Seasonal Cinema: Classics on the Big Screen

Well made holiday movies make us want to see them year after year.

May we take a moment to address any potential movie producers reading this? Thank you.

Dear movie producers: If you want a film made by you to breathe life in theaters decades from now, please follow our humble but completely dead-on advice. A- Make it about the holidays. B- Make it incredibly timeless and very, very good.

Easy, right?

Look no further than "It's a Wonderful Life," a snowy snickerdoodle of a cinema cookie that happens to find its way onto a local big screen every holiday season and with good reason.

George Bailey is the man. Oh, sure, the movies have given us other Men, capital M, but has anyone bested Jimmy Stewart for sheer, aw-shucksian good-hearted-ness?

That's a huge, huge nope.

It's playing at The Egyptian on Saturday, Dec. 21 if you'd like to see it the way it played back in 1946 (aka large).

The Scene

Want to find new things to do in Los Angeles? The Scene's lifestyle stories have you covered. Here's your go-to source on where the fun is across SoCal and for the weekend.

Snack, with style, on the Rose Bowl field and support a great cause

LA says goodbye to the iconic Conga Room

Two fun local "Wonderful" factoids:

Bedford Falls, the snowflakiest of all movie towns, is Encino. We mean, it was filmed in Encino. Right??? Movie magic, you never fail to make us haul out the additional punctuation, out of total excitement.

The second factoid? Frank Capra wrote the screenplay at La Quinta Resort & Club, and you can stay in the very casita where he wrote it. The desert destination does it up, Capra-style, each Christmas, with "Wonderful Life" extras aplenty (like cocktails named for the characters).

If watching George Bailey run through Bedford Falls happily shouting "Merry Christmas" isn't your thing -- and, please, if it isn't, maybe it should be, just a little, for cheer's sake -- then check it out: 1983's "A Christmas Story" screens in Pasadena on Saturday, Dec. 14, for free.

Another holiday gem, thirty years along. Seriously, movie producers, we're not joking. A very well-done yuletide story is the key to big-screen legendary-ness, or so cinema history has shown us.

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