What a view | It’s Twixtmas! What to watch on Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Go to get you through the Christmas comedown
- From Neo Yokio: Pink Christmas, to The Princess Switch, fill the strange, in-between days between Noel and New Year with seasonal fare from your favourite streaming giants
Forget Christmas, it is over, and the ghosts of seasonal movies past, from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Home Alone (1990) to Die Hard (1988), have been laid to rest for another year.
Instead, Twixtmas is upon us, and how better to fill these strange, in-between days than with a Japanese-Korean-American anime holiday special that’s futuristically satirical, satirically futuristic and features a male protagonist with pink hair?
Neo Yokio: Pink Christmas (Netflix) is an hour-long follow-up to last year’s eccentric Neo Yokio series and, similarly, it’s a deft demolition: a classy skewering of rabid consumerism and, this time, Christmas conventions, albeit one about which you needn’t think too hard.
Kaz Kaan (Jaden Smith) is an eligible bachelor and demon hunter subtly ridiculed by his mecha-butler Charles (Jude Law), who looks like a Transformer. With Susan Sarandon, Angélique Kidjo, Jamie Foxx and Alexa Chung lending supporting voices, social climber and competitive gift-giver Kaz learns (sort of) the true meaning of the season of goodwill while fighting the pink-eyed monsters that threaten his hometown, a brand-splattered fantasy New York.
Not that that stops him exclaiming, “I’m part Spanish – no wonder I love Balenciaga!” or one of his closest salesman friends realising: “People just want to engage with a logo. The products don’t even matter.” Ahhh, that warm Christmas glow!
Back to the humbug. The Netflix selection box features tense family reunion Love the Coopers (2015), whose jokey title becomes a Christmas card sign-off rather than an imperative with the addition of a comma. A superior sort of schmaltzy, across-the-generations comedy-romance, it’s a star vehicle for Steve Martin’s voice (but not his face), John Goodman, Diane Keaton and Olivia Wilde. The droll Alan Arkin, however, steals the best lines, advising that whatever life delivers, “it’s all going to become an anecdote” and that at Christmas, “everybody panics, as if you can schedule happiness”.