Die Hard

Christmas Vacation hands down, FWIW two days late to the thread. To wit...

"Can I refill your egg nog for you? Get you something to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead?"

"Better take a raincheck on that, Art. He's got a lip fungus they ain't identified yet".

"Eat my rubber!"

"You couldn't hear a dump truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant".

"This isn't charity, it's family".

"It's Christmas..and we're all in misery".

"Where do you think you're going!? Nobody's leaving...nobody's walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. No..no..we're all in this together. This is a full-blown , four-alarm holiday emergency here. We're gonna press on and we're gonna have the hap hap happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny fucking Kaye ! " .

And the classic  " Shitter was  full  ! "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbTsyHH_7XU

I've successfully resisted watching that movie ever since I wasted several hours of my life watching the Chevy Chase Vegas and Europe and Wally World movies. The humor was sophomoric and worse, predictable. Clark Griswold. What a bozo, but you, the audience, may not be able to figure that out, so we'll help you by giving him a bozo name. I liked a few of the Vegas movie scenes where Clark gets clobbered in the casinos, especially by that Princess Bride guy, sneering at him while beating him over and over at progressively simpler and stupider games. Reminds me of the real-life advent of Casino War.

It sounds like the Christmas movie lampoons (har!) the way many families treat Christmas, as a mandatory family gathering sacred rite that most of them don't even enjoy, but nobody dares to say so. Traditionnnnn...da da, whump...tradiTIONNNN, da da, dump...

Thankfully, when I was growing up, our close relatives were far too geographically dispersed to make a family gathering a practical possibility. Still, my favorite part of Christmas Day was when I left and went to friends' houses to give them their gifts--not the family ceremony at home.

Bah, humbug!

Speaking of sophomoric, we might need to roast your chestnuts over an open fire. The fact that the grand majority of this movie's audience instinctively knows Griswold is a bozo is part of the overall appeal and core theme..ie inseparable. Much better movie vs Vegas vacation, imho. But, opinions vary..*shrugs*

"Christmas In Connecticut".  Best scenes were early in the movie, Barbara Stanwyck, feature writer at Smart Housekeeping-a ladies' magazine a la Southern Living- typing her gourmet Thanksgiving meal for the next issue--describing the sights and sounds at her 'country estate', fire crackling in the fireplace, etc...in reality she is typing it in her cramped urban apartment, radiator hissing, which the owner/editor (Sydney Greenstreet) of the magazine has no clue about.  She buys herself an expensive fur coat she can barely afford, etc., then learns that the boss has decided he wants to join her at the 'estate' for Christmas dinner.  She will surely be fired when he finds out about this fabrication.  Then a long time suitor, wealthy with a big mansion/farm, whom she cares nothing for, sells her on the idea of them getting married just so she can entertain Greenstreet there, keeping her job.  The plot thickens all kinds of ways.  Upbeat, funny, some really good lines in that movie.

Candy

Yeah, I hear you, but it seems like overkill to plaster a dum-dum name onto a dum-dum character. Sort of like making him wear a propeller beanie. I mean, as you say, we learn very early that he's a schmuck. They don't need to paint "SCHMUCK" on his forehead, just in case we were too dumb to figure that out.

The entire National Lampoon Blah Blah series lacks any kind of subtlety, kind of beating you over the head with every joke. The only movie that ever did that successfully was Airplane!, because that relentlessness was in and of itself a joke, which is appropriate for a parody.

Of course, comedy isn't the only genre guilty of this character naming bash the audience over their heads with it stuff. Spy movies, fantasy stuff, etc. where the villains are named Badguy McEvil. Romantic sludge where the girl is named Angel Flower Pulchritude. 

Subtlety is not Hollywood's middle name.🤔

Barbara Stanwyck--wasn't she the matriarch in, I think it was, The Big Valley? The only one in that family who didn't have a gun-:she didn't need one, as she could kill with a single withering gaze.

The plot device of mamage of convenience/deception is so tried and true, it dates back to Aeschalus (sp?) in ancient Greece. It was an old chestnut when Shakespeare used it (at least 3/4 of his stories and plot devices were cribbed from other, older sources).

But why would she buy a fur coat? It's not like she would wear it to work or if she worked from home, her editor would ever see it. And it's hard to believe that her boss would ever try to insinuate himself into her (family's) Christmas dinner. And if he takes her descriptions of her estate life at complete face value, he's more credulous than any editor of any publication has a right to be. And if he found out about her deception, why would he fire her--if he likes her writing, he shouldn't care if she's doing it from prison.

But Hollywood is silly, especially back then.😀

The appeal of those "Griswold" movies was "What crappy thing is going to happen to Clark now?"

And then you laughed hoping things would work out for the poor guy.

Your version wouldn't be very entertaining, Kevin.  No studio would pick it up.  LOL.

Stanwyck has a line about the fur coat, something to the effect that 'every girl should treat herself if she wants one.'  Yes, she works from home.  She and the boss have never met.

Stanwyck visits the boss to 'apologize' that she can't entertain him at her farm, says her 'child' has whooping cough (she doesn't have a child).  A overbearing sort, he replies, "Oh, that's not serious at all."  Is determined to taste the food she's been writing about in Smart Housekeeping.  He has just read his doctor's prescription for the Christmas meal...prune fluff, etc.  Gruffly shouts no way!  Then happily "I'm having Christmas in Connecticut!" 

So then the 'couple' has to come up with a child.

It goes on and on, beautifully.  

I hear you...except that I got the sense that most of those crappy things were caused, or at least allowed, by his own stupidity and/or cluelessness. That's not very effective humor in my book, though I acknowledge that it's a tried and true trope. Audiences feel smarter when they watch some bumbling fool get into trouble.

I didn't think that Clark Griswold was any different from Chase's SNL character who kept tripping over and knocking things down. These movies were just a different kind of slapstick.

Chase brought his SNL persona into a movie with Goldie Hawn (the title of which I'm too lazy to look up), and it was surprisingly effective, because they didn't overdo the "bumbling fool" part.

What was the old-time term for someone who is always fate's butt-monkey? Sad Sack?

Agreed...