charles dickens Tagged Articles at Cinematical

We've all lamented the way that Christmas decorations, candies, and wrapping paper start appearing on store shelves between fake pumpkins and cheesecloth ghosts. In some stores, the Christmas stuff appears as early as July or August. But when it comes to our local multiplex, we're generally safe from holly and plum pudding until it's actually cold outside. Not this year.

Being entertainment fiends, I'm sure that the last week found most of you were tuning into AMC, IFC, and other assorted channels to check out their horror selections. You were also undoubtedly watching your favorite television shows, football teams, and following the World Series. I'll bet that you saw the tv spots for A Christmas Carol around ten times a day. Possibly more than that given all the games. Did you feel a cold chill run down your spine?

I did, and it wasn't caused by a pocky Jim Carrey or the possibility of Robert Zemeckis' mo-cap dead eyes. It was the fact that my jack o'lantern was flickering on my kitchen counter, bell jars of bones were decorating the top of my television, and Shadow of the Vampire was beckoning from my DVR. It was Halloween weekend. Even after October ticked down to its last gasp and we fell back, it was still autumn. It's harvest time. It's heartwrenching drama time, the real start of the Oscar race. It's time for The Road, The Men Who Stare At Goats and the Coens. It is not Christmastime. I don't care what the Three Spirits try to tell me, or whether Tiny Tim wants God to bless us, every one. I'm not going to listen until December 1. Perhaps I'll miss a great 3D thrill ride and the velvet voice of Colin Firth, but I'm not ready for snow and Dickensian morality just yet. Are you?

Readers of this blog are well aware that Mr. Guillermo Del Toro (aka Mr. Awesome Genre Film) is about to spend the next several years helming a pair of Hobbit movies for producer Peter Jackson ... who is certainly no slouch in the action / horror / fantasy department. And we all know that Del Toro has long yearned to do an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness -- which he probably will be doing at Universal some time in the future.

Ah, but there are two words you'll hear a lot regarding Guillermo Del Toro: "Universal" and "future." More specifically, the filmmaker and the studio look to be teaming up for the next two decades! According to one doozy of a Variety article, Uni and Guille will be teaming up for (get this) new versions of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Slaughterhouse-Five*, as well as an adaptation of Dan Simmons' upcoming "alternate reality Charles Dickens" novel Drood! Oh, and he'll also be producing Hater with Mark Steven Johnson and Crimson Peak with Matthew Robbins!

This guy's like the Derek Jeter of genre directors! And frankly, it couldn't happen to a cooler moviemaker. I'll include a few choice quotes after the jump, but you should probably just peruse the whole article for yourself. It actually makes you want to look PAST The Hobbit so you can get a peek at (dear lord) Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein. I get goose bumps just thinking about it.

(* Gotta feel bad for Frank Darabont. He really wants to make this movie.)

Many, many actors have played Ebenezer Scrooge. Not even counting all the various stage productions featuring the likes of Patrick Stewart, the movies and TV alone have brought us dozens, including George C. Scott, Bill Murray, Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Kelsey Grammer, Jack Palance, Jim Backus and Scrooge McDuck. It says a lot, then, that Alastair Sim is widely considered the best Scrooge of them all. And the film that he starred in, Brian Desmond Hurst's Scrooge -- released in 1951 in the U.S. as A Christmas Carol -- is likewise the definitive film adaptation.

Sim is known for this role above all; his only other two roles of note came in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) and Peter Medak's The Ruling Class (1972). For one thing, Sim looks like Scrooge as Dickens might have imagined him; he has a kind of sour, pointy mouth and sunken, dagger-like eyes. His body is stovepipe lanky, and his wiry, white hair flies off in frightening angles. For another, he seems to understand Scrooge at some core level. Rather than a being of pure evil, this Scrooge comes from a place of sadness, loss, anger and regret. In one great scene, Scrooge has left the office on Christmas Eve and stops at a tavern for his meal. He orders more bread, but when he finds out that it will cost extra, he decides against it. His expression after the waiter leaves is nearly broken, crushed, as if that bread might have brought him his final bid at happiness.

I can tell you a thousand things that Scrooged, director Richard Donner's 1988 updating of A Christmas Carol, gets wrong. It features Bobcat Goldthwait, for one example; it's silly and sketchy and has the attention span of a fruit fly, for another. Carol Kane's Ghost of Christmas Present is amusing for a millisecond and annoying for every moment thereafter. The script veers between brilliance and bathos, there's at least four too many sub-plots and the film is littered with those little Donner touches -- left-leaning posters as set dressing, acting in his own film -- that mark Donner as one of the more competent and terrifying hacks of our time.

But there's one thing that Scrooged gets right -- and indeed, it gets that one thing so right, that moment of perfection turns it from a diverting cable standby to compulsory holiday viewing. Mitch Glazer and Michael O'Donoghue's script gives a modern makeover to Dickens's classic story, and also mocks the Scrooge tale even as it re-enacts it. Frank Cross (Bill Murray), the youngest network president in the history of television, is harried and hateful as the holiday approaches; his network's spending $40 million on a live production of A Christmas Carol (which, for some reason, the film calls "Scrooge") that'll run Christmas Eve. The live shoot is going to be a mess: Buddy Hackett's playing Scrooge, and isn't great with his lines, at one point asking in dress rehearsal "Why am I surrounded by these sea urchins?" John Houseman's doing the narration; Mary Lou Retton is playing Tiny Tim. It's going to be horrible. And, most importantly to Frank, profitable.

Film critic Roger Ebert is taking some heat for a piece he wrote comparing Crash to Dickens. Now let, me start out with a confession: I haven't seen Crash. I know, I know, you can flog me with a wet noodle now. It's true, I don't see every single film that comes down the pike. To be honest, I haven't been all that interested in seeing Crash, really. It sounded a bit too Traffic and Nine Lives to me - the whole "group of strangers whose lives intersect in unexpected ways" thing. Ebert's take, though, actually makes me want to see the film.

Ebert argues that if the plot of Crash seems contrived, it's intentionally so. Dickens, he says, used carcicature and coincidence as literary devices to drive stories that shone a light on the social issues of his day, in a fight to bring about change. Characters were as they needed to be; answers appeared when they should; the particular scrap of paper that was needed turned up at just the right moment. Crash, sayeth Ebert, uses the same devices in the same way to drive a story about a relevant social issue of our time - racism.

I can't say yet whether I agree with Ebert's take, but it does put a spin on the film that actually makes me want to see it. If you've seen the film and loved it - or hated it - what do you think of Ebert's analogy? Is Crash a film of Dickensian proportions? Or is it just so much contrived hot air unworthy of its Oscar nods?