Last Friday night, my wife (German in nature) made a big deal that we needed to watch something with a hint of Christmas. The choice from TV? ARD (public TV, channel One) was offering 'Wenn das fünfte Lichtlein brennt' (translating to When the 5th Little Light Burns).
About 25 years ago, an associate of mine (also married to a German) commented on Christmas movies and how crappy they were. This was brought up about a TV movie made where Santa was being hunted by Serbian mafia guys (with machine guns) and some 3rd rate script had been written to interest viewers. It wasn't built for kids under ten, and I doubt if anyone over the age of forty watched this crap.
To be honest, around Christmas....what you can usually expect is Rambo, Die Hard, or Alien to be shown.
So going back to this 5th Little Light Burns....the script goes this way. An airport in Germany is about to be shutdown on Christmas eve, and around fifteen people are having a chaotic mess on their hands.
There's some older guy dying of cancer....who will be dead by 6 AM the next day. He'll be robbed of his medication during the night.
There's some gal screwing around with a co-worker who has a wife and kids.
There's some Santa-actor who has problems.
There's the airport manager who is a dumbass.
Other than Christmas ornaments and decorations.....there's really nothing about this movie to suggest Christmas features.
It's mostly a pretty slow movie, with negative points.
Anything for kids to watch? No. Anything for teens? No. At best....maybe some folks in the forty to sixty age group might find this OK, because there's literally nothing else on TV worth watch (just another reason to having Netflix).
1 comment:
Funny you should mention this. My wife, also German in nature, suggested we watch a Christmas movie, so I suggested, Fatman with Mel Gibson. She never heard of it, so we watched the Santa themed gore fest. Afterward, she said she had a new rule of life, never let me chose the Christmas movies.
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