Christmas at the Movies: It's Not Just for Jews Anymore

Most people have been indoctrinated into believing in the (frankly wacky) notion that Christmas is a day meant to be spent at home, in the company of those you love best.

This is wrong.

Christmas Day is for watching movies in the theater while all the suckers who love their kids and don't spend the holidays scrapping with their loved ones are at home, cooking hams and opening stockings and shooting BB guns and the like.

While they're all otherwise occupied with merriment, you have a golden opportunity to catch all sorts of movies in that rarest of cinematic environs--a theater full of people who just want to watch the damned movie.

For instance, on Christmas Day, you can trek out to Northgate and see James Cameron's 3D sci-fi epic Avatar in IMAX, the way it was meant to be seen--on an obscenely large screen, surrounded by nerds.

For the more dramatically-inclined heathen moviegoer, modern master Pedro Almodovar's latest offering, the neo-noir inspired Broken Embraces opens at the Egyptian this Friday. Almodovar's glass-smooth, luminous directorial style is once again matched with the all-too-beautiful Penelope Cruz in a twisting story of lies, betrayal, and murder. Really, what else could a moviegoer want for Christmas?

How about the late, great Ricardo Montalban? Gotcha covered. As the joy of Christmas Day slips into the inevitable emotional hangover and profound relief of the day after, the Egyptian's Midnight Madness showings prove that they cannot be stopped by your pitiful solstice celebration, presenting the pinnacle of Trekkie cinema, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

But for some, none of these offerings are enough to tempt you out of the house and risking spoiling a day where no one really expects you to get out of your pajamas. That's fair, and there's plenty of great stuff recently out on DVD to get you in the spirit of the season, including Quentin Tarantino's Nazi kill-fest Inglorious Basterds and the excellent sci-fi action fable District 9.

We're classicists here at Seattlest, and will remind readers that no one ever had a bad Christmas in the presence of the following: