Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 347: Sun Dec 13

A Christmas Story (Clark, 1983): Underground Film Club, 4pm


Those people at the excellent Rooftop Film Club have gone underground, literally! They have taken residence in the Waterloo Vaults and programmed a crowd-pleasing season of movies in the lead up to Christmas. It's a similar set-up to the Rooftop venture but there's a bigger screen and it's guaranteed to be warm. Plus you can play crazy golf. I went on the launch night and was impressed with the food, the service ... and the choice of movie ... Tangerine!

You can find out the full schedule of films here but be sure to book. These events are popular and often sell out. Tonight's screening is a quirky, popular holiday hit from the director behind Black Christmas and the excellent Murder By Decree. All in all, highly recommended.

Chicago Reader review:
As a follow-up to his excoriated Porky's and Porky's II, director Bob Clark teamed with nostalgic humorist Jean Shepherd for this squeaky clean and often quite funny 1983 yuletide comedy, adapted from Shepherd's novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. The bespectacled young hero (Peter Billingsley) lives with his parents and younger brother in northeast Indiana and craves a BB gun for Christmas; the old man (Darren McGavin in one of his best roles) wins a newspaper contest and insists on displaying his prize—a table lamp shaped like a woman's leg in fishnet stockings. Shepherd provides the voice-over of the grown hero narrating, and his prominence on the sound track forces Clark to focus on visual humor, resulting in some wild Our Gang-style slapstick.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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