Candy Cane Lane

Book Retorts

Danielle ends our Winter Bizarre this year with the 2023 Eddie Murphy movie Candy Cane Lane. Chris is your average Christmas obsessed man living in the one neighborhood in Los Angeles which goes full Candy Cane Lane with a house decorating contest each year. After losing his job and then conveniently learning the decorating contest prize this year is one-hundred-thousand dollars, Chris goes off the deep end to win. He drags his young daughter along, instead of taking her to school, and finds a random Christmas store under an overpass. Totally normal. Inside, Chris manically spends way too much money on a massive tree of indeterminate height, and many other decorations, to win that competition. Chris is pressed by the store owner, Pepper, to sign the receipt without reading the fine print, which should be a red flag, but then somehow when he’s given the tree it’s been been collapsed into a large tuna can for transport, and that fact he is sanguine about all this shows just how much he’s lost touch with reality. Now the movie takes a sharp turn towards lunacy as all the ornaments on the tree, which depicted the Twelve Days of Christmas song, come to life and escape, and Chris learns that Pepper is a rogue elf dishing out vigilante Christmas justice and he has to collect the golden rings from the song lest he be turned into a Christmas figurine forever. So Chris battles a truly ludicrous amount of birds and maids a milking to prevent himself being served some piping hot justice cocoa. Happy holidays!

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Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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