What to watch at home alone this Christmas

After Love Actually’s banning by the woke brigade, I went looking for some safe, modern festive alternatives. Trigger warning: The news is not good.

A scene from Love Actually. Picture: Alamy

It’s the grumpiest time of the year. Mariah Carey won’t get out of your head, you have to actually sit down and talk to your family and worst of all, you have to read yet another think-piece about the film Love Actually.

So surely this holiday, the streamers should be providing some much needed gems to cure us of any yuletide blues.

Yes, there are always It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street, The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Muppet Christmas Carol. You can rely on the classics.

But surely there’s some new, exciting bauble on the cultural tree this year to shunt Love Actually out of the way as the most talked about festive feature — especially since it’s now cancelled — and join the great pantheon of Christmas films?

In case you missed it, you can’t just go watch Love Actually any more. It’s been cancelled for not being diverse enough and for making its female characters victims or lovesick puppies.

Is it bad to cancel a film from nearly 20 years ago based on today’s woke lens? Probably.

Is it good if cancelling the film means nobody ever talks about Love Actually again? Probably.

I’m afraid you’re more likely to get a thrill from a Christmas ghost this year than anything on your favourite streaming service.

There’s the odd Christmas light touch here, and the odd festive cheer there. But 2022’s offerings for the holidays aren’t likely to make anyone swap carolling for a night in watching telly.

Netflix has become the Hallmark of the 21st century in terms of offering up Christmas schlock, and its big splash for the holidays is diva-of-all-divas Lindsay Lohan’s Falling for Christmas.

Now, given Lohan’s somewhat troubled past, Falling for Christmas has been approached by some with cynical eyes. Most of the focus has been on whether Lohan could pull it together and not look or sound like a mess.

Sadly, Lohan’s film is more of a snooze-fest than a trainwreck. The latter at least may have been a bit more jolly.

The star of Mean Girls plays a down in the dumps heiress preparing for another glam Christmas in one of Daddy’s many international hotels when an accident leaves her stranded in a tiny town with no memory.

As you can expect she meets a hunky local (Chord Overstreet, of Glee fame) with a young daughter and a heart of gold.

But this lacks the laughs or the heart of previous Netflix yuletide outings such as the delightful gay rom-com Single All the Way or Vanessa Hudgens’s adorable Princess Switch series.

It’s not that Lohan is unlikeable or sloppy or wooden. She’s just not really there.

There’s little drama and few jokes. It’s just all a bit empty. For someone who started her career as one of the most promising high comic actors of her generation, maybe a better writer or director might have given Lohan the lift that Falling for Christmas fails to provide.

Christmas has a rather rough reputation for being a bit soft and saccharine – people really skip past Herod’s massacres in Bethlehem these days – so of course Disney Plus is full of yuletide content.

Leading its slate this year is its TV revival of the classic Santa Clause franchise starring Tim Allen (Toy Story, Home Improvement) once more as Father Christmas.

Allen has been playing the role of Santa Claus for 28 years – it’s a title and role that is inherited in this world – with Elizabeth Mitchell’s Mrs Claus by his side.

But the cynical world of 2022 is losing faith in Santa and Rudolph and all that, so he’s losing his powers and his passion for the North Pole gig.

The Santa Clauses is as sickly sweet as you can get. Christmas cheer, wee kiddies playing elves, Christmas singalongs. This show would make any Scrooge throw up and any wise guy or gal run for the skip button.

And yet Allen is charming as ever as Santa and Mitchell is very good as a Mrs Claus starting to question – like Hillary Clinton famously once did – if she really should be spending her time baking cookies.

It doesn’t have much edge, but younger kids will dig the Santa Clauses.

In a galaxy much too close for comfort, Disney’s Marvel monolith is also pulling out all the festive stops with The Guardians of The Galaxy Holiday Special.

Led by a swaggering Chris Pratt, a band of outer space rascals including a raccoon and a talking tree try to give Pratt’s Star Lord (who was taken by alien pirates as a wee boy) the Christmas of his dreams. So of course, the alien mates kidnap Kevin Bacon and put him in festive wrapping, as Pratt is a bit of a Footloose super fan.

This holiday special stays true to GOTG’s “we’re comic book heroes, but we have a sense of humour” style. Bacon is a trooper as a very confused 1980s superstar sped away to a far-off planet.

Among the Guardians gang, Dave Bautista is particularly charming as an emotionally challenged, super strong mercenary – even if he is a poor man’s Hulk. And Groot the talking tree (Vin Diesel) is always a hoot.

As always with Marvel, the film spends too much time on its internal mythology to rise above the usual superhero schlock it doles out.

The GOTG holiday special does better than most superhero offerings. At least you don’t need to have watched all 10,000 previous Marvel movies to understand this rather short holiday special.

Christmas Ransom on Stan is the festive season’s main local offering.

Comedian Matt Okine (best known for his time as a Triple J host) is the glum toy shop manager who is facing closing up for good when a good, old-fashioned hostage crisis helps him find the true meaning of Christmas.

Yes, hostage-taking at Christmas. There are more than a few Die Hard references in this Yuletide rom com – the best being a crook falling Alan Rickman-style into a ball pit – and other Christmas markers to boot.

Okine is charming as the lead and Miranda Tapsell is luminous as always as a tough, loyal, security guard. Geneviève Lemon is particularly gruesome as the nasty granny behind the kidnapping.

But Christmas Ransom often feels cheap and nobody seems particularly enthused – writers or performers – to put tinsel over the cracks.

The dialogue is often wooden, the jokes often flat and the writing just can’t seem to pull it together. Given this film’s talented leads, you do wish Santa would come down the chimney and give them a better script.

Okine and Tapsell give it enough sparkle if you need to divert the children for an hour or so, but this ain’t Australia’s answer to Home Alone or Die Hard or much else.

Falling for Christmas, streaming on Netflix.
The Santa Clauses, streaming on Disney Plus.
Guardians of the Galaxy, streaming on Disney Plus.
Christmas Ransom, streaming on Stan.