National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and Ferris Bueller's Day Off

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Chevy Chase is an a-hole, but this is hard to remember while you’re watching the ridiculously charming National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which made an instant, seemingly permanent splash in the Christmas-movie canon for the children of the eighties and nineties. All Clark Griswold wants is to decorate his house with twenty-five thousand lights, find a perfect tree, have a nice turkey dinner, and get his bonus so he can buy his family a swimming pool. But the lights won’t work, the tree is infested by a crazed squirrel, the turkey’s tough, and the swimming-pool dream turns into a hostage crisis. Elaine from Seinfeld plays the tragic yuppie next door, and Beverly D’Angelo steals scenes as the indefatigable Ellen Griswold. In trying to dig up new tidbits about a movie I’ve seen dozens of times, I discovered that the music is by Angelo Badalamenti of David Lynch fame, which I’m still trying to get my head around. This double feature at the Carolina pairs it with another John Hughes-penned retro classic, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. —Brian Howe