As a kid, the basic premise of Home Alone struck me as really depressing. I couldn't imagine anything less festive than being forgotten by your parents, spending Christmas in an empty house and then having to contend with a home invasion on top of everything. Even worse, Kevin's parents continued to do this for three straight movies, not including the two with a different cast and characters. There's a point where that stops being charmingly absent-minded and swaggers into wilful neglect. Family is so central to the heart of our modern secular ideas about Christmas that to see this disconstructed my a kid's film casts a bit of a somber pall over the holiday. I've heard persuasive arguments about the franchise being a damning portrayal of capitalism but one thing about this trips me up. If it was honestly an anti-capitalist statement would they really have made so many sequels? In fact the reason that this article only really acknowledges the first two in the franchise because I've honestly never met anyone who has anything good to say about 3-5.