Christmas is coming soon, and it’s Monday Update, blitheringly unaware of your calendar! Or maybe not.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas – Boy, am I a sucker for Jim Carrey movies!
I know a lot of people do NOT like this film. At release, it came with mixed reviews but rolled in the money. Maybe that was on the brand name, but The Cat in the Hat did terribly, so maybe not/ Mostly, this relies on you having a vague notion of the original book or animated short, as it’s really, REALLY light on what I’d call “plot”. It’s hilarious, and dumb, and sometimes I have no idea why they tried to make a live-action version of this story. It doesn’t work as a full-length feature with the same message as the original. That’s not a terrible mishap, though! As a vehicle for Jim Carrey to act like he’s having a borderline psychotic break in nearly every scene (with that level of makeup, you might find yourself in the same situation). Thus, it becomes its own terribly-mangled Ron Howard-directed (I was surprised too!) beast that entertains in spite of the source material.
To get to movie length, additions had to be made. Those additions aren’t very amazing except as the butt of jokes. And making Cindy into a character…meh. It doesn’t really DO anything for the whole structure. You know – Grinch hates Christmas, so he steals it and then finds out that Christmas doesn’t come from a store. It means a little bit more. But here, it just means a little too much exposition and “I don’t get whether PRESENTS are the whole of Christmas”. Seriously, does a four year old have the understanding or comprehend the complexities of that existential issue? Also, setting up a weird love triangle with the Grinch presents its own host of problems, not the least of which is “how are Whos born”, and “why would anyone want to date a giant green and fat hairy humanoid creature?” The suspension of disbelief this movie would have required to be successful at these things is staggering.
Still, you (and the millions of other people who made this the second highest grossing Christmas movie ever (I am not joking, look it up (does Home Alone even count as a “Christmas” movie? I debate that))) aren’t REALLY here for that spreading of Christmas cheer for everyone to hear. No, you just want to see some silly movie parodies, dumb Christmas related jokes, the Grinch cross-dressing (oh, that’s not what it’s called anymore, is it?), and all other sorts of things that you’d expect in a Jim Carrey-style film. Actually, watching this a decade later makes many of the lines stand in stark relief to our current cultural paradigm – I don’t think you could say SOME things in the movie at all, let alone in something rated PG. Times change, I suppose. Glad to have a childhood like that, to be quite honest.
Overall, then, if you’re willing to just sit there, understand what you’re about to experience, and accept that this isn’t “the Seuss Grinch” and you’ll no doubt have a barrel of laughs. Unless you don’t like Jim Carrey, in which case we have nothing to discuss.
The Hobbit (Film) – In a surprise to all, the movie’s rather good. The critics don’t agree, obviously, but they’re comparing the film to Lord of the Rings. That might be all well and good from a critical perspective – after all, it’s Tolkien stuff – but the Hobbit seems an entirely different style. You’ll notice there’s a lack of extreme violence. There’s definitely no spurting or anything of the sort, and the adventure’s decidedly light-hearted. Slapstick humor abounds, and I would call it a rollicking good time.
Yet, at the same time, we have the problem of the trilogy. Why is this a trilogy? Because of additional material taken from various sources, including the Appendices and other information we know of Middle Earth. This widens the scope of the film, making it appear much grander and try for loftier heights than the original 1937 book. Does this improve the original? I quite like the Hobbit: it’s just a fun adventure with no pretensions of greater meanings. It’s just a fun book.
I guess that’s an unfair question. The original’s a pure children’s story which later became the prequel to a series of exhaustive books. Rather, it’s more: what is the intention of Peter Jackson in making this trilogy (if not just MONEY MONEY MONEY). The answer, from my perspective, seems to be a retelling of Lord of the Rings in a different key. There’s hundreds of glancing thematic references to that previous trilogy in both characterization, the common themes of friendship and working together. Also, not being racist helps everyone out – you know, all the races band together to defend their homeland sounds pretty familiar to me! The dwarves, not just money-grubbing guys, become a little more heroic and grand befitting their place as protagonists. Parts of the story become wholesale inventions at times to play up these changes, which ends up further changing the tone of the story from its origins.
So, did I like it? Heck yeah! Are you kidding me? Who doesn’t like these things? I don’t even really like the books, but I LOVE the movies. I am weird, yes. And the Hobbit, really, is just a fun movie.
A more informative take: it’s a different film from the Lord of the Rings, and that’s as it should be. It totally shows Jackson borrowing from Jackson, but he steals from his best material here with all the storytelling beats you’ve come to expect from these works. It’s a movie setting the stage for the next film, and in that sense it’s quite a success. Like Fellowship before it, it doesn’t even hint at what Jackson will do with the next few films, and I’m all for the adventure. Something movies me about these films that few others can, and I’m just happy to see more stuff in this universe.
Perhaps it’s just that we’ve seen this stuff before, but now this style’s become quintessential Middle Earth in cinema form, so it’s not like you can escape it.
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That’s Monday Update, and more stuff about games/art/violence in the works. In a positive way!
