There are people who claim, not unconvincingly, that Wham!’s perennial earworm “Last Christmas” is only nominally a Christmas song (Lifehacker’s Nick Douglas called it the Die Hard of Christmas songs in a 2017 post). I’d argue that the insistent sleighbells and theme of manipulating people through gift-giving is, in fact, very pertinent to the holiday, but otherwise, I can concede that it is very much a love song whose yuletide framework could be interpreted as circumstantial. It is equally appropriate and regrettable that Paul Feig’s Last Christmas, which was named after the song, is barely a Christmas movie. Yes, it takes place at Christmastime, it’s largely set in a Christmas store, and its protagonist learns a remedial lesson about the soul-warming effect of helping others, but that’s all backdrop to a rather chaste and saccharine love story with superficial subplots concerning Brexit and queer coming out that could take place at any time of year and still go down like curdled eggnog.
