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Top-ten lists of holiday films abound right about now, but what about picking the top three Christmas movies ever made? Certainly there's plenty to choose from. Christmas movies are almost a genre unto themselves: between live-action and animated features, there are literally hundreds of titles out there. Inevitably, some are pretty bad, others amusingly cheesy.

Simply put, it is the season of sentiment. Sentiment drives every hour of the month of December, whether through nostalgia or wishes for the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the most romantic Christmas movies were made in the 1940s, a time when lovers were often parted by war and optimism was badly needed.

In 1964, a team of British documentary filmmakers assembled a group of school children, all aged seven, to begin a profound social experiment that has ended up spanning half a century. Known now as “The Up Series,” director Michael Apted has, for fifty years, followed the lives of fourteen British children from opposite ends of the economic and class spectrum, charting their lives in installments every seven years.

As producer/director Roger Corman once told me, movies are a kind of alchemy, an outcome of many complex elements. Bad movies can be forged from wrongheaded decisions, great ones can often be attributed to … plain dumb luck. The resulting concoction is all that counts. Of course, when you watch an amazing performance in a great film, it’s hard to envision how it could have been done any other way. Casting is crucial because most often we associate movies with the actors that star in them. But consider how differently a movie might have turned out if an alternate choice had been made. Just a tiny shift in the recipe can make a world of difference.  Here then is a list of 9 actual “what might have been” casting choices from some of our favorite films that prove my point. 

If you break down “I aint ‘fraid of no ghost” – I think it means… I am, in fact, extremely afraid of many ghosts.     And I am especially fearful about the rumbling prospect of an ill-conceived “Ghostbusters III” — a specter that Sony has been slamming through the film marketplace for over five years like a twenty-story, sailor-suited, marshmallow man on the run from a pair of block-long graham crackers. The word ‘round the campfire is that this attempt to beat a ghostly horse could have been greenlit as of about a year ago, when longstanding hold out Bill Murray, who played Peter Venkman in the original, abdicated his franchise rights. But the film has been “coming soon” for a very long time, and Blues Brother-turned-vodka maven Dan Aykroyd, who helped pen all the “Ghostbusters” scripts (including potential #3 — with the recently departed Harold Ramis), continues to be haunted by stumbling blocks.

The finest sports movies are about more than the glory of the contest; they peer into the psychology of fans and players alike. Who are these athletes as people? And what’s behind all the devotion fans feel for them?

Once again, I hear Alice Cooper in my head screaming out that anthem of freedom: “School’s out for summer!” I was actually on the cusp of high school when that song became a hit, and I took the lyrics very much to heart. Back then, summer seemed like a time of endless possibility- parties to attend, girls to meet, and um, everything else associated with that.

Ah, that eternal question: which is better, the book or the movie? Though such comparisons are natural, even inevitable, they’re also kind of pointless, since the conventions of each medium differ so markedly. Books explore the dense inner lives of characters in a way movies can’t, while films use sight, sound and motion to create an immediacy books can’t.

Cheap knockoffs are usually pretty easy to spot in real life. Buying a purse for my wife once in Chinatown, I asked, “is this a REAL Coach bag?” The vendor produced a hot glue gun and a Coach emblem and said, “It will be when you buy it.”  This kind of thing shouldn’t surprise us — in movies, it happens all the time. For those who don’t already know, Hollywood’s unspoken mantra is: “If it works, buy it or steal it!” This means that studios pilfer from successful foreign films all the time, and have for years. After all, as more than one sage has noted, there are no new stories, only new ways to tell them... Sometimes it’s just plotlines that get recycled. Example: observe how certain scenes in Akira Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress” (1958) resemble a little movie called “Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope” (1977).