It’s the most wonderful time of the year: the sweating season! Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, the end of the year is usually a time for catching up, keeping cool, spending time on the couch, and trying to make the most of a wonderful clump of public holidays (yay!).

If you’re wondering what to watch, we can recommend a few things – some Christmas-themed, some not. But we think they’re bound to please just about everyone who watches them (hopefully):



Top Gun

Top Gun is extremely silly (please see clip below), but it is also strangely hypnotic and very, very entertaining (please see clip below). In the film, Tom Cruise plays an adult man named “Maverick” who joins the Navy and tries to impress everyone with his reckless, no-rules, you’re-not-my-dad flying. There’s some kind of romantic subplot, of course, (Top Gun is also legendary for its machismo and tight uniforms), but Top Gun is mostly about appreciating director Tony Scott’s aerial camerawork (which is really pretty great) and revelling in cheesy dialogue and the unrelenting ’80s soundtrack.



Finding Nemo

I’ve never met a human person who doesn’t like Finding Nemo, and for good reason: if you don’t like Finding Nemo you probably aren’t human. (Maybe you are some kind of higher being, or something else, I don’t know). Finding Nemo is basically a story about a fish who gets kidnapped by a dentist and ends up in Australia (it’s happened to all of us, let’s be honest). But the real heart of the story is Dory, whose humour and happiness and heartfelt advice stays around long after the movie is over. There are good life lessons here. Just keep swimming, my friends.



It’s A Wonderful Life

It’s A Wonderful Life is so full of warmth that it might be dangerous to watch on a very hot day. It’s a film about a man named George Bailey, who feels like such a failure and so crushed by disappointment that he decides to kill himself on Christmas Eve. When he gets to the bridge where he’s decided to end his life, he instead meets his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, who shows him what the world would have been like without him in it. The magic of It’s A Wonderful Life has less to do with guardian angels and alternate realities, and more to do with how it shows us (or reminds us) what we mean to other people and how we all change the world in our own way, even if we don’t realise it ourselves.



Whiplash

Oh boy. If you really want to experience INTENSITY this Christmas, just sit back and watch Whiplash. For the fainthearted it certainly ain’t. The plot sounds simple enough: Andrew, a music student at a prestigious New York college, wants to be a great jazz drummer and is determined to reach his goal. Eventually, he’s chosen to be the understudy drummer for the school’s renowned jazz band by its conductor, Terence Fletcher, and he feels like he’s on his way. This all sounds very nice and dandy, until we discover Fletcher is relentless, cruel and abusive in his pursuit of perfection: he ridicules his musicians, slaps them around and is generally just a very scary and intimidating dude. Watching Whiplash is basically like going to the gym, because you end up tensing every single muscle in your body. It also asks some pretty uncomfortable questions: what does it mean to be great? What is the price of art? I don’t know the answers.



Scrooged

Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, I think everybody maybe worships at the Church of Bill Murray, so Scrooged should definitely be on your list of things to watch. It’s basically a modern-day (or, at least, 1980s-day) version of A Christmas Carol, starring Bill Murray as Frank Cross, a heartless, horrible television executive who doesn’t really care about anyone but himself. Because he is so horrible, he ends up being visited by three ghosts, who each try to show him the error of his ways. It’s all very dark and very funny – and, of course, very Bill Murray.