“The Holidays”, that generic term designed to offend no one, are upon us. There are so many things that come in the big package that defines December it’s hard to know where to start. Most people just dive in and get into the spirit of it all. Not me. I like to find amusement in watching everyone else run around. Sooner or later, that means a hard look at the Holiday Movie Season.

Movies at this time of year are just one of the big diversions away from the simple fact that it is butt-cold outside, a condition that describes the reflexive clenching when you sit down to start a car and it is around zero Fahrenheit. It’s not what you want to do. A warm theatre seat is a great alternative, assuming there’s some kind of good entertainment to be had. That leads to the two types of movies, and only two types.

Some movies are intricate examinations of character or plot, and you can tell this immediately from the ads. If the commercials on teevee or in print show the lead characters looking at each other or glaring out at you, there’s a chance you have a good movie here. A chance, mind you, because you can never be totally sure it was written well, but you can tell that they were at least trying. That’s the important thing.

The second type of movie features the “gots”, as in, “It’s got two car chases, a ninja fight scene, and three breasts.” The ads for these kinds of movies show you bits of what it’s “got”, and often stray far away from the original setting. For example, one kids’ movie recently was plugged with an ad that had all the flying devices featured and tremendous chaos, but the music they used was from “Peewee’s Big Adventure”. This is probably from the sage advice of Peewee Herman, “If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?” (or was that just a comeback? They’re often the same.). This movie was a flop, as I predicted, because it was nothing but a series of “gots”. That’s what I “got” from the ads, at least.

I realize that in the desperate search for warm diversion many people don’t care all that much about these two kinds of movies, and can find entertainment in either. To that, I say, “Mazeltov”, as in, “When you’re going to the movies on Christmas Eve with your Jewish friends, you take what you can get”. That does happen. But as a writer, I do have to wonder about how these movies based on “gots” are assembled. They sound like extended pitches to a studio to me:

“OK, so we have this fantastic toy store, see, and it’s got all kinds of fantastic things in it, and when it’s going to be shut down the kids make use of what it’s got and do all these crazy things and in the end the stuff they got wins out over the forces of evil.”

Nearly all entertainment is pitched in some form these days, largely because the machinery that cranks out our bemusement is bombarded heavily with stuff that no one has time to read. That’s probably why formulaic “got” movies are so popular; they don’t require a lot of thought on the part of either the production crew or the audience.

Naturally, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are always a few movies that come along that are worth the $6 jumbo popcorn and price of admission. They are just a bit harder to find, and they don’t advertise as much. They also very often don’t “got” nuthin’, which is remarkably like the life all around me that I happen to enjoy very much, thank you.