I'LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS (1998) **1/2 Winsome smartass teen Christmas flick replete with vultures, liederhosen, dog farts, octogenarian Tom Jones groupies, sleigh theft, several parades and an old red Porsche. What I'm saying, I think, is that Tom Nursall and Harris Goldberg effectively work the well established principle that road protagonists must be led into unusual and amusing situations. There's something goofy about Jonathan Taylor Thomas that coincides on some molecular level with these situations, even though, or maybe because now that I think on it, he's posing as little more than the archetypal wheeler-dealer kid flirting with amorality. They say that likes attract, and that likes repel, and that that's all there is to the universe besides mysterious dark matter. I won't say that the film is entirely bereft of dark matter, but only because I can't quite figure out why I enjoyed it to the extent that I did. Andrew Lauer's bit early on confirmed an off-rhythm, the script kept it pumping, and somewhere off to the side there seemed to be a little bit of teleologically random light being shed on the dark matter that invariably leads to Christmas being a mystical time of pleasantly unusual occurrences.
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