Oh, what can we say? It's perfect. Perfect! The Peanuts gang shows us every possible way to screw up the holiday: Snoopy decorates his dog house like it's Atlantic City; Sally asks Santa to send cash money; Charlie Brown, that blockhead, mopes, sulks, overanalyzes, expects too much, and then settles on a terrible crappy little tree simply to test the Christian patience of everybody else. Thank God for Linus, who recites the relevant passages of the Gospel of Luke from memory, who wraps us all up in a blanket of good will, who can make animated characters and human viewers alike cry and cheer. It's what secularists have on Christmas Eve instead of church. [ABC, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: Ace In The Hole

There are some out there who believe 1951's Ace In The Hole is Billy Wilder's masterpiece—they're wrong, of course, because The Apartment exists, and Sunset Boulevard. Nonetheless, this is a foul, sad piece of work, and maybe the most misanthropic movie ever made. Kirk Douglas stars as the down-on-his-luck reporter lucky enough to stumble upon the dream front page subject: a man trapped under a rock slide but still awake and circulatory enough to give interviews. Around the cave entrance, rubberneckers, first responders, well-wishers, misery tourists and a sloppy-seconds press corps all gather in expectation of an unhappy ending, which turns out much unhappier than you think. [TCM, 9:30 a.m.]

Wednesday: Leverage

We're related to one of the writers, so consider our recommendation corrupt. Regardless, we have a tremendous weakness for any show or movie where a group of grifters operate with the elegance and efficiency of an Olympic relay team. Timothy Hutton is too saggy, shaggy and self-serious to be our Danny Ocean, but his supporting cast is a nerd summit: Gina Bellman was the sexpot in Coupling and the schizophrenic-loving wife in Jekyll; Christian Kane was the bad lawyer on Angel; Aldis Hodge guested as q.b. Voodoo on Friday Night Lights; and Beth Riesgraf you might know as Jason Lee's wife and the mother of their child, Pilot Inspektor. Their geek résumés somehow lend them more credibility as smarter-than-thou con artists. [TNT, 12 a.m.]

Thursday: The Thing

Here's the only thing you really need to know about this John Carpenter–directed remake of Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World; Kurt Russell has a flamethrower, and he kills aliens with it. [SciFi, 7 p.m.]

Friday: Frosty the Snowman

We can't be positive that CBS is going to show our favorite version of this other Christmas classic (after all, the network is airing something called "Frosty Returns" right after). But, we're optimistic—it's Christmas after all! And nothing reminds us of being kids quite like crude, jerky animation and ominous narration. You know the song, so we won't tell you what happens. And yes, it might make you cry. [CBS, 8 p.m.]

Tootsie is one of the great actors' showcases. Everybody in it's magnificent. There's Dustin Hoffman, of course. In drag, as Dorothy Michaels, the soap opera star, he is brassy, gentle, not convincing exactly, but committed. And as Michael Dorsey, the manic, Method-y, utterly unemployable thespian, he offers about as honest and harmful a self-parody a man could, at least without losing his mind and giving up completely. On second thought, maybe he did ruin himself. After Tootsie, there were no more Ratso Rizzos or Ben Braddocks or Little Big Men. He was twinkly, older, boring.

And we could write a whole poem cycle about the supporting cast: There's Sydney Pollack, also the director, doing another of his exasperated, slick, tired-of-this-shit turns; and Charles Durning, as the widower who falls in love with Dorothy, and whose response to what's really under her skirts is more heartbroken than homophobic. There's Terri Garr, who we adore, even though no one in the movie adores her back; and Jessica Lange, as Southern and strange as a Faulkner novel, still beautiful, back before plastic surgery turned her catlike.

And there's Bill Murray. He's only in about 10 minutes of the movie, playing Dustin Hoffman's best friend and the movie's one-man Greek chorus. Sure, he'd made Stripes and Caddyshack by then, and done his time on SNL, but it was still sort of a miracle how fully-formed his Groucho Marx-meets-Cary Grant persona already was. He improvises lines like "I don't want a full house at the Winter Garden. I want people who just came out of the worst rainstorm in history. These are people who are alive on the planet... until they dry off. I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rained," which would qualify as satire if he didn't sound so serious and anguished when he says it.

This was 1982. Two years later, Bill Murray quit acting. Look it up. His earnest, only-slightly-awkward adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge was released within a few months of Ghostbusters and made something like 34 times less at the box office. So he moved his family to Paris, read philosophy at the Sorbonne, went to the Cinematheque Francaise and watched a lot of old movies. He turned his whole life into a Maugham novel. It's hard to imagine what a 'fuck you' this must have been.

Eventually, of course, he came back. In 1988, he made Scrooged, which is also on this weekend (Cinemax, Saturday, 2:15 a.m.). As with any remake of A Christmas Carol, even one this silly and punk, it ends not just with an affirmation of life, but a reengagement with other human beings. So Bill Murray, having seen all the holidays he's wasted, is wasting, will waste exclaims: "I get it now! If you give, then it can happen...then the miracle can happen to you. It's not just the poor and hungry, it's everybody who's gotta have this miracle! And it can happen tonight for all of you! If you believe in this spirit thing, the miracle will happen...and then you'll want it to happen again tomorrow. You won't be one of those assholes who say Christmas is once a year and it's a fraud; it's not! It can happen every day; you've just got to want that feeling. And if you like it, and you want it, you'll get greedy for it...you'll want it every day of your life. And it can happen to you."

The movie was a big hit. He was so famous again, nobody even remembered that he'd disappeared, or why.

We've got a real soft spot for White Christmas. The movie's credentials, first off, are completely ridiculous: the director was Michael Curtiz, who did Casablanca, and the choreographer, an uncredited Bob Fosse. The music's all Irving Berlin and every VistaVisioned, Technicolored shot is as bright and lovely as a light on a tree.

And the cast: as army acquaintances who become big Broadway producers, there's Bing Crosby, avuncular but grumpier than Bogart, and Danny Kaye, inventive, cartoony, satyr-ic Danny Kaye. As the sister act for whom they give up their dignity and their holiday plans, there's Vera-Ellen, at a moment when her anorexia had gotten her to a 21-inch waist but before it had withered her into retirement; and there's Rosemary Clooney, with her wide-open face and crazy, giant voice.

Oh, the plot? An inn needs saving, so they save it. There's some matchmaking too, despite an absence of sexual tension all around. The end result, of course, is schmaltzy and sort of garbage and somewhere in the middle of a time-stretching ballet sequence, you'll realize that at 120 minutes the movie's maybe 60 minutes too long. But if you have functioning tear ducts and a heart that's not three sizes too small, you'll probably mist up once or twice.

Our favorite moment happens early on: Vera-Ellen, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye, and Bing Crosby all wind up crammed in a club car booth on a night train from Florida to Vermont. They order a couple of sandwiches, and then spontaneously, in harmony, all of them, burst into song: "I'll soon be there with snow/I'll wash my hair with snow/And with a spade of snow/I'll build a man that's made of snow."

You can imagine their heartbreak and confusion when the the train pulls into the station and they find ski slopes as dry and warm as beaches. So the whole movie snow's all anyone thinks about, sings about, wishes for, worries about, dreams of, like it's the key to world peace or the cure for polio. Actually, at the end, when the cirrocumulus clouds finally blow in and the water droplets finally oblige to supercool and Christmas finally whitens, everything in the world is, just for a moment, all right.

In The Philadelphia Story, for instance, he's condescending, too wry, a tabloid reporter stuck covering a society wedding who gets loaded and tries to bone the bride-to-be. In Rear Window, it's bad enough that he's become, trapped in that wheelchair, this peeping tom, creepy, obsessed, but he also treats Grace Kelly most of the time like she's a flesh-eating virus he might catch. And in It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey may be the bulwark that prevents Bedford Falls from devolving into Potterville, but the man is also self-righteous, self-pitying, driven easily to suicide, and a screamer. This is the bravery of Jimmy Stewart. He didn't hedge for your sympathies, he screwed with them. He undermined his sappy, sad face with nasty, sinister eyes; and used that timorous, aw-shucks voice to say the most terrible things.

Which brings us to Vertigo. It's on TCM, this Saturday evening, at 5:45. Don't count on doing much afterward, because it tends to leave a person pretty fucked up. But it's Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece and maybe the finest American movie ever made, our apologies to Godfather fans.

Here, Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie, a detective forced to retire because dizziness hits him at any height above chair level. Kim Novak plays the rich woman he's hired to tail, who is probably sick in the head but may be possessed by the ghost of a Spanish noblewoman, whom he falls in love with and loses. Ms. Novak plays too the shopgirl he meets later on, also loves, wants to possess.

So, he remakes the shopgirl in the image of the dead rich woman. He's like a Hollywood talent agent manipulating some kid fresh off the bus into the shape of a starlet. He re-creates the style of gray suit he remembers, dies her hair platinum blond and twists it back up into the tree-ring knot he longs to caress. "Judy, please, it can't matter to you!" is what he pleads, as he dolls her up and destroys her.

Maybe the detective parts of him are still whirring and humming inside, putting her puzzle together piece by piece, deducing with great difficulty why the rich woman and the shopgirl look so much alike, making the mystery make sense. But he's also so deeply disturbed, so awful and broken, that Freud and a whole team of Viennese psychiatrists wouldn't be able to figure him out. Hell, they couldn't even name what he's got. His vertigo, bad enough, becomes a disequilibrium that can never be righted. We think Scottie's weirder and scarier than Heath Ledger's Joker, but because he wears a Jimmy Stewart suit and Jimmy Stewart seeming-good intentions instead of facial scars and war paint, it's hard to see.

Anyway, for anyone who doesn't already know, we're loathe to spoil the ending, so all we'll say is that Scottie cures himself of his vertigo, but the cure is tragic.

And about Kim Novak, who you'll mourn twice, she had the crazy knack of acting both earthy and uncanny. We recommend following Vertigo up with one of two other Kim Novak movies: Kiss Me Stupid, a Billy Wilder sex-farce co-starring Dean Martin as a grosser, hornier, even drunker version of himself, or The Notorious Landlady, the comic thriller she made in London with Jack Lemmon and Fred Astaire. In each of these films, she again plays someone pretending to be someone else, but these masquerades end happily. Of course, there's no real antidote for Vertigo.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (TCM, Sunday, 10:15 am) was the Juno of 1944. The full plot summary would require thousands of confusing words so let's try long story short: Small town Trudy loves soldiers, which is why, the morning after a farewell dance for a bunch of them, she wakes up concussed, hung over, newly married to a private who is maybe named Ratzkiwatzki but has definitely already shipped out--not to mention she's, surprise, knocked up. Unfit-for-service Norval loves Trudy, which is why he pretends he impregnated her and tries his hardest to marry her. Needless to say, hijinks ensue.

Among Preston Sturges' comedies, we prefer The Lady Eve, where Henry Fonda falls in love with Barbara Stanwyck, loses her, and then falls in love with her all over again while she's masquerading as a different woman. It's Vertigo if Vertigo was hilarious and not soul-crushing. Everybody else on earth seems to prefer Sullivan's Travels, his Hollywood satire, or The Palm Beach Story, because it stars Claudette Colbert.

But Morgan's Creek is a pretty great time, mostly because you can't believe you're watching a ‘40s comedy about a young woman... who's pregnant... because she had a one-night stand... with some anonymous dude... she met, screwed, and married while hammered on "victory lemonade"... and after she'd drunkenly jitterbugged herself straight into a chandelier. (Which explains the concussion.) Sturges later wrote, in his autobiography, that he wanted Morgan's Creek to "show what happens to young girls who disregard their parents' advice and who confuse patriotism with promiscuity." This is very responsible, very moral, except the movie doesn't. Morgan's Creek never judges Trudy, even if Sturges did.

Now imagine the same movie today. Juno, after all, got pregnant in the most wholesome way and with Michael Cera, who was almost as innocent as a bystander. A remake of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, about a drunk chick who fucks soldiers on their way to war, would be a grainy, miserable, unhappily ending drama shown on just a few theater screens instead of, well, the highest grossing movie of its year.

His resume will, of course, be well-covered in the obituaries: he appeared on CBS Sunday Morning and reviewed television for New York and books for The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Harper's and the Times. He filled so many column inches for so many different outlets that he sometimes repeated his references and quips. You'd go crazy counting up the mentions of Shane or trying to figure out how many times he alluded to the joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger, surrounded by an Indian war party, outnumbered, totally screwed, a blaze of glory their best and only option, the punchline of which is: "What do you mean we, white man?"

If this were a Leonard-penned obit, he'd wish the departed bon voyage while listing their every possible destination: the rush-covered islands of Aaru, the grey, weird plains of Elysium, the undescribed sheol, the dance hall of Valhalla, the animistic paradise as plentiful as a supermarket, the luminous cumulus-covered angel-thronged heaven, the next stop in samsara as a dog, dragonfly or the doctor their parents secretly hoped for. I don't know whether John Leonard really wanted to come back to earth or persist eternally or provide a perfect feast for beetles and worms, although this paragraph, from his review of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking probably gives it all away:

But it would be too depressing to end with that and he was too joyful a reader, too wild a writer. Instead, I'll offer one of the many other passages of his I loved. He wrote it about Elizabeth Hardwick, but it applies equally to him:

Mark Halperin on The Page: THE NETWORKS WON’T TELL YOU BUT THE PAGE WILL: BARACK OBAMA WILL BE THE 44TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

Nate Silver, on Fivethirtyeight.com: "!"

Andrew Sullivan: This is Obama's achievement; but it is also Karl Rove's.

Josh Marshall, on Talking Points Memo, under the heading of "F--K Ya Blogging": For the moment, I'm not sure what else I have to say.

John J. Pitney Jr., for The National Review: As we look to the next 2-4 years, we should keep in mind this passage from Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ: "A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. You'll ask me why. It's because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.”

But should you have a spare second between calling Wisconsin for Obama and saying petty things about David Gergen’s brace of hair, we want to recommend The Atlantic’s Live Election Analysis—a staid and awfully Atlantic-like name for what’s actually a hilarious group twitter account.

It’s a little bit like reading a stage play about a newspaper: the whole staff shouting at and past one another, teasing, joking, screwballing around, calling out developments as they break. It’s His Girl Friday for wonks, which we guess tonight would make Marc Ambinder Cary Grant.

But The Most Breathless Post In the History of the Liberal Blogosphere may already been written. That would be Boyd Reed’s “I Didn’t Vote for Obama Today” on TPM Café. We'll spoil the twist ending for you:

There’s something judgmental about this sort of holiday programming: if it’s Christmas, you should be curled up with loved ones in front of a roaring fireplace; if it’s Halloween, you should be dressed up as a pirate or a slutty werewolf or as Sarah Palin, getting hammered on pumpkintinis; and if you’re home on the couch watching TV, you must be a friendless, family-less loser in deep denial that a holiday is even taking place. You want to watch The Starter Wife and pretend it’s any other Friday night.

To be fair: for the past few weeks, cable TV has been wall-to-wall horror, almost all of it mediocre, un-fun, and in no way terrifying. Maybe by now we’re supposed to be as sick of chills up our spine and knots in our stomach and the edges of our seats as we already are of the presidential election. This, of course, is the problem with distending holidays into interminable shopping seasons: when the actual calendar date rolls around it’s not a celebration but a finishing line, a relief.

But like low-information undecideds who don’t get interested in voting until the day of, we only get weepy about Linus and Charlie Brown and that crappy, lovely little tree on Christmas Eve and we want the shit scared out of us only on All Hallow’s Eve. Your best bet this year would have been to DVR the original 1974 version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre when it played on the IFC channel on Tuesday. That’s a movie so bleak and rough and flawlessly fucked up we will not write a single word more about it for fear of making ourselves vomit on our computer keyboard.

Otherwise, be sure to catch 1968’s Night of the Living Dead tonight at 2 a.m., on WLIW 21. Before turning it on, please follow the example of anyone besieged by zombies: draw every drape; lock every window; bolt every door.

About George Romero’s later work—see: Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, don’t see: Land of the Dead— we go back and forth: are his radical progressive politics too campy, his scares too heavy-handed, his gore too silly and gross? But here, in his very first, very low-budget film, every dial is set to just the right, revelatory frequency: as a result, the black and white film is as sad and stark as news reel footage of riot police attacking civil rights marchers. Outside a boarded-up farmhouse, the ghouls, in a mood of apocalyptic tedium, shuffle slowly forward, stopping only when they hit a wall or reach a meal. Inside, the survivors, maybe the only ones, fret, and freak out, and do their very best to make sure everybody else gets killed. They’d probably resort to cannibalism if they lasted long enough. This, of course, is the scariest, least forgiving thing about George Romero: you’re never clear who’s better off, the living or the dead.