and
I’m not totally up to snuff, or I’m suffering from writer’s block, or my hands have finally caught up to the crap my brain has come up with, so here’s a short article I managed to come up with as my gift to all of you you. No, you can’t return it.
Well it’s that time of year again folks: Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice/Festivus. A time of festivity and joy, where families and friends gather together to enjoy fine foods, exchange gifts with one another, bask in the glow of each other’s company and attempt to not be utterly rancid dicks to each other for at least 24 hours. Or, if you’re the kind of miserable dick that I sometimes tend to be, it’s a disgusting display of consumerism and greed that long since killed any sense of goodwill that the season originally had and replaced it with high suicide rates and naked opportunism. Mostly however, I tend to see Christmas and the assorted other holidays much in the same way I see the life of Batman: Full of childhood trauma, often times drifts into dark places, but ultimately a force for good. If you see any clowns at your Christmas party though, you get the fuck out of there. No good can come of it.
Speaking of movies, Christmas is the one holiday (aside from Halloween) big enough to have it’s own film hype train surrounding it, like a festive Flava Flav. Most of them are, of course, schmaltzy three dollar productions shat out by the Hallmark Channel or ABC to appease moms and people with a high saccharine tolerance, but there are a few gems that really justify the concept of a Christmas movie. The most famous is easily It’s A Wonderful Life (which actually helped to destroy Frank Capra’s film career), but you also have A Miracle on 34th Street, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Nightmare Before Christmas, Home Alone, Rudolf and the other Rankin-Bass animated films, A Christmas Story and probably others that I’ve forgotten or that you the reader care more about. It’s no easy task creating an iconic Christmas movie, and I’m not talking about a movie that is just set on Christmas either. You have to take that same message of peace and love that every other X-mas movie out there is trying to push and twist it just enough that it stands apart from the others without alienating itself from the message it’s meant to represent. Many have tried to create a Christmas movie that will be remembered throughout the ages, and they all been washed away into the great yuletide sea. Does Scrooged, the film I’ve decided to write about this time, share a similar fate to it’s brethren? We shall see.
We shall see.
Directed by one Mr. Richard Donner, whom you might recall from such films as Superman, The Goonies, The Omen and the Lethal Weapon series, Scrooged is a slick 80s take on the classic Christmas Carol story by Charles Dickens, which was about a old rich bastard who is tortured by three ghosts on Christmas Eve into being charitable in case you can’t check wikipedia for some reason. SNL alum and comedic legend Bill Murray plays Francis Xavier Cross, a rich young bastard who just so happens to be the president of the IBC television network, which is about to broadcast an international extravaganza edition of ‘Scrooge’, as they call it. Frank is a miserable dick, as you might expect, whose relentless drive upwards has alienated himself from everyone around him, including his brother James, assistant Grace (with requisite ailing child, although he’s not so much dying of some sort of super-polio as he is the strong silent type), and his former lover and love interest, Claire Phillips. One night, Frank is visited by his old business partner Lou Hayward, who warns him of continuing down the path he’s made for himself so far, and drops the truth bomb: Frank will be visited by three ghosts, who will attempt to show him the error of his ways, or else. You can probably guess what happens from there.
Predictable though it may be, there are a lot of good points to Scrooged. It’s funny for one, as you might expect from a film that counts Bill Murray, Bobcat Goldthwait amongst it cast. Not quite laugh out funny in my opinion, except for perhaps a few moments with in Ghost of Christmas Present, but there’s a low simmering humour that persists throughout the film. I also quite like the special effects, especially the Ghost of Christmas Future moments (is this always where the budget goes in these types of stories?), which are fantastical without being overblown. It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed about the Donner films that I’ve seen; they’re fantastical without being full-on fantasy, grounded without mulling about in hard-nosed reality. Scrooged is a bit too goofy to work out as well as Superman in that regard, but it also feels like a film that is having fun being a film, and isn’t that what we as an audience like to see? I mean, that’s why Guardians of the Galaxy made 80 trillion dollars right? Because it was fun?
Hopefully that was one coherent paragraph.
The major complaint I have with this movie also happens to be its major strength: that of it’s lead actor, Bill Murray. Now I love Bill Murray as much as the next guy, and he’s been in plenty of films that I consider the pinnacle of comedy, but that’s kind of the problem. Frank Cross is supposed to be this caustic, self-serving prick, the Ebenezer Scrooge of Scrooged and I can’t see Bill Murray in that role. A smug jerk sure, the sarcastic asshole that you can’t help but like, but a Dickensian heel? No. In fact, whenever you see Bill Murray trying to lay down the Scrooge, it just comes off as forced and unnatural, like he’s trying to take the piss out the role. Which is fine on some levels of course, you know what you were buying into with Murray in the 80s, but it undercuts the more dramatic moments of the film and (once again) makes those scenes come off as unnatural. Even if I had never seen a Murray-centric film before, I can’t buy him as an evil boss, or really anything other than a guy who has mastered the art of the snark. Which is probably why he did The Razor’s Edge and all those Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch movies, to prove he had acting chops and shut fuckers like me up.
So is Scrooged worthy of being considered a Christmas classic? Eh, could be. It’s got enough black humor and jokes for the adults while not being too dark for kids to enjoy, much like The Goonies, which I would guess classifies it as ‘fun for the whole family’. It’s got a little bit of happy, a dash of sad, and it ends on the positive message that you want out of a Christmas movie. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but I certainly wouldn’t have a problem placing it within the Christmas movie rotation next time winter rolls around. Try it out for yourself, maybe you’ll feel the same way.
Result: Recommended
No comments:
Post a Comment