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A Christmas Carol
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (24th December 2010). |
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The Film
 Something terrible has happened to Robert Zemeckis. Somewhere along the line he snapped, drawn into an obsessive and addictive relationship with realistic looking motion capture that strives to be real when real actors could have just been used instead. Maybe an actor offended him along the way and he wanted to be able to change aspects of their performance in post production, or he pissed off every practical effects person and they didn’t want to work with him anymore, but something is terribly awkward about his obsession with motion capture, but he seems to think it deserves more praise than criticism. In “A Christmas Carol” (2009), Zemeckis tries to push harder for his love of motion capture in a full 3D environment on his take of the often adapted Charles Dickens tale. The classic story remains the same, Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is ornery and very un-Christmassy, that is until the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman) who warns him of his wasted life and the chains he will wear as a ghost. Scrooge is then visited by three Christmas spirits (all played by Carrey) to try and change his grumpy ways while seeing a glimpse of Ebenezer’s past, present and future. From lost friends to lost loves, Scrooge sees the meaning of Christmas and how he eventually lost the Christmas spirit, trying to find it once again. While the story goes unchanged, the means of presenting it and writing out bits of dialogue and comedy added to the film certainly help to depreciate the experience. The movie’s insistence on 3D gags and gimmicks aren’t nearly as annoying as the bits of physical comedy and little jokes that Zemeckis tries to insert in his screenplay. While the look of the film and the movement helps to create what would have been a midly more entertaining experience on the big screen in 3D, on a home, 2D television it just falls flat. Sound helps and as does the created look of the environment, but with the uncanny space that the characters roam in every person just seems far too eerie and fake. Zemeckis constantly makes the mistake of thinking that making his characters look more real, adding more pores and eyebrow hairs, will add to the experience when making everything more stylized and less human would do wonders for Zemeckis’ art. Much of the CG used on top of the motion capture in the film looks worse than some of the fully CG animated movies of ten years ago, but because those have a style rather than attempted human emulation they can hold up far better than these faux, rubbery looking, people. Even the muppet adaptation ("The Muppet Christmas Carol" (1992) one of the best adaptations by far) had more human looking Bob Cratchet when it was played by Kermit the Frog, rather than just computer generated and voiced by Gary Oldman. But while Oldman does a fine enough job with the voice acting, it brings up another one of Zemeckis’ strange obsessions with having Hollywood actors masquerade as full fledged voice actors with each taking on a handful of roles in the movie. It’s almost as if Zemeckis’ doesn’t understand the craft of voice acting. While Carrey does a good job alternating his voice and changing his tones to the different Christmas spirits, he doesn’t hit the key points of any of them, his Past hisses rather than speaks softly, while his Present’s voice doesn’t quite boom the way it feels it should. Even his Scrooge voice feels odd as he emulates the different accents of the U.K., trying to follow in the footsteps of legendary scrooges like Patrick Stewart and Michael Caine who added more depth and visual emotional change as the film progresses. As a result from Zemeckis’ uninspired screenplay and odd looking visual styles the film doesn’t succeed as an adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" that could become a traditional Christmas watch in the coming years. While he seems to get how to use 3D effectively to create a larger experience, at home it just doesn’t work in 2D when the characters aren’t particularly well written/adapted and the 3D gimmicks just lie flat on the screen. In 3D, on screen this could be a whole different experience, the few action sequences could be exhilarating, but the rest of the movie is fairly poorly paced and doesn’t amount to much anyways. Some aspects of the character design show promise, such as the candle-esque Ghost of Christmas Past or the shadow visage of Christmas Future, the intermittent action sequences to show off the 3D don’t liven up the characters or the storytelling enough to make it an actually compelling home view.
Video
Presented in 1080p 24/fps in a 2.40:1 ratio with AVC MPEG-4 encoding, the CG is all too clear, much like it’s fully animated relatives, the light and shadows, contrasts and colors all come through very clearly. But this adds to the eerie appearances of the characters that look too human to be animaged and too fake to be live action, creating the uncanny valley that is just off putting rather than entertaining. While the camera movmeents and visual effects of the action sequences were made for 3D there is something there that could have been exciting, but it doesn’t translate here, even in this nice looking transfer.
Audio
Similarly clear is the English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track 48 kHz/24-bit proves well and tries to emulate the movment of the theatrical experience, but can’t resurrect the 3D film from it’s flat presentation form. The soundtrack and scoring of the movie resemble other Zemeckis efforts and bring a resounding Christmas feel to it, as the soundtrack should. It’s nothing special or unoriginal at the same time, making it a plain addition to the movie that suits the general feel of the film without being inspiring. There are also English Dolby Digital 2.o stereo Descriptive Video Service for visually impaired, French and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks. There are also English for the hearing impaired, French and Spanish subtitles.
Extras
The 2-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo set is another instance of understandably loading the Blu-Ray with special features like an audio commentary and interactive experience, featurettes, deleted scenes and bonus trailers, while leaving the accompanying DVD with just a few features from the first disc. DISC ONE: BLU-RAY First up is the “Behind the Carol: The Full Motion Caputure Experience” version of the film, playable with commentary by Robert Zemeckis. With a brief introduction, Zemeckis introduces the picture-in-picture interactive experience that shows the filmed motion capture performances shown along with the film. It’s almost like Zemeckis is trying to legitimize his method of madness, but it actually gives some insight into the process. Zemeckis explains that the filming and the reference points and real time performances make it so they have to animate less rather than putting more art into the film. The picture-in-picture visuals are neat for the first little bit until you realize that it means watching the entire film again, so it becomes less enjoyable the more it goes on. Zemeckis in the commentary meanwhile, talks about how they create the different shots in the movie and how the visual style of the film is allowed more by motion capture as he can move the camera more in a digital environment. It gives a little insight on how obsessed Zemeckis is with his favorite form of filming, but it doesn’t help justify the performances or the medium in my mind with the way it turns out for Zemeckis. Seeing everything side by side, it becomes more apparent that it’s not as much a problem with the motion capture, but the actual animation style of Zemeckis (along with some of the performances that he draws out of the actors) that help to make his films seem so bizzre, and unenjoyable to look at. Its an engaging commentary/picture-in-picture track that makes the film more interesting, but it also means sitting through the terrible experience again. “Capturing Dickens: A Novel Retelling” runs for 14 minutes and 43 seconds, a featurette covering the motion capture, complete withJacquie Barnbrook acting as the goofy and wacky host of the featurette. There are behind-the-scenes looks along with Zemeckis raving about how the film does the novel actual justice, generally bragging about how their production does the best job of displaying the Christmas Carol, even getting Susan Zieger, an Associate Professor of English Literature from UC Riverside into appearing on a featurette that hopefully never shows up in her tenure review, to proclaim that this is a definitive edition of the story. Carrey, Oldman and the other actors are brought in to talk about motion capture and finally through to the CG animators who interpret the motion capture data. It’s an informative clip, though not really explanatory or justifying the whole process. The fact that there are no full camera people or general effects people outside Zemeckis and his handful of animators, it makes him seem greedy, almost scrooge like, in turning down the different on-set people that make a movie really run during production, pre and post production as well. Next is the “Countdown to Christmas: Interactive Calendar” which is like an interactive feature, digital advent calendar that flashes a little animated sequence for every day. They all have to be done in order and are just a simple animation with a sound effect. Probably better getting a regular advent calendar if you celebrate Christmas and aren’t allergic to chocolate. The second and last featurette is “On set with Sammi” which runs for 1 minute and 52 seconds, following Sammi Hanratty, one of the child actors from the film, as she walks through the motion capture costuming process, more just showing the assembly of the Motion Capture suit and taking it off, rather than the actual filming process. There are 6 deleted scenes, playable together for 8 minutes and 39 seconds with intertitle cards or separately described below, there's also an “Introduction by director Robert Zemeckis” that runs for 11 seconds, played only when the scenes are all played together, excusing the scenes for being incomplete. The scenes included are: - “Tattered Caroler” runs for 52 seconds, a little caroler shows up at Scrooges door and he scares them away. - “Stew & Swine” runs for 1 minute and 44 seconds, Scroge has a problem with his stew, its gross. - “Hearse” runs for 1 minute and 14 seconds, Scrooge goes up stairs at his house, only to see a ghostly hearse. - “Small Matter” runs for 1 minute and 33 seconds, Scrooge sees his younger self dancing with his old girlfriend/wife, Scrooge and Dick talk about how much they like working for Fezziwig. - “Belle’s Family” runs for 1 minute and 42 seconds, Scrooge sees a vision of Belle’s family and home. - “Clothesline” runs for 59 seconds, in the action sequence scrooge falls on a clothesline. The last two pieces are a pair of advertisments, the first is “Discover Blu-ray 3D with Timon & Pumbaa” promo which runs for 4 minutes and 23 seconds, while the second is “Learn How to Take your Movies On theGo with Disney File Digital Copy” promo which runs 1 minute and 4 seconds and is moderately self descriptive. Bonus trailers on the disc are for: - “Disney Blu-Ray 3D” spot runs for 1 minute and 25 seconds. - “Bambi: Diamond Edition” runs for 1 minute and 15 seconds. - “Tron: Legacy” runs for 2 minutes and 32 seconds. - “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” runs for 1 minute and 12 seconds. - “Disney Movie Rewards” spot run for 19 seconds. - “Disneynature: Oceans” runs for 1 minute and 2 seconds. - “ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas” runs for 32 seconds. - “The Search for Santa Paws” runs for 1 minute and 22 seconds. - “Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2” runs for 2 minutes and 1 second. - “Fantasia/Fantasia 2000” runs for 1 minute and 17 seconds. - “The Incredibles” runs for 1 minute and 17 seconds. DISC TWO: DVD The “Capturing Dickens” and “On Set With Sammi” featurettes are identical to the Blu-ray, while only the "Hearse", "Belle’s Family" and "Clothesline" deleted scenes are available on the DVD version. Of course the "Blu-ray 3D" and "Digital Copy" promos are still here, with the big unique element of the disc being another promo “Dylan and Cole Sprouse: Blu-ray is Suite!” which runs for 4 minutes and 45 seconds. Bonus trailers on the disc are: - “Disney Blu-ray” spot runs for 1 minute and 7 seconds. - “Bambi: Diamond Edition” runs for 1 minute and 15 seconds. - “Tron: Legacy” runs for 2 minutes and 31 seconds. - “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” runs for 1 minute and 12 seconds. - “Disney Movie Rewards” spot runs for 20 seconds. - “Disneynature: Oceans” runs for 1 minute and 5 seconds. - “ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas” runs for 32 seconds. - “The Search for Santa Paws” runs for 1 minute and 26 seconds. - “Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2: runs for 2 minutes and 5 seconds. - “Fantasia/Fantasia 2000” runs for 1 minute and 21 seconds. - “Phineas and Ferb: A Very Perry Christmas” runs for 1 minute and 11 seconds. - “The Incredibles” runs for 1 minute and 21 seconds.
Packaging
Packaged in a 2-disc Blu-ray case housed in a cardboard slip-case.
Overall
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