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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9202736" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Re: Christmas movies -- I feel the question of "Is _________ a Christmas movie?" is right up there with "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" (or the more evocative question: 'is cereal soup?' <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-P" title="Stick out tongue    :-P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":-P" />). There is so little consensus on the matter* that the term is useless. Hearing someone else describe something as a Christmas movie tells you nothing about the film unless they've given you a step-by-step rundown of their qualification criteria -- in which case they probably could have simply told you what the movie was about. *other than that the concept of Christmas must appear in some form within the film. Re: Scorsese -- he's definitely a case of having the good fortune of living past the point of peak output. His early work speaks for itself. What perhaps frustrates many is that he failed to get Oscars for his seminal works*, but instead much later for rather inferior works*. That one has to chalk up to an entire industry not built around those awards actually going to the best product. An interesting point of comparison to Scorsese and Dylan might be Dave Arneson. There's a continual low-intensity discussion churn over how important Gary and Dave were to the hobby, whether their major contributions were really all that important, etc. Eventually the discussion almost inevitably comes down to after the initial 1970-74 pre-game/proto-game era (once the original D&D product was published and out the door), Gary went on to make and run TSR for many years**, while Dave pretty solidly crashed and burned in short order. I've always found it interesting the wonder whether that later period really ought count on the scale of whether the earlier contributions be deemed important. I know I don't hold musicians and directors to the standard of forever producing masterpieces (and it not tainting their early work in my eyes), and suspect the Janis Joplins and Curt Cobains of the world would follow the same trajectory as Dylan, had they survived past their peaks). *sometimes because the work wasn't recognized at the time for being as transformative as it was; other times because some other directors was getting effectively a lifetime achievement award/'sorry your best work didn't get this' consolation**which in turn pushed out of the way some of the best works of other producers, in a continual cascade of industry machinations. ***with various caveats about how impressive that is and how much any success was his doingIt was a movie we (boys of a certain age in 1984, or who rented VHS tapes with parents who didn't realize the problem some years later, or who had TBS some years later for the edited version) all saw. When you describe the actual action [SPOILER="spoiler"](obtaining sex from a woman through deception, and her having a positive response to the eventual discovery thereof)[/SPOILER], it's mind-boggling. However, it didn't stand out as an outlier nearly as much as it should given the juvenile male-audience comedies of the late 70s/early 80s. The actual edit is very straightforward: just omit the offending scene, and to heck with the continuity issues. I saw the movie as a rental* first, so when I saw it again on TV I noted the absent scene but didn't think through the ramifications. A friend was watching as well, and asked why the female character was now working with the protagonist side. In explaining it, only then did I realize how messed up it was. *someone's 12th or 13th birthday sleepover, along with Porky's and Animal House. A similar situation worked better for an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. They started watching a prospective bad movie (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sidehackers" target="_blank">The Sidehackers</a>), decided 'yep, this is terrible, let's go with it' and started production before finishing the movie. Eventually they did and realized that the third act was instigated by the antagonist fridging the protagonist's girlfriend in a violent murder-rape that they could not edit to be viewable on basic cable in their timeslot. So they just cut the scene. We return from break to the movie (+silhouettes of MST cast) to the next scene, Crow turns his head to the audience and says, "For those of you playing along at home, Rita is dead." It worked okay-ish given the already pretty fractured experience of watching an MST3K show for the actual movie.I've heard that there's some really weird financial incentives in moviemaking, but have not followed up on it enough to speak authoritatively. I get the impression that having to write off a poorly performing new Scorsese movie is low enough of a financial hit that the mere possibility of just one more runaway success is worth the risk. Also that, even if it's the same production company, the actual risk expenditure might be a bundled debt and owned by who-knows-who, so each of these poor-performers-in-search-of-a-hit are independent risks taken. If I had more free time, it'd be an interesting* thing to follow up on. *I was an economics minor BitD, so I do enjoy untangling these financial stories.</blockquote>

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