Mainlining Christmas

While it stops short of greatness, this Hallmark Christmas Carol/romantic comedy comes significantly closer than you'd expect. Frankly, only a weak ending keeps this from securing a full recommendation, and even then it's a close call. And coupled with the fact this thing offers quite a few surprise turns, if you generally enjoy these sorts of TV movies, you might want to stop reading and start watching before getting spoiled. First, I need to clarify that even compared to other border cases this isn't really an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Instead, it attempts to build on movies like "Scrooged" and "It's Christmas, Carol" to further build out the sub-sub-genre of quasi-sequels set in a world where A Christmas Carol is based on a true story. I'm actually not the one choosing those examples, by the way: Ghosts of Christmas Always alludes to those movies when a character calls them out as his favorite versions of the story. I'm guessing &qu

The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Charlie Lovett, 2015 After my first two forays into expansions on A Christmas Carol, I was worried that I would never find something enjoyable that respected the source. Happily, this one was a delight. Set ten years after the events of the original story, this sweet and playful novella takes the form of both a loving parody and a thematic expansion. Scrooge is still the subject of gossip in the street, only now the consensus is that he's taking this whole keeping-Christmas-all-the-year thing a bit too far. He's generous beyond his means, affectionate to a fault, and comes off as more than a bit eccentric, wishing people Merry Christmas in July. I was a bit worried early on that the story would conclude on a wishy-washy moral of moderation in all things. I could not have been more wrong. Instead, Scrooge realizes that as one man, he can only do so much to help the world. So he proposes a scheme to the Christmas Spirits to multiply his

Strictly speaking, this probably doesn't need  to be revisited. Lindsay reviewed it back in 2011 , and while it's more a summary than what we do these days, it's more substantial than most of our reviews from the first couple years of the blog. Even so, I'm trying to rewatch every significant adaptation of A Christmas Carol, so I've got some thoughts. This is, of course, the CG motion capture version directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jim Carrey as Scrooge and all three spirits. The intention was to bring Charles Dickens's story and John Leech's illustrations to life through the use of modern visual effects. Motion capture offered a way to merge performance with animation to an extent that hadn't previously been possible. It was a lofty goal. I don't think it's controversial to say they failed miserably. There's something deeply wrong with the way the human characters (and most of the spectral ones) appear. They resemble grotesque wax f

Watching the 1999 made-for-TV adaptation of A Christmas Carol makes for an odd experience. It boasts an impressive cast, but the production values, script decisions, and effects are impossible to ignore. This really doesn't hold up at all. The role of Scrooge is played by Patrick Stewart. Apparently, he was cast in part because of a one-man play he performed (incidentally, if anyone knows of a way to legally view a recorded version of said play, I'd be fascinated to see it). As a rule, I typically like Stewart, both as an actor and because he just seems like an all-around great human being . Naturally, I'd love to say I thought he works here. Unfortunately, I don't think that's the case. His portrayal of Scrooge feels largely one-note, and - to be perfectly honest - more or less indistinguishable from Jean-Luc Picard. My guess is this is in part due to the version of the character created for the one-man show. If one actor's playing numerous characters, it's

You probably noticed that we've been watching a lot of versions of A Christmas Carol. As we went, I started noticing how many musical versions there are. As a lifelong musical theater fan, I'm a sucker for a good musical. Because these are all adaptations of the same story, many use songs in similar places for similar purposes. I find it interesting how these songs can make very different choices, so let's take a few minutes today to explore that together.  I don't remember enough music theory to get too bogged down in whether these songs are necessarily "good" by any specific musical metrics. I'm interested in only a few things:  Does the song support the story, expand the character(s), or enhance the tone? Is it enjoyable to listen to: lyrics understandable and not annoying, tune catchy, performed well?  How do the songs which fulfill the same purpose in the narrative compare across adaptations? Here are the versions of A Christmas Carol I'll be visi

We've seen this before, of course - Lindsay did a brief write-up back in 2010 . But we were overdue for a reexamination of this even before I set out to watch every significant version of A Christmas Carol ever made. I realize this isn't a popular opinion, but I'm not a huge fan of this movie. There are elements I really like, and I admire what they're trying to pull off here. But as a whole, I think it fails more than it succeeds. It tries to be too many things and doesn't manage to pull its disparate parts together. First, let's try and break down what this is trying to do. The Muppet Christmas Carol represents a surprisingly high-concept approach to the material - this really isn't just the Muppets doing Dickens. The best description I can offer is it's a relatively straightforward adaptation of the story (aided by musical numbers), paying homage to previous adaptations, with a Muppet narrator and supporting cast accompanying Michael Caine as he encou

I wasn't going to do  this again . Depending on your point of view, it's not at all clear this should count as an adaptation of A Christmas Carol at all. Really, it's more a parody or derived work. If we're counting this, should we also be counting The Grinch, It's a Wonderful Life, or Cash on Demand? But this kept appearing on online lists of Christmas Carol adaptations, and I eventually decided if I wanted to seriously look at how these have evolved over time, I really needed to consider this one as well. To recap, I briefly reviewed Scrooged as a Christmas movie more than a decade ago, with the main takeaway being I thought the movie was fine but not particularly memorable. Rewatching it in 2022, I have quite a few more thoughts on a number of different subjects. Some of this is going to be very positive, some negative, and still more that's just... weird. Let's start with the weird, actually. Scrooged begins with a number of promotions for holiday specia

Jacob T. Marley R. William Bennett, 2011 After my first attempt at reading a Christmas-Carol-adjacent novel led me to a pile of trash masquerading as a book, I just hoped this one would be better. And it was, at least at first. The first half or so of this book was actually pretty good. It creates a plausible backstory for Marley and his relationship with Scrooge that works with the original, while expanding aspects of it. It occasionally flirts with stylish prose without trying too hard. This Scrooge and Marley choose to act greedily within the letter of the law (unlike the mess in the other book), showing that the law is not enough when you don't care about anything but wealth and your own advancement - capitalism without human kindness leads only to exploitation, loneliness, and misery. So far, so good. And if it had ended, as the other book did, with Marley's death, I could give it a cautious recommendation: not a great book or anything brilliant, but a nice little piece of

The 1984 adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott feels like it's trying to be difficult to categorize. Released theatrically in England and on TV in America, I'm not even sure whether to consider this a full movie or a made-for-TV production. It's also abnormally difficult to bucket the genre: this straddles the line between horror and drama to an unusual degree. Taken as a whole, this is one of the better modern adaptations I've seen. It covers the full scope of the story, the casting is good, and it's visually impressive. That said, I don't think it leaves as much of an impression as the best of the lot. Essentially, it's difficult to find anything significant to fault, but it's nowhere near my favorite of the bunch. Starting with the opening shot, the movie looks good. Rather than spending their budget on expensive sets, they simply filmed in a market town that hasn't significantly changed since the 1800s. Between that and some go