Before I met my fiancé, my Christmastime film-watching rituals were limited to the shoot-your-eye-out shenanigans of A Christmas Story and the animated anti-commercialism of A Charlie Brown Christmas. My fiancé introduced two new films into seasonal rotation pretty early in our relationship: Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas (a puppet-saturated Jim Henson classic) and It's a Wonderful Life. The latter — presented in two separate screenings at Tampa Theatre this weekend — is Frank Capra's 1946 post-war holiday drama about George Bailey, a savings-and-loan manager who's so busy helping others that he takes little time to help himself. After suffering from one misfortune too many, Bailey decides that he's worth more dead than alive, but his suicide attempt is interrupted by Clarence, a guardian angel with a Dickensian plan to show Bailey what the world would have been like had he not been born. (To see a 30-second version re-enacted by animated bunnies, visit angryalien.com.) Dec. 23-24, 7:30 p.m. Sat., 3 p.m. Sun., Tampa Theatre, 711 Franklin St., downtown Tampa, $7.50, 813-274-8982.
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2006.