This week is all about my top 10 Christmas movies, but as always I have to take a few minutes to do an aside about the government because no year end series of blogs would be complete without me taking warranted potshots at the most tired and bereft of ideas government in Canadian history – the Trudeau federal government..
For those of you who are living under a rock (or just don’t care) the Canadian Liberal minority government continues to underperform even the complete lack of expectations that Canadians hold. No mean feat for Canada’s Natural Ruling Party.
I do have Christmas/Holiday stuff to get to so I will keep this brief.
We are a mere day away from the historic giveaway to the poors that some junior PMO staffer came up with on a cocktail napkin. That’s right, tomorrow we will all get to save anywhere from 5% to 14% on our holiday purchases, including a complicated parsing of toys and games, pre-pack liquor, wine, beer, expensive dinners, Christmas trees and, yes, as a gift to Canada’s Jewish population – Hannukah Bushes, which aren’t even a thing. But if you want one, it’s GST free. Enjoy the snipe hunt.
This largesse is set to continue for two months – February 14th to be precise. Note sure if flowers and chocolates qualify though. Sorry Romeo.
At the end of two months, everyone gets a cheque for $250 unless you are above the poverty line ($150k in income) or had no earned income last year – tough luck students and seniors!
All this for the low, low price of $6.5 billion, give or take. A drop in the bucket, right?
I say this because our wonderful government is finally going to give us our lump of coal Secret Santa gift on Monday in the form of the “Fall Economic Statement” wherein the soon to backed over by a proverbial bus Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland gets to deliver the news that our current deficit is projected to be somewhere up to 50% higher than they promised – approaching $60 billion instead of $40. Billion. With. A. B.
The proverbial bus of course is going to be driven by Trudeau on his way to pick up current bromance partner and Liberal Party Savior Mark Carney, who by all accounts is a nice, smart and accomplished buy who, if he takes this bait, will prove himself to have the political instincts of a fruit fly.
Of course now that we know about the fiscal cliff we are driving off of, it makes perfect sense why the Trudeau brain-trust seems to think that distracting us with cheap beer and handouts would save their back-bacon.
But seriously, we should have none of this. Time’s up Justin. Call an Election. Call it now. You have a problem with the budget. You have a problem with the border. You have a problem with the incoming president of the Unted States. You have a problem with NATO. You have a problem with the electorate.
Let Canadians decide and if you lose, you lose. Take a lesson from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Be there for your country. Step up for your country and step down. Time to go.
OK, speaking of time to go – it’s time to let everyone get on with things. Time to do some actual work and present to you my most anticipated blog of the year, which is annually some of my best work.
That’s right, here comes my annual paen to the Christmas movie.
This is mainly because as any regular reader knows, I have an uncharacteristic weak spot for Christmas and holiday movies.
Wait, let me restate that. I have a Christmas and holiday movie problem. It’s not pretty. The family is actually concerned and tried an intervention but the Elf on a Shelf didn’t make it on time.
Here’s how it happens. Pretty much the day after American Thanksgiving the binge begins, with our home television tuned nightly to the Women’s Network, W (Canada’s answer to Hallmark Channel) and Bravo watching a virtual non-stop barrage of such timely holiday classics as Hats Off to Christmas, Christmas in <<insert generic small-town name here>>, Sharing Christmas, A Cookie Cutter Christmas, A Holiday Engagement, A Royal Christmas, A Corgi Christmas, A Wish for Christmas, Crown For Christmas, Family for Christmas, A Cheerful Christmas (this seems mailed in to be honest) – I could go on forever.
And most of these movies have one of two generic plots – either a scrooge-like, non-Christmasy city-slicker is dumped into small-town America (often during a blizzard) where they discover the true meaning of Christmas when they meet a down-to-earth overly happy plaid-clad sharer of simple wisdom or some “commoner” American (usually a dress-maker, a teacher or an event planner) discovers that her new boyfriend/prince charming is in fact a real honest to goodness prince of some made-up European principality (Wingravia anyone?) and she has to battle both a grouchy queen and bad Christmas mojo to secure her rightful place at his side as he discovers the meaning of love and Christmas at the same time. About 30% of the time, the gender roles are reversed.
Some of the titles seem decidedly lazy with such luminescent tales as “Tell them to come home for Christmas” and “The Nine Kittens of Christmas” (extra points for animal exploitation!) and “Light Up Christmas” (I feel this may have been an ad for a pot store). These titles tell me that the Artificial Intelligence wave has been writing these movies for quite some time.
An added twist in the past few years has been the inclusion of LGBTQ characters and, in a weird trip down memory lane, an uptick in Hannukah themed movies that all seem to feature my high school classmate Alex Poch-Goldin as a kindly, bumbling Jewish grandfather.
A few additional factoids on these Christmas movies. First, the vast majority are filmed in Canada. Second, they are legally required to cast Lacey Chabert in 50% of all Hallmark movies with a sentimentality score of 47 or higher.
Oh, and this year, they had a reality show context to win a role in an upcoming movie that will be aired on December 21 and is called “Happy Howlidays” starring the winner. Who isn’t me. I shit you not.
Where am I going with this? Well since I am an expert and all, I am going to count down the Top 10 holiday movies of all time (in my EXPERT opinion) and, since this is in theory still an energy blog, I am going to provide plot synopses for each as if they were set in the energy industry. You will note that despite my Hallmark addiction, there is nary a one in this list.
10 – Trading Places
As the Christmas season begins, upper-crust executive Louis Winthorpe III and down-and-out hustler Billy Ray Valentine are the subjects of a bet by successful brokers Mortimer and Randolph Duke. An employee of the Dukes, Winthorpe is framed by the brothers for a crime he didn’t commit, with the siblings then installing the street-smart Valentine in his position. When Winthorpe and Valentine uncover the scheme, they set out to turn the tables on the Dukes.
Two old school oil and gas tycoons – let’s call them Murray Edwards and Mike Rose bet each other a dollar that a down and out homeless man named Kevin will be as successful predicting the price of oil as the multi-million dollar analyst and hedge fund manager they are currently paying. As the contest plays out over Christmas, it turns out it’s a draw – no one can predict the price of oil. Murray Edwards fires both of them on Christmas Day while sailing off the coast of the French Riviera.
9 – A Christmas Story
This movie follows the wintry exploits of youngster Ralphie Parker, who spends most of his time dodging a bully and dreaming of his ideal Christmas gift, a “Red Ryder air rifle.” Frequently at odds with his cranky dad but comforted by his doting mother, Ralphie struggles to make it to Christmas Day with his glasses and his hopes intact. Most memorable line of course is “you’ll shoot yer eye out” which he almost does.
In the oil patch version, premiere Kooky Danielle Smith desperately wants a “Red Pipeline Shovel” for Christmas and spends her time dodging a bully named Trudeau and filing paperwork to bug him. Ultimately, she receives the longed-for gift of an emissions cap, except of course it comes with a catch and that’s the unintended consequence of almost shooting her eye out – careful! As the movie ends, we’re still not sure what will happen, but oddly we are treated to a scene where Smith and Trudeau are seen eating Peking Duck and doing Jamieson shots at a Chinese restaurant while laughing about the recent election of Donald Trump and his promise to finally build the Keystone XL Pipeline while simultaneously slapping the oil it would transport with a 25% tariff.
8 – The Nightmare Before Christmas
The film follows the misadventures of Jack Skellington, Halloweentown’s beloved pumpkin king, who has become bored with the same annual routine of frightening people in the “real world.” When Jack accidentally stumbles on Christmastown, all bright colors and warm spirits, he plots to bring Christmas under his control by kidnapping Santa Claus and taking over the role. Chaos ensues.
The oil patch version follows our protagonist Vlad Putin, the uncrowned king of Russialand who has become bored of incarcerating journalists and enriching himself amid the cold Moscow winters. When he discovers OPEC, the Middle East and Saudi Arabia and all the gold-plated cars and riches he can have, he hijacks the group and appoints himself defacto influencer and invades his neighbour for fun, thus setting off the inevitable destruction of his own country. Chaos ensues.
7 – National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
As the holidays approach, Clark Griswold wants to have a perfect family Christmas, so he pesters his wife, Ellen, and children, as he tries to make sure everything is in line, including the tree and house decorations. However, things go awry quickly. His hick cousin Eddie and his family show up unplanned and start living in their camper on the Griswold property. Even worse, Clark’s employers renege on the holiday bonus he needs.
Roger is the CEO of a major US energy player operating in the Permian Basin and he wants to drive his stock price up so he can get paid a massive bonus. Roger overpays for land, borrows indiscriminately and squeezes all his suppliers and service providers to drop their costs as much as possible so he can show great numbers. Eventually however, the overworked completions crew based in Midland decides they are tired of working for 1992 day-rates so things go sideways fairly quickly and Roger ends up with a bunch of DUCs. Ultimately, the board realizes that Roger has spent a billion dollars in capex in less than 5 years and has never made a dime while cashing obscenely high paycheques. So, they turf him and he loses his bonus. The new CEO decides that an oil company drilling for oil is dumb and takes all his cash flow and gives it to his lenders and shareholders. Anyone who doesn’t want a divvy gets to sell their shares back. Not very Christmasy, I know – maybe this one is more of a documentary.
6 – Prancer
Refusing to give up her belief in Santa Claus, a little girl discovers a hurt reindeer in the woods, which she believes to be Prancer. With the help of a sympathetic veterinarian (played by Abe Vigoda!), the girl takes care of the wounded creature. It’s supposed to be a secret, but eventually a department store Santa Claus, the girl’s dad and the entire town find out about Prancer, leading to big problems for the girl, her family and, of course, the poor exploited reindeer.
In this timeless classic tale of prior years, Justine refuses to give up her belief that if only she does the right thing, then good things will happen for her province’s energy sector. One day, she discovers a slightly broken carbon levy and thinks that this just the ticket to get good results, so she nurses and nurtures it to the point where it should be fully functional. However, she discovers much to her chagrin that nobody really cares what her country does and that by and large people are jerks and just in it for themselves. Ultimately the townsfolk turn on her and she realizes that she is going to lose an election to people who don’t care as much about carbon as she does. On top of all that, some mean guy halfway across the country says he’s going to axe the tax. In a heartwarming finish, a group of sympathetic economists band together to make Justine realize that a carbon levy in any form was really only a type of magic. They are all left believers.
5 – Miracle on 34th Street
An old man going by the name of Kris Kringle fills in for an intoxicated Santa in Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade. Kringle proves to be such a hit that he is soon appearing regularly at the chain’s main store in midtown Manhattan. When Kringle surprises customers and employees alike by claiming that he really is Santa Claus, it leads to a court case to determine his mental health and, more importantly, his authenticity which is proved once and for all through all the letters he receives from children everywhere thanks to, of all things, the Post Office.
In this scintillating re-imagining of the timeless holiday classic, a skeptical energy sector is revived when a country called Saudi Arabia kicks an over-extended tight oil sector to the curb. Subsequent to this, the benign oil power uses its market heft and leverage to calm oil prices, reduce inventory overhang and deliver a goldilocks oil price environment to the world just in time for Christmas. A skeptical investment community is distracted by the IPO of yet another grifty SPAC, some crypto blowups and a video of Elon Musk dancing the Macarena with Donald Trump. Meanwhile energy prices continue their inexorable rise even with Scroogy Joe Biden doing his level best to stop the malarkey and get gas prices down. Saudi Arabia is once again proven to be the Santa Claus of the energy sector thanks to its overwhelming market power, acknowledged by no less an authority than yours truly.
4 – Elf
Buddy was accidentally transported to the North Pole as a toddler and raised to adulthood among Santa’s elves. Unable to shake the feeling that he doesn’t fit in, the adult Buddy travels to New York, in full elf uniform, in search of his real father. As it happens, this is Walter Hobbs, a cynical businessman. After a DNA test proves his paternity, Walter reluctantly attempts to start a relationship with the childlike Buddy with increasingly chaotic results and eventually helps Buddy save Christmas.
A once proud and iconic home-grown Canadian oil and gas company decides that it isn’t cutting it in Canada so it packs up its management and capital and decides to head south into the United States in search of an acceptable short cycle play to sink all its money into. Now firmly in drilling mode, the company overpays for multiple acquisitions, changes its name to something incomprehensible and relies on some seismic data provided by the same shady local who sold them their land for $167,000 an acre. Drilling well after debt-financed well, the company finally realizes that this isn’t for them, so they eventually decide to retry their luck as close to the North Pole as many of them ever want to get. So, they return to the Great White North and the infusion of cash saves the Canadian oilpatch.
3 – Scrooged
In this modern take on Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Frank Cross is a wildly successful television executive whose cold ambition and curmudgeonly nature has driven away the love of his life, Claire Phillips. But after firing a staff member, Eliot Loudermilk, on Christmas Eve, Frank is visited by a series of ghosts who give him a chance to re-evaluate his actions and right the wrongs of his past.
Justin Trudeau is a wildly successful politician whose dismissive attitude to the energy sector threatens to send his economy into a decades-long funk of stagnant economic growth. After being reduced in an election to yet another minority government (an outcome completely due to his government’s own incompetence), Justin is visited by a series of ghosts who give him a chance to re-evaluate his actions and right the wrongs of his past.
The first ghost (played ironically by his father Pierre Elliott Trudeau) shows him his father and then Energy Minister Marc Lalonde drafting the National Energy Program and laughing about those suckers from Alberta while an eight-year-old Justin plays with a Tonka toy excavator and bulldozer in the background.
The second ghost (Ralph Klein) shows present day Trudeau taking selfies, surfing, changing his socks, blandly promoting a progressive agenda while jet-setting abroad and completely ignoring unemployment, inflation and game changing capital projects at home. Then the ghost shows Justin all the oil workers who are out of work because he was too soft to push the agenda, and the slow deterioration of the Canadian standard of living.
The third ghost – who is really just an apparition vaguely resembling Donald Trump, shows a scene that opens with newly minted Alberta Empress Danielle Smith opening the first border crossing station between Alberta and BC, before climbing on a tank and leading a hearty rendition of the new Alberta national anthem “Alberta #1 Dammit”. Then it shows an apocalyptic scene in Ottawa where a broke Canadian government is being taken over by the new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and his deputy Ezra Levant. A look of terror shows on young Justin’s face as he is shown the interior of the House of Commons and realizes that his Liberal Party in 2025 has been completely obliterated in the election, winning only one seat, ironically held by Mark Carney.
Waking in a cold sweat, Trudeau gives Canadians a GST holiday and commands Stephen Guilbeault to fetch him the finest pipeline in the land!
2 – Die Hard
New York City policeman John McClane is visiting his estranged wife and two daughters on Christmas Eve. He joins her at a holiday party in the headquarters of the Japanese-owned business she works for. But the festivities are interrupted by a group of terrorists who take over the exclusive high-rise, and everyone in it. Very soon McClane realizes that there’s no one to save the hostages — but him.
Canadian pipeline foreman Johnny Canuck is doing integrity work and a cutout on a live mainline natural gas pipeline somewhere in the Canadian hinterland when his crew is attacked and taken hostage by dozens of non-descript environmental terrorists on Bombardier snowmobiles. Canuck realizes there is no one there to help rescue the hostages except himself so he takes on the whole lot of them – carefully emptying their gas tanks into jerry cans, collecting their jackets and putting them in the cab of his truck – the usual. In the closing scene, Canuck has been chased to the end of a side-boom where the chief eco-warrior tries to convert him by yelling at him with a bullhorn. “Repent now you fossil fuel exploiting freak” but he slips into the bell hole while he’s doing it and only the fast reflexes of Canuck grabbing his wrist saves him from getting crushed by a length of pipe. “Hey” yells Canuck, “where’s your helmet, your safety tickets and your cover-alls?” before getting him a blanket and a cup of hot cocoa (our hero has both safety and culinary training!). In the last scene, we see Canuck with a lot of concern loading the last of the frost-bitten and chastened attackers into an F350 Crewcab for the long, but warm, drive back to civilization and a Christmas celebration with friends and family.
What? Well seriously, what did you expect to happen? It’s the Canadian oil patch. Safety first. Look out for each other. Everyone goes home.
1 – It’s A Wonderful Life
After George Bailey wishes he had never been born, an angel is sent to earth to make George’s wish come true. George starts to realize how many lives he has changed and impacted, and how they would be different if he was never there.
After Greta Thunberg, environmentalist and climate change warrior priestess, wishes that oil had never been discovered, a geophysicist and baseball fan is sent to earth to show her what a world without oil and natural gas would be like.
The geo-nerd drops Greta in a world without fossil fuels and underground seismic mapping and tells her to take a look around. After wandering around in the dark and choking on the smoke from all the wood and turd fires required to maintain warmth for 8 billion people, Greta stumbles upon a town where infant mortality is well in excess of 20%, life expectancy is less than 50 years, there are no computers, crop yields are a quarter of what they were, there are no airplanes, war is a constant and what is with these itchy hemp clothes! Topping it all off, Greta discovers that in this world, Donald Trump is the co-emperor with Vladimir Putin. Crying out in desperation, a chastened Greta is heard to exclaim toward the end of the film: “I had it all wrong, surely there is a way we can all co-exist!”
As the movie closes, a smiling Greta is seen driving a Tesla battery-powered side-boom as part of Spread #2 for the Keystone XL project as a bell rings – another geophysicist has earned its wings. As the movie closes, Elon Musk puts his arms around Donald Trump’s shoulders and says: “should we tell her?”. “No” says the Donald.
Bonus Actual Top Movie Even Though Most of the Characters are Jewish – Diner
Billy returns home to Baltimore at Christmas to serve as the best man at the upcoming wedding of his childhood buddy Eddie. In the meantime, he and Eddie get together with their friends at the local diner, where they trade stories about their lives. All they really want to do is go back to being the carefree boys they once were, but they know it cannot be. Their funny and at times revealing exchanges help each other face the mounting responsibility of adulthood.
Stu and some fellow Crude Observations subscribers and readers get together at a local watering hole just before Christmas to enjoy a couple of glasses of wine and some good food while swapping stories about the old days when oil was $70 and natty was $3 and people actually spent money in the oil patch. Oh wait, that’s a real thing we’re hoping to do next week!
So, there you have it, my top 10 Christmas movies of all time, absolutely ruined by twisted metaphor.
And I know you all wanted Die Hard as the number one, but I just couldn’t do it. To me, the Christmas movie is all about the sappy/happy ending and what could be better than Greta Thunberg acknowledging that oil and gas has made life wonderful thanks to Donald Trump?
And as to the inclusion of Diner as the actual best one? It brings me back in time. Not to the early 60’s, because I wasn’t alive, but back to a much more youthful and innocent time and how much those characters resonated with our lives then. Plus – Fenwick is in the manger – we must have travelled far.
FWIW, here is an AI list:
- It’s a Wonderful Life
- Home Alone
- Elf
- A Christmas Story
- Die Hard
- The Santa Clause
- National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
- Miracle on 34th Street
- The Grinch (2000)
- Love Actually
Loe Actually? No Prancer or Diner?
Meh – now we know why it’s called “artificial” intelligence.
