Family Filmgoer
A creepy ‘Christmas Carol’
“Disney’s A Christmas Carol” (PG, 1 hr., 36 min.) It’s hard to know to what age group this dour, ultra-spooky animated adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” will appeal. Although the movie is a showcase for actor Jim Carrey and for advances in a particular type of computer animation, it seems too frightening and humorless for children under 10.
Director/screenwriter Robert Zemeckis uses the same “performance capture” technology (shooting live actors on a soundstage, then overlaying their performances with animation) that he used in “Beowulf” (PG-13, 2007) and “The Polar Express” (PG, 2004). This time he has added 3-D and dizzying 360-degree perspectives in some action sequences.
The result is a film that feels more like a bizarre experiment than a good holiday yarn. Zemeckis takes the creepier aspects of Dickens’ tale, which was subtitled “A Ghost Story of Christmas,” and emphasizes them to such a degree that kids under 10 may be too unsettled watching it.
When we first meet him, Ebenezer Scrooge (voiced by Carrey, who also plays the younger versions of Scrooge and the three Spirits who visit him) is so stooped, gnarled and angry that he looks like an out-of- sorts Abe Lincoln. Some children may literally be scared by the 3-D close-ups of his arthritic hands.
The happier moments—at Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit’s house (Cratchit and his son Tiny Tim also played by Oldman); at Scrooge’s nephew Fred’s (Colin Firth); and at Scrooge’s old employer Fezziwig’s (Bob Hoskins) Christmas party—are overpowered by the high-tech chills and general dourness of the film. Even Scrooge’s eventual conversion to a loving keeper of Christmas feels anti-climactic, which it never should. Carrey’s winning wit is barely in evidence in his performances here.
There are many, many scary scenes, some vertiginous flying with the spirits, and a quick shot of a 19th century Londoner taking snuff.
The Family Filmgoer still loves the 1951 version of Dickens’ classic (sometimes titled “Scrooge”), starring the great Alastair Sim—simple, spooky, heartwarming.
“The Fourth Kind” (PG-13) Bunk and hooey are words that come to mind while viewing this barely scary sci-fithriller about a psychologist in Nome, Alaska, who comes to believe her insomniac patients are actually victims of nighttime alien abduction.
Director/screenwriter Olatunde Osunsanmi intercuts grainy videos of “actual” treatment sessions on which the movie is supposedly based, but the people in the videos are clearly actors, too, so it smells like a big hoax.
There are themes about suicide and children missing their dead father. In a tragedy more implied than shown, a distraught man kills his family, then himself.
There are flashbacks to a violent murder, and occasional mild profanity. Too intense for middle schoolers.
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