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DVD Movie Rating for: Christmas with the Kranks

Rating for Christmas with the Kranks: 5 out of 5 stars

Movie Plot of: Christmas with the Kranks

Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded malls, no corny office parties, no fruitcakes, no unwanted presents. That's just what Luther (TIM ALLEN) and Nora Krank (JAMIE LEE CURTIS) have in mind when they decide that, just this once, they'll skip the holiday altogether, despite the fact that they're usually the most fanatical about it. They might as well, since it won't be the same without their daughter, who's away in the tropics. They get the idea to JOIN their daughter in sunny paradise as a surprise, and thus, theirs will be the only house on Hemlock Street without a rooftop Frosty; they won't be hosting their annual Christmas Eve bash; they aren't even going to have a tree. But when their daughter surprises THEM by cutting her trip short and returning home for Christmas, there's a mad scramble to prepare themselves to have the traditional Christmas fanfare on extremely short notice.

DVD Production Details of: Christmas with the Kranks

Christmas with the Cranks has not yet been released on DVD

Christmas with the Kranks DVD Extra Bonus Features

None

Cast of the movie: Christmas with the Kranks

• Tim Allen .... Luther Krank
• Jamie Lee Curtis .... Nora Krank
• Dan Aykroyd .... Vic Frohmeyer
• M. Emmet Walsh .... Walt Scheel
• Elizabeth Franz .... Bev Scheel
• Erik Per Sullivan .... Spike Frohmeyer
• Cheech Marin .... Officer Salino
• Jake Busey .... Officer Treen
• Austin Pendleton .... Umbrella Santa/Marty
• Tom Poston .... Father Zabriskie
• Julie Gonzalo .... Blair Krank
• René Lavan .... Enrique DeCardenal
• Caroline Rhea .... Candi
• Felicity Huffman .... Merry
• Patrick Breen .... Aubie
• John Short .... Ned Becker
• Bonita Friedericy .... Jude Becker
• David Hornsby .... Randy Becker
• Kevin Chamberlin .... Mr. Scanlon
• Lyndon Smith .... Randy Scanlon
• Ryan Pfening .... Gus Scanlon
• Mark Christopher Lawrence .... Wes Trogden
• Vernee Watson-Johnson .... Dox (as Verneé Watson-Johnson)
• Arden Myrin .... Daisy
• Jan Hoag .... Choir Director
• Joe Guzaldo .... Burglar
• David L. Lander .... Tanning Intruder
• Kim Rhodes .... Office Staff
• Doug Cox .... Neighbor #1
• Matt Walsh .... Neighbor #2
• Andrew Daly .... Husband
• Dawn Didawick .... Shopper
• Julia Roth .... Cashier
• Taylor Block .... Schoolgirl
• Paul Taylor .... Fireman
• J.P. Romano .... Mailman

Photo Gallery of the movie: Christmas with the Kranks

Christmas with the Cranks Photo Gallery

Reviews of the movie: Christmas with the Kranks

Tim Allen and Jamie Curtis are actually kind of funny in this above average movie from Colombia Pictures about two parents who must get a holiday gathering going when their teenage daughter calls and says she will be home early for the Holidays, the two parents then go through all sorts of problems just to get things ready in a hurray and drives their neighbors crazy in the act.Despite the cliches in the script, the movie does have some funny performances and turns out to be better then most so-called holidays movies pretent to be and are not.

Directed by Joe Roth and based on the novella "Skipping Christmas" by uber-author John Grisham, this delightful dose of holly-jolly fun will warm the hearts and tickle the funny bones of all but the grinchiest of grinches.

Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis star as Luther and Nora Krank, a couple whose all-out approach to celebrating Christmas has made them famous throughout their close-knit Chicago suburb.

But this year is different. Their daughter Blair (Julie Gonzalo) is flying the coop to join the Peace Corps in Peru, dampening their holiday cheer.

With the nest empty, Luther suggests the unthinkable: skip Christmas.

He proposes that they forgo their usual festivities -- including their annual Christmas Eve bash -- and take a romantic Caribbean cruise instead. Nora hesitates at first, but soon warms up to the idea of a week in the tropics.

The same can't be said for their militantly merry neighbors, who mobilize to persuade the Kranks to reconsider. Their unsuccessful efforts are spearheaded by ringleader and block busybody Vic Frohmeyer (Dan Aykroyd).

Refusing to cave to their pressure, Luther pulls a Scrooge and humbugs anything to do with the holiday, putting the kibosh on decorations and nixing his support of a police charity, as well as the local Boy Scout troop's Christmas tree drive (much to Nora's chagrin).

As the holiday approaches, the war of wills escalates, reaching a boiling point when Luther refuses to put a large illuminated plastic snowman on his roof like everyone else, inciting a "Free Frosty" rally on his front lawn.

But when Blair calls and tells her parents that she has decided to come home for the holiday -- and is bringing her new Peruvian fiance -- Luther and Nora must make a mad scramble to deck the halls and whip up some last-minute Christmas spirit. To do it in time, they'll need to quickly mend some fences and solicit help from the very neighbors they've alienated.

Allen and Curtis are at the top of their game and totally at ease with the physical comedy their roles demand. The supporting cast is equally pitch-perfect; it includes Cheech Marin and Jake Busey as local cops and Austin Pendleton as a mystery guest at the Kranks' Christmas party.

Though the movie lacks the timeless magic of Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" or even the Rockwellian nostalgia of "A Christmas Story," it does share one essential ingredient with those two perennial favorites: heart. Unlike several recent yuletide films which serve up sour eggnog, the picture's overall tone is unabashedly uncynical.

"Christmas With the Kranks" manages to be genuinely sentimental without being sappy, as evidenced by a tender olive branch scene between Luther and his neighborhood sparring partner (M. Emmet Walsh), whose Christmas with his ailing wife is made brighter by Luther's generosity.

And while the film makes only passing references to the religious dimension of Christmas, its strong, counterconsumerist message of selflessness, family and coming together as a community clearly embodies the truest spirit of the season.

If you're looking for a holiday treat, you might want to spend this Christmas season with the Kranks.

Christmas With the Kranks offers an obnoxiously condescending portrait of Regular People who live in the red states and wouldn't think of getting blue at Christmastime. They're suburban automatons dressed in dull shades of muddy brown and smoke-stained yellow, pale schmucks who buy their tans in mall kiosks, uptight and overweight empty nesters married to skinflint pricks. With their roofs adorned by life-size snowmen, their homes trimmed with thousands of sparkling lights, their guts full of booze guzzled on Christmas Eve, they fetishize Christmas and all its accoutrements and damn anyone who thinks of December 25 as just another day on the calendar. God help the poor Hebrew or Hindu who moves into this neighborhood.

This is Big Studio's hateful version of suburbia, a drab place where people dress alike, think alike, look alike, and act alike, to the point of abhorring anyone who would revolt against the norm. A case could be made for satire, if only Christmas With the Kranks at all sympathized with its rebels. But instead it's a celebration of conformity, a film that begs for laughs by mocking and ridiculing anyone who harbors an original thought or action. It makes its dissenters out to be dopes and cheapskates, Scrooges dishing out ill will as others dole out their good tidings with plastic grins that come to resemble smug sneers.

Tim Allen sleepwalks through the movie as Luther Krank, a middle manager in a fluorescent office who decides one afternoon to ditch town for the holidays and take wife Nora (Jamie Lee Curtis) on a Caribbean cruise. Their daughter Blair (Julie Gonzalo, known if at all for Dodgeball) has left home to join the Peace Corps, and Luther would rather be out of the empty house for the holidays. Besides, he figures, the Kranks spend some $6000 annually on the holidays; better to spend half that, he tells Nora, and have something to show for the expenditure.

Nora is a reluctant accomplice: She is saddened by the absence of their daughter and terrified at what the neighbors will think of their refusal to host the annual Christmas Eve bash or join in any other reindeer games. Her apprehensions are well-founded: Burly, buzz-cut neighbor Vic Frohmeyer (Dan Aykroyd), with his 1950s-dad apparel and Chicago accent, runs the street like a suburban ward boss, handing out veiled threats along with holiday greetings. Vic and his henchmen -- actually, a gang of toughs led by Malcolm in the Middle's Erik Per Sullivan -- terrorize Nora, demanding she "Free Frosty," the snowman hidden in the Kranks' basement. Curtis plays the part like she's remaking Halloween yet again, shrieking behind locked doors.

Director Joe Roth, head of the ironically named Revolution Studios and maker of the repugnant America's Sweethearts, does all he can to humiliate Allen and Curtis, to the point of parading Curtis around in a bikini several sizes too small in a tanning salon. Curtis was celebrated two years ago for demanding she be photographed sans makeup and anything else save a Spandex bra and shorts in More magazine; she wanted women to realize even movie stars have jiggly tummies and thick thighs. But Roth takes that moment, that statement, and wrings the meaning from it all for cheap, humiliating laughs. We're meant to groan and gasp at the image of Curtis, who bared her breasts to Aykroyd in Trading Places, running around a mall without her clothes on, bumping her head on a tanning bed and bumping into her priest (Tom Poston, yeesh). There's no dignity in being used as a punch line, especially in something as insipid and inconsequential as Christmas With the Kranks. It's a fate that befalls many in this film, among them Cheech Marin as a cop, Felicity Huffman as a desperate housewife, and especially Tim Allen, also squeezed in a bikini bottom and pumped full of Botox.

Luther's neighbors, among them M. Emmet Walsh as the crusty sumbitch with the heart of fool's gold, don't just love Christmas -- they hate anyone who doesn't, which makes them uncharitable hypocrites at best. They jeer and taunt Luther and Nora, hurling snowballs of invective at them till at last they get their way, when Blair, in the Peace Corps for all of a few days, returns home with a new boyfriend and expects to see the ornaments and mistletoe hung in their proper places. The Kranks are terrified not only of their neighbors but also of their daughter, to whom they can't admit they were going on a cruise.

A colleague who's actually read Skipping Christmas, poor bastard, says the screenplay for Kranks, by hack-turned-Harry Potter-hero Chris Columbus, is almost a word-for-word translation of Grisham's work; wouldn't know, since I don't and won't ever read a word of his stuff. But that's not the point; a sixteen-month-old can repeat his parent's words. What matters is how the movie injects into those words a maliciousness aimed at the people uttering those words, their alleged Christmas spirit laced with arsenic. A Christmas classic that makes Christmas Vacation look like It's a Wonderful Life, this is the perfect gift for people who hate people