"Ghost of the Future, I fear you more than any spectre I have seen"

It’s Christmas time once again, and along with the turkey, mistletoe and family quarrels come the feel-good Christmas Movies. This year’s roster is much smaller than previous years, when looking up the top Christmas Movies of this year I found no others that actually dealt with Christmas apart from A Christmas Carol, this time in glorious 3-D (if anyone finds one feel free to comment, I wouldn’t mind watching some more festive films).

For anyone who doesn’t know, if that’s even possible, A Christmas Carol is set in the Victorian-era and is about a miserable bugger named Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carey) who hates children and poor people and Christmas, not necessarily in that order.

This begins to change however when he is visited by four ghosts, the first being the ghost of his deceased friend Marley and then the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet To Come. It was written way back in the day by Charles Dickens, it has never been out-of-print since and has been adapted into countless plays, films, plays and even an all-black Broadway musical.

Wow, nice. Lets just dive right in to the visuals. This is one of the very few 3-D films that I have ever seen and it is definitely the one that utilises it the best. In The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D it was barely used and in Final Destination 3-D is was used so much that I felt like I had been full-on punted in the brain by the end of it. A Christmas Carol 3-D however felt much more natural, I think this may be because it is all computer generated and therefore much more easy to manipulate during the 3-D-ifying. All the 3-D-ness aside the film looked amazing, the attention to detail was just incredible. Down to the little hairs on Scrooges nose you could really tell that a lot of time was taken and the results are some of the best computer generated characters that I have ever seen.

The fact that it was in a completely CG world also meant that they didn’t have pesky gravity to hold them back and from start to finish the (imaginary) camera was soaring around, passing through walls and fitting through the tiniest of gaps allowing for some breathtaking shots that could not have been performed rubbish real-life cameramen. The soundtrack of this film was perfectly put together, though it is mostly just Christmas songs so I won’t give out an undeserved amount of credit. It did create an atmosphere that had me smiling and remembering what it used to feel like when Christmas was approaching, so I think children especially will enjoy the feel that the film has.

Story-wise its pretty much perfect. It’s worked for over a hundred and fifty years now and will no doubt continue to work until we are taken over by aliens or robots or whatever. The film doesn’t take any real liberties with the already established story, if my memory still serves then I’m sure that a large amount of the dialogue was taken directly from the book and left unaltered. There were a few moments where I was confused by lack of explanation, for example a character is referred to but not properly introduced until later so unless I missed something there were a few mess-ups, all together though it was pretty much spotless, a true classic. For the most part this is a good thing, it makes the film easy to keep up with and has the nostalgia-factor but it also doesn’t really stand out from any of the other adaptations from previous Christmases.

When it comes to the actors the only one that really screams out to me is Jim Carey. Bob Hoskins and Colin Firth do well in their roles (the CG resemblance is uncanny) and Gary Oldman (a favourite of mine) also did an amazing job as Bob Cratchit and Marley, though I didn’t even realise it was him until checking the cast list on imdb.com but all of the really important characters, apart from Cratchit, were played by Jim Carey. Scrooge (all four versions of him), as well as all the three Christmas Ghost’s were all played by him and whether or not he did a good job depends on your opinion of Jim Carey. I personally didn’t notice that he played all of the Christmas Ghosts, they were all so different and so…not Jim Carey, Scrooge on the other hand was very much what I expected. For the first part of the film (the humbug stage) he is pretty subdued but nearer the end, when he starts to cheer up a bit, he gets a lot more Ace Ventura, with the over the top facial expressions that were expertly recreated by whoever does that stuff, and the strange voices that he puts on for little to no reason he really does become the Carey that we remember from before Eternal Sunshine and The Number 23. Personally I loved his films as a kid and I still do now, I think he did himself proud as Scrooge but if you don’t like him than you probably won’t like the film very much as he is on-screen literally all the time.

Overall I think the film was better than a lot of the other Christmas fluff that has been brought out in recent years but it isn’t a film that you are going to be watching at any other time of year. It may repeat on TV for a few years but it won’t go down as one of the greats. It looks amazing and the actors were competent but it is just another remake of a film that we have seen a hundred times. 6 ‘Pairs of Socks from Your Nan’ out of 10 The slightly-film-related-question-of-the-week this week is What is the best Jim Carey movie of all time? This is a really hard choice but I’m going to go with Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls…

kesley@itsnotatumour.com

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Tags: 3-D, 3-D Nose Hair Action, A Christmas Carol, Ace Ventura, Charles Dickens, Colin Firth, Feel-Good, Fluff, Gary Oldman, Ghosts, Hater Of Children and the Elderly, Humbug, Jim Carey, lol, Nice Folks, Pesky Gravity, Review, sexy fun time, Top Facial Expressions

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.