This weekend at the theater
Jim Carrey does most of the voices in "Disney's A Christmas Carol." Image from Wikimedia.
If you don’t think the Rated R satirical comedy “The Men Who Stare at Goats” — which critics call “a farcical antidote to big-screen bores about Afghanistan and Iraq” — is quite your speed, you have a couple of options at pretty opposite ends of the spectrum.
On one end we have Jim Carrey doing the voices of about six different roles in the animated holiday flick “Disney’s A Christmas Carol.” If you’re not into Jim Carrey, Disney or Christmas, your other options are horror movies. Check out “Christmas Carol” reviews and “The Box” reviews below. You could also spend your payday advances on the movie that none of the critics liked, “The Fourth Kind.”
“A Christmas Carol” movie reviews
Officially, “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” is rated “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes, but 56 percent of critics liked it, so that’s a majority. Lisa Kennedy of the Denver Post wrote “Does this entertainment achieve a timelessness beyond its exquisite source material? Not even. Yet there’s pleasure to be had and relief in feeling the filmmakers didn’t Scrooge it up either.”
Randy Myers of the Contra Costa times also gave it a bit of a mixed review, saying “Disney’s excessively hyped A Christmas Carol brings Dickensian details to such sumptuous life that you mostly forgive it for possessing a stop-motion soul.”
While most critics agreed with the vague “not great but good” take, many agreed with Christian Toto, who said “The only major change Disney’s A Christmas Carol takes with the source material is draining the humanity right out of it.”
‘The Box’ movie reviews
Jolene Mendez from Entertainment Spectrum called this movie starring Cameron Diaz “a box full of boredom.” “The Box” got 46 percent good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Betsey Sharkey from the Los Angeles times agrees, but decided to skip the word play and go straight for the kill. She wrote:
Have you ever actually tried watching paint dry? A sloth walk? Grass grow? You can have all the thrills with none of the chills courtesy of The Box, the painfully sluggish new sci-fi morality play from Donnie Darko creator Richard Kelly.
However, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis said it was “Sincere and sinister and inevitably ambitious.” Stephen Witty from The Newark Star-Ledger admired its originality, saying “It’s not slick, standard sci-fi, sure — and that’s a good thing.”
‘The Fourth Kind’ movie reviews
My experience in observing these things tells me that even though “The Fourth Kind” got terrible reviews, it’ll still make a killing at the box office. I don’t think it’ll pass up current box office topper “Michael Jackson’s This is It,” but terrible horror movies have a cult following — and it’s a big cult.
Tom Long of the Detroit News says “The Fourth Kind” is “Unintentionally, laughably bad.” I suspect reviews like that will actually encourage a lot of people to go see it. I understand. It’s the same reason I love movies like “Step Up 2: The Streets” and “You Got Served.”
“A gimmicky, inordinately self-impressed attempt to cash in on the latest tabloid buzzwords. If this was made in the ’70s, it’d be narrated by Leonard Nimoy and chock-full of yetis and the Devil’s Triangle,” writes Andrew Wright from The Stranger.
Critics are always looking for something to bash on. It doesn’t matter how good the movie is, critics will be critics. They will stick their fingers down their throats to summon a nasty vomit just for the heck of it.