Something happens to me every December where films and music that are objectively bad suddenly become irresistible simply because they’re “about Christmas.” By that I mean I spend entire days listening to Michael Bublé and that one Zooey Deschanel album, and entire nights watching whatever nonsense Netflix has been producing lately, namely movies called “Snow Falls.” kissing hot people in cities.

So I recently pressed play on the 2004 comedy Christmas with the Kranks, Streaming on Hulu and starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Aykroyd and the child of Malcolm in the middle. Of course, I had already seen it, and the only thing that came to mind was, of course, “How can a college-aged woman love ham so much?” (kind of a major plot point). Anyway, it was fine. It did its job and turned my brain into a snow globe for an hour and 34 minutes.

That was before my fiancé, an unrepentant Letterboxd snob, decided to look for reviews Christmas with the Kranks and noted that it has a 5 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Five! This means that out of 100 reviews, only five were good. Incredibly low, I thought, for a film that I would at least consider worth seeing. And the reviews themselves were mean: Robert Ebert called it “a holiday movie of breathtaking awfulness that gets worse when it gets gooey at the end,” while the Washington Post said it was “a leaden whimsy so violent that it gets through.” the air threatens to crack.” Multiplex floor.”

My first thought wasn’t anger at the critics of 20 years ago for tearing to shreds a film I had just watched for 94 precious minutes. There was an overwhelming suspicion that if Christmas with the Kranks If it came out today, it would be much better received by critics than it was 20 years ago.

So I looked for reviews for similar mid-budget Christmas movies from the 2000s that are still popular on streaming (Ill is currently the seventh most popular movie on Hulu). Turns out critics hated a lot of them too. 2008 Four Christmases, Starring Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn, it has a paltry 25 percent rating and was described as a “miscast mess” by Empire Magazine and “outrageous” by the Guardian.

Ron Howards The Grinch Who Stole Christmas was described as “an awesome, scary, strange film” with 49 percent. Most shocking of all, The holiday, an objectively perfect Nancy Meyers film, despite Kate Winslet ending with Jack Black, was described by the BBC as “soggy, syrupy” and “bloated” and criticized for not “saying much”.

Do you remember the last time you read a review of a Christmas romantic comedy where you complained that it didn’t have enough to say? I don’t. Because no one expects them to say anything anymore. And that’s bad for the current state of pop culture.

Think about the kind of reviews the legions of Christmas movies made specifically for streaming are getting these days. Comedies that manage to land real A-list stars and a decent budget Spirited And The Christmas Chronicles receive mostly positive reviews for being “fun for the whole family,” while romance novels tend to be mediocre A Christmas prince who falls in love with Christmas, And Hot frosty are praised for being simply passable. An LA Weekly critic described Lindsay Lohan’s Netflix joint as mind-bogglingly terrible Falling in love with Christmas “Perfect background noise for wrapping presents or a great excuse for a cackling watch with friends and a group activity (while getting all merry and juicy).”

It’s worth asking what’s the point of reviewing a film if the conclusion is, “Sure it’s bad, but give it up if you don’t plan on paying attention to it.” This isn’t a dig at this one special critic (who, to be fair, only included it as part of a roundup of 2022’s Christmas films). It’s more of an indictment of the way we’re now expected to engage with films – and television and music too. It’s now taken for granted that when we click play on a streaming platform, it’s probably not the only thing we’re paying attention to.

The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka argued that homogeneous, predictable, mood-based “ambient TV” (think Emily in Paris, dream home makeoverand basically any show about food) that keeps users watching even if they aren’t is the backbone of the streaming economy. “Like previous eras of television, ambient TV is less a creative innovation than a product of the technological and social forces of our time,” he writes.

As a result, the quality we now expect from our films, television and music is decreasing. But it’s only part of the equation. At the same time that streaming platforms proliferated, social media also grew, dramatically increasing the amount of content produced by amateur posters rather than creative professionals. Meanwhile, algorithmic social media platforms push the most mediocre content on their users. Now we’re also struggling with the problem of an endless amount of AI bullshit that synthesizes everything that came before it and produces worse versions.

However, the fact that bad films are praised as “good enough” is not just a problem with the film industry or an algorithm. In the late 2000s, social media ushered in an era of poptimism: If critics openly criticized a film or artist that was popular, they were considered a snob or out of touch with the millions of people who suddenly had just as much power to publish something their own opinions. “Now when a pop star reaches a certain level of fame,” Chris Richards wrote in the Washington Post in 2015, “something magical happens. They don’t seem to get bad reviews anymore. Stars become superstars, critics become cheerleaders and the discussion bubbles up into a consensus of uncritical enthusiasm.”

Poptimism is not all bad. One of the consequences of this was that critics suddenly had to take the underrepresented opinions of non-white people, young people and women seriously. But it is also inherently cowardly to try to appeal to the tastes of the masses for fear of being left behind.

Maybe because social media democratized the role of the cultural critic, or maybe because local journalism (and journalism at large) has collapsed, but today we have fewer professional critics writing film reviews. This means that critics don’t fully engage with Roger Ebert reviews.Ill Mode as before – with one exception. This year’s action-comedy Christmas film Red, Starring The Rock and Chris Evans, it was described as a “clearly joyless execution of a premise” by critics, who seemed particularly annoyed by the gargantuan budget ($250 million) and the Marvel wannabe plot.

The reviews are almost refreshingly nostalgic – perhaps a sign that not every sector of the media has adjusted to the current state of everything: a culture industry in which both producers and audiences are more focused on charts, follower numbers and profitability than themselves to deal with them topic.

I now realize that I am part of the problem. I have treated Christmas with the Kranks like a movie viewer in 2024: something I can throw on while I look at my phone and then look up the score on Rotten Tomatoes, as if its algorithm could synthesize all the infinite nuances of a good review. I have no interest in arguing about it Ill Is this a good movie or not, but reading the terrible reviews reminded me that even the most mediocre Christmas comedy should be taken seriously. We should demand more than just good movies in which recognizable stars follow predictably comforting tropes — even if all you aspire to is having a brain that turns into a snow globe.