This month two anticipated films were released: A Christmas Carol, featuring Jim Carey and the end of the world movie, 2012. One movie is worth seeing, while the other is not deserving of $7.Here is what Steven D. Greydanus at Decent Films Guide has to say about them:
2012
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2012 is Emmerich at his most existential — and his most laughable. I don’t mean only the premise, which blends silly technobabble about solar flares and neutrinos with a few actual science facts (like the volcanic hotspot under Yellowstone) and a concatenation of New Age anxieties around the year 2012 supposedly connected to the ancient Mayan calendar, in roughly the same way that the Heaven’s Gate cult’s anxieties around the Hale-Bopp comet were connected to the Bible.
Nor do I mean the jaw-dropping set pieces, which go way beyond conventional action-movie impossibilities like outrunning fireballs. In two of the movie’s best scenes, the heroes race through a disintegrating landscape, literally riding the event horizon of a rolling cataclysm consuming the earth directly under their vehicles’ wheels. Crumbling buildings, tumbling vehicles and heaving shelves of rock and earth extend the crisis into four dimensions. Whether action movies should aspire to the condition of theme-park rides is highly debatable, but they do, and the set pieces in 2012 set a new standard for what is possible in this respect.
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A Christmas Carol
The most surprising thing, arguably, is the soundtrack. Not the official track listing offered by Walt Disney Records: a lineup of themes, composed by Alan Silvestri, inspired by episodes from the story (“Flight to Fezziwigs,” “Who Was That Lying Dead?” etc.). I mean the actual songs sung and played throughout the film. This is a Christmas Carol with actual Christmas carols. “Venite, Adoremus/O Come All Ye Faithful.” “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.” “Joy to the World.”
It’s almost a shock to hear the words “Christ the Savior is born” in a big-budget Hollywood movie today, even a time-honored period piece like A Christmas Carol. Only five years ago, Zemeckis’ own The Polar Express rang with “Silver Bells” and “Deck the Halls,” but not so much as a “rum pa pum pum” from the stable at Bethlehem (not even at Santa’s North Pole home, where everyone celebrates Christmas).
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Now Zemeckis and Carrey have given us a Christmas movie that’s actually aware of the reason for the season, that doesn’t reduce street carolers to crooning “O Tannenbaum” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Even in the score, if I remember correctly, are strains of “Good King Wenceslas” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (though at times arranged for action-movie tension). Musically speaking, it might just be the most Christmas-y Christmas Carol yet.
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The USCCB gave 2012 an A-III while A Christmas Carol received an A-I rating.
[Photo: Yahoo! Movies]
