Brave new world

Pixar's Brave was going to be our first 3D movie on our "new" 3D TV.

I'm very glad it ended up being the second. But first some history.

We got our "new" 3D TV around the time we moved, which makes it seven months old and nearly ready to shed the descriptor "new." To our great shame, we went the first six-and-a-half months of its life without even tapping into the feature that gives it its name. We knew we couldn't watch a 3D BluRay until we followed up this purchase with a 3D BluRay player, but we also knew that there were some 3D features on our TV we could access directly through the TV. Still, watching programming in 3D remained for us a peripheral priority, something that seemed vaguely too hard to do.

Flash forward to Cyber Monday, when I decided to convert on my intention to buy us a 3D BluRay player for Christmas. I couldn't click the "purchase" button on Best Buy's website fast enough. The thing cost a scant $70, and with having it delivered to the store rather than to my house, there was no shipping cost either. The next Saturday, I walked my son down to the nearest Best Buy and returned home with this tiny new component, less than 2/3 the size of our current BluRay player.

I knew I couldn't wait for Christmas to present it to my wife. I also knew it couldn't be a present specifically for her, because that's cheating -- I'd obviously get as much use out if it as she would, and probably more. So I decided to repurpose some birthday money for the purchase, and decided I would present it to her on the Saturday night before Christmas (she should still unwrap it, as a good way of revealing the surprise). That left Sunday and Monday nights as two possibilities for watching our first 3D movie. Oh, it would have still been "special" if our first 3D movie didn't come until after Christmas, but the days leading up to Christmas have this special kind of magic to them. Besides, one of my two movie choices would only make good viewing prior to Christmas.

See, another thing I'd been working on in December was borrowing the copy of Disney's A Christmas Carol I bought for my friend two Christmases ago. I bought him the version that included a 3D BluRay, even though his family didn't yet have a 3D TV (and still doesn't). But the timing of the borrow was tricky. His family planned to watch it this holiday season, but hadn't yet. About two weeks ago we realized that my needs and theirs were not incongruous. They weren't going to be watching the actual 3D BluRay, because they couldn't. So his wife secretly slipped me that disc in a padded manila envelope when she was babysitting for us two Saturdays ago.

I figured my wife would choose A Christmas Carol and that's what I was rooting for, but it seemed only fair to have another option available. And we do in fact own one 3D BluRay: Tangled. However, in my mind, that was a definite Plan B. We had both already seen Tangled twice. This would be my third Christmas Carol viewing as well, but she'd only seen it once, and had also proclaimed it "probably her favorite movie version of that story." Besides, Tangled would keep until after Christmas. A Christmas Carol would not.

As it turns out, she wanted a Plan C. And that's where Brave came into the discussion.

Both of the proposed BluRays were movies we'd seen within the past two years, and my wife was eager for another option. She mentioned that Brave had been in 3D, and neither of us had seen Pixar's latest yet. My Christmas Carol bias notwithstanding, I thought it was a great idea and went to work figuring out how to procure it.

We weren't so excited to see Brave that we thought it was worth it to actually own the movie, which would currently be priced at its all-time high. So Sunday morning I swung by Blockbuster to see if they might rent 3D BluRays. I didn't even need to get further than the front counter, where the friendly clerk told me that they didn't. I gave him an opening to refer me to one of his competitors: "So the only way to see a movie in 3D at home is to buy it?" "Pretty much," he responded.

I was satisfied with the response, because I thought it clinched my desired Christmas Carol screening. It did not. My wife chose Tangled.

And I'm so glad she did. Even if it denied us a seasonal viewing, Tangled is far and away the better movie. And watching a great movie in 3D on our own TV was as wonderful a way to usher in this new era as I could have possibly imagined.

Simply put, the 3D was astounding. I would have expected something that was very clearly a lesser version of what you get in the theater. At the very least I figured you needed to position yourself at a perfectly straight angle to the screen in order for the images to have that third dimension. But no. Tangled was as breathtaking as it had first been for me in the theater, with incomparable depth as well as images occasionally popping out of the screen. My wife, who hadn't previously caught it in 3D, claimed to like it better than she ever had before. Even a part of the third act that she had previously considered a significant narrative problem did not bother her this time. Amazing how an extra dimension, when done correctly, can just wrap you up in its spell and eradicate all your complaints.

Unfortunately, Brave could not pull off the same feat.

Last night, we did watch Brave in 3D -- without needing our new BluRay player, in fact.

It turns out that our LG 3D TV (all three of our components, including both of our BluRay players, are LG) has kind of an "app store" accessible from its home screen. It can use our wifi to deliver us a variety of movies directly from the TV, and it being a 3D TV, has a section devoted to movies we can rent in 3D. The other two 3D movies were movies we'd both already seen (The Avengers and Gnomeo & Juliet), so Brave was clearly it, especially since we'd flirted with this very idea on Sunday. Eight dollars even seemed a reasonable price to pay for such a rental -- that's probably a quarter of what it would cost if we bought the BluRay combo pack to own.

And after watching it, I can tell you that we don't want to own Brave.

Keeping in mind that I have yet to see Cars 2, Brave is the first Pixar movie that I have actually given a thumbs down. A Bug's Life might have been close, but even that lame movie would get a marginal thumbs up from me. Well, not this one. Even reasonably good 3D (though not as good as Tangled) and images that are certainly beautiful were not enough to blind us to the movie's many, many narrative flaws.

Name a few? Okay. (SPOILERS)

1. It's pretty damn hard to forgive your heroine after she has gotten a witch to cast a spell on her own mother. When was the last time you trusted a witch to do exactly what you told her to do? I didn't think so. Much like the devil, a witch's main priority is to make a nearly legalistic analysis of your request in order to figure out creative ways to follow the letter of what you asked for, though not the spirit of what you asked for. See Brave for a very good example.

2. As a result, Merida spends the entire second half of the movie trying to correct her own mistake. My wife always says that she can't stand movie characters who create their own problems. There are certainly exceptions to this, but it's hard to get behind a character who has to go to considerable trouble to undo something he/she never should have done in the first place.

3. I was led to believe one of the main plot points was that Merida competes against her suitors in a variety of feats of skill, in order to "win her own hand in marriage" rather than letting someone else win it. In this way I expected the story to resemble the tale of Atalanta from Free to Be ... You and Me (though originally a Greek myth). Turns out, she has one archery scene against the three dopes trying to marry her, none of whom can do anything with a bow and arrow. (One suitor hits the bulls-eye, but it's by accident.)

4. What the story is actually about is human beings turning into bears. Really. That's what this movie is about. The problem is that if a human being is confused for a bear -- because of, you know, being turned into a bear -- another human being might try to kill that bear. Never mind the fact that Merida could just say to her father, who has built his reputation on his desire to exact revenge on the bear who took his leg, "Dad! Don't kill this bear. It's Mom. I gave her a cake that had been cursed by a witch, and she turned into this bear." Instead, they have to hide the bear and run around like idiots.

5. When Merida and her bear mother are out in the woods, trying to find a cure to the mother's bearness, they somehow learn things about each other that make them understand each other better. However, none of this is actually dramatized in any particular moment. I guess being turned into a bear by your daughter is enough of a reason to realize that she doesn't need to get married against her will. 

6. Even while it's clear that the cake Merida has given her mother is making her physically sick, she doesn't care. All she cares about is whether her coughing and choking mother has changed her mind on whether she must marry one of the three dopes. Which, you remember, is the reason she poisoned her in the first place. All of these so far should lead naturally to #7 ...

7. I didn't like the characters. Any of them, really.

But I've saved possibly the most problematic element of the movie for last ...

8. Nothing that occurs on screen here -- I mean, nothing whatsoever -- requires an ounce of bravery. No one does something really daring. No one puts him or herself in position to make a sacrifice. No one leads an army against impossible odds. The film's only established antagonist (other than the witch with ambiguous intentions) is the king's brother, who was turned into a bear (called Mordu) after becoming evil and trying to take over sole control of the kingdom. He only appears in the story a couple times, and his motivations are so vague and generic that they almost don't even exist. He is dispatched somewhat easily. You could say that the queen engages in a bit of bravery by taking on Mordu, but since she is also a bear at the time, the risk to her is considerably less than if she had been, you know, not a bear.

So yeah, I didn't like Brave.

But that doesn't mean I can't use its poster art to symbolize our exciting new home 3D adventure. And now I'm just rubbing my hands together, figuring out which movie to rent or own that will blow our dimensional minds next.

My wife hasn't seen Wreck-It-Ralph, and I didn't see it in 3D. That seems like a probable one to own come February or March, as we get ever deeper into this brave new world.

A curious literacy strategy

You can imagine I was surprised to see this familiar image on information kiosks this holiday season, since Disney's A Christmas Carol came out a full two years ago.

Turns out, they're just using the image of Jim Carrey's Ebenezer Scrooge to convince people to read books.

On the one hand, I get it. But on the other, isn't it kind of a contradictory impulse, to tell people to "Explore New Worlds," but then to spoon-feed them the images upon which to base that exploration?

The supposedly wonderful thing about reading is that you get to create the world in your head. You can imagine what every character looks like, and you get to conjure your own appearance for the houses and towns in which they live. Your brain gets a special boost if it's a fantasy world, something for which you may have no previous frame of reference.

And so, presenting someone with a fixed image of what a character, such as Ebenezer Scrooge, looks like, is kind of counterproductive. Not only that, but it's a fixed image from a movie. Aren't movies supposed to be the enemy of books, at least for hardcore bibliophiles?

Never mind the nit-picky detail that the setting of one of the world's most famous and celebrated Christmas stories is hardly a "new world" to explore.

I guess the bibliophiles responsible for this campaign, at least, must acknowledge that they need celebrity to sell the idea of reading. Only by using the likeness of Jim Carrey on a poster about reading will they get our attention enough to bring home the message. Advertising is a visual medium, so you need something to catch our eye. Might as well be something familiar, something that makes us look twice -- as I looked twice, enough that I stopped to take a picture and am now writing about it here.

Well, it's for a good cause in the case of A Christmas Carol. Not only should everyone see Robert Zemeckis' movie, which is truly creative and visually arresting, but they really ought to read Charles Dickens' novel, which brings the Christmas spirit like no other.

Literally. Three spirits, actually.

Haunted by spirits

As recently as Friday I wrote about how our "new" LG BluRay player (we got it in August) has been acting up a bit. In a longer post about other things, I mentioned that it had shown poor fault tolerance when trying to get me through a viewing of a DVD of The Best Years of Our Lives, which I was able to complete without further incident on my laptop.

It's not the first time it has showed that behavior, and the age/history of the disc doesn't seem to be a factor. As a matter of fact, it choked on the last chapter of Gigli a couple weeks ago -- on a brand new disc. How did I have a brand new disc of Gigli in my possession? It was part of a gag gift for a friend, and the gag part required me to open the packaging anyway, so I thought I'd use the opportunity to finally watch this famous turkey. Let's just say I didn't find it to be as much of a turkey as most people, but I did think it was hilarious that even a brand new disc couldn't play through to completion. At the time I took it as a sign of the poor quality of the pressing -- but now I'm not so sure.

So over the last few days we had a couple funny incidents that I thought were worth sharing, involving the movies Disney's A Christmas Carol and Japanese Story. As you see, I have cleverly fit them both under the title "Haunted by spirits" -- A Christmas Carol involves that quite literally, while Japanese culture is steeped in the spirit world. But the real haunting is of my BluRay player, whose quirky behavior is getting harder and harder to pigeonhole.

Don't pause it

As I may have discussed before, I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to monitoring how closely other people are watching the movies I'm watching. And since my wife is the one I usually see movies with, she's the one who gets under my skin on this issue -- looking down at her food too long while missing visual information, not looking at the screen while there are subtitles to read, etc.

But the one that gets me most is when she gets up from the couch and says "Don't pause it." That's right, she's going to walk away from the movie for some unknown amount of time -- she may know, but I don't -- and she doesn't even want me to pause it. If it's a crappy movie, I don't mind so much, but if it's something I'm enjoying, it disappoints me greatly.

"Don't pause it" took on a different meaning on Friday night, Christmas Eve, when we watched Disney's A Christmas Carol, which I had been raving about since I saw it in the theater last year -- and since she refused to go with me for what would have been my second time. The viewing was a victory overall, because she told me afterward that it might be her favorite film version of Dickens' tale -- and that it would, in fact, have been cool to see it on the big screen in 3D. (Not saying "I told you so," not saying "I told you so.")

But the viewing got off to a rough start when I paused to yell at the neighbor's dogs. Most often, their toxic behavior presents itself in the form of hair-trigger barking, but they're also known for trying "to make their great escape" from the yard. That's how my wife and I refer to it when they rip and tear at the corrugated plastic fence, which sounds a bit like a child's toy going a couple rounds in the garbage disposal. "Knock it off!" I shouted a couple times, with mixed results at best.

The results were decidedly negative for the movie. For some reason, upon coming out of the pause, we were now in "closed captioning for the hearing impaired" mode. Huh?

Thinking it a fluke, we went back to the main menu and reset the settings. Back to normal. But, I made the mistake of pausing a second time, and once again, the movie thought we were deaf. I've seen strange behavior by DVD players in terms of the closed captioning, but never triggered by the pause button.

So we took this opportunity to go to the bathroom, put on another layer, and stock up on whatever food and drink we might possibly need for the rest of the film. Still, I was worried. This was a film I had a lot invested in, and I could easily see her needing to do or get something, and refusing to let me pause it, knowing that the pause would entail yet another trip out to the setup menu.

Nope. We made it all the way to the end. She fell asleep for 15 seconds once or twice, which I guess is the equivalent of leaving on a 15-second errand around the house -- or "not pausing." But her praise for the film meant I could live with that.

Reboot

The previous story could have been blamed on either the BluRay player or the disc itself, but this next example is a lot less ambiguous.

Wanting to reconnect with her Australian homeland on Christmas Day, my wife asked if we could watch one of the Australian films we had on our Netlix instant queue -- which of course uses our BluRay player to operate. Walkabout was a possibility, but we ultimately went with Japanese Story, a movie directed by a woman named Sue Brooks, starring Toni Collette. It's a bit of a weird movie, but I mean that in a good way. It's about an unexpected love affair between Collette's geologist and the Japanese businessman she's driving around, because his company owns hers. And it takes a definitely unexpected turn around the end of the second act. But I agreed with my wife that in the end, it's quite beautiful in its way.

It was the end of the third act that was the problem. In fact, on the very last shot of the film -- even if she hadn't already seen it, I'd have known it was the last shot because it had that "last shot feel" -- the movie crapped out. At first it just got stuck, like a DVD freezes when it encounters a scratch. But then when I tried to press stop, it hung while trying to process the command to return to the previous menu.

It soon became clear that I wasn't going to have any luck until I shut down the player entirely. But even this was a no-go. Pressing the power button on the remote control was having no effect. So I pressed the power button directly on the player. Still no effect. Just when I thought I was going to have to unplug the damn thing, it finally shut down.

That would have been weird enough, but when it came back on, and we tried to go to Netflix, it asked us if we were subscribers. Upon selecting "Yes," it then asked us to go to our Netflix account on our computer and type in this code. In other words, we needed to be set up for the first time all over again. I immediately wondered what might have been lost in this exchange, like the memory of where we were in certain incomplete viewings -- or even that we'd ever had any viewings at all.

My wife did as requested, and everything was restored. Except for the fact that we had recently viewed Japanese Story -- there was no evidence of it whatsoever. I had to select it from our instant queue again, and fast-forward all the way to the end in order to watch the last 30 seconds of the last shot, and the credits.

So yeah, we may have a cheap BluRay player. I guess we'll just have to see what the future holds in store.

And maybe call an exorcist to banish these ghosts from my machine.

About face

Just over three weeks ago in this space, I was issuing dire predictions about the quality of Disney's A Christmas Carol.

Yesterday afternoon, I felt disappointed not to be seeing it a second time.

Amazing how actually seeing a movie can change your impression of it.

I caught A Christmas Carol a week before Thanksgiving, when a friend of mine was in the neighborhood and had some time to kill between an afternoon engagement and an evening engagement. This was earlier than I planned to see it, being one of those old-fashioned guys who doesn't acknowledge the beginning of the Christmas season until after Thanksgiving. I also thought I'd be seeing it with my wife, since she'd expressed some interest, and Dickens' tale plays a history in the formation of our relationship.

Yet I convinced myself of my own logic, that A Christmas Carol looked like a garish abomination, and that the only thing we could expect to get out of it was the hollow sensory enjoyment of some good 3-D on the IMAX screen. (Plus, it was the only thing playing at a convenient time that both my friend and I wanted to see, but hadn't already seen.) On these grounds I decided I'd probably be saving my wife the trouble of having to witness it herself -- keeping in the back of my mind the possibility that if it were really good, maybe I'd go with her a second time.

Well, it was really good. And yesterday was supposed to be that second time.

Yet on our walk home from brunch, my wife confessed that she didn't really want to see it -- even with my glowing review. I was glad she asserted her opinion in no uncertain terms, rather than letting me steamroll her into going against her will. You see, I had just steamrolled her into changing tables at brunch, mistakenly believing that we would both consider the new table an upgrade, when in fact it removed us from the direct sunlight that would have helped make sitting outside more palatable for her. I get that way sometimes, and a person who just wants to be agreeable can pay the price for my inadvertent headstrong behavior.

Still, I felt a sinking feeling inside me when she told me this. I accepted her decision, but thought it would be worth mentioning that the experience of A Christmas Carol would not be the same at home on DVD, without the astounding 3-D. She then took it one step further and said she might not ever want to see it. And to that there was no retort.

Realizing we were not going to A Christmas Carol made me realize that I had no excuse for a second chance to absorb that 3-D experience, and also made me recognize just how much value that experience itself has. I rarely see movies twice in the theater, yet with A Christmas Carol, I realized I was worried I wouldn't be seeing it twice. The last time I saw a movie twice in the theater was There Will Be Blood, when I arrived at the theater too late for the start of Semi-Pro. And though I love There Will Be Blood -- more than A Christmas Carol, to be sure -- I ended up feeling somewhat disappointed by the decision to revisit it on the big screen. Not that it wasn't still a great movie, just that if you're going to spend theater prices on something, might as well make it something new.

But that's where the 3-D is a real game changer. It's not just the same to wait and see it at home on DVD. Once you miss that 3-D experience, you won't ever get it again, barring some kind of extremely unusual theatrical re-release, which hasn't really been fashionable since before the days of video stores.

I've been split on 3-D in the past. I've complained that it affected my enjoyment of Up; since the 3-D was done somewhat indifferently in that movie, I found myself clawing at the glasses with no clear benefit. Yet I found it riveting in Monsters vs. Aliens and Beowulf, the latter of which was Robert Zemeckis' most recent use of the same kind of motion capture technology used in A Christmas Carol. I might have felt the same desire to see Beowulf again if there was a reasonable excuse to go again, but my wife saw it with me the first time. My second experience of Beowulf was at home on DVD, where I still liked it, but didn't feel that same sense of being engulfed by the action that IMAX 3-D had given me. While we're on the topic of 3-D, I'll also mention that the 3-D component was a factor for me in prioritizing seeing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in the theater, rather than waiting for DVD.

A Christmas Carol left little doubt of just how wonderful 3-D can be, if done correctly. As interpreted by Zemeckis and Jim Carrey, A Christmas Carol didn't move me, per se -- the familiar story hit the usual beats, but didn't really warm the cockles of my holiday heart. And so I'd have to say that the visuals themselves -- starting with the animation and expanding outward, literally, with the 3-D -- were what put A Christmas Carol over the top. As I suggested earlier, I felt surrounded by 19th century London in all its splendid detail, swooping through the city with the camera, and wondering if this landscape was really, truly sharing the same theater with me. Not to mention the fact that there are some wonderfully scary, trippy details in that movie.

But that kind of sensory experience doesn't hold the same currency with my wife, who really does need the cockles of her holiday heart to be warmed. That's something I just have to accept. In fact, I also have to accept that urging someone to see a movie isn't always going to yield positive results. As critics, we probably believe that our recommendation, made strongly enough, will hold enough weight to push someone off the fence, to be the crucial endorsement necessary to make even a skeptic see the film in question. But there are just some movies that some people are never going to want to see. Not only is my wife never going to want to see A Christmas Carol, but neither is another of my friends with whom I discussed the film, who also rejected my endorsement of Beowulf. It is what it is.

But I'm not really sad for them. They're adults, and they've made up their minds. I can only put so much heft into my guarantee of enjoyment, and then I just have to let it be. After all, they really may not enjoy it. Movies are extremely subjective experiences, and it's a mistake to assume someone will love something just because you did.

No, the person I'm really sad for is me. I realized yesterday afternoon how much I really wanted to see A Christmas Carol again, but how much I also needed a legitimate excuse to pony up another $16 for the ticket. On Thanksgiving I learned that my friend had gone a second time, having taken his wife the night before. That only whetted my appetite more.

Well, I'm an adult too. If I want to see A Christmas Carol a second time, then dammit, maybe I should just go. It seems absurd to consider such a thing during what is sure to become a very busy viewing season, very soon. Especially with my upcoming trip to Australia, which will knock out two weeks of prime year-end viewing.

But most of those other movies will probably be just as good on DVD.

If I'm ever going to see A Christmas Carol again, now is the time. They're going to need that IMAX screen for something else soon enough.

Stay tuned, dear readers, stay tuned ...

Carrey, Zemeckis: Stay away from Christmas

I really want to get behind Disney's A Christmas Carol. Believe me I do.

I have been a Jim Carrey supporter long past the point where it was fashionable -- if it was ever fashionable -- and I have liked Robert Zemeckis' career directorial output as much as anyone. Plus, my wife and I have a special place in our hearts for Charles Dickens' classic tale. It was at a local staging of A Christmas Carol, five years ago next month, that we first met.

But history tells me to be cautious. Christmas and Jim Carrey and Christmas and Robert Zemeckis have been a toxic combination.

Let's take Carrey first. Still have the bad taste in your mouth after Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, directed by Ron Howard? I do, and that was nine years ago. It was loud, garish, malevolent and in all other ways crass. The Whos looked perverse, and Carrey as the Grinch was no better. That movie buckled under the weight of expanding outward to feature length from a short Dr. Seuss classic. It left few of us happy, and Carrey's over-the-top antics were one of the things ringing in our ears when we left the theater.

And speaking of the age-old difficulty of making movies out of extremely short stories, Zemeckis sapped all the joy out of Chris Van Allsburg's wonderful storybook The Polar Express five years ago. (That very same Christmas I met my wife, in fact -- I knew it all had to be interconnected somehow). Zemeckis did a pretty good job with the book's signature soft-focus look, the one I found so magical when reading this with the family when I was younger, but the filler plot was a total mess. Instead of the straightforward trip up to the North Pole from Van Allsburg's book, Zemeckis got obsessed with the train being constantly out of control, with the children aboard suspended in a constant state of mortal danger. Plus a dozen other set pieces designed only to plump up the running time. Not exactly how you want to feel during your family-oriented holiday fare. Then of course there was the most infamous element of this film, the fact that the not-quite-perfected motion-capture animation style (which has been a hallmark of every Zemeckis film since) left all the characters with dead eyes and jerky motions, most notably Tom Hanks appearing in about seven different roles.

My fear is that A Christmas Carol will represent the worst of both of these films.

The Polar Express vibe is the one that comes off more strongly from the trailer. What most people have seen of A Christmas Carol is the extended sequence in which Carrey's Ebenezer Scrooge is blasted into the air on the rocket-cone depicted in this poster. (The single-image declaration that this is not your father's Christmas Carol, I suppose.) The cone proceeds to disintegrate as Scrooge is about level with the moon, and he continues swimming/falling forward through the air, yelling out a supposed-to-be-hilarious "Humbug!" at the height of his arc. At some point in this whole affair he shrinks (?) to the size of a mouse and does a waterslide down some kind of pipe, which disgorges him on the slanted roof of a building. His momentum continues him onward through a line of icicles, which smash into his tiny face and torso as he slides downward, and he eventually lands in a sack being carried by a man on the street below. The last word we hear him emit is, again, "Humbug," but this time in the voice of Alvin or one of his chipmunks.

Huh?

Warning flags going up left and right. What the hell does this have to do with A Christmas Carol?

Obviously, Zemeckis is not in it for a straightforward retelling of A Christmas Carol. That I can appreciate. There have been no less than 27 stagings of the tale in cinematic history, all of them relatively straightforward. But the specific way in which Zemeckis plans to reimagine the story really reeks of all those out-of-control trains in A Polar Express. Not to mention the fact that Carrey plays at least four characters here, echoing Hanks' role in A Polar Express. If Zemeckis hasn't learned any lessons from where he went wrong there, it's going to be a long night on IMAX 3-D for a lot of people this weekend.

But if A Christmas Carol tanks, Carrey will have certainly played some role in it as well. I'm not sure I love the idea that he plays all three ghosts in addition to the main character -- and Bob Cratchett? And Bob Cratchett's wife? And Tiny Tim? And Jacob Marley? And Jacob Marley's chains? I'm not sure whose idea it was, but playing many roles probably made Carrey a lot more interested than if he were just playing Scrooge. To be sure, Scrooge would have given him ample opportunity to exercise his love of scenery chewing. With at least three other prominent roles in the film, will we feel as bludgeoned by his Jim Carrey-ness at the end of it all, as we did at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas?

However, now that it's officially Christmas season -- finish up that Halloween candy, because gingerbread is right around the corner -- I'd be a bit of a Grinch/Scrooge myself if I didn't try to end this post with a bit of hope. So here goes.

I have really loved Zemeckis' last two films that used his now-signature technique. Monster House (2006), which was produced by Zemeckis and directed by Gil Kenan, started me backpedaling on my doubts about the effectiveness of this motion-capture technology. It was a fun, unique summer movie for kids and adults alike. Then the following year, the Zemeckis-directed version of Beowulf drove my wow factor over the top. Watching that film in IMAX 3-D was nearly a religious experience -- rarely have I felt so surrounded and absorbed by the world a film was trying to create for me. This is not to say it's a perfect film, just that it is executed in a way that makes you feel, momentarily, like it is.

And Carrey? Well, I'd be lying if I said that Carrey was at his peak right now. Last year's Yes Man was quite the disappointment; the previous year's The Number 23, all the more so; 2005's Fun With Dick and Jane, somewhere in between those two. But the more germane subject here is what Carrey has done with outsized characters that we've enjoyed. He was wonderful in the vastly underrated Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, in a similarly Scrooge-like role. Most would agree that he gave a bravura performance as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. And don't forget that original role way back when that put him on our map -- Ace Ventura, one of the most over-the-top characters in film history. I remember I watched the original Pet Detective at least two and possibly three times on the same rental.

My wife and I won't see A Christmas Carol this weekend -- we've got a number of movies, most notably Paranormal State, still standing in front of it. Besides, I'm not in the Christmas spirit yet. I always think it's a mistake to release Christmas movies this many weeks before Thanksgiving.

But we will see it eventually, and I'd love for it to be good, just as a symbolic celebration of our five years together.

Prove me wrong, Carrey and Zemeckis. Prove me wrong.