Best, Worst, Most Deranged Holiday Films: Q&A with Alonso Duralde

Advocate.com interviews Alonso Duralde, author of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas

Which film in your book are readers most surprised you included?
I probably get the most raised eyebrows over Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, but again, take another look at the film and you’ll be amazed at how almost every scene includes a decorated tree or wrapping paper or twinkle lights.

You were a guest on the TCM Classics cruise earlier this month. What was that experience like?
I did a clip show and lecture based on my book, and it was a real blast. There was an interesting mix of people on the boat in terms of ages, ethnicities, and sexual orientation, but everyone there was a movie fan and thrilled to be around not just movie stars like Ernest Borgnine and Eva Marie Saint but other classic film fans. You would get seated with strangers at dinner, and within minutes you’d be comparing notes about your favorite John Huston movie.

Keep reading on Advocate.com and don’t forget the 4th page that includes a video of the entire 1959 Mexican Christmas film Santa Claus. 

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Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas by Alonso Duralde
Don’t waste another second of your valuable holiday time on another boring Christmas movie. Film critic Alonso Duralde highlights the best – and worst – movies of the Yuletide season with this fun and informative film guide. Whether you’re looking for the classics, family favorites, holiday horror, Christmas-themed crime epics, or the most wonderfully awful cinematic lumps of coal, Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas will point you and your rental queue in the right direction. Whether your idea of a holiday classic is White Christmas, Bad Santa, Die Hard,Eyes Wide Shut, or Gremlins, you’ll find the right film for you, as well as an exhaustively entertaining breakdown of the various screen Scrooges, from Alistair Sim to Jim Carrey to…Tori Spelling? And get ready to encounter movies you may never have heard of from the gritty noir Christmas Holiday, starring 1930s singing ingénue Deanna Durbin in her first hard-bitten adult role, to the loony Santa Claus, a Mexican kiddie movie in which St. Nick teams up with Merlin to fight the devil! Plot synopses, video availability, and fun facts – did you know the actor cast as Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life was also in the running to play mean old Mr. Potter? – make this a stocking stuffed with information you’ll turn to every Christmas season. Available from Limelight Editions and booksellers nationwide.

Alonso Duralde is the author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men. He has written about film for MSNBC.com and the Advocate, among others, and programmed film festivals, including Outest and the USA Film Festival/Dallas. A regular contributor to The Rotten Tomatoes Show, Duralde has been featured in documentaries for IFC and Starz, and on the Brokeback Mountain and Valley of the Dolls DVDs.
Follow him on Twitter.