Look around at your family, look at their increasingly bleary-eyes, the weariness of several days of festive decadence etched on their features. Perhaps some of them have the crusted residue of some substance lingering in the corners of their mouth, you look closer – it is gravy, you are overcome with vicarious shame.
You have played 13 games of Monopoly together – consequently you now know, by proxy, far more about each other’s attitude both to vulture capitalism and rental caps than you had ever envisaged. You have played Boggle. Oh how you have played Boggle. You have played perhaps more Boggle than any other family in the history of Western civilisation. When you close your eyes, Boggle pieces float through the darkness of your vision’s void. If someone were to even bring up the possibility of another round of Articulate you would consider committing an act of vandalism upon their person that would result in, if not jail-time, than at the very least a hearty dose of community service.
As such, it is time to reward yourself, it is time to absent yourself from the frenzy of board-games and allow your eyes to glaze over as the lurid colours of a televised early-noughties rom-com wash over you. We have cherry-picked the films that you ought to watch today, the three films that should make you determined to cement yourself to the sofa for the day – metaphorically or literally it’s all the same to me.
1) Dunkirk, 1pm BBC Two:
While not the most festive beginning to this list here, it’s important to remember that it’s only thanks to the heroics of those whose stories are imagined in the film that I am not sitting here typing this in German. Though, the same could be said of my own consistent inability to follow through with my German lessons on DuoLingo, so that’s not really any indication as to its quality.
Needless to say though the film, depicting the evacuation of thousands of British Expeditionary Force troops from beaches in Northern France in 1940 so as to evade capture from the onrushing German army, was one of the best to be released in 2017. While some of the film’s successes may be lost watching it on a television at home as opposed to in a cinema, it is still a massively compelling and engaging movie.
It is also on right now, so start watching the damn thing this instant.
2) Philomena, 9pm, BBC Two:
I have it on good authority that Christmas is all about family and, despite the fact that myself and the few family members I remain in contact with now communicate exclusively through our legal teams, I think it’s a sentiment still worth getting behind. Philomena, a film (Philom?) based on the incredible true story of an Irish woman’s search for her son who was sold for adoption by nuns to an American family in the 1950s, showcases this innate yearning for familial connection in a beautiful and profound way.
3) About A Boy, 10:55pm TG4:
Would you like to see an embarrassingly young and adorable looking Nicholas Hoult? Yes. Would you like to see Nicholas Hoult in this state of youthful adorableness fictively murder a water-fowl with a loaf of poorly-leavened bread? Yes. Would you like to see Hugh Grant stamp a large packet of biscuits into a child’s booster seat in the car-park of a supermarket? Hell, yes. Would you like to watch this movie? Of course you bloody well do!
