11-12-09 Movie review: Disney’s A Christmas Carol

Three noncommercial offerings over the next week, including Laurel and Hardy, a really strange-looking conglomeration from France, and the movie that made Clint Eastwood an international star. Friday features the Clint Eastwood movie, which follows Kurosawa's Yojimbo so closely that legend has it that Yojimbo was used as its screenplay, A Fistful of Dollars, directed by Sergio Leone, 7:30 in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway, courtesy of Wichita Film Festivals. The same Friday, the Laurel and Hardy fan club is showing "The Live Ghost," Pack Up Your Troubles, and You Nazty Spy," which I believe stars the Three Stooges and was the first anti Nazi movie released by Hollywood, at 6:30 in Calvary United Methodist Church, 2525 North Rock Road. And Sunday at 7:30, the usual Blank Page gallery movie is Paris, je t'aime, from France in 2006, a sort of amalgamation of vignettes listing an incredible cast including directors like that Coen brothers, Gus Van Sant, and Wes Craven, as well as actors like Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Buscemi, and Ben Gazzara.

And commercially, we have the somewhat experimental Disney's A Christmas Carol. It's somewhat experimental because it continues the new convention of adapted photography familiar from Polar Express and Boewulf, with certainly greater success than Polar Express, but still a tendency to work better with caricatures than normal looking people. It's also in 3-D, which I did not see; but you can tell when director Robert Zemeckis gets got overwhelmed with his third dimension, especially near the end, where a totally unnecessary horror ride sends Ebenezer Scrooge soaring like Spiderman through a catalogue of horrors and attacks that have virtually nothing to do with either plot or theme. The sequence is well done, but out of place and too intense for tiny moviegoers, to quote a Wichita reviewer from some years past. It isn't the only place where 3-D takes over, but it's the only one that really bothers; the others are just ceilings that are unnecessary high and aerial sweeps that are cliches and unrevealing.

The character of Scrooge is extremely well done, but none of the others except maybe the ghost of Marley are particularly notable. I thought Gary Oldman looked too much like a simple-minded juvenile and Bob Hoskins too much like a tree-ornament Santa Claus, and the heroine was as flat as Snow White; but in general, the visuals were suitable to the material and well enough done, if surprisingly conventional, almost stereotypes for Dickens characters.

Dialogue is, as always with A Christmas Carol, lifted pretty totally from Dickens, with all the famous speeches about springs of holly through the heart and God blessing us every one intact, for which I was grateful: some things are so perfect you don't tamper with them even in 3-D. Fezziwig's business seemed to rival a small corporation for size, though, and Scrooge's nephew seemed to be dining with the royal family. I also didn't care for Scrooge's un-Dickensian fear of death or his reformation's being celebrated with "Joy to the World, the Lord Has Come," as if equating the renewed Scrooge with God Himself. But these are little matters and will probably disturb few except the grinches.

It's too bad, in a way, that such traditional Christmas fare is only marginally suitable for the kiddies, but it's more likely the parents will be upset by the scary stuff, which all the supposed Disney classics include. If I had kids, I'd take a chance and take them with me to Disney's A Christmas Carol.