Not your mother’s St. Nick

Not to be outdone by Hallmark, Netflix has released a slate of Christmas movies, and one in particular is getting lots of love from fans.

“#ChristmasChronicles is absolutely the Christmas movie we needed,” one fan wrote on Twitter. “It goes up there as [one of] the best ones over the decades.” Another viewer tweeted, “Instant Christmas classic! Great story, best Santa, can’t wait to see it again.” The movie currently has 87 percent positive audience reviews at Rotten Tomatoes.

The Christmas Chronicles stars Kurt Russell as a smoldering St. Nick who’s out to teach a bickering brother and sister how to work together. The movie follows a time-tested plot formula: A grumpy protagonist, in this case teenage boy Teddy, helps Santa Claus out of a predicament and finds his or her Christmas cheer, usually with the help of an elven sidekick (check) and an overly cheerful companion (Teddy’s younger sister, Kate).

Russell is not your mother’s Santa, unless your mother had a crush on Kurt Russell in the 1980s. He chews out the kids who slow down his Christmas Eve deliveries, steals a car, and complains that popular drawings of him make his rear end look big.

“I’m not playing him as a jolly, old elf,” Russell told Parade. “He’s a real person.”

Russell’s character still brings plenty of Christmas cheer, but in a disjointed way that makes you wonder what he’s really up to.

The actor also said he intentionally played up Santa’s authoritativeness in crafting the character.

“Santa’s got an element of intimidation to him,” he said. “You watch kids going up to the … Santa Clauses in the malls, and there’s a big part of that that involves intimidation. They’ll keep their eyes down.”

The Christmas Chronicles version of St. Nick could have come from Greek mythology—a flawed deity with intense but limited powers and, of course, good looks. He takes the humans for a wild ride, and they learn lessons along the way.

The movie has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments—like the CGI elves doing The Floss—along with the tenderhearted sentimentality expected from a Christmas flick.

Sadly, the strongest characters get the least screen time. Teddy and Kate’s parents, played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley and Oliver Hudson, Kurt Russell’s real-life son, have an enduring, sacrificial love for each other and their children. Dad is a lion-hearted leader whose devotion to his family crescendos at Christmas, while mom works tirelessly behind the scenes to care for everyone under her roof. But Teddy and Kate can’t fathom how much they are loved until someone more powerful comes down to their level to show them. It’s a lesson the movie shares with the true story of Christmas, in which God comes down to His people to help them accept His gift of love.

Heist hype

Three men managed to remove a valuable painting by French impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir from its frame and leave a Vienna auction house with it on Monday night. Bidding on the landscape painting, one of Renoir’s lesser-known works, was scheduled to open Wednesday night. The work has an estimated value of $136,000 to $181,000.

Theft of art and cultural artifacts is a booming business, especially in conflict-prone areas like the Middle East. Dealers and investigators often say the stolen art trade is the world’s third-largest black market after drugs and arms trafficking, though Interpol says it’s impossible to quantify. Last week, Muse reported on a stolen Byzantine-era church mosaic that was recovered and returned to Cyprus. And reports circulated earlier this month that one of the Pablo Picasso masterpieces stolen from the Kunsthal Museum in the Netherlands in 2012 had been found buried under a rock in a Romanian forest. But the painting turned out to be a fake, buried by a performance art troupe from Belgium. That story, and this narrative of the Kunsthal heist, make great reading for art lovers. —L.L.

Hoop dreams

The NBA is expanding in Africa, attracting young talent to a new training center in Saly, Senegal. Plans are also in the works for a pan-African basketball league, as well as NBA preseason and regular season games on the continent. —L.L.

In memory

This week, Hollywood mourned the loss of two notable creators who produced very different content. Academy Award–winner Bernardo Bertolucci, director of Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor, died at age 77 of cancer in Italy. And Steven Hillebrand, creator of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, died at age 57 of Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. —L.L.