We’re on Day Two of our 12 Days of Christmas Rom Coms with a classic from the 1980s that’s fun for the whole family.
There’s a good chance you may have someone in your life whose first priority isn’t to watch a bunch of rom-coms. Tragic, I know. So for our second day of the 12 Days of Christmas Rom Coms, we’re lulling them into a false sense of security with 1988’s Scrooged. A modern-day take on A Christmas Carol with Bill Murray as the money-hungry business man? Who wouldn’t love the sound of this?! And with a romance thrown in for good measure, this’ll make everyone happy.
Normally the main character of A Christmas Carol is a curmudgeonly old man with scraggly, whispy gray hairs on an otherwise bald and age-spotted head. You wouldn’t think of him as a rom-com lead. But when you instead cast Bill Murray in his prime, of course you’ll give him a love interest. You’d be silly not to! Enter Frank Cross, a TV executive who cares for nothing except the ratings he’ll get on his station’s live performance of A Christmas Carol.
This is a movie I began watching nearly every holiday season starting when I was a wee lass. Every year I notice something different. Some years I felt sorry for the young boy in Frank’s Christmas Past. More than one year I announced Carol Kane’s Ghost of Christmas Present as my favorite part of the movie. This year, things are a little different.
Greed is always the main antagonist of this story, regardless of the adaptation. Money is bad, community is good. In this version, it’s about a CEO in corporate America getting shown just how much commercialism and capitalism can ruin lives. The Ghosts of Christmas teach this American CEO a lesson.
Hmm…that seems particularly relevant right now, doesn’t it?
And then there’s the romance. Though I never quite had the rosy feelings for Frank and Claire’s relationship that I’ve had for other movie couples, there’s something some realistically domestic about their love story. In real life, it’s those warm moments of eating Chinese food together. It’s the inside jokes. It’s weathering hard times and still coming out the other side as in love as you ever were–maybe more. While I don’t want to be either Frank or Claire in this relationship, I still want what they have, and isn’t that the whole point of a rom com anyway?
Scrooged shows up in these iconic lists:
