The irony of the holiday or cheers to you, actually

There are many holidays in the world and every cinematography has a few films in which the presentation of holidays came out of a dramaturgical need, because holidays are a convenient background for the heightened feelings of the hero and various dramatic situations. Also, the cinematographs of countries that deal with cultural politics (yes, yes, there are those!) from time to time make serious efforts to create economically and ideologically profitable works, and the holidays are a great time to market in both of these domains. Filmmakers, for their part, do their best to create works that, after the festive premieres and cinemas, can be shown on television every year, always in connection with the same holidays, so as to enter the mandatory film reading of many generations. Some succeed less, some more, and some fail because they are not up to it. Some of the latter are lying and some are telling the truth.

And while the information people we've become, we suffer from an excess of information, when we increasingly lack the filters to distinguish the valid, important and beautiful from the simple sale of goods or services, there are numerous recommendations of the best films on the theme of winter holidays, on the so-called in the developed West, most often Christmas. All this for the sake of saving the time that a person would spend sifting through his memory to find a favorite movie and watch it again, for the sake of saving him from not watching the movie he remembered at all because, my God, he has already seen it, let him watch something never seen before, and for the sake of saving the so-called fragmentary time that eats the continuities of our lives, because time is not exactly what we agreed upon by introducing clocks, but is determined by the events in it.

Don't save time, spend it thinking about which movie you would watch again or show it to someone who hasn't seen it. Are there any intersections with these that I remembered on holiday and without "guns", rewriting, consulting with Google, that is. without the discipline of a film critic, ignoring the cruelty of readers who believe that criticism is not an artistic but an informative act?

– TV movie Postman by Miloš Radović (2005), witty, romantic, set in the period between the two wars, warm like all of Radović's works, and with a story in the Nušić-Trifković manner, based on the script by Mirjana Lazić;

- Die hard by John McTiernan (1988), which takes place on a holiday, and says that even in a marriage there is no harmony without an external enemy;

- That wonderful life by Frank Capra (1946), which pleads with all its might against suicide (as well as the Mayo Clinic, which claims that holidays are not the favorite time of suicides), and is somewhat similar to Zoran Pešić's poem Sigma, in which the lyrical subject believes that each of us has a guardian angel, and that Sigma's angel, just like the one who protects Capra's main character (James Stewart), is a jerk;

- Dead by John Huston (1987), according to Dubliners James Joyce, in which the holidays not only suspend the ordinary days of the lives of the main characters, but on that occasion they suspend their entire lives and where, when at the end it starts to snow "on all living and dead", every viewer knows very well how much Houston was large;

- Christmas in Connecticut Peter Godfrey (1945) with Barbara Stanwyck and Denis Morgan, where, through the revelation of the manipulative media, the unequivocal attention of the female audience is drawn to the need for the returnees from the war to be incorporated into domestic life, whether the heroine is married, unmarried, a modern career woman or a commercially invented prototype of the housewife . The film is also interesting because it reminds of Meet John Doe (1941), where a journalist (also Barbara Stanwyck), for less commercial (as is the order at the beginning of the war), and more ideological reasons, manipulates the audience, but also a poor and anonymous man (Gary Cooper).

- White Christmas Michael Curtiz (1954), in which Bing Crosby sings the Oscar-winning song of the same name by the genius Irving Berlin for the third time (he first sang it in Holiday Inn (1942) by Mark Sendrić, the second time in Blue sky (1946) where Sandrich died on the ninth day of shooting, so the film is signed by Stuart Heisler), where Danny Kaye makes the gay story Almodóvaresque picturesque, and the community, claiming to care for the heroes of the Second World War, is actually healing from the Korean War;

- Irony of fate or Cheers to the sauna!, a two-part masterpiece by Eljdar Ryazanov (1975) from the golden age of Mosfilm that is so reminiscent of the golden age of classic Hollywood. The film was created based on the motives of a theater play by Ryazanov and Emil Braginsky and tells about coincidence, which is a light-heavy comedy of various confusions, characters and situations, actually a certain prank on the Soviets who in 1975 did not want to have religion on the big and small screens, and let alone a film in which churches are seen in various places, the dialogue mentions the monastery as a place to welcome the New Year. The whole story tells about nothing except that God's providence, attracted by the personal ritual of four friends bathing in the sauna before Novi Sad, brought two people together, who could not have an angel like the Americans at Capra, so the angelic action was filtered through vodka and beer. The incredible production combined a great story with actors such as Andrei Myagkov and Barbara Brilsky (known to Yugoslavs from White wolves with the East German Vinetu Boris Mitić), for whom this role somewhat ruined her career because her native Poland did not forgive her Soviet fame. It is interesting that Brilsky did not know Russian at the time of filming, so on the set they communicated with her in English, her dialogues were dictated by Valentina Talizina, and Al Pugachev's singing, like Myagkov, sings in the voice of Sergei Nikitin. In the most commercial Soviet film (250 million viewers), the lyrics of Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Akhmadulina, Yevtushenko are sung!

- Love, in fact (2003) by Richard Curtis, a New Zealander working temporarily in England, until then famous as a screenwriter and producer, a phenomenal cinematic endeavor in all its elements: through parallel stories that touch and intertwine, the story of love during the three weeks of Advent culminating in Christmas evening. These are stories about British self-awareness and attitude towards America (Hugh Grant, Chris Marshall), mid-life crisis (Alan Rickman), the right to be different (Martin Makachen), cowardice and courage (Haike Makač), adultery and forgiveness (Emma Thompson), parents and children (Liam Neeson), openness to other nations and cultures (Colin Firth, Lucia Moniz), about platonic love (Keira Knightley, Andrew Lincoln), about flaws and the virtues of refusing to be fast and functional (Rowan Atkinson), caring for one's fellow man that requires sacrifice (Laura Linney) and, to top this film off, the friendship between a pop star (Bill Nighy) and a producer (Gregor Fisher) and their Christmas thrash - a hit that represents the minion of pure genius of this film, and stands, just like today's holidays, on the border between sincerity, self-irony and camp.

The history of holidays is linked to rituals that structured time by separating the ordinary life of the community from the moments that matter more. Whether in pagan, polytheistic, or monotheistic spaces and times, holidays are reserved to separate the sacred from the profane. Unlike ordinary days full of history, work and the hardships of ensuring existence, holidays gather the community around the essence, around what is eternal, ahistorical, joyful. In our region, with a more or less metaphysical feeling and reminder that human sacred time is in harmony with the universal cosmic rhythm, around the winter solstice the old Slavs celebrated Christmas, the Romans Saturnalia, the Christians Christmas, the Muslims

Kurban Bayram, Jews Hanukkah, Communists New Year. Holidays have always been connected with nature, and even monotheistic religions did not completely cover this connection, and neither did the fighters against religiosity that followed. Only the most recent founders of permanent profanization do this: the shops have no windows and are constantly under artificial light that suggests darkness and winter; outside, from the autumn to the spring equinox, there are Christmas trees and holiday lights - for the people to spend what they would not spend without carnivalization, which tends to become a permanent state, and to allow what they would not allow without suspending the common sense of everyday life. And that's why, on non-working days, resist profanation: remember your favorite movies, ethics and logic of the previous century, holiday madness, and not permanent servitude. Happy Holidays!