Mainlining Christmas

This was one of a handful of adaptations of "A Christmas Carol" that were on my list when I binged fifty or so of these back in 2022, but I was unable to get to it at the time. I've been meaning to rectify that since, but it never seemed to be on the right streaming services at the right times. Well, that finally changed, so at long last I was able to sit down and watch it. The movie is quite a bit more ambitious than most low-budget versions. The story is set in what was then the present-day, song and dance numbers are added (though the music is diegetic, save for when the source is explicitly supernatural), and the majority of characters - included Scrooge himself - are gay. Several characters are gender-flipped to accommodate this: nephew Fred is now niece Freda, Belle becomes Bill, and so on. Sequences and minor characters are added to expand on this idea, however the core of the story is unchanged. In fact, in several respects this adheres closer to Dickens's blu...

  The second figure in the Four Horsemen Studio's line of A Christmas Carol figures is, naturally, their take on The Ghost of Christmas Past. If you missed my review of Marley's Ghost , this line (or sub-line) recreates characters from Dickens' classic as seven-inch action figures. These aren't cheap (the first two figures ran me $70 each), but the quality, attention to detail, and generous accessories go a long way towards justifying that price tag. They've followed the lead of several adaptations in making the spirit female. Dickens' original implies the spirit itself is non-binary, shifting between forms as its light flickers like a candle's (that's also the rationale behind the figure having four arms, an image pulled from the original story). Because the character's always shifting, you could make the case any visualization is accurate to the source material. Personally, I like this interpretation quite a bit. As was the case with Marley, the bo...

   Even for action figures, that title's a mouthful. Let me attempt to break this down: Four Horsemen Studios is a company producing toys for collectors, which means the quality is going to be several steps above what you'll find in the toy aisles, and the same goes for the price tag. This seven inch figure ran me seventy bucks before tax and shipping - roughly three times what you'd expect for a similar size toy from a mass-market toy company. Was it worth it? Yes, actually, it was absolutely worth it, but I'll get to that in a moment - first I need to finish explaining the name and what it is. Four Horsemen Studios mostly produces original fantasy and sci-fi figures. The "Figura Obscura" line is used to make figures drawn from myth, folklore, and classic literature. They produced a Krampus a while back, but I balked at the price tag. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't regretting that, by the way. That brings us to their sub-line within Figura Obscura de...

Until I saw some online discussion surrounding this recently, I hadn't realized it was an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. I'd never seen the movie and have no memory of the trailers - if I ever thought about the movie, I must have assumed it was a fairly typical romantic comedy with supernatural elements. Hell, until we expanded our purview five or so years ago, we wouldn't have considered this worth reviewing the blog at all (it explicitly is not  set at Christmas). But the Dickens connection here is significant and worth exploring, and - for better and worse - this is an interesting movie. It's also surprising in a number of respects. This is a far more faithful retelling of A Christmas Carol than I'd ever have expected given the premise. It incorporates elements of the story and characters, mostly in clever and subtle ways (though I could have done without the "What day is it" callback gag near the end). That's the "better" side of the ...

Lindsay and I wound up seeing this because our daughter has become fixated on Winne the Pooh. I believe we've now watched or re-watched all of the animated movies at least once; most more than that. Judging by her level of excitement while this was playing, I'm guessing we're going to watch this several more times, so I actually wanted to write it up before I become sick of the damn thing. "More sick" might be a more accurate description. Don't get me wrong: I'm a fan of the bear with very little brain and have been for a very long time. Hell, I used to wear a Winnie the Pooh pendant in college, and I'd take it out when asked about my religion. It was a joke, of course, but my affection for the character is genuine. I still love the original Disney shorts and the movie they were compiled into, and I was pleasantly surprised to find The Tigger Movie - something I'd last seen in theaters - holds up. The 2011 movie is pretty great, too. But as we'...

For those of you who weren't reading last year, well... first of all, welcome to the party, pal! But second and more germane to the topic, I spent a comically large portion of 2022 watching and reviewing roughly fifty adaptations of A Christmas Carol, presumably making me one of the world's foremost masochists on the subject. This was still just a drop in the bucket as far as the breadth of TV and film versions of the story are concerned, but I managed to check off virtually every adaptation on my list. Virtually. There were a couple that slipped through the cracks. The most notable of which is an elusive 1940s version from Spain that's probably going to be one of those "white whales" I obsess over for decades. But after that, there was Ebenezer, a version starring Jack Palance, with the setting moved from London to the American West. This was an extremely late addition to my list - because the title differs from the usual pattern, it hadn't initially caught m...

Anyone reading the blog last Christmas (or even just following me on one of the social media platforms I used at the time) likely remembers my big project last year. While I'm pretty much always seeking out new holiday movies, last year I watched and reviewed as many versions of A Christmas Carol as possible, finishing the season having seen more than fifty (an exact count is complicated, because several resided in the gray areas between adaptation, homage, and parody). On top of that, I saw several more than once - in order to keep various versions straight for purposes of comparison, I watched some as many as four times. It was, to say the least, quite an undertaking, particularly considering I was doing it as a side project to a side project. The primary reason for the exercise was to gain a better understanding of the history of how the story was viewed, as well as some broader insight into the evolution of Christmas media in general. I wrote up my observations in a few summar...

As soon as I heard this existed, I knew it had to be the last version of A Christmas Carol I watched and reviewed for this project. Twelve Hundred Ghosts is, at least in theory, a supercut of more than 400 adaptations, homages, and reimagined spins on a Christmas Carol, arranged and edited by Heath Waterman, who completed the project over a year and a half. So that certainly puts the fifty-some-odd versions I covered here this year to shame. I do want to return to that "supercut" moniker. Strictly speaking, it's not inaccurate, but I don't think it does justice to the experience of watching this. Waterman isn't simply cutting between scores of adaptations across multiple mediums; he's creating a montage that explodes both the original narrative, as well as the incredible breadth of media it's inspired. He uses split screens to combine versions from different eras and styles, he plays audio tracks over incredibly different films, he includes audio plays, re...

I stumbled across this looking for adaptations of A Christmas Carol, and it sounded both interesting and significant (at least in England - I don't believe this has gotten any kind of release in the states). For reasons I'll get to in a moment, I'm glad I gave this a chance. First, I want to explain to the best of my ability what this is, which is a little difficult as the background on this BBC comedy Christmas special is substantial. I'm going to try and cover this quickly, with the caveat I haven't seen any of Mischief Theatre's other work. A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong is the second BBC holiday special produced by Mischief Theatre. The first, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, is itself a sequel to The Play That Goes Wrong. All of these (along with several other plays and a later TV series) center on a fictitious acting troop called the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society who are supposedly performing the plays in question. The joke is that the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Soc...

This is a one-hour musical adaptation where the lead actor, writer, director, producer, and songwriter are the same person. That's kind of impressive, regardless of how the movie came out, but it tells you a great deal about the budget. Or lack thereof. Yes, this is one of those cases where I spend a lot of time trying to decide what kind of curve to grade on. The production values aren't in the same league as the stuff I usually look at. This doesn't have elaborate sets, intricate costumes, expensive digital effects, and the like. In short, it doesn't look or feel like a "real movie." And that's okay. I try and approach things like this as test runs for ideas and talent. Frankly, after watching dozens of these, I'm more interested in whether original elements of these offer anything of value than I am in whether they rank among the top 30 best adaptations. So, with that in mind, let's explore Anthony D.P. Mann's take on A Christmas Carol. The ...