A negative review from the VILLAGE VOICE...

Jim Carrey and Robert Zemeckis' Very CGI Christmas Carol

By Ella Taylor
Tuesday, November 3rd 2009 at 3:41pm

It's not hard to see how the director of Forrest Gump would be thought a good fit to adapt the dearly beloved (and much lampooned) Dickens tale that has survived nearly two centuries of retelling if you count the Flintstone, Muppet, and Barbie versions. Stuffed with simple souls winning over a stingy misanthrope to the view that life is a box of chocolates even when it manifestly isn't, A Christmas Carol is nothing if not a meaty yarn. It's a lot more besides, but Robert Zemeckis, a cutting-edge animator who hasn't told a decent story since 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, has a tin ear for Dickens's grand moral melodramas, or just doesn't care much. What switched him on were the CGI possibilities of Ebenezer Scrooge's journey back to the future, which Zemeckis has folded into, of all things, a horror story so terrifying that even my hardened 11-year-old clutched my arm in fright. Or was that me clutching hers?

A Christmas Carol is a whiz-bang 3-D thrill-ride with all the emotional satisfaction squeezed out of it. For what it's worth, the movie's performance-capture digital tricks all but abolish the boundary between live action and animation. That gives Jim Carrey, sunken into a great beak of a nose and a never-ending chin, a chance to show off the full range of his india-rubber body language as he morphs from bent old Scrooge to fresh young Scrooge—in love and not yet warped by want and paternal abuse—and back again to the money-grubbing grinch who's so cheap that he stoops to filch the coins placed over the eyes of his dead partner, Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman).

But we're not permitted to dwell on the old miser's past life, or his tyranny over poor Bob Cratchit (Oldman again, only ruddy and round), or anything you might connect to with feeling rather than sensation. Zemeckis keeps pulling us away to where the action (and the tween-boy market) is at: Scrooge in his nightdress, hurtling over the rooftops of a beautifully rendered London winter whose falling snowflakes threaten to drift right up your nostrils, or skiing down icy streets, or tumbling down black holes into the abyss that was, is, and might be.

While he's there, he's beaten and bruised, dangled and verbally abused for the good of his bitter old soul by Marley, who flings chains in our faces and does Freddie Krueger things with his jaw that you wouldn't want to see in a PG movie. To say nothing of the ghosts of Scrooge's life passages, all flagellating the crap out of him, all played by Carrey, and none remotely like Dickens's vision of Scrooge's own conscience: For reasons unknown, Christmas Past is whimsically realized as a cunning little critter with a severed head on fire, while Christmas Present pitches up as a red-headed, manically ho-ho-hoing giant who looks like a cross between Robbie Coltrane and Jesus Christ—at which point the effects team appears to have lost interest, for the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a drug-store Halloween grim reaper in black sheet and clawed fingers, while all the good-guy characters save one (Scrooge's kindly former employer Fezziwig, an enchantingly tubby eggcup presence, is delightfully rendered by Bob Hoskins) have to make do with grimy replicas of the cabbage-patch-doll faces worn by the travelers on Zemeckis's Polar Express.

When A Christmas Carol isn't carried away by its own frenzied motion, it's a ruinously stiff tableau vivant of good folk (Colin Firth, wearing a squashed ColinFirth-face, phones it in as Scrooge's honest-to-God nephew) valiantly toasting the éminence grise in his absence and wringing their hands over the possible demise of Tiny Tim. Granted, the priggish tyke is one of Dickens's more cloying creations—had Oscar Wilde not given his bitchy all to chortling over the death of Little Nell, he'd undoubtedly have sunk his molars into poor Tim, a saint so blamelessly Forrest Gump–ish that it's hard to resist the urge to club him with his own crutch.

Many of Dickens's characters begin as caricatures, but the best are so deeply felt, so fleshed out and bred in the bone of their creator's horrible childhood, that they become universalized expressions of our own fears, and our need to be forgiven. Zemeckis milks Tim's pathos for every holy drop, leaving little breathing room for the final chapter's most powerful parable, in which Scrooge does penance for a life squandered on avarice and acquisition.

On the plus side, Zemeckis avoids screaming parallels to recessionary villains we love to hate. Scrooge is no Bernie Madoff—he's an early-capitalist accumulator who would have thrown a visiting venture capitalist out on his ear. More to the point, though, he's a mensch in hiding, deformed by an abusive father and by a terror of poverty so profound that it blinds him to the insight that you can't take it with you, that wealth should be shared, and that life is best lived with others. That's the message that will make A Christmas Carol live forever as a novel. In Zemeckis's new and far from improved version, it comes buried in software.

A negative review from Todd McCarthy in VARIETY...

Shortchanging traditional animation by literalizing it while robbing actors of their full range of facial expressiveness, the performance-capture technique favored by director Robert Zemeckis looks more than ever like the emperor's new clothes in "Disney's A Christmas Carol." Charles Dickens' 1843 novella and screen perennial has been retrofitted here as a so-called thrill ride in which Scrooge zooms above the streets of London and rockets halfway to the moon and back, only because now he technologically can. But while curmudgeons, here qualifying as anyone who might prefer earlier versions of the classic tale, will frown, bright-eyed young'uns will ooh and aah from behind their 3D glasses, resulting in bountiful early holiday B.O. tidings for the company that has now incorporated itself into Dickens' title.

Making his third consecutive feature in the hybrid format, after "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf," Zemeckis seems almost stubbornly committed to the process. In regard to "A Christmas Carol," the director has made the point that the tale's spectral manifestations and time-traveling nature (it was purportedly the first fictional work to shuttle both backward and forward in time) are ideally suited to being rendered in the latest high-tech fashion.

But while it's true that the various ghosts and geographically plausible aerial images of the British metropolis in mid-19th-century are arrestingly vivid, there isn't a moment when it wouldn't be preferable to see Jim Carrey himself, even slathered in old-age makeup, as well as the real Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins and the rest of the cast, rather than their airbrushed CGI approximations. Even as their vocal performances remain intact, the elaborate technique drains the actors of their emotional warmth and expressive nuance, rendering every moment obvious and uninteresting from a thesping p.o.v.

So tidy are the snow-dusted holiday neighborhoods of industrial-age England here that the only malign element on view is the parsimonious personality of Ebenezer Scrooge (Carrey), who early on is seen pocketing the very coins covering the closed eyes of his late business partner, Marley, on the undertaker's slab.

Much of the general plot is familiar: Scrooge begrudges his ever-suffering clerk Bob Cratchit (Oldman) Christmas Day off, and is so antisocial he refuses a Christmas dinner invitation from his nephew Fred (Colin Firth). The stingy old accountant is surprised by three ghosts who separately present him with emotionally telling snapshots from his own life -- past, present and future -- which fill the grumpy old grouch with regret, fear and an overwhelming sense of the error of his ways. An excellent moral and an excellent Christmas tale, which is why it has never faded from sight through the generations.

But then, as with "Romeo and Juliet" and other imperishables, perhaps every generation gets the "Christmas Carol" it deserves: The postwar British feature, starring Alastair Sim, was no doubt the best; next came a bloated, musicalized post-"Oliver!" version; then, in the '80s, Bill Murray starred in a hipster "SNL"-era modernization. In this context, it makes a certain sense that the early 21st-century edition is dominated or, more accurately, dictated by technology; there's no other impulse running through it other than the desire to create shots and pull off effects that would have been impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive, prior to the invention of CGI, the performance-capture technique and the rebirth of 3D.

To capitalize upon the latter, Zemeckis favors placing objects such as hands or chains in the extreme foreground so as to create a 3D deep-focus effect. He's also developed many scenes with an eye to moving the camera constantly in relation to the characters and settings, keeping editing to a minimum. But given the overall animated patina, this doesn't create anywhere near the beauty or excitement that similar moves would in live-action cinematography. Also, the diminishment in image brightness by at least 20% when the 3D glasses are put on is quite noticeable.

For some, the dramatically pointy nose and even more pronounced chin added to Carrey's face would be 3D effect enough for any movie. In fact, Carrey's readings are entirely persuasive, and the animated stick-like body given him would make Peter O'Toole resemble John Goodman by comparison. For fun, if not for any urgent artistic reasons, Carrey also gives voice to the three ghosts, while supports Oldman, Hoskins and Cary Elwes similarly do multiple character duty. The animated faces given Oldman, Firth and Robin Wright Penn, the latter as Scrooge's youthful love, are particularly bland and featureless, neutering them as performers.

Based on "Beowulf" and "The Polar Express" I have similar problems with the performance capture technique as Todd McCarthy.

A negative review from Kirk Honeycutt in THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER...

Bottom Line: Exuberant movie technology overwhelms, then buries Dickens' emotional tale.
Didn't Charles Dickens use to be the author of "A Christmas Carol?" Well, now it's "Disney's A Christmas Carol" that opens later this week. Even that's a misnomer. It should be "Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol." This is not nitpicking, for authorship goes to the heart of what's good and what's not good about this latest cinematic installment of the classic Christmas story.

When it comes to name recognition, you cannot ask for more at the holiday season than Disney and "A Christmas Carol," so a potent boxoffice is assured. Putting Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman and Colin Firth on the marquee only adds to the window dressing.

Now, about who's the author here: In one sense, this is a most faithful interpretation of Dickens' 1843 novella. Indeed, nearly all the dialogue is lifted from the original text. But this also is writer-producer-director Zemeckis' third motion-capture film following "Beowulf" and "The Polar Express." It has been shot and, on accommodating screens, will be projected in Disney's trademarked Digital 3D.

So, taking a few cues from Dickens and with the latest in digital technology at the creators' disposal, this movie version revels in effects: Ethereal, menacing spirits burst through locked doors; frightening visions terrify Scrooge; and images of wild horses, twisted human forms and coal-black dwellings rife with crime, filth and misery are linked by flights through London's cityscape and over countrysides that lift from "Harry Potter" movies as much as from Dickens.

Initially, all this serves to invigorate an old war horse. One is reminded that what Ebenezer Scrooge experiences -- when the chained ghost of his long-dead partner and then three spirits assault him in his own bedroom -- is horror in the true sense. So this is a very dark tale, a tour of a miserly, misanthropic man's soul, and Zemeckis' film does reclaim this aspect of a story that has become more of a cheery cartoon in modern retellings.

But as the spirits escort Scrooge through his sorry life, Zemeckis gradually makes this "Christmas Carol" his own. But as he does, with his intense reliance and belief in movie technology, this auteur shuns the beating heart of Dickens' story.

Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is about emotions. It's about how emotions can get stunted and tramped down, how they can be revived and how empathy and affection can bring joy to the human soul. One will find none of that here.

Zemeckis' "A Christmas Carol" is, in its essence, a product reel, a showy, exuberant demonstration of the glories of motion capture, computer animation and 3D technology. On that level, it's a wow. On any emotional level, it's as cold as Marley's Ghost.

Motion capture allows an impressive cast -- along with Carrey, Oldman and Firth, there's Cary Elwes, Robin Wright Penn, Bob Hoskins and Fionnula Flanagan -- to play multiple roles. For instance, Carrey is not only Scrooge at every age, he is the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, and Oldman plays Scrooge's meek but cheerful clerk, Bob Cratchit, as well as his sickly son, Tiny Tim.

You certainly can justify this. The ghosts are aspects and extensions of Scrooge's personality, and a son should mirror his father. But gimmick casting leads to gimmick acting. With vocal tricks and accents, CGI-distorted faces and figures and exaggerated body language, the movie robs Dickens' vivid, prototypical characters of any sense of being living, breathing flesh. They become caricatures in a Christmas pageant.

The worst offense to the spirit of Dickens comes with Tiny Tim. He, more than any other character in this tale, represents its true spirit. In the Zemeckis version, he's a dress extra who tiresomely exclaims, "God bless us, everyone!"

So deck the halls with praise for the crew -- cinematographer Robert Presley, designer Doug Chiang, animation supervisor Jenn Emberly, visual effects supervisor George Murphy and Alan Silvestri for his robust score. But a rousing humbug to those who confuse the media for the message.

A ** out of **** review from SLANT...

by Nick Schager
Posted: November 3, 2009


Robert Zemeckis is as committed to motion-capture CG animation as Ebenezer Scrooge is to pinching pennies, and with A Christmas Carol, his third effort with the technique, the director comes closest yet to justifying his obsession. Unfortunately, close, as they say, only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and the effects explosions that frequently engulf Zemeckis's second computerized Yuletide saga (after 2004's The Polar Express) are at once magnificent and wholly wrongheaded, shifting the focus of Charles Dickens's timeless classic from themes of greed, generosity, and redemption to rollercoaster thrills aimed at pleasing the under-17 set. What with the narrative's time-hopping and supernatural specters, Dickens's tale certainly lends itself to some flash-and-sizzle, and if Zemeckis's over-the-top treatment gets anything right, it's the sense of overwhelming otherworldly terror, of grand-scale divine intervention of a most unsettling sort, that consumes Scrooge (Jim Carrey) during his pow-wows with the chained apparition of his deceased partner Marley and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come. However, unlike Beowulf, whose warrior-monster conflict was ideally suited to elaborate camera-whooshing flight and fights, Dickens's book is inherently about a single man's soul, a focus far too often lost amid this film version's extravagant spectacle.

Still, in purely technological terms, Zemeckis's third time with motion-capture is a relative charm, as his digital tools have finally overcome their most significant prior problem: eyes. While supporting and background characters boast less detail than their primary compatriots, Zemeckis's Scrooge is an animated marvel, not only with regard to his intricate skin texture and rickety comportment, but his eyes, which—unlike the dead gazes found throughout Polar Express and Beowulf—exhibit a persuasive spark of life. Part of the legendary miser's visual credibility is due to Carrey's spot-on performance, as well as the fact that aged skin and creaky, slow-moving bodies suit motion-capture better than youthful complexions (which come off as plasticine and unreal) and movement (which has a slippery, gliding quality). For both these reasons, Scrooge is, aesthetically speaking, a consistent success, something that can't quite be said of Gary Oldman's Bob Cratchit, Colin Firth's Fred, or Bob Hoskins's Fezziwig, all of whom have that stilted-mannequin appearance that calls direct, unflattering attention to the CG production work at play and, in turn, frustrates true emotional immersion into the whiz-bang proceedings.

Carrey's duty as not only Scrooge but also the three spirits makes thematic sense but nonetheless comes off as a sore-thumb distraction, as does Oldman's double-dip as Tiny Tim, here relegated to catchphrase-spouting peripheral prop. Carol is often alight with wondrous imagery tinted with malevolence, sorrow, and regret, from the ethereality of the candle-shaped Ghost of Christmas Past, to the chuckling Santa-Zeus Ghost of Christmas Present (who accosts Scrooge with the type of zombie-ish criminal and whore for whom the money lender has such disdain), to Scrooge clinging to the shadowy Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come's bony finger so as not to plunge into his own cavernous grave. Especially in this last instance, as well as Scrooge's frantic videogame-ish zooms across the city and countryside (one for each Ghost visit), Zemeckis utilizes 3D to potently enhance his animation's depth. Alas, after an impressively patient, creepy opening half that taps into the ghost-story horror of Dickens's tale, such theme-park business overwhelms the action, a fatal flaw considering that it becomes dominant at just the moment of Scrooge's crucial, underdramatized crisis of conscience and ensuing transformation and salvation. A clear step in the right direction for Zemeckis and his pet techno-project, Carol nonetheless ultimately sabotages itself by prizing the hectic over the heartfelt. In doing so, it proves not so much bah-humbug as merely ho-hum.

A negative review from MSNBC...

Bah, humbug! ‘A Christmas Carol’ has no spirit
Classic tale buried in extraneous 3-D whizbangery

REVIEW
By Alonso Duralde
Film critic
msnbc.com contributor
updated 3:24 p.m. MT, Tues., Nov . 3, 2009


Could someone please keep Jim Carrey and director Robert Zemeckis away from cherished holiday classics? We’ve already had to endure Carrey mugging it up as the Grinch while Zemeckis turned “The Polar Express” into a bloated and freaky-looking theme park attraction, and now these two have gone and put the stink on Charles Dickens’ beloved “A Christmas Carol.”

While Zemeckis’ brand of ooh-cool-it’s-3-D filmmaking added zest to “Beowulf,” here it just gets in the way. Remember how completely superfluous that runaway-train segment was in “Polar Express”? Multiply that by numerous flying-over-London and scary-carriage-on-the-rampage sequences this time around.

Carrey, at least, doesn’t go over the top; whatever hamminess he brings to the role is at least appropriate for portraying Ebenezer Scrooge, a character who starts the piece at one extreme of human behavior and ends it on another. In this version, the first scene shows us a Scrooge so skinflint that he removes the pennies from the eyes of his dead partner, Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman); “Tuppence is tuppence,” he mutters as the undertaker gapes in horror.

Thanks to the motion-capture technology Zemeckis apparently loves so — again, it worked in “Beowulf,” but here and in “Polar Express,” everyone just looks rubbery and creepy — the lead actors get to play multiple roles. Carrey acts opposite himself as all three Spirits of Christmas (the Ghost of Christmas Past’s accent wobbles between Scottish and Liverpudlian) while Oldman pops up again as a gnomish Bob Cratchit and a Tiny Tim that’ll make your skin crawl.

Bob Hoskins looks just right as kind old Mr. Fezziwig, but that may be more of a testament to the actor’s physiognomy than to the motion-capture process, which makes most of the film’s cast look like they just sauntered out of Madame Tussauds.

Zemeckis’ screenplay is a rather odd patchwork — at times, he’s exceedingly faithful to the original text, down to the part where Ignorance and Want huddle beneath the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present. But surely Dickens never intended to have a tiny Scrooge running through drainpipes while being pursued by a demonic coach-and-six, no matter how much the chase pops out of the screen.

“A Christmas Carol” has resonated with readers for more than a century because it so brilliantly captures the themes of redemption, generosity, family love and community that the Yuletide, at its best, summons in all of us. It can even be argued that the story’s impact can be felt in subsequent holiday favorites like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Home Alone” — both are about characters who, like Scrooge, are given a Christmastime glimpse of an alternate reality that makes them reevaluate their lives.

All of which is to say that, if you’re going to create yet another version of “A Christmas Carol” — IMDB lists 60 other film and television adaptations — you’ve got to bring something besides over-the-top special effects and unsettling animation to the table.

Not surprised at these reviews. Zemekis can keep Jim Carrey and his motion capture. I'll watch the version I do every year - Michael Caine and the Muppets!

Owen Gleiberman of EW gives it an "A":

When I was a kid, gathering around the TV set to watch one of the old movie adaptations of A Christmas Carol — the 1938 version starring Reginald Owen, or the 1951 remake with Alastair Sim — was as cozy and cherished a holiday ritual as watching It's a Wonderful Life or (God help us, every one) A Christmas Story is today. So indelible is the toasty magic of those twin Dickens films that I have never had much use for any other Christmas Carol — like, say, all those family dinner-theater productions (''Judd Hirsch is Scrooge!''). So when it was announced that writer-director Robert 
 Zemeckis would do a new version for Disney, using the same photo-realist, motion-capture animation technique that begot The Polar Express and all its eager rubber-faced children (and starring the reflexively ironic Jim Carrey as Scrooge), all I could think was, ''Not for me.''

How wonderfully wrong I was! Disney's A Christmas Carol is a marvelous and touching yuletide toy of a movie, and the miracle is that it goes right back to the gilded Victorian spirit of those black-and-white films of yore. From the hypnotic opening shot, which seems to travel through every nook and cranny of London without a cut, Zemeckis signals that he's made a bold technical leap: The faces are now fully expressive, the streets and buildings so real you could touch them. Ebenezer, with his drooping flesh and coldly fearful eyes, is no caricature — Carrey plays him with scolding sharpness and a plummy deep melancholy — and his journey unfolds with a classicism that is only enhanced by Zemeckis' spangly visual flamboyance. He makes the ghost of Marley, for instance, a figure of true terror. After this grisly bit of paranormal activity, we can see that Scrooge's redemption has already begun.

A Christmas Carol, as Dickens wrote it, might almost be about the original case of psychotherapy, with the ghosts as shrinks who reveal to Scrooge the dynamic interior forces that shaped him. Zemeckis stages the familiar episodes briskly, with more jaunty showbiz than we're used to — he uses Carrey and Gary Oldman in multiple roles — yet without sacrificing any emotion. The spirits have a spooky majesty (the Ghost of Christmas Past is a disembodied head of flame), and when Scrooge's home gets turned into a roving hovercraft with an invisible floor that allows him to stare at his life, the sci-fi-ish conceit doesn't distance us. It mirrors the dislocation of a man who is now dreaming with his eyes wide open. Zemeckis does hit one false note, dropping an incongruous ''action'' scene into the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come episode. That's the rare misstep, though, in a Christmas Carol that left me festive with delight, not to mention in dire need of a holiday hankie. A

A **** review from Roger Ebert...

"Disney's A Christmas Carol" by Robert Zemeckis (and Charles Dickens, of course) is an exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time he's one of the few directors who knows what he's doing with 3-D. The story that Dickens wrote in 1838 remains timeless, and if it's supercharged here with Scrooge swooping the London streets as freely as Superman, well, once you let ghosts into a movie, there's room for anything.

The story I will not repeat for you. The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future will not come as news. I'd rather dwell on the look of the film, which is true to the spirit of Dickens (in some moods) as he cheerfully exaggerates. He usually starts with plucky young heroes or heroines and surrounds them with a gallery of characters and caricatures. Here his protagonist is the caricature: Ebenezer Scrooge, never thinner, never more stooped, never more bitter.

Jim Carrey is in there somewhere beneath the performance-capture animation; you can recognize his expressive mouth, but in general the Zemeckis characters don't resemble their originals overmuch. In his "The Polar Express," you were sure that was Tom Hanks, but here you're not equally sure of Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, Robin Wright Penn or Bob Hoskins.

Zemeckis places these characters in a London that twists and stretches its setting to reflect the macabre mood. Consider Scrooge's living room, as narrow and tall just as he is. The home of his nephew Fred, by contrast, is as wide and warm as Fred's personality.

Animation provides the freedom to show just about anything, and Zemeckis uses it. Occasionally, he even seems to be evoking the ghost of Salvador Dali, as in a striking sequence where all the furniture disappears and a towering grandfather clock looms over Scrooge and a floor slanting into a distant perspective.

The three starring ghosts are also spectacular grotesques. I like the first, an elfin figure with a head constantly afire and a hat shaped like a candle-snuffer. Sometimes he playfully shakes his flames like a kid tossing the hair out of his eyes. After another (ahem) ghost flies out the window, Scrooge runs over to see the whole street filled with floating spectral figures, each one chained to a heavy block, like so many Chicago mobsters sleeping with the fishes.

Can you talk about performances in characters so much assembled by committee? You can discuss the voices, and Carrey works overtime as not only Scrooge but all three of the Christmas ghosts. Gary Oldman voices Bob Cratchit, Marley and Tiny Tim.

I remain unconvinced that 3-D represents the future of the movies, but it tells you something that Zemeckis' three 3-D features (also including "Beowulf") have wrestled from me 11 of a possible 12 stars.

I like the way that Zemeckis does it. He seems to have a more sure touch than many other directors, using 3-D instead of being used by it. If the foreground is occupied by close objects, they're usually looming inward, not out over our heads. Note the foreground wall-mounted bells that we look past when Scrooge, far below, enters his home; as one and then another slowly starts to move, it's a nice little touch.

Another one: The score by Alan Silvestri sneaks in some traditional Christmas carols, but you have to listen for such as "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" when its distinctive cadences turn sinister during a perilous flight through London.

So should you take the kiddies? Hmmm. I'm not so sure. When I was small, this movie would have scared the living ectoplasm out of me. Today's kids have seen more and are tougher. Anyway, "A Christmas Carol" has the one quality parents hope for in a family movie: It's entertaining for adults.

quote:

Originally posted by pacinofan:
A **** review from Roger Ebert...

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy reading Ebert's reviews. But he's starting to hand out four stars like they were candy....

Surprised by glowing reviews... trailer looks ghastly.

I think the film actually looks kind of cool. I hope to see it this weekend.

quote:

Originally posted by Pucifer:
Surprised by glowing reviews... trailer looks ghastly.

The first handful of reviews in this thread are negative.

quote:

Originally posted by MissyGal:
I think the film actually looks kind of cool. I hope to see it this weekend.

I can hardly wait to start celebrating Christmas in July!

(Once upon a time, didn't Christmas come after Thanksgiving?)

Like MysteriousRent, I really like the Muppet Christmas Carol. With that one and the older British one with Alastair Sim in existence, I can't imagine why I would need another one.

Plus, I really can't stand this motion capture animation that Zemekis is using. It seems ridiculous to get such expressive actors to play really iconic roles and then replace them with animation. Why???

A pan from Joe Morgenstern in the WALL STREET JOURNAL...

To put it bluntly, if Scroogely, Disney's 3-D animated version of "A Christmas Carol" is a calamity. The pace is predominantly glacial—that alone would be enough to cook the goose of this premature holiday turkey—and the tone is joyless, despite an extended passage of bizarre laughter, several dazzling flights of digital fancy, a succession of striking images and Jim Carrey's voicing of Scrooge plus half a dozen other roles. "Why so coldhearted?" Scrooge's nephew, Fred, asks the old skinflint. The same question could be asked of Robert Zemeckis, who adapted and directed the film, and of the company that financed it. Why was simple pleasure frozen out of the production? Why does the beloved story feel embalmed by technology? And why are its characters as insubstantial as the snowflakes that seem to be falling on the audience?

A catch-all answer—and by now an all-too-familiar one—lies in the unnature of that technology. Like "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf," which were also directed by Mr. Zemeckis, "A Christmas Carol" employs a motion-capture process that translates the movements of live actors into fantasy images. For its advocates, the process is cost-efficient and good enough. For its detractors, including me, motion capture has become synonymous with a special sort of semi-lifelessness—body language that is vaguely impoverished, faces with limited mobility and dead eyes.

In the global marketing push for his new film, the director has dismissed such problems as essentially solved. But they haven't been solved at all; they've only been mitigated, and partially masked by the novelty value of 3-D. Motion capture remains an impediment to capturing emotion. "A Christmas Carol" soars only when Scrooge is in temporal transit—one lyrical sequence flies him back to his boyhood village. And some of the action, as well as a cataclysmic climax fueled by hellfires and hellwinds, will scare little kids out of their little wits.

Dickens framed his novella as a moral tale. Disney sells it as a thrill ride—"The Polar Express" with a really bad Santa. Well, it's a free country, and a public-domain property. Nevertheless, you can almost see the various rooms on the Disneyland ride-to-be while the movie makes its way from Victorian past to fun-house future. (Maybe the ride's sound design-to-be is why the Ghost of Christmas Present laughs so long and maniacally.) In the turgid stretches between action sequences, the drama, or what's left of it, makes its way with such ponderous, self-important artistry that Scrooge's present threatens to become an eternity. This sad excuse for family entertainment tries to enshrine a classic while defacing it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,

Went to see it tonight. It was good, not great. I like that it was faithful to the book. I thought Jim Carrey did a very good job. I don't mind the motion capture. Yes, some of the faces are muddled, but the face of Scrooge is very well defined. I liked the ghosts, and the symbolism of them. The chase scene in the future was unnecessary though. And the script didn't have the depth of the book (Fanny & Belle are very short changed). I saw a lot of kids at the movie, warning, some parts of the movie are a little too slowly paced and scary for young ones. A solid film. Good, not great.

I saw this yesterday.

I really liked it. The motion capture + the 3D really worked to the films advantage. It had a very creepy effect, which I liked. This film shows, when he works at it, Jim Carrey can be extremely talented.

Some of the parts were a little scary for the young ones (even I jumped a few times!). Overall, a delightful treat. Unfortunately, barely anyone was in the theater when I saw it, so I doubt it'll be a successful film.

quote:

Originally posted by Pucifer:
I can hardly wait to start celebrating Christmas in July!

(Once upon a time, didn't Christmas come after Thanksgiving?)

Ugh, I can't believe a radio station here has already started playing nonstop Christmas music since November 1st. They use to wait until at least the day after Thanksgiving, but I guess since there's at least 3 radio stations, that I can pick up on my lowly work radio, who play nonstop Christmas music from Thanksgiving until Christmas that this radio station had to find someway to get the jump on the other two stations.

quote:

Like MysteriousRent, I really like the Muppet Christmas Carol. With that one and the older British one with Alastair Sim in existence, I can't imagine why I would need another one.

I really like those two versions too. While I guess I'm glad they're not doing a big screen version of Alf or Thundercats yet, I didn't really see a reason that A Christmas Carol had to be adapted again.

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Plus, I really can't stand this motion capture animation that Zemekis is using. It seems ridiculous to get such expressive actors to play really iconic roles and then replace them with animation. Why???

I don't get it either, and I also don't like the look of it either. I will watch films that use it, but I prefer other types of animation.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mrs. Daryl Zero,

I saw this movie today and I had a great experience.

I really liked it and I think it is the best movie Robert Zemeckis has made since he started to work with the motion capture technique. Jim Carrey was also great and I think that Andrea Bocelli’s song will be nominated for an Oscar next year.