It's just a few days before Christmas, and Ralphie (9) only has one wish for his present: a BB rifle gun, the one his hero, comic-book cowboy Red Ryder has. However, his mother doesn't want to hear about it, fearing he might hurt himself with it. Ralphie experiences numerous misadventures in his hometown: his father is angry at the malfunctioning boiler; Ralphie's little brother Randy doesn't want to eat his food; the teacher rejects his essay about wanting to buy a BB rifle gun... On Christmas, alongside numerous other gifts, Ralphie is happy to find a BB rifle gun that his dad bought him. However, while shooting outside, Ralphie is thrown back by the blast and breaks his glasses.
Similarly like "Home Alone" and "Bad Santa", this film takes the Christmas holidays only to twist and spoof them into a black comedy, since the "Porky's" director Bob Clark was not immune from occasionally crude or vulgar jokes which do clash weirdly sometimes with the story, yet overall "A Christmas Story" is still a movie with its heart on the right place, depicting both the realistic chaos surrounding Christmas and the crazy childhood of the protagonist Ralphie (Peter Billingsley, who would later become a producer of "Elf" and "Iron Man"). With time, this film's reputation grew out of proportion (among other, Roger Ebert even included it in his Great Movies list), since not every joke works to the fullest, whereas some are even downright grotesque: the viewers' taste will depend on how they judge such sequences as the mom tricking the little Randy into eating his dinner by making him imitate a pig licking the plate or when one kid licks a cold pole during winter, and his tongue gets stuck on it (later even copied in "Dumb and Dumber").
Luckily, there are many other "proper" jokes that amuse better. In one of the best, the story depicts the always annoying childhood appearance of a big bully who picks on the little kids, here in an alley, where Randy falls on the snow and stays lying there, so Ralphie the narrator goes: "Randy lay there like a slug. It was his only defense". In another, while helping his dad change a tire, the camera zooms in on Ralphie saying "Fuuuudge" in slow-motion, as the narrator explains: "Only I didn't say "Fudge." I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word!" This is mirrored earlier when the dad swears while trying to repair the broken furnace:"In the heat of battle my father wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan." The story satirizes consumerism, parenting, naivety, negligence and primitivism in society, with several clever observations, whereas in doing so it is often surprisingly honest, without any attempts to succumb to idealism of nostalgia, depicting that even childhood has its problems. A more cynical version of your run-of-the-mill Christmas film, "A Christmas Story" simply enjoys the absurdities of it all.
Grade:++
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