Worth Mentioning - Good Afternoon

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody is still watching Christmas movies.

SPIRITED (2022)

Some stories have been brought to the screen so many times, I could on just fine without seeing another adaptation. One of those stories is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. We’ve had straightforward adaptations, we’ve had comedy adaptations, we’ve had cartoon adaptations, and even a Muppet adaptation. I’ve had my fill of the story of Scrooge. So I can’t say I was hyped when I heard that a musical adaptation / follow-up was coming to AppleTV+. Not even the fact that this musical would star Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell was enough to catch my interest. But then I started hearing good word-of-mouth about this movie called Spirited... and since I wanted to watch something lighthearted and wholesome during the holidays, I ended up giving Spirited a chance. As it turned out, I liked the movie more than I expected to.

Scrooge was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present, the Ghost of Christmas Past, and the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-to-Come in Dickens’ story, and Spirited finds that in his afterlife Scrooge (Ferrell) now works for his former business partner Jacob Marley (Patrick Page) in the afterlife department that handles the Christmas visitations of people who need to do better in life. Scrooge is the Ghost of Christmas Present, and is still holding on to the job even though he has earned retirement. Giving away the fact that the Ghost of Christmas Present is actually Scrooge could be considered a spoiler, since the movie tries to withhold that information for a while, but I don’t think it really is. I figured out the Scrooge twist during an early musical number.

Scrooge was considered Unredeemable before the ghosts visited him and turned his life around, and he still feels bad for how much of a jerk he was during his living days. That’s why he becomes fixated on the idea of visiting another Unredeemable, media consultant Clint Briggs (Reynolds). And as the ghosts start visiting him, Briggs certainly proves to be a tough nut to crack. He’s such a flippant douche, he’s quite annoying at times. But as the story goes on and Briggs gets further looks into how awful he is and the consequences of behavior, it becomes clear that we’re in for a heartwarming ending.

Ferrell and Reynolds both do fine work in their roles, and the songs are nice enough. I don’t think any of them are going to stick with me except for the one that presents “Good Afternoon” as an insult, but they do the job and the cast delivers them well.

Spirited, which was directed by Sean Anders from a script he wrote with John Morris, was a pleasant way to spend a couple hours during the holiday season, so I’m glad I gave it a chance.

CHRISTMAS WITH THE CAMPBELLS (2022)

Directed by Clare Niederpruem, the comedy Christmas with the Campbells is an interesting experiment that was conducted by producers Vince Vaughn and Peter Billingsley. The movie is meant to be something of a parody of the holiday romance movies that flood the TV airwaves every year – and to accomplish this, they first hired Barbara Kymlicka to write the script. Kymlicka has a long list of TV romance movies to her credit, and Vaughn and Billingsley didn’t tell her Christmas with the Campbells was going to be any different from the usual TV romance. They just told her to write yet another holiday romance. Then when she turned in her script, they revealed what they had planned: Vaughn and Dan Lagana were going to rewrite the dialogue to turn the trickly sweet love story into an R-rated comedy.

It’s a great idea, but I wouldn’t say that the experiment was entirely successful. The rewrite not only filled the movie with hit-and-miss sex and drug jokes, but also made it clear that Vaughn and Lagana were much more interested in every other character than they were in the lead character, Jesse (played by Brittany Snow). Jesse is completely overshadowed in her own story, so much that the romance aspect doesn’t even work. She’s just kind of gliding through the movie while everyone around her talks in jokes.

The typical TV movie romance remains in place: Jesse is dumped by her smarmy boyfriend Shawn (Alex Moffat) right before Christmas. Jesse and Shawn usually spend the holidays with Shawn’s parents Robert (George Wendt) and Liz (Julia Duffy), and since Shawn isn’t planning to go to his parents’ place this year, Liz says Jesse should go ahead and spend the holidays with them anyway. So she does... and at the Campbells’ she meets Shawn’s rugged cousin David (Justin Long). Romance gradually blooms, sort of. And gets complicated when Shawn shows up after all.

I found Christmas with the Campbells to be underwhelming overall, but still thought it was entertaining enough for a viewing. It’s not something I’ll be returning to in future holiday seasons, but it was fine to waste 88 minutes with this year. I was so intrigued by the experiment Vaughn and Billingsley were conducting here, I just wish the result had been better and more memorable.