This ChristmasHallmark cribbing  November 20,
2007 2:03:31 PM
VIDEO: Watch the trailer for This Christmas.
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Christmas movies have always meant boring white people going home to settle lifelong resentments and eat ham. It’s only fair that black folks get a crack at re-enacting these insipid mechanics. As artificially homy as a plug-in air freshener, writer/director Preston A. Whitmore II’s This Christmas fills the bill. The unwieldy ensemble story has no fewer than six grown kids staying with mom (Loretta Devine), each cramming hangers-on and manufactured conflict into a bland, overstuffed lump. There’s not a single moment that doesn’t bristle with exposition and cliché — only Idris Elba as Quentin and Delroy Lindo as Joe give the film’s Hallmark cribbing anything resembling life. 117 minutes | Boston Common + Fenway + Fresh Pond + Suburbs
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- Inside the prize-filled trophy home of a seemingly obsessive-compulsive contest enterer
- A do-gooder who recorded abusive Boston police officers was himself arrested under a controversial ‘wiretapping’ law
- That intoxicating smell, the siren-call sizzle — looks like pop culture has gone hog wild
- Never mind its tough-girl alt-porn feminism: SuicideGirls has already moved on to a new generation
- We already know about politicians’ capacity for coarse behavior. But how low can the press go?
- Body modification as art at the Peabody Essex Museum
- That intoxicating smell, the siren-call sizzle — looks like pop culture has gone hog wild
- Is there one political story the press shouldn’t report?
- Dutoit and Elder at the BSO, Collage’s Berio, Boston Conservatory’s Turn of the Screw, and Kurt Weill at the Gardner and the MFA
- Body modification as art at the Peabody Essex Museum
- The right of a performance artist represents the rights of all Americans. Plus, an opportunity with Cuba.
- We already know about politicians’ capacity for coarse behavior. But how low can the press go?
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Disinterestedly coughed up
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Not original "original" screenplay
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Juno is in the family way
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Better than fairy-tale straightjackets
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Buddy story meets History Channel remake
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The Honda Accord of movies
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Monumental clunk
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Adding to Odenkirk's cinematic slump
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Some words with the class clowns of Superbad
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- Unintentional laughs
- A step ahead of the rest
- Too many weird gimmicks
- Religious groups and the environment
- A rich kid on the road to comeuppance
- A shambling charmer
- Revisit one of the great films about the artistic process
- Seraphim in France
- Poignant enough
- An 88-minute flop
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