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| Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas |
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| Movies,
Matt Fresco,
05 February 2001 |
Rating: F2
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The problem with the Grinch is that it's a green, snivelling, snot-ridden pile off pulchritudinous drivel. Apart from that I liked it. Ron Howard is Hollywood's reliable box office magnet. He has never made a loss or flop but then he has never made a decent picture. The best thing he ever made was the Roger Corman funded Grand Theft Auto and the best thing about that movie was the title. It was Corman who insisted on the title and Corman who thought of it. On the other hand its made a bucket of money and thrilled the kids across the world to the point that very soon the Grinch will be as ubiquitous a Christmas movie as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Wizard of Oz.
Jim Carey and Ron Howard working together is a dream ticket. Carey is a talentless gurning comedian in the mouldy mould left vacant and thought forgotten by Jerry Lewis. In his favour Carey at least would like to make serious movies like Man on the Moon but the studios simply do not believe he can act. For once the studios are bang on the nail. He couldn't act his way into a walk on part in Sunset Beach.
But this is what the kids want. Even my kids. So off we trek to Putney for a slap up feed of popcorn and a very dull and uninspired afternoon with the Grinch. What upset me so much about this festering pile of celluloid trash is its awkward similarity to Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas. That Burton stole the Grinch plot may well be true but that is no excuse for Howard to then rip off the design and pace for his own plagiaristic version. It's the same movie all the way down to the kiss curl mountain above Whoville (which ought to be renamed Whocaresville).
Worse than that the kids in the cinema simply did not laugh. They were not entranced. But to be fair they were not bored. After all, there was always the fun to be had in throwing popcorn around the theatre. But they had the same glazed, mildly amused faces that are normally reserved for watching Saturday morning cartoons. The best thing about the movie is the wonderful Screenmate beautifully designed by British animation company Indimi with help from Ron Howard himself. Its available here at www.Tooned.com.
The problem lies with the lack of material Dr Seuss gives a filmmaker. Theodor Seuss Geisel's genius was to bet a publisher $50 he could write a kid's book with a vocabulary of no more than 50 words. Seuss was responding to a 1954 Life magazine report concerning illiteracy among school children. Perhaps Variety could run a similar article about the state of American movies. The result was the best selling Green Eggs and Ham. He never collected the bet but that book and the ones that followed are still best sellers to this day.
Ron Howard uses an even smaller cinematic vocabulary and produces a movie of green dregs and ham acting. Seuss died on 24 September 1991 and he must be spinning in memorial bank vault.
UK rating:
U
US rating:
G
Ron Howard
Jim Carrey, Anthony Hopkins, Molly Shannon, Jeffrey Tambor, Verne Troyer
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