12 Films of Christmas: Unaccompanied Minors

A recent family film that went mostly unnoticed by both critics and audiences gets a little love in this excerpt from Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas:

Winter storms trap a whole bunch of children traveling alone -- "unaccompanied minors," in airline-speak -- on Christmas Eve at Hoover International Airport. Spencer (Dyllan Christopher) leads a group of kids who escape the bunker-like "U.M. Room" and explore the airport.

Grace (Gina Mantegna) enjoys a spa treatment, Charlie (Tyler James Williams, at that time the star of Everybody Hates Chris) takes a spin on the Sharper Image karaoke machine, and Beef (Brett Kelly from Bad Santa) inflates some emergency landing gear, while Spencer has a junk food extravaganza in the airport restaurant. When Oliver Porter (Lewis Black), the airport's crabby "passenger relations manager who doesn't like passengers," takes them back to the room, they discover that all of the other kids have been sent to a nearby hotel for the night. Spencer must devise a way for them to bring his kid sister a doll, lest she think that Santa has forgotten her. Will Spencer and Katie's dad (Rob Corddry) make it to the airport in his eco-friendly, vegetable-oil-fueled car? And can the kids outsmart Mr. Porter and help him learn to love Christmas again?

While Unaccompanied Minors reads as very much a post- Home Alone movie, it has its own appeal independent of that prior megahit. Director Paul Feig created Freaks and Geeks, one of TV's greatest comedy-dramas, and his gift for casting new faces and eliciting strong performances from young actors is very much in evidence here. While there's a poignant undercurrent to the film -- all of the main characters are children of divorce, which makes them slightly ambivalent about the holidays and also, as Spencer notes, "more resourceful" -- the laughs keep coming. Teri Garr has a great bit as a Christmas-obsessed woman with lawn decorations so aggressive they actually frighten passers-by, while a parade of great contemporary comedians (see "Fun Facts," below) keep popping up in various roles, both large and small. Unaccompanied Minors fell between the cracks during its all-too-brief theatrical release, but here's hoping that it finds its audience on DVD.

Fun Facts:

· Unaccompanied Minors began life as a story by Susan Burton on the public radio show This American Life, about having to spend a night in a hotel with strangers when she and her younger sister were snowed in during air travel. Burton later noted, "When I imagined the movie of my life, I never thought I would be portrayed by a teenage boy."

· Feig rounded up an amazing array of comic talent for the film's supporting characters, including three of the Kids in the Hall (playing airport security guards in, of course, a hall), various cast members from The Daily Show (Rob Cordrry, Rob Riggle, David Koechner), author and NPR commentator Sandra Tsing-Loh, The Office's Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak, Arrested Development's Jessica Walter and Tony Hale, Saturday Night Live's Kristen Wiig, Reno 911!'s Cedric Yarborough, and Freaks and Geeks' Dave "Gruber" Allen.

Check out the rest of Movieline's 12 Films of Christmas as they're revealed throughout the week.