Christmas (movie) time is here

Hollywood's annual deluge of "prestige" fare continues to draw us to the big screen every December. The studios recognize full well that America's holiday traditions — family gatherings, lights on the house, decorations on the tree — include a visit or two (or three, or five) to the local multiplex. There's no doubt about it: We love watching movies during these festive days of early winter.

Yes, Virginia, tough guy Robert Mitchum starred in one of the sweetest little Christmas
 films ever made, 1949's Holiday Affair. That's Janet Leigh on the left, years before
Alfred Hitchcock would ignite her career in an entirely different way.

Nor is this behavior confined to the big screen; indeed, it's an even bigger deal at home, with friends and families popping corn, nogging eggs and settling onto the couch, often on Christmas Eve and/or New Year's Eve, in order to watch some beloved classics. And, since it is the season, one's thoughts often turn to holiday-themed movies.

We don't get many of those, these days. Christmas movies used to be a Hollywood staple, decades ago; now they're an endangered species. Which is just as well, because most recent efforts have been lamentable, to say the least. I mean, Fred Claus? Seriously?

Tinseltown seems to have lost the ability to deliver a genuinely heartfelt holiday film, confining all such activity to overblown comedies that inevitably land with the disheartening thud of last year's fruitcake. Sentiment is an ugly word in the States these days — except with made-for-TV movies, particularly on the Hallmark Channel, which confuse sentiment with maudlin, slushy treacle — and yet we crave precisely that during the holiday season. What to do?

I addressed this problem back in 2005, finally responding to a request that all film critics get in December: What's the best holiday film? Give us something different to watch this year. I also was bothered by the tendency — then, as now — for Christmas movie lists to exhibit a singular lack of imagination (and cinema history) by citing the same stuff, time after time. And, so, I compiled a list of the all-time best, worst and most eclectic holiday offerings.

The funny thing is — and it proves my contention above — that list hasn't changed much, in nearly a decade. In fact, it changed only once, in 2011, when (finally!) a new film entered the Top 10. No surprise: It came not from Hollywood, but from our British cousins.

Here, then, is where you'll find my current list of go-to holiday movie suggestions. And if you're curious to learn what changed, you'll find the original article here. If you've seen It's a Wonderful Life or Home Alone a few times too many — although I'd argue that isn't possible — these alternatives should be welcome.

Happy viewing!

A Christmas Carol: What the Dickens?

A Christmas Carol (2009) • View trailer for A Christmas Carol
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG, despite considerable dramatic intensity and quite scary scenes
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.6.09
Buy DVD: A Christmas Carol• Buy Blu-Ray: Disney's A Christmas Carol (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo)

Despite the frequently awkward blend of Charles Dickens, Jim Carrey and 21st century computer graphics, director/scripter Robert Zemeckis gets an impressive number of things just right: enough that, at first, we have reason to be optimistic about this rather unusual adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

Sadly, Zemeckis also gets a lot of things disastrously, jaw-droppingly wrong.

Ebenezer Scrooge (sorta-kinda Jim Carrey, right) reluctantly allows the Ghost
of Christmas Present (Carrey again) to begin a journey through London -- a
trip that will reveal painful details about Scrooge's clerk, Bob Cratchit -- in
director Robert Zemeckis' ill-advised CGI adaptation of Charles Dickens'
classic holiday tale.

By the time the Ghost of Christmas Future shows up, you'll wonder if Zemeckis is designing a Disneyland theme park ride, rather than honoring the legacy of the most famous holiday story in recent history.

Zemeckis clearly is fixated by this hybrid animation process — which builds its characters, like the old-fashioned rotoscoping technique, by re-imaging actual people — that he first used in his adaptation of The Polar Express (2004) and then in Beowulf (2007). Although the technology has improved with each film, it remains distracting on many levels.

The core argument is the most basic: If one hires the likes of a Jim Carrey, why not simply use him?

Granted, animation allows a filmmaker the ability to put his "cast" through trials and tribulations that no flesh-and-blood actor ever could attempt, let alone survive. Zemeckis takes advantage of this many, many times during A Christmas Carol, and the simple touches often are the best: a sneer that not even Carrey's malleable features could produce, a disturbingly bony finger beckoning from a distance.

And Scrooge's encounter with the seven-years-dead Marley, late one dark night, is a masterpiece of editing, pacing and dialogue lifted faithfully from Dickens' novella. Unsettling camera angles blend with a truly frightening phantasm to produce an encounter that no man could soon forget. Nor do we.

But then, almost as if drunk with a puppeteer's power, Zemeckis overplays these techniques. Whizzing through the streets of London, passing in and around obstacles inserted to juice up the 3-D "in our face" effects, is breathtaking and exciting. The first time. Even the second time. But Zemeckis repeats this gag over and over and over again, until it becomes both tiresome and quite likely to induce nausea in vertigo-sensitive viewers.

It's an old lesson, and one worth remembering: The mere fact that one possesses the ability to design a dramatic sequence a certain way, doesn't mean that one should over-indulge and yield to it at every opportunity.