BLACKADDER’S CHRISTMAS CAROL: The Queen Has Banned the Christmas

Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988) – Directed by Richard Boden – Starring Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Miriam Margolyes, Jim Broadbent, and Nicola Bryant.

If you have not seen BLACKADDER’S CHRISTMAS CAROL, you should take 45 minutes out of your day and go watch it. There are three reasons why if you only see one adaptation of Charles Dickens’ non-cricket starring Christmas story this season, it should be this one.

Reason #1: It’s really funny. BLACKADDER was the coolest comedy back in the day, and it still holds up remarkably well. Rowan Atkinson sits at the center of a merry cast of characters, and he’s able to mold each different iteration of Blackadder to that time period’s different cast of characters, while still managing to be a pretty big assh*le in each one. (If you haven’t seen BLACKADDER, each season of the show sees the series recast in a different time period from British history.) In this version, Blackadder is the nicest guy in London, and on Christmas Eve everyone comes in and takes advantage of his generosity, leaving him penniless. Atkinson and Tony Robinson play extremely well off each other and the episode’s funny is derived largely from their relationship.

Reason #2: The big name stars. Nearly everyone here is someone you’ll recognize: Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent, Robbie Coltrane … heck even Doctor Who’s Companion Peri (Nicola Bryant) makes an appearance. Double heck, it was co-written by Richard Curtis, who you know as the guy who wrote Love Actually and “Vincent and the Doctor.”

Reason #3: This is a really well-done and executed adaptation that sees the traditional story flipped on its lid. Instead of the Scrooge character being a wretched human being that gets set straight by the Ghosts of Christmas, the Scrooge character (Blackadder) is actually the nicest guy in London. Everyone takes advantage of him, and his yearly profits of seventeen pounds and one penny walk out the door in donations on Christmas Eve. Heck, even his Christmas bird and bowl of nuts get taken away from him.

Blackadder doesn’t mind, though, as he puts a positive spin on everything. He heads to bed and he’s visited by the Spirit of Christmas (Robbie Coltrane), who just wants to pop in and pop out because Blackadder is such a nice guy there’s nothing to show him. Blackadder convinces the Spirit to do the whole deal, so he shows him scenes from the past. We see the series versions of Blackadder, and the Christmas Blackadder sees how his ancestors were rather reprehensible. Instead of thinking better of himself, however, he begins to admire them. As awful as his ancestors are, they weren’t taken advantage of the way Christmas Blackadder has been abused by the locals.

The Spirit of Christmas is horrified and doesn’t want to show Blackadder the future, but he relents and does. In one version of the future, Christmas Blackadder becomes this super space-faring bad ass; in the version where he continues to be nice, he becomes the sidekick.

So he decides to become a dick, and ends up blowing his opportunity to gain a fortune and a royal title from Queen Vic.

It’s a great inversion of the original tale, and makes for a satisfying final twist to a very satisfying special.

Be sure to check out the Holiday Review Index for all the Holiday-themed reviews to be found at Atomic Anxiety.

SCROOGED: I’m Sure Charles Dickens Would Have Wanted to See Her Nipples

Scrooged (1988) – Directed by Richard Donner – Starring Bill Murray, Karen Allen, John Forsythe, Bobcat Goldthwait, Carol Kane, David Johansen, Robert Mitchum, Alfre Woodard, John Glover, Jamie Farr, Buddy Hackett, and Brian Doyle Murray.

There are lots of adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but none of them scream the 1980s as loud as SCROOGED. Bill Murray, Karen Allen, John Forsythe, Bobcat Goldthwait, the Buster Poindexter guy, and the Solid Gold dancers all had a big decade, and they all come together in a rather entertaining comedy about a TV executive producing a live Christmas Carol broadcast who simultaneously has a Christmas Carol experience himself.

Frank Cross (Murray) is a complete dick, and runs his network like his own personal kingdom, despite the fact that it’s Robert Mitchum’s kingdom. He hates Christmas, hates subordinates, and hates himself. He drinks a lot and insults and bullies everyone he comes across. What’s nice about Murray playing the Scrooge character is his relative youth. Frank Cross isn’t a man at the end of his life, but in the middle of it. Ebeneezer not only knows he’s a jerk, but has suffered a lifetime of becoming increasingly miserable and isolated so his pump has been primed for a change. Cross is half his life from that moment; even though he’s been separated from his One True Love, Claire (Karen Allen), Frank is still a man climbing the social and economic ladder.

Despite being set in the present and despite not using the names of the Dickens’ characters, SCROOGED follows the general pattern of A Christmas Carol pretty closely – Frank is visited by a ghost of an ex-collegae, Lew (Forsythe), who warns him that three ghosts will visit him this night. The Ghosts come in expected order, and Frank is . The Ghost of Christmas Past (Johansen) is an incredible boor and cloaks himself in the garb of a taxi driver. (Not THE Taxi Driver, but a taxi driver.) As much as I dislike this character, the decision to start Frank off with a gruff ghost is a good one, as Frank needs someone who’s totally self-assured and doesn’t depend on him for anything. That’s the Ghost of Christmas Past – unshaven, bad teeth, cackling laugh … this is nearly as far out of Frank’s comfort zone as you can get. The connection between Past and Frank’s early days is pretty clear; Past represents the working class life Frank left behind. They witness Frank’s dad (Brian Doyle Murray) giving him a cut of meat for Christmas and while the ghost is appalled, Frank defends his father’s act as a good lesson.

There’s always a lot of weight placed on the Christmas Past ghost, as his visitation creates the back story for Scrooge. Past shows Frank his childhood, his early days as a low-level employee at the TV network’s Christmas party, happy times with Claire, and their eventual break-up, when Frank chooses his career (a dinner date with his boss, Lew) over dinner with their friends. Claire is heartbroken, but Frank is too career-obsessed to care. That they have this chat as Frank is in costume, playing Frisbee the Dog on a kid’s show, only serves to enforce the disconnect between Frank and Claire. It’s an absurd moment but it’s played perfectly straight by Allen and Murray.

And let’s just stop here for a moment to appreciate how awesome Karen Allen is as an actress. She’s plays off Murray as effortlessly and perfectly here as she does with Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Peter Reigert in Animal House, and Jeff Bridges in Starman. (Though, admittedly, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen that last one – feel free to call me out if I’m off-base.) All four of those actors require a different set of skills from Allen, and she usually only has a small amount of scenes to put those skills into action.

Christmas Past is followed by Christmas Present (Carol Kane), who continually smacks Frank around. She takes Frank to visit his brother James (John Murray), replacing the traditional role of nephew. The result plays the same, however; his brother laments Frank’s absence from his life and gets a trivia question about Gilligan’s Island wrong as Frank watches in disgust. (Not enough people give Dickens credit for his influence on Sherwood Schwartz sitcoms.) We also get a visit to his assistant Grace’s (Alfre Woodward) house, where he discovers that Grace has a kid who hasn’t talked since his father died.

Back to the network studio and we see Frank awaiting the visit of the third ghost as the live broadcast of A Christmas Carol (with Buddy Hackett as Scrooge) begins. Christmas Future gets only a quick appearance, sticking around just long enough to show Frank Grace’s mute son holed up in a mental institution and his own funeral.

Frank decides to change and his born again sequence is one of the greats. Murray plays it as much like a man coming off the rails as a man with a new focus in his life, really doing an outstanding job of walking that thin line between inspired and insane. He interrupts the live broadcast of A Christmas Carol to deliver a heart-felt plea for people to connect with their families. It’s a really great, really fresh version of the story, and Murray is completely convincing as a man unburdened by the weight he wouldn’t even admit he was carrying.

There’s plenty of great supporting work turned in by Bobcat Goldthwait, Robert Mitchum, and John Glover, yet for all of this, SCROOGED is merely a good movie and not a great one. One of the reasons why Scrooge is such a great character is because he is at the end of his life. He’s old, isolated, and bitter, and his trip with the ghosts reveals a man who’s life has gone wrong, and whose conversion speaks to the idea that it’s never too late to change. Frank Cross, on the other hand, is an unlikable lout in the middle of his life’s journey, drunk with power and not yet isolated from the world, and as great as Murray is, his descents into weepy territory don’t carry any weight to it. I’m not sure whether to laugh at the absurdity of his waterworks or feel empathy for his realizations.

I like SCROOGED but this was the first time I’d ever watched the entire movie in one piece; I enjoyed Donner’s film but I can’t say I feel any remorse at not having watched it previous to now. It’s a good movie but it’s ultimately a diversion rather than a film that sticks with me.

Be sure to check out the Holiday Review Index for all the Holiday-themed reviews to be found at Atomic Anxiety.

DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL: The Ghost of Animated Christmas Performance Capture

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) – Directed by Robert Zemeckis – Starring Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Cary Elwes, Sammi Hanratty, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn, Ryan Ochoa, and Molly C. Quinn.

When I watched Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol the other night and wasn’t remotely moved by it, I began to wonder if maybe I’d hit my limit on adaptations of Charles Dickens’ classic. Combine this with my general dislike of Jim Carrey and my general dislike of performance capture and my hopes weren’t too high for DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL adaptation to win me over. In fact, I only watched it because Netflix had it streaming and I wanted something playing in the background while I wrote the review for Love Actually.

It was to my incredible surprise that by the time Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman) had threatened and warned Ebeneezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) about what his future held for him I was totally engrossed in the film, and by the time it ended I was willing to rank DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL among my favorite adaptations of Dickens’ tale.

This is a prime example of why I like doing these themed months; without spending the month purposely looking for holiday films to watch I wouldn’t bother with a film starring Jim Carrey and made with performance capture, especially when there are other versions of this story that I wanted to see more. (Like Scrooged. How I managed to go all this time without seeing Scrooged is beyond me, but it’s an oversight that’s since been corrected. Expect it to be the next film reviewed.) But because I’m on the lookout for holiday movies this month and because it was streaming on Netflix I’ve found a great film to add to the holiday rotation. DISNEY’S adaptation strikes the perfect balance between being a kid’s movie and an adult’s movie, and Robert Zemeckis has wrung seemingly every bit of humor, fright, and action possible out of this story.

But did it have to be performance capture?

Performance capture is just generally pretty creepy-looking. I enjoyed Zemeckis’ previous movies made with this technique (The Polar Express, Beowulf), but my enjoyment was in spite of the performance capture and not enhanced by it. After seeing several movies made with this technique now, I still have to wonder … why? It’s not as good as live-action, it’s not as good as hand-drawn animation, and it’s not as good as CGI. It just looks … off. If the movie is good I’ll suffer through it, but it’s usually not a pleasant watch.

It’s to Zemeckis’ credit that A CHRISTMAS CAROL is the best performance capture I’ve seen; it looks good enough that I actually didn’t mind watching most of it. I’m not sure why most of the actors play multiple roles (Carrey is not only Scrooge, but all of the Ghosts of Christmas; Oldman is Bob Cratchit, Jacob Marley, and Tiny Tim) except maybe to save some cash for the studio, but it can be a bit disconcerting to see vaguely familiar faces popping up on multiple bodies.

What helps keep things righted, however, is that Zemeckis just might have done the best job in any Christmas Carol adaptation of making London look interesting.

Because honestly, mid-nineteenth century London normally looks like a wet fart – stinky, soggy, and brown.

That’s nothing against the city, but a city that big from that era was awash in greys, browns, and blacks. When you combine that with the general dreary tone of the story, there’s not a lot of room for color in A Christmas Carol, but Zemeckis has done a masterful job of infusing Scrooge’s adventure with a real vibrancy. This adaptation moves, and it moves in loads of color. London is still the same drab, dreary place it always is, but Zemeckis has infused every possible aspect of the story that he can with color and movement.

Zemeckis wisely builds off the cold, muted, dull colors of London by filling out the palette with the Ghosts. As the film progresses, Zemeckis brings more and more color into the film as the action picks up. The Ghost of Christmas Past, for instance, is a flickering, white candle person, while the Ghost of Christmas Present is a big, fat redhead. The first is wispy and quiet while the second is rotund and loud. By the time we get to the Ghost of Christmas Future, Zemeckis slams the palette all the way back down with the midnight black ghost and his nightmarish horses.

There’s plenty of action, too. I absolutely love the way the film treats the ghostly visions, with Scrooge’s contemporary environment often dissolving to reveal the vision. The best example of this comes with the Ghost of Christmas Present as the floor of their ornate room dissolves to reveal the city of London. The room goes swooping over the city, giving us a wonderful and rich vision of the bright, warm room and the harsh, cold city. As creepy as the human characters can be to look at, the environments look amazing.

As for the story itself, it’s A Christmas Carol, and importantly, Zemeckis keeps Carrey contained inside his characters. Maybe Carrey’s at a point in his career where he just can’t go crazy for the entire shoot, or maybe the performance capture process forces him to play roles rather than allowing his roles to become a Carrey caricature. Whatever the case, he’s rarely been better than he is as Scrooge. He’s so good you rarely notice it’s him, whereas the Past and Present Ghosts see Carrey’s features shine through. I like how Zemeckis decides to have Scrooge spend Christmas dinner with his nephew, even if the performance capture version of Colin Firth is creepy to look at.

And that’s what it really comes down to with DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL – it’s a really good adaptation that is, at times, really creepy to look at. It’s a bit disconcerting to see Carrey’s and Oldman’s image shining through so many characters, but the story is really well told, and it’s perfectly paced. Even with the creepiness of performance capture, this is a gorgeous film to watch and completely engaging from start to finish.

Be sure to check out the Holiday Review Index for all the Holiday-themed reviews to be found at Atomic Anxiety.