Timing The Grinch

I know The Grinch is not going to be great.

If there was ever much doubt, I snuck a peak at its Metacritic score, which is an uninspiring 51. That's only five points higher than Ron Howard's 2000 garish debacle Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. A new holiday classic it will not be. Or, I should say, a new holiday classic it already is not.

But dammit, I at least want to see it before Christmas.

Last night my wife suggested that we hang on to it until we are on our beach holiday on the Mornington Peninsula, which will run December 31st through January 4th. Now, that's not a beach holiday timed to swim in the snow drifts, mind you. That'll be peak summer here in Australia.

Her logic is that we know we want to take the kids to their first drive-in movie down there -- or rather, first since the older one was an infant -- and we don't know if we can rely on another kid appropriate movie playing there.

After Christmas. She wants to watch the movie after Christmas.

I like that she can continue to carry the Christmas spirit with her on into January, but for me, Christmas is dead to me on December 26th. Never happened. On to the next thing.

If you think that's contrary to my ordinary level of sentimentality, don't worry. We leave our tree up until at least January 20th. But that doesn't mean I want to have the pop culture pastimes I imbibe be Christmas-oriented ones after the 25th. Heck, I don't even want to watch a Christmas-oriented TV show or movie on Christmas itself. Christmas Eve is the latest I'll go for that. Without grumbling, anyway, as I am doing now.

Besides, I think her thinking is flawed. The Grinch didn't release here as early as it did in the U.S., where a friend described seeing it way too early (before Thanksgiving), but it did bow within the month of November, on the 29th. There's good reason to believe that drive-in will have already stopped showing it by then, especially if it's not that great, and especially given that we get a cavalcade of new releases on Boxing Day each year.

One of which is always the latest Disney and/or Pixar movie, and this year, is Ralph Breaks the Internet.

Now, there's absolutely no denying that this movie will be playing at that drive-in. They do realize they need something for families, and that'll be it. One hundred percent guarantee. You can't say the same for a movie that'll be a full month old by then, plus no longer have its relevant holiday still awaiting in the future.

I suppose it's an especially long delay given how much later her suggestion is than when I originally planned to see it. Which was this past weekend.

See, I'm the only guy at my website who will review an animated movie. That's not entirely true, as my editor was the one who reviewed Finding Dory. But he spent half the review talking about how it would have made a lot more sense for me to review it. No kidding. That's the kind of reviews he writes. They're hilarious.

The Grinch seems like the kind of movie that deserves a review on our site, especially since I recently reviewed another holiday movie that hardly met that same standard: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. What site reviews a weird Nutcracker movie and not The Grinch?

Yet I've got a thing about reviewing a movie after its moment of greatest freshness. I don't even like the delay of a review of mine not posting until Monday after a Thursday release, which often happens because I don't have time to write it that night after getting home, and Website 101 says you don't post new content on weekends.

My editor doesn't care about this. He'd take a review of The Grinch from me in March. He views the site less as an ongoing news feed of new posts but as a repository that will ultimately be used by future readers to search out our reviews. He'd have more of a point, I think, if the percentage of movies that got reviews weren't so scattershot, leaving the whole thing well short of the type of completism I like. But I'm getting sidetracked.

The critic in me wanted to see The Grinch on opening weekend. But my heart grew three sizes at my wife's suggestion that we see it on the weekend immediately before Christmas itself.

This was a tolerable sacrifice, and maybe something better than that. I don't review the film, but I get to see it at a time of its maximum impact boosting my holiday spirit. That's in theory only, mind you -- chances are the kids will be fighting that day and it will be 100 degrees out, meaning it won't feel much like Christmas anyway.

I was just settling into the idea and had barely 24 hours to do so before my wife floated this idea of grinching possibly as late as 2019.

There's some sweet spot between my friend seeing it before Thanksgiving, me planning a December 2nd viewing, watching it on or around the 23rd and waiting until January. I don't know what it is, but I've got to find it.

That's a lot of emotional energy expended on a movie with "mixed or average reviews."