movies: a christmas carol

It's slightly odd that although there's a movie theatre within walking distance of my house, it's not the one that Ma and I choose to go to regularly... in fact, the last time we went there was to see Revolutionary Road.

It's also a theatre that we went to quite a bit when I was a kid... there are a number of significant movie moments in my life that have happened in that particular theatre. So standing around in the upstairs deco foyer did bring on the movie memories...

Sadly, I don't think that Disney's version of A Christmas Carol is going to be one of the lasting movie memories.

We did end up seeing it in 3D though... we didn't originally intent to, but I'd misread the movie times on their website and thought that they had a normalD session just before the 3D session... turns out that that was for Thursday... so we ended up with yet another pair of the slightly silly looking 3D glasses (which we recycled after the session, although what exactly they do with the glasses to "recycle" them I don't know).

I'm not exactly sure how many different versions of the Christmas Carol story I've actually seen... at least two or three "faithful" adaptations, a musical version, plus the Bill Murray version, and possibly part of the Muppet version... plus I've read the book a couple of times (although not recently), so I'm pretty familiar with the story, and from a pure story/dialogue perspective, the movie is fairly dead on...

However the movie hovers along that divided line... while the dialogue is faithful, there's a number of seemingly improvised "flying, falling and rollercoasting" sequences that I could have done without. Especially the ones around the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come... what with the demonic horses and shrinking and icicles and suchlike.

In some ways, the opening scene of the movie sets you up for all the flying around that's going to happen during the next 100 minutes... there's a long sweeping camera shot over 19th Century London (or the Disney animated version of it anyway) that flies between chimneys and peeks in windows before finding Scrooge. It might have been nice if they got rid of some of the flying and concentrated more on making the story have more depth.

Of course if they did away with the flying, then there really isn't any reason that the movie needed to be in 3D.

It also really does suffer from what I've head referred to as "The Uncanny Valley"... while I didn't find the digital renderings of people disturbing, they were definitely in that "not right" classification. Particularly problematic were the renderings of both Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit and Colin Firth as Fred (the nephew)... the reasoning behind making these particular characters look like the actors playing them baffles me a little... particularly Firth's character... while Cratchit had an element of cartoon or characture about him, Fred seemed to be an attempt to just do a straight version of Firth... which came off looking decidedly wrong.

There was also an element of "Shrek-ism" to the scene involving Mr and Mrs Fezziwig dancing... moves that no human being could ever even attempt, let alone pull off.

Personally I'm not sure why they want to go the totally "photorealistic" route... I mean the Scrooge character is very much exaggerated, I just wish they would have pushed it a little further still and taken him more over into the toon relm... and doubly so for all the other characters.

I did like the way that they dealt with The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come however... the aforementioned demon horses and hearse notwithstanding... although part of me does wish that they could have pulled off the entire sequence without needing to cheat the concept.

So in the end it really wasn't quite one thing or the other... enjoyable, yes... but also fairly forgettable.

yani's rating: 2 chained spirits out of 5