8-Bit Christmas

A family film set in a town outside Chicago at the end of the 1980s. A grown man tells his daughter a Christmas story from his own childhood. The narrative goes back to 1988. Jake wants a games console. His mother says absolutely not; there is a story about what happened to a boy in the neighbourhood because of a console, and the parents have taken a common line. The one rich boy in the class has a console and the others take turns playing at his house. Jake and his friends decide to buy one with their own money. Selling cards, shovelling snow, scout biscuits and a few miscalculations. The best thing about it is the unreliability of the narrator: some scenes are exaggerated on screen because he is exaggerating; the story grows as he tells it and his daughter breaks in with questions. The source is Kevin Jakubowski's novel. Neil Patrick Harris plays the adult Jake, Winslow Fegley the boy and Steve Zahn his father. Michael Dowse directed. It was released on a streaming service. The ending turns on the relationship with the father rather than the toy and steps a little outside the pattern of the genre. A pleasant choice for anyone who likes Christmas films and the nostalgia of the 1980s. For a viewer wanting a new story, the film stands very close to the known examples of its kind.