That’s right, little girl from the Trump ad, we said it. Happy fucking Holidays, a greeting that includes Christmas as well as Hanukkah (which, to be fair, is over), Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, Boxing Day, Festivus, Card Playing Day, National Flashlight Day, and National Bicarbonate of Soda Day. All your years of…
We typically use this space to chime in with whatever we currently have on rotation, but it’s that special time of year when we’re forced into social situations with acquaintances and family members with whom we rarely interact, and find ourselves listening to treacly music we wouldn’t normally stomach or be caught…
Our A.V. Club Field Guide To Parenting is designed to guide you toward the best kids’ books, shows, movies, and music, just like we do with The A.V. Club for adults. Every month or so, we feature a new subject with a few essential pop culture takes parents should know, saving you from the mountains of kids’ dreck out…
The holidays are about remembering what’s really important in our lives. This year, the nation has learned that the most important thing in the world is talking shit to people you disagree with online. So, in the spirit of that newly minted American tradition, Amazon reviewers are absolutely roasting a MAGA Christmas…
American Christmas dinners typically feature classic dishes like ham, mashed potatoes, gingerbread cookies, and eggnog, but there are a whole host of food traditions from around the world we don’t partake in. For this 6 Things, we’re taking a look at six of the most interesting items Americans should add to their…
If you’ve taken a look at Netflix in the past week or two, you’ve probably noticed an influx of insanely obscure and terrible looking Christmas movies. This yearly dump of Hallmark classics and straight-to-VHS trash can provide endless entertainment for those tired of watching A Christmas Story for the hundredth time.…
In news that will evoke emotions ranging from severe disappointment to sweet relief, depending on your true feelings about going home for the holidays, it appears that—for American Airlines customers anyway—there’s a chance that Christmas might be canceled this year. That’s thanks to a computer glitch that allowed…
Gremlins is a Christmas movie much like how Die Hard is a Christmas movie, which is to say that it’s a movie that takes place during Christmas and has vague themes of gift-giving and family togetherness. People talk about Die Hard too much during the holidays as it is, though, so anyone looking for a seasonal film…
Everything is awful and it’s Christmas, when the free-floating anxieties of the year are only compounded by the forced merriment of the season and, especially, the empty cheer of Christmas music. With a few exceptions, most Christmas music is also terrible, an assemblage of saccharine, nostalgic platitudes crafted by…
The ritual donning of ugly Christmas sweaters once served as an ode to the festive wear of our parents, a way for adults to recapture the sweet, gaudy innocence of our childhood holidays. Over the last decade, however, they’ve become big business and, in a bizarre turn of events, co-opted by the beer-swilling bros of…
Every year as the holiday season dawns, the same debate arises: What’s the most painful holiday song that we have to hear over and over until the very end of the year? Baby Driver director Edgar Wright took to Twitter and went straight to the source, the brave souls who have to endure those songs on an infinite loop:…
Rick And Morty may have become the highest-rated comedy on television, and a cause of intense adoration and debate online, but its recent third-season finale fell a little flat. After a season of escalating plotlines and delicately portrayed character arcs, it took a gaga left turn into a single-episode conspiracy…
Tensions between idiot misogynists and normal people were bad in the lead-up to Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters movie, with idiot misogynists going after Leslie Jones, whining on reddit, and freaking out over the sort of hospital visit that apparently only Chris Pratt can do, but a new Anna Kendrick project just might…
Every year, at some point someone trots out the old chestnut that Die Hard is the greatest Christmas movie. And it is, objectively speaking, a truly great one. (No one ever picks Prometheus, strangely.) But a new video essay explores the actual inspiration for Die Hard’s Christmas setting: writer-director Shane Black,…
For an episode called “Treepocalypse Now,” the documentary filmmakers at Great Big Story headed out to Corvallis, Oregon, home of Holiday Tree Farms; at 8,000 acres, it’s one of the largest Christmas tree farms in the world. There, veteran tree farmer Mark Arkills has a daunting challenge in front of him: harvesting a…
Today, Christmas cards have their own familiar, comforting iconography: Santa Claus, candy canes, snowmen, gingerbread houses, etc. But, back in the 19th century, people were still figuring this stuff out. For them, a Christmas card might reasonably include a picture of one frog stabbing another or a jellyfish…
When Star Trek grapples with religion it usually does so through alien cultures, not human ones. But there’s got to be at least a few members of Starfleet who celebrate Christmas (Miles O’Brien definitely likes a good spiked egg nog). And this Deep Space Nine-themed Christmas carol brings some Federation spirit to the…
From movies like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to the music videos of OK Go, not to mention that impossible-to-win Mouse Trap game, the Rube Goldberg machine has a proud legacy in pop culture. Named for an American cartoonist and inventor, it’s any elaborate contraption that takes many complicated steps to perform a single,…
2016 has seen what appears to be the end of the Pearson family saga with the release of Phantasm: Ravager, the fifth and final film in the Phantasm series, which just hit Blu-ray this week along with J.J. Abrams’ remastered edition of the 1979 original. To commemorate the release, Mondo is now taking pre-orders for…
2016 has been a year we hated dearly and passionately every step of the way, from the unexpected deaths of countless pop culture icons to the unexpected debasement of the American political system by a racist steak salesman. It has seemed, since that last indignity, as though we might have gotten through the worst of…
