A Christmas Carol (2009)
A Christmas Carol (2009) — Bias Disclaimer: I’m a really easy sell on A Christmas Carol. I just love the damn story and have since I was a kid. Pretty much anything that doesn’t stray too far from the source material (and even a couple that do [Scrooged]) just works for me. I, a man who many have called cynical, get overflowing with that Christmas spirit with this story. So in order for me not to like it Scrooge would need to… I don’t know, forsake Christmas for Kwanzaa or something (nothing against Kwanzaa). Even if it did do that I think it’d be funny enough that I would not necessarily mind. Anyway such hypotheticals are totally beside the point as the movie is very faithful to the Dickens story and I enjoyed the movie a lot. I’ve also enjoyed Robert Zemekis’s previous motion capture films The Polar Express and Beowulf. I never really got that “uncanny valley” thing about people getting creeped out by realistic-but-not-real animated people. Whatever. Anyway I like that the character design for A Christmas Carol lets the characters be somewhat cartoony. Scrooge is impossibly thin and has a gigantic nose and chin. Fezziwig is short and fat but jumps around as if he weren’t. I like that for all the talk of photorealism Zemekeis still lets the story be something of a cartoon. The character design of the Ghost of Christmas Past doesn’t quite work for me, but that’s a very minor quibble with this movie. I liked it quite a bit. I also liked that this movie embraced the idea that this is a ghost story and isn’t afraid to be a little creepy in the haunting scenes. When you know what’s going to happen but are put a little bit on edge about it happening, that’s decent suspense. I like the look of the film, I like the voice acting [by a handful of people each in multiple roles], and I have always loved the story. My favorite version is still the Muppets one (largely because it came out when I was eight) but this is a very fine addition to the many movie versions that Dickens’s book inspired.
Persistence of Vision 