The Pagemaster

Joe Johnston, Maurice Hunt, 1994
Rotten Tomatoes score: 18%

When I reviewed Richie Rich about two years ago, I noted that Macaulay Culkin won a Razzie in 1994 in recognition of his performances in three movies: Richie Rich, Getting Even with Dad, and this one. That was an underrated movie, but all I had to say at the time about The Pagemaster was, "the less said the better."

Well, far be it from me to leave well enough alone.

This was a foray into the style of movie-making that combined live action and animated content, but unlike Roger Rabbit, this movie doesn't combine the animated and real-life characters in the same scene. Instead, it begins as a live-action movie, but then switches to animation after the first act.

I guess that was supposed to be enough of a gimmick to draw you in, because the story certainly wasn't worth telling. But you wouldn't know that to look at the Wikipedia article, a huge portion of which is given over to describing a dispute amongst the writers, the production staff, the studio, and the Writers' Guild of America over who was entitled to take credit for this masterpiece.

Macaulay Culkin plays Richard, a boy so pathologically anxious that he's too afraid to participate in such harmless pursuits as doing dangerous bike stunts without a helmet at a construction site. What a loser! His dad, Ed Begley Jr., wants him to toughen up, so he deploys him on a mission to buy nails at the neighborhood hardware store during a thunderstorm. Amazingly, this turns out to be a bad idea, and Richard has to take shelter in a local library.

It's one of those gigantic, cavernous libraries with multi-million-dollar frescoes painted on rotunda ceilings, no patrons, and a mysterious librarian (Christopher Lloyd) who insists on doling out library cards to every person who wanders in just to get out of the rain. Richard slips on some water and falls headfirst on the stone floor, rendering him unconscious.

Don't worry, this is the fun kind of concussion, the kind that causes you to have mysterious adventures through animated alternate realities. Richard suddenly finds himself in a cartoon world (he is even aware of the fact that he is now a drawing, which I found somehow strange). He is greeted by the Pagemaster (voice of Christopher Lloyd), who tells him about the jaw-droppingly generic journey he's about to embark on to reach the library exit.

Richard makes three new friends on his voyage, and they're all books: Adventure (voice of Patrick Stewart), Fantasy (voice of Whoopi Goldberg), and Horror (voice of Frank Welker). So there you have it—this is one of those inane kids' movies that tries to teach you the joy of childhood literacy by dramatizing bland, uninspired interpretations of Victorian literature.

Our animated heroes venture into the secret laboratory of Dr. Jekyll (Leonard Nimoy), who immediately transforms himself into Mr. Hyde. Fleeing Mr. Hyde's obligatory wrath, they cast off to sea, where they almost instantly come face-to-face with Moby-Dick and the crew pursuing him. Moments later, they wash ashore on a desert island, and—

I'm going to stop here and just list the remaining literary works that are referenced: Treasure Island, Gulliver's Travels, some generic dragon story, Jack and the Beanstalk.

Richard then reaches the exit, is congratulated for his bravery by the Pagemaster, and returns to the real world, where he has gained the courage necessary to ride his bicycle over dangerous ramps in inclement weather and sleep in a ramshackle treehouse. End of movie.

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The Pagemaster was in production for three years (which, incidentally, explains why Macaulay looks so much younger here than in Richie Rich). Why did they bother? The DVD even includes a behind the scenes "making of" featurette, hosted by Christopher Lloyd. You can tell he doesn't believe a word he's saying about what a magical experience the movie is.

I remember this kind of drivel being everywhere when I was a kid. We were constantly being told how books can take you to faraway places and how your imagination is your ticket to a new reality. But kids aren't stupid, and they know the difference between books and hallucinogenic drugs. Hearing adults say things like that is just embarrassing.

And what's worst about it is that a lot of these books really are capable of entertaining kids. Treasure Island can be filmed in a way that children will love, as the Muppets proved. But it takes more than just a half-assed 45-second sequence depicting one or two of the characters. The literary vignettes in this movie have all the dramatic sophistication of a Sunny D commercial.

That might not matter if the movie itself had any semblance of a story. But nothing happens in it. Once you take out the homages to public domain classics, all that's left is a story about a nervous child who suffers a head injury.

Heavyweights

Stephen Brill, 1995
Rotten Tomatoes score: 29%

What better plot can you imagine for a family feature than a story about overweight children who commit aggravated kidnapping, aided and abetted by three ostensibly responsible adults?

It's all right, I'll give you time to think.

Heavyweights is an odd film, one of a few from its era that straddles the nostalgia line between dopey kids' movie and mid-90s counterculture talisman. Judd Apatow co-wrote it, it was one of Ben Stiller's early starring roles, and Paul Feig (creator of Freaks and Geeks) appears in it. So does Jeffrey Tambor. Even Tim Blake Nelson (from O Brother, Where Art Thou?) has a pointless cameo as a guy who apparently does door-to-door recruiting for a summer camp.

It also reunited the writer and many of the cast members of the Mighty Ducks trilogy, including Kenan Thompson and Goldberg.

Gerry Garner is a husky, sarcastic kid who gets no respect. When his parents send him off to a weight loss camp, he balks at the idea of spending the summer with "a bunch of fat loads." But once he arrives at Camp Hope, his attitude changes. The other big-boned youngsters are nice to him, and counselor Pat is a cool role model who bears a strangely close resemblance to Gerry, to the point that you keep wondering if he's going to turn out to be his real dad.

(He's not.)

But then comes the bad news. The kindly, encouraging camp owners have come upon hard times and filed chapter 9 bankruptcy. (Will their faces ever be red when they discover chapter 9 is only for municipalities.) The camp has been sold to wannabe fitness celebrity Tony Perkis (Ben Stiller), who is "looking forward to interacting with children for the first time" and plans to put the kids in an info-mercial. Gone are the fun camp pastimes, replaced by grueling "Perki-cising" sessions and co-ed dance parties designed for the sole purpose of humiliation.

Not only that, but the campers are told they will be forced to compete in the Apache Relay, an annual athletic contest against the jocks from Camp MVP across the lake. But if this is an annual source of misery, does that mean the kind-hearted former camp owners made the kids participate in previous summers? I'll let you ponder that in the quiet of your study.

When Uncle Tony discovers that the campers have not been losing weight, he reacts by ordering them on a 20-mile hike. The counselors express entirely well-founded concerns, so they all forbid the children to participate in this obviously dangerous activity, and that's the end of the movie.

No, sorry, I was reading the alternate version of the script where not every adult on the planet earth is totally useless. In the real movie, Tony shouts down the voices of reason and the pushover counselors give up immediately.

During the criminally negligent forced hiking activity, the boys hatch a plan to get the upper hand. They set a cartoon booby-trap for Uncle Tony, trap him in a hole, and somehow transport him back to camp, where they lock him in a cage that they have taken the grotesque extra step of electrifying with a bug zapper. When the counselors discover this Lord of the Flies situation, they instantly free Tony, forbid him to interact with the children anymore, call everyone's parents, and recommend the children seek psychiatric care. So that was Heavyweights—

Whoops, there I go again. No, actually the adults decide that unlawful imprisonment is the way to go, so they leave Tony in the cage and take over the camp. After the kids (and Paul Feig) slather themselves in chocolate syrup and spend the night outside in the grass, Pat takes charge and announces that every eleven-year-old camper is now in charge of his own diet. (What could go wrong?) When Parents' Day rolls around, the parents are horrified to learn how badly Tony has been treating the kids, though no one sees fit to mention that he is being detained in an electrified chicken-wire cage in the adjacent building.

Tony's dad (also played by Ben Stiller) is called in to shut the camp down, but all the kids say they'd rather stay on, and Pat is elected to take over. Pat says he's been at Camp Hope for 18 years, and earlier in the movie he said he's been coming every year since he was ten. Are we supposed to believe that this man

is 28? He was actually 36.

So Pat helps the kids prepare to take on Camp Apache or whatever I said it was called in the annual relay games. Fortunately for the Camp Hope team, the games include such events as balloon-shaving and solving math equations in an impossibly short time, subjects at which the boys just so happen to excel.

The final event is a go-kart race. The race begins with a pistol start, but wouldn't that defeat the purpose of a relay competition? What's the point of all the other events if you can't get a head-start on the final race? (Did you ever use to watch Nickelodeon Guts? Let's not get into that.)

Gerry wins the race with the help of an electric fan that launches him into the air and on top of the other kid's go-kart, which (1) would never work; (2) would surely be against the rules; and (3) would have killed the other racer if he hadn't inexplicably had a roof over the top of his kart.

So there you have it. Gerry has had the best damn summer of his life (allowing him to say the D-word), and all the kids have learned a lesson about... self-esteem, I guess. Or self-confidence? Whichever.

Did you know...?

1. In the scene where Uncle Tony uncovers the secret junk-food stash, I always thought it looked funny when Goldberg makes the "Seymour Butts" joke, as if the line was dubbed over in post-production. Sure enough, it was. The original line was quite a bit more risqué—I shall not repeat it here—and would probably have led to a PG-13 rating.

2. In the dance scene, watch carefully and you'll notice that several of the child actors are apparently sharing costumes. There's at least one other kid dressed exactly like Gerry, and two other actors are wearing identical t-shirts. My only theory is that they needed substitute kids due to work-hour limitations, and I guess there were only so many Les Mis shirts to be had.

The Santa Clause 2

Michael Lembeck, 2002
Rotten Tomatoes score: 55%

After two reviews in a row of belated sequels, why break the streak?

Eight years after the original The Santa Clause, which begat a slew of imitators and inaugurated a whole new generation of family Christmas movies, they finally got around to making a sequel. But this time around it is a strictly G-rated affair, and the change of tone is pretty striking—the reindeer are now goofy cartoon characters, Tim Allen's trademark wit has lost its edge, and David Krumholtz as boss elf Bernard acts like he's had a lobotomy. Corniest of all, Scott and the elves are joined in this sequel by a host of other "legendary figures", including Mother Nature, Father Time (curiously played by Peter Boyle, who was Scott Calvin's boss in the first film), and the Tooth Fairy, whose macho pride Scott flatters by renaming him "the Molinator."

It's Bernard, assisted by his henchman Curtis (Spencer Breslin), who breaks the bad news to Scott Calvin. It turns out the Santa Clause that took effect when he first put on the red suit has an additional rider: If Scott isn't married by Christmas Day, he will lose his infinite power. Does this mean that every past Santa Claus has been married? Did Scott's clumsy predecessor leave behind a mourning widow when he fell off that roof? If so, where is she?

Well, let's immediately dismiss all those concerns from our consciousness, because Scott has a second problem on his plate. His son Charlie (played by the same kid from the first movie, but looking totally different) has become a juvenile delinquent. Now Scott must travel to his unidentified home town (Chicago maybe?) to put Charlie back on the straight and narrow and, if possible, arrange a shotgun wedding for himself while he's at it.

Conveniently, the target of Charlie's misbehavior happens to be the beautiful, unattached female principal of his high school (Elizabeth Mitchell). Principal Carol Newman is so stodgy and no-nonsense that she has outlawed all holiday decorations in the school—not out of any commitment to secularism, but just to be a Grinch. Clearly there is room here for her to undergo a total change of character and fall for Scott, but that will have to wait until he has gone through a series of disastrous blind dates (including Molly Shannon working very hard to be obnoxious and succeeding tremendously).

Meanwhile, Scott spends his downtime trying to reconnect with his son. Apparently, Charlie is frustrated by the burden of keeping Scott's true identity a secret; the rest of the world believes that Scott lives and works in Canada. Wait a minute, why is this necessary? I don't understand why Santa Claus has to have a secret identity. He's not Batman. What would be the problem if Charlie's friends knew his father was Santa? And besides, at the end of the first movie the whole town (or at least the whole police force) found out about it.

And what has been happening at the North Pole all this time? Bernard and Curtis have been hard at work filling the movie's run-time by inventing a robotic Santa Claus to stand in for Scott during his absence. I don't know if they're afraid the other elves are fomenting revolution or something, but apparently they are all stupid enough to believe this plastic being is the real Scott. Anyway, do you remember the episode of Futurama where there's a robotic Santa Claus who becomes a tyrant and terrorizes people at Christmas? Well, the same thing happens here, only there are no explosions, and John Goodman is not involved.

Back in the real world, Scott discovers that his magical powers are gradually fading as he spends time among mere mortals, so he has started to look more and more like Tim Allen. Principal Carol notices the difference, but she seems rather unfazed by the fact that Scott has lost fifty pounds overnight. Fortunately, Scott has just enough magic left to liven up a faculty Christmas party by miraculously materializing nostalgic vintage children's toys for the attendees. Slowly, it dawns on Carol that there is something special about Scott, but she can't put her finger on it. (Maybe it was the way he caused it to snow directly above her head, which so few people can do.)

But when Scott tells Carol the truth—that he is Santa Claus and needs to marry her immediately—she has some difficulty accepting it. Unfortunately, that conflict will have to take a back seat, because Curtis has just arrived to tell Scott about the increasingly repressive regime of robot Santa. With no magic left to fly him home, Scott is forced to yank out one of his own teeth (a surprisingly bloodless operation) to summon the Molinator, who obligingly transports him to the North Pole at supersonic speed. Shortly thereafter, Charlie and Carol show up as well, having each sacrificed a tooth to make the trip.

Once the robot Santa is brought to heel, Carol reveals that Charlie has melted her icy heart by uttering some inspirational dialogue. She has now decided to throw caution to the wind, and Mother Nature marries them, Vegas-style, without filling out the proper paperwork. Imagine Carol's surprise when Scott instantaneously transforms back into a 250-pound elderly bearded man before her eyes. (Actually, the credits sequence suggests that Carol herself eventually becomes old thanks to the magic of Christmas, but that will be forgotten by the time part 3 rolls around.)

Not to be left out, Charlie has had a change of heart as well, and he now views his role as Santa's secret-keeper as a blessing rather than a burden. I still object to the whole situation.

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This is a toss-up; I really have no strong feelings. I guess I'll say

Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House

Rod Daniel, 2002
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 24%

Well, here's a low-hanging fruit that deserves more than the one-paragraph treatment I gave it in my Home Alone review in 2012. I called it "despicable," urged readers never to watch it "under any circumstances," and even made sarcastic comments about actors French Stewart and Daniel Stern. That wasn't really fair. Daniel Stern is a reliable character actor, and French Stewart does all he possibly can with the material he has to work with here.

However, I should add that, according to Wikipedia, Daniel Stern refused to appear in this picture, calling it "an insult, total garbage." This quote is unsourced and unverifiable, but what would you have said if they'd asked you to play Marv?

As I mentioned before, this movie was released 10 years after Home Alone 2, but all the characters are played by different, much younger actors. Kevin's enormous family has been reduced to two siblings, Buzz and Megan, who are still bullies. His parents are separated, and his father plans to marry a rich woman named Natalie. Natalie is a decent person who tries her best to be a good stepmother to Kevin, but for some reason we're supposed to view her as a villain.

Fed up with his family as usual, Kevin decides to spend Christmas with dad and Natalie in their capacious mansion. Actually it's more than a mansion; it's a high-tech palace that rivals Smart House. Left with the run of the place during the workday, Kevin enjoys playing with the voice-controlled gadget that controls doors, fireplaces, and showerheads, but the grouchy butler Prescott wishes the little brat would go home. Fortunately, grandmotherly housekeeper Molly is there to look out for him. (In case you're keeping score, no, Kevin is neither at home nor alone.)

But since this is a Home Alone movie, inevitably the Wet Bandits have to make their appearance sooner or later. For some reason, Harry has hung up his crowbar, so instead we get Marv and his loving wife Vera, who scheme to kidnap a crown prince who will be spending Christmas with Natalie. Marv looks and behaves very differently than he did in the old days, and curiously he wears Harry's black stocking cap in every scene. Did the wardrobe department get them mixed up?

You might have thought that the high-tech gadgetry would provide a lot of new opportunities for wacky slapstick sequences involving Marv and Vera, but I guess the writers figured that was too obvious. Instead Kevin thwarts their crimes by bonking them over the head with pots and pans.

Awkwardly, the encounters between Kevin and the Wet Bandits are staggered across a string of clumsy sequences, with the bad guys repeatedly finding new excuses to break into the house and then leave again. First they show up to "get the lay of the land", and Kevin defeats them by turning on all the water in the master bathroom and filling the entire ground floor of the house with six inches of standing water. Unequivocally the best scene in the movie is the one where the bathroom door bursts open and Marv and Vera are carried downstairs on a giant tidal wave that floods the entire house. The first time I saw this, it made me laugh uncontrollably. It's not quite enough to make the movie worth watching, but this is gratuitous property damage straight out of Steve Urkel's playbook, and it is worthy of an encore.

Anyway, when Natalie comes home to eight inches of standing water covering the first floor of her house, she blames Kevin. Kevin insists that the burglars are to blame, but none of the adults believe his story. (And even if they did, I'm not sure this was a reasonable response to a housebreaking.) Meanwhile, Kevin concludes that Prescott must be working for the crooks, since he failed to respond to Kevin's call for help.

The bad guys return during a dinner party, disguised as caterers, hoping to abduct the prince. Unfortunately for them, the prince's flight was delayed, so after another pointless run-in with Kevin, they resolve to break in yet again on Christmas day. When they do, they imprison Kevin and Prescott—who was innocent all along—in the wine cellar. It turns out their inside man was actually Molly, who is Marv's mother. Trapped in the cellar, Kevin uses Prescott's last few minutes of cell phone battery life to call first Buzz and then his mother. When the phone call cuts out, the mother panics and burns rubber to get to Natalie's house. If only there were some simple way to contact professional law enforcement officers during an emergency! Eventually, Kevin and Prescott escape, and a few uninspired pranks later all three Wet Bandits are apprehended.

Once everyone is safe, Kevin's dad reveals that he has decided, purely out of narrative necessity, to leave Natalie and move back in with his family. Even the crown prince, who has finally arrived on the scene, wants to stay with Kevin's family instead of Natalie. Natalie is devastated, but that serves her right for having done absolutely nothing whatsoever to incur anyone's animosity! That'll teach her to be a disfavored love interest!

Kevin brings the entire production to a close by using the voice-control system to cause it to start snowing. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the entire production company laughing at your expense.

Jingle All the Way 2

Alex Zamm, 2014
Rotten Tomatoes score: 30%

I was mildly surprised to discover last year that 1996's Jingle All the Way had suddenly spawned a sequel after eighteen years of well-earned obscurity, and that it starred blue-collar funnyman Daniel Lawrence Whitney (who was born and raised in Nebraska and has never worked for a cable company). I was more surprised, upon finally watching this movie a year after I bought it, to learn that it was produced by WWE Studios, the motion picture division of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Also surprising is the fact that this direct-to-video low-budget sequel actually scored higher on Rotten Tomatoes than the original.

Larry the Cable Guy plays Larry Phillips, a hayseed who may or may not be a cable guy, and who presumably excels at gitting-r-done. Larry lives in a trailer in the woods of North America and enjoys ice fishing with his five-year-old daughter Noel. (The movie was produced in the Vancouver area, known for its damp but mild winters, and seems to take place in equally temperate North Carolina. Apparently Larry and Noel don't mind making the thousand-mile drive to Ontario in a single morning to go ice fishing.)

Noel loves Larry as truly only a naïve child could, but her mother is now married to Victor Baxter, a multi-billionaire box manufacturing mogul. One wonders what Noel's evidently intelligent and attractive mother ever saw in Larry, but if we pause to wonder about that, we may as well also ask why Larry speaks with a cartoon southern drawl while everyone else in his hometown is Canadian. So let's just move on.

Larry resents Victor for his ability to supply Noel with things material, so when he chances upon the tyke's letter to Santa, he sneaks a look to find out if there is anything Noel wants that Victor has not yet provided. It turns out there is: Noel's misspelled letter is hard to decipher, but it appears to say, "I want my family to get Harrison." Larry interprets this cryptic statement as a reference to Harrison the Talking Bear, the most popular children's toy on the market.

Now, in Jingle 1, the sought-after toy was clearly a parody of Power Rangers and other action figures that were the rage in the mid-90s. I'm not sure what they're going for with this talking bear—the closest thing I can remember from real life is Real Talkin' Bubba, but that came out 20 years ago. (If you're old enough to remember Real Talkin' Bubba, I'm sorry for reminding you of it, and if you're not, I dare you to look it up.)

Christmas apparently is still several days away, so Larry is not under the same time pressure as Arnold in the first movie, but every time he comes close to laying his hands on a Harrison Bear, events conspire to thwart him. Eventually, we the audience discover that there really is a conspiracy to stop Larry from buying the doll, and of course Victor is behind it—he has bought every Harrison Bear in town to make sure Larry can't find one. Larry finally puts the pieces together (actually he learns about Victor's scheme from the local news, which seems like a lazy plot device), and sneaks into Victor's warehouse to confront his nemesis.

Faced with scandal now that the town knows he's been hoarding toys, Victor bears his soul to Larry. It turns out that Victor has always envied Larry, the easy-going fun-loving dad, and bought up all the Harrison Bears in a desperate attempt to steal Larry's thunder. This of course comes out of nowhere, but I can't say it's out of character, since Victor was never really given any character traits to begin with. Anyway, Larry and Victor learn to appreciate each other and put aside their differences in record time, after which they placate the townspeople by distributing the stockpiled Harrison Bears to the masses.

On Christmas morning, Larry finally gives Noel her present, and to everyone's astonishment, she is indifferent towards it. It turns out her letter to Santa Claus actually said, "I want my family together as one."

Well, that's just ridiculous.

Lucky Christmas

Gary Yates, 2012
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 14%

We're scraping the bottom of the stocking this time. Notice that that 14% score is an audience rating. As we all know, the audience reviews are usually unrealistically positive, so this is a truly abysmal showing.

This is, of course, a Hallmark original movie. Over the last few years, the Hallmark Channel has become to adults what the Disney Channel once was for children, namely a clearinghouse of inoffensive, inexpensive, incompetent movies produced on the business model of an all-you-can eat buffet: Quantity over quality, drinks are extra, and stay the hell away from the seafood.

Starting around Halloween and continuing until the New Year, Hallmark throws its assembly line into overdrive and produces at least 600 new movies a day, all of them cheesy, family-friendly romantic comedies taking place around Christmas and featuring actors whose names are vaguely familiar. This time out we get Jesse Spano from Saved by the Bell and Lt. Randy Disher from Monk as Holly and Mike.

As always, the female lead is a pretty, likable single mom whose tremendous intelligence and potential are being squelched by her life circumstances. And as always, the male lead is a handsome, likable single man whose foolhardy but non-malicious actions get him into trouble. (I say handsome, but Mike does his best to hide his handsomeness in this film by wearing a hideous House M.D. beard.)

Holly is a chef by trade, but she just can't get together the money she needs to open up a restaurant. Meanwhile, Mike is a highly-educated architect who is stuck doing menial labor in the family business because his uptight brother won't listen to his big ideas. While Holly is lamenting her difficulties with her best friend (a character who never once speaks to anyone else but Holly—is she a ghost?), she fails to realize that Mike is in the same bar with his best friend, the world's biggest chowderhead.

Mike has taken one too many of his sister's snake-oil cold pills, so he passes out at the bar, and his idiot friend has to drive him home. Since the friend's car has been booted by the police for unpaid parking tickets, he decides to "borrow" another car, which just so happens to be Holly's. Now, the idiot friend has no intention of keeping the car, but once he discovers a lottery ticket in the glove compartment, he ropes Mike into a harebrained extortion scheme. Needless to say, the scheme requires Mike to pretend to fall in love with Holly, and now you can see the shape this mess is taking.

You can probably fill in the rest of the blanks for yourself. It involves Holly's horrified revelation that their relationship is a sham, Mike's belated realization that he has fallen in love for real, a lot of ineffectual attempts by Mike to make things right, and a huge number of very prominent references to the Pinewood Derby. (You probably wouldn't have guessed that last one, but man, they sure plug that Pinewood Derby for all its worth.)

Mike attempts to return the lottery ticket, but due to a contrived series of oversights, Holly doesn't find it until the last ten minutes of the movie. The lottery ticket has to be turned in at midnight on Christmas Eve, and Holly finds it two hours before the deadline. But just to manufacture some suspense for the big finale, she then spends an hour and 45 minutes driving around the city searching for Mike to reconcile with him before they cash in the ticket. She finds Mike with just minutes to spare, and then stands and talks to him for an eternity while the clock ticks down. For crying out loud, there's suspense, and then there's just bad writing.

The final shot of the movie is Holly and Max walking into City Hall to redeem the ticket just as the clock strikes twelve. There's a school of thought that holds that leaving a story's outcome to the audience's imagination makes it more satisfying. I have some sympathy for that perspective, but with a movie this bad I don't think it's worth the bother. If they really want to take that strategy, why not just end the movie right after the opening credits?

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Yeah, this is a really bad movie. But 14% from the viewers? That's just appalling.

Unbelievably, but this thing managed to be

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TMoC:

1. The lottery is your secret to a happy life.
Actually, as the state lottery commission informs us, "lottery games are based on chance, and should [not] be played[.]"

2. The Pinewood Derby is an alternate secret to a happy life.
When George Costanza was a Cub Scout, he got stuck on Webelos for three years because he kept losing the Pinewood Derby. Happy Festivus!

The Grinch

Ron Howard, 2000
Rotten Tomatoes score: 53%

I saw this movie in theaters the winter of 2000, and the theatrical poster was the one you see to the left of this paragraph. The title was The Grinch. Then, when the movie came out on video, the title had been expanded to Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. (And that exclamation point is part of the title; I did not type that sentence with any enthusiasm.)

Apart from being an unwieldy mouthful, this train wreck of a title disingenuously implies that the film is a close adaptation of the Dr. Seuss children's book of 1957. I will continue to refer to the Jim Carrey movie as The Grinch, so as to forestall any confusion with the 1966 cartoon, which has exactly the same title.

Another point on the title before moving on: No version of this story is called "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." So stop calling it that.

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This is a difficult movie to review. The book and the cartoon are so nearly perfect that it was risky to even attempt a live-action adaptation.

After all, the story derives its charm from its simplicity: The Grinch is a misanthropic creature who, for no reason at all, hates Christmas and begrudges the people of Whoville their happiness. So senselessly curmudgeonly is the Grinch that he goes to absurd lengths to deprive the Whos of their Christmas presents, thinking he can make them as miserable as he is, but he is redeemed in the end by the revelation that simple companionship is what makes the Whos happy.

Even filling a 26-minute cartoon required a lot of extra material, but fortunately it all took the form of songs and cartoon set-pieces; not a word was added to the story. But you just can't go from 26 minutes to 104 minutes without massively changing the plot. So rather than the inoffensive non-speaking plot devices we're familiar with, the Whos are now an irritating bunch of busybodies and bad neighbors who make the Grinch look like the hero. (I guess he's supposed to be the hero, but why does that mean the Whos have to be so obnoxious?)

As for the Grinch, he's given an unnecessary backstory to explain why he's such a grouch. (His heart is two sizes too small—isn't that enough of an explanation?) Cindy Lou Who has been aged, soap-opera style, from "not more than two" to about six, and her part has expanded as well. Since she's the only really sympathetic character in the movie, this is a welcome change, but her role is limited to having the Wide-Eyed Innocence of a Child and trying to persuade the townspeople that the Grinch is not all bad. (But he is all bad! That's the whole point!)

But I think I'm being unfair. Nothing could have lived up to the original Grinch, so it's only right to evaluate the movie for what it is.

And for what it is, it's all right. Jim Carrey of course steals every scene, and he's exactly what a live-action Grinch should be. He spends about half the movie talking to himself, and these scenes are my favorite because the Whos aren't there. The voice he does sounds similar to Boris Karloff in the cartoon, and just look at him—he looks exactly like the Grinch. (They actually won an Oscar for this make-up, but why do the Whos have tiny rat-noses? Aren't they bugs?)

They did a reasonably good job of making the movie look like a Dr. Seuss book, though not quite as well as in the Nickelodeon show The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss. It certainly has a stylized look, but I could have done without all the intense red and purple lighting; all the nighttime scenes look like they take place in front of a bar in a bad part of town. The music is good, including some new songs, but the best number remains "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," this time sung by the Grinch himself, which is clever and very in-character.

Well, I've been pretty critical of The Grinch, and I was going to say it was overrated, but then at the last minute my icy cold heart grew three sizes. So I guess it's

...but not by much.

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The True Meaning of Christmas is:

1. The joy of Christmas is the company of your fellow rat-nosed bug people.
It will come without packages, boxes, or bags, but according to this movie it will be like pulling teeth towards the end.

2. Just watch the cartoon.
I have to admit, it still gets to me when the Grinch hears a sound rising over the snow...

I'm sorry, I just... talk amongst yourselves.