, broke his leg a couple of months into the season, possibly ending his career. Another, Steven Turner, broke both ankles. “He breaks one ankle, so he hops on the other one,” Clarkson says. “Then he breaks the other one and has to hop on the good bad one. Then he goes all the way through and makes it to the Canadian finals. “It was unpredictable what was going to happen with the characters.  It can all change in seconds.” Clarkson says the last thing he wanted to do was “a sports documentary.” The idea was to “gain a better understanding and appreciation for what they go through to ride.”
One of the challenges was getting the characters to open up and say something that came close to dialogue, he adds. “They’re not overly verbose.
You look for short sound bites in television, but I’ve never had shorter sound bites. “You’d ask, ‘How was the ride?’ and get, ‘She bucked good.’ ” ‘Could you expand a little bit?’ ” ‘She bucked real good.’ “

X-CARS

X-CARS is a two-hour documentary special that traces the incredible, 30-year journey of an automotive dream. From a sketch on a napkin in 1985, to the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE races in the summer and fall of 2010, George Parker and his Future Vehicle Technologies (FVT) team from Maple Ridge, BC have become one of the top contenders in the international competition to build a mass-market car that can get more than 100 mpg with a range of at least 200 km.
Through the obstacles and the breakthroughs of constructing the car literally piece by piece, to the triumphs and disappointments of competition preparation and the races themselves, we’ll be with the FVT team every step of the way. With a budget that’s a fraction of most of their glossy competitors, it’s a ride that isn’t always going to be pretty – but it’s guaranteed to be very, very real.

‘FRAMED’ ART FOR ALL!

‘FRAMED’ ART FOR ALL!
A forlorn art curator tries to hide the entire collection of London’s National Gallery near an eccentric, inquisitive Welsh village, on “Framed,” adapted by Frank Cottrell Boyce from his best-selling children’s novel about art, love, life, and Ninja Turtles, airing on Masterpiece Contemporary, Sunday, December 26 at 9pm on KCTS.
Boyce, who also wrote masterpiece’s powerful holocaust drama “God on Trial,” was inspired by the relocation of the National Gallery’s treasures to the Manod slate mine in Wales during WWII.
In “Framed,” he depicts a similar emergency—this time due to catastrophically deteriorating plumbing at the museum—which ends up sparking a clash of cultures that is humorous, heart-warming, and romantically satisfying.
“Framed” stars Trevor Eve (”Heat of the Sun,” “The Politician’s Wife”) as Quentin Lester, the man in charge of moving the National Gallery’s holdings to Manod and keeping it secret. Eve Myles (”Little Dorrit,”
“Torchwood”) costars as vivacious local teacher Angharad Stannard, whose students solve the mystery in no time.
Quentin’s initial suspicion of Angharad soon melts, but it takes all her skill to reform his peculiar view of art. He thinks it is about composition, genre, and genius, but she believes that art is nothing without people to appreciate it and maybe have their lives changed in the process.
The film also features Welsh child actors Sam Davies (”Doctor Who”) and Mari Ann Bull as Dylan and Minnie Hughes, siblings and star pupils in Angharad’s classroom. Their father, Daffyd (Mark Lewis Jones, “Robin Hood”), runs a gas station and lovingly restores old cars— an extravagance that lands the family in financial straits. When Daffyd disappears, it’s up to the youngsters to save the family business, which they proceed to do by outwitting the security system at Quentin’s art storage facility—with its priceless Monets, Van Eycks, Leonardos, Raphaels, Donatellos, and much more.
The last three names are the occasion for some confusion between Quentin and Dylan. When they chat about these figures, Quentin is referring to the artists while Dylan is thinking of the reptiles—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—who, as all the world except Quentin knows, bear the same names. Dylan’s well-honed opinions, such as “Raphael is an idiot,” lead Quentin to conclude that he is a remarkably astute young art connoisseur, when, in fact, he is remarkable for quite different reasons … as becomes clear.
Manod is an endlessly diverting gallery of interesting characters, from the Elvis-obsessed butcher (Robert Pugh, “Prime Suspect: The Final Act”) who won’t sell liver because “it’s alive!” to Dylan and Minnie’s baby brother, Max, who becomes the photo model for a collage that ends up hanging in the National Gallery, where it attracts one very special admirer.
And as great art should, the National Gallery’s masterpieces can’t help but vitalize and inspire the residents of this remote Welsh outpost, Quentin included. Indeed, like liver, you might say that these grand old works are alive.

A BOXING DAY BLOWOUT FOR HOCKEY FANS

It might be stretching things to call Team Canada the underdog, but we are in something of a come-from-behind situation this year.  To make matters even more disturbing, we’re hoping for a comeback against Team USA. For hockey fans, the real Boxing Day blowout is the 2011 IIHF World Under-20 Championship – the world juniors – which begins Sunday, Dec.
26, on TSN. The sports network is carrying all the games live from Buffalo and Niagara Falls, N.Y., with Canada, the United States, Germany, Sweden, Russia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Switzerland, Norway and Slovakia vying for the championship.
Going in, it looks as if the major rivalry will be between Canada and Team USA, which last year edged its northern neighbor in overtime play in the championship game, forcing us to settle for silver for the first time in six years.
“There’s no doubt about it, it was a great game,” says TSN’s Gord Miller. “So, what makes this year’s tournament interesting is that the United States goes home as the defending champion – which is very much like the last time the tournament was in the U.S. The ’05 tournament was in Grand Forks, North Dakota, which was the year after the United States had beaten Canada to win its first gold medal.”
Canada still holds the record for most consecutive gold medals – twice. We had a five-year run from 1993 to ’97 and another from 2005 to 2009.
That doesn’t mean we don’t come up against tough competition every year, Miller says.
“What’s interesting about that is, in those five straight years that Canada had won gold medals, it seems like every year, even though it was five in a row, there was a real close call.
“You think back to 2007, and they barely survive a shootout against the Americans in the semis. In ’08, in the Czech Republic, it took an overtime goal to win it against the Swedes. In ’09, it took (Jordan) Eberle’s goal in the last second in Ottawa in the semis to pull it out.
“Then in 2010, they go to overtime, and they lose to the United States. So they dominated that tournament by razor-thin margins.”
Even before it snatched the gold last year, Team USA was shaping up to be Canada’s No. 1 international rival – largely because the players know one another so well.
Many Americans have played junior against a lot of the Canadians they’ll be meeting on the ice in Buffalo. And there are “more than 100 Americans playing junior in Canada,” Miller says. “They play against each other a lot, whether it’s the under-17 teams or under-18 teams, or junior hockey.
“Last year, you had Cam Fowler of the U.S., who was teammates with guys like Taylor Hall. And Canadians and Americans are naturally competitive.”
Team Canada is in a tough pool. Action starts with Canada versus Russia on Boxing Day, followed by games with the Czechs Tuesday, Dec.
28, and Norway the next day. The preliminaries wrap up New Year’s Eve with Canada versus Sweden. The main difference between Canada and the rest, Miller says, is not so much the quality of the players as the quantity. “Canada’s best 20 are pretty much the same as everyone else’s. The difference is that Canada’s next 20 could also win the tournament.”

SOME FAVORITE CHRISTMAS FLAVORED FILMS

With Christmas falling on a Saturday this year, there’s one last full week — well, almost — before St.  Nick makes his annual rounds. Thanks to television, DVD and Blu-ray, there also are chances to give yourself some extra holiday cheer with movies that invoke the yuletide. Here’s a look at some of our favorites, those that are very traditional in their use of the holidays … and others, not as much.
TRADITIONAL:
“White Christmas” (1954), Jay Bobbin: A sure sign of the season, this enduring delight — reutilizing elements of the earlier “Holiday Inn,”
including Irving Berlin music — guarantees warm feelings as soon as the title tune’s first notes sound over the opening credits.  Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are teamed memorably as ex-soldiers, now a successful song-and-dance team. They take their act to a Vermont inn operated by their former commander (Dean Jagger), who has fallen on hard times and may have to shutter the place … but not if Crosby and Kaye, along with two comely sisters (Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen), can help it. Also notable as the film that introduced Paramount Pictures’ VistaVision process, it gets multiple Christmas Eve showings Friday, Dec. 24, on AMC.
“A Christmas Carol” (1938), John Crook: I’m a “Christmas Carol”
junkie, and this faithful early MGM adaptation, which casts real-life acting couple Gene and Kathleen Lockhart as the senior Cratchits, is fine on many counts. But look closely at the kids, which include their real daughter, June (“Lost in Space”), who years later would charm me in an interview with warm memories of that fi lm, as well as the Christmas traditions she and her parents shared back then in Hollywood, when they would open their home to other Brit actors pulling holiday jobs in California. I still treasure that chat.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), Jacqueline Cutler: Though inescapable during the holidays and essentially a twist on “A Christmas Carol,”
try watching this film without crying. This is the only movie I know precisely when I first saw it — July 23, 1983. It was a week before my wedding, and my fiance couldn’t believe I had never seen it. While we watched Jimmy Stewart, as George Bailey, become the richest man in Bedford Falls, my car was burglarized, and wedding gifts, just retrieved from the post office, were stolen. Yet the inscription guardian angel Clarence (Thomas Mitchell) wrote to George resonates:
“Remember, George, no man is a failure who has friends.”
“Miracle on 34th St.” (1947), Kate O’Hare: This film dangles the tantalizing proposition that Santa Claus is not just a nice man in a red suit and then provides a surprising legal resolution. Customers love Macy’s store Santa Kriss Kringle (Edmund Gwenn), but his calm assertion that he’s the real thing gets him accused of insanity. His unlikely defender is a stubbornly rational little girl (Natalie Wood) whose divorced mother (Maureen O’Hara) has banned all fantasy. With a little help from the U.S. Postal Service (how often is that agency a
hero?) and some deductive reasoning, Kringle — along with love, faith and imagination — is vindicated.
 NONTRADITIONAL:
“Love Actually” (2003), Jay Bobbin: Directing one of his scripts for the first time, Richard Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,”
“Notting Hill”) infuses the many plots of his something-for-everyone romantic comedy-drama with the holiday season from the start, as a washedup rock star (the superb Bill Nighy) has trouble converting the Troggs’ pop standard “Love Is All Around” into a Christmas-oriented version.  Frequent Curtis doppelganger Hugh Grant plays England’s new prime minister, Colin Firth appears as a jilted writer, Andrew Lincoln (“The Walking Dead”) is an acquaintance of new bride Keira Knightley, Alan Rickman portrays an office boss with Laura Linney one of his employees, and Liam Neeson is the stepfather of a wise-beyond-his-years schoolboy (Thomas Sangster, who — trivia alert! — is a real-life cousin of Grant). And they’re all affected by, and affecting in, matters of the heart.
“The Ref” (1994), John Crook: I like to pull this one out when I reach that inevitable point where my holiday goodwill is at its lowest ebb.
This acidly funny, grandly acted yarn about a harried burglar (Denis
Leary) who is forced to take a relentlessly bickering married couple (Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey) hostage on Christmas Eve just gets funnier every time I see it. The classy supporting cast, with Christine Baranski and Glynis Johns, doesn’t hurt, either. A few sips of this improbable mix of eggnog and bitters — lots and lots of bitters — can lift the fala-la-la-lousiest funk for me.
“Meet John Doe” (1941), Jacqueline Cutler: Besides my weakness for old newspaper movies, this stars the handsome, honorable Gary Cooper as Doe, and as the wisecracking newspaperwoman, the magnificent Barbara Stanwyck. Just before Christmas, her character is laid off; furious, she writes a fake letter, signed “John Doe.” The paper publishes it, launching a movement.  Doe is supposedly so disheartened by the political climate he’s going to jump off a building on Christmas Eve.
A broke baseball player pretends to be John Doe, but his conscience kicks in, and ultimately so does everyone else’s.
“Die Hard” (1988), Kate O’Hare: In this blockbuster, NYPD Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) lands in Los Angeles to celebrate Christmas with his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia) and kids but winds up battling high-tech thieves in a Century City office tower. To the accompaniment of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” McClane blows up the bad guys while reaf-firming the values of courage, love, family, sacrifice, determination and friendship — all while showing that Christmas-wrapping tape is really good for securing your gun. Amid a flurry of paper in the finale, the reunited McClanes drive away to Vaughn Monroe’s “Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let It Snow!”

HOW TO MAKE YOUR HOME PAY FOR ITSELF

It’s all over but Junior hockey, the bowl games and the bills. So now might be a good time to be thinking about ways to bring in money. And that’s where Scott McGillivray comes in, with a Boxing Day “Income Property” marathon Sunday, Dec. 26, on HGTV.  McGillivray is a carpenter with a marketing degree, so he knows renovation, and he knows a little bit about presentation and sales.
Each week, he visits a couple with a mortgage and some kind of spare property and helps them get the most out of the latter and put the least into the former. For example, in one episode, a couple with a $300,000-plus mortgage are stuck with a basement apartment no one seems to want.  Small wonder. The kitchen looks industrial. The living room lacks a window. There’s no closet in the bedroom. The carpet is such a horrible color that it actually improves with wear.
The solution is a $10,000 makeover that transforms the subterranean space into something that looks like a pricey high-rise condo.  What can make your mouth water is the bottom line on all this. The owners’ mortgage is $1,100/mo, and the property rents for $950. On the other hand, there are enough surprises involved in the renos to keep things interesting.

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