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List Price: $14.99 | | Label: Dreamworks Video
Salesrank: 1885
Released: December 21, 2004 |
| Our Price: $7.49 |
| Used Price: $4.00 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Facing another lonely christmas drew wants to revisit his childhood home & relive holiday memories. But when he gets there he finds another family living in the home. Drew offers a nice financial reward to the family. But is his cash the beginning of an annoying visitor who is overeager to celebrate christmas? Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 08/19/2008 Starring: Ben Affleck Christina Applegate Run time: 91 minutes Rating: Pg13
Description of Surviving Christmas:
Ben Affleck is well-cast as Drew Latham, a millionaire on the verge of nervous collapse, a man with no sense of self who tries to buy the trappings of life--including the family that just happens to be living in his childhood home. He jumps around with a plastic smile on his face, trying to impose himself on the bribed household, who--even though the parents are on the verge of divorce--are still more psychologically coherent than he is. Surviving Christmas has been unfairly trashed due to anti-Affleck sentiment in the post-Gigli era; though the movie eventually succumbs to bland formula, it has some moments of bracing dark comedy and genuine empathy, mostly thanks to James Gandolfini (The Sopranos, The Mexican) and Catherine O'Hara (A Mighty Wind, Beetlejuice) as the parents--two superb actors who could breathe life into any banal script. Also featuring Christina Applegate (Anchorman, View from the Top). --Bret Fetzer
Surviving Christmas Reviews:
one of the funniest Christmas movies ever! 
2008-11-29 - The first time I saw this movie I was feeling a bit depressed...I'd been trying to buy a house for ages and everything kept coming up NO and it was just frustrating...so I had no expectations of being amused - I was just there with a couple of other friends and my daughter...
Boy, did I laugh myself silly! So many of the situations were so incongruous - my favorite was the "mini marshmallows". I couldn't wait for it to come out on DVD...it seemed to take forever. I still can't understand why some people just don't see the humor in it! My daughter and I just laugh at the mention of the movie - and we look forward to watching it every year - I have to wait till she comes home from college this year - she begged me to wait!
Great surprise movie 
2008-01-20 - This movie was a great surprise. It was one of the funnies movies we had seen in quite a while. We rented it from a video store when we had a friend in, and then we rented it again a week later when our kids came home, and then just decided to buy it because we enjoyed it so much. I looked everywhere for the movie - WalMart, Target, etc. Decided to order from Amazon - got it quickly, as always, with Amazon. Great movie for laughing out loud!
Reasonably Amusing 
2008-01-02 - Imagine a rich spoiled young man that decides since none of his family or co-workers have invited him for Christmas he will buy it from a family. Affleck plays the spoiled young man reasonably well and the casting of the family is decent. He offers them a quarter of a million to let him stay with them over the week of Christmas. At first things are very strained as he makes all kinds of demands for food and favors but the money makes them grin and bare it. With time an understanding is reached and the family is not quite as dysfunctional.
I quit after 20 minutes 
2007-07-17 - This is such an artificial movie. Acting is nearby that bad as the storyline. There are really very few movies out there that do not touch me, but this one really does not. Everything is so forseeable. The guy who is big in selling advertisement, presenting his client's product on christmas for the people that have it so hard to go through it with their hatred family, then he for himself does not even have a family and finds himself on christmas alone. Of course as a successfull business man he pays some people to be his family during christmas. It is a wannabe comedy, and the laughers it creates in me are just of that kind of painful-"attention now is coming something they wanted to be funny"-laughing. It is so bad!
Good product! 
2007-01-09 - Love the movie, and the product was exactly as I had expected! I even received it before Christmas-- Thanks Amazon!