Carrey is Mr. Popper, a divorced dad who sees his kids on alternate weekends but can’t relate to them, mainly due to his workaholic ways. All Popper wants from life is to be a full partner in a ruthless Manhattan real estate firm that specializes (for no logical reason other than to make them sinister) in purchasing New York landmarks and replacing them with cold glass and steel buildings. Popper’s partnership dreams are finally within grasp when his trio of bosses (including Philip Baker Hall and Dominic Chianese) issue Popper, their best closer, a seemingly impossible challenge: purchase the only piece of privately owned land in Central Park, the Tavern on the Green, and you’ll get your name on the door.

Unfortunately for Popper, Tavern on the Green is owned by Mrs. Van Gundy (the always delightful Lansbury), and she’s less interested in money and more interested in something Popper doesn’t have — integrity and character. Popper’s pretty sure he can wear her down, though, at least until his life is suddenly complicated (I won’t spoil why this happens) by the arrival of six live penguins at his swanky Manhattan high-rise penthouse. At first, naturally, Popper wants nothing to do with them. But in the end, will the penguins make him a better person, father, and citizen of the world?

What do you think?

The emotions are there, though you do feel more than a little manipulated, and some of the jokes do work, especially Carrey ripping on Baker Hall’s age. But most of the laughs fall flat, the penguins have no personality whatsoever, and the predictability of the story only gets worse as time passes.

What I did like, though, were the more conservative elements. Believe it or not, the villain is an obnoxious zookeeper, a boorish bureaucrat who’s always pushing people around with his stupid badge. Better still, when Popper attempts to get the city to take the penguins off his hands, he runs into worse bureaucrats made inflexible by union rules. Also, Gugino’s boyfriend is a touchy-feely hippie who’s the butt of more than a few jokes.

Concerned leftists need not worry. These jokes are subtle, not preachy or divisive, but like the sighting of a dodo bird, that kind of humor is worth mentioning due to the belief it was extinct.

Hey, maybe this weekend you could rent “Mr. Popper” for the kids instead of risking heir indoctrination by those communistic “The Muppets.”

I kid.

Mostly.

——

In the story, Carrey plays officer Steven Russell. Russell joined the police force to locate his birth mother but when he eventually finds her, she quickly rejects him. Soon enough, Russell quits the force and starts a new life with his wife and children. Everything changes once again when Russell is involved in a severe car accident. While recovering, Russell admits that he’s gay and begins a new life as a gay con man because, as he notes, “being gay is really expensive.”

Russell’s ex-wife (Leslie Mann), who is surprised by Russell’s new lifestyle, is portrayed as the typical “Hollywood” Christian. Once she discovers that her ex-husband has become a thief, she asks if his homosexuality has anything to do with his tendency to steal. That isn’t the first or the last time that the movie pokes fun at her religious values.

After getting caught breaking the law, Russell is sent to prison. When a new inmate arrives, Russell talks openly about the sexual acts that inmates must perform to get what they want. Eventually, Russell befriends fellow inmate Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), a naïve young prisoner who is afraid to walk out into the prison yard. Because they live in separate buildings, Russell and Morris write love letters to each other. When Russell moves into Morris’s cell, the two begin a romantic relationship until Russell is transferred to another prison.

After the couple are eventually released from their respective jails, they move in together. Russell starts working at a large corporation. Through some shrewd financial decisions, he finds a way to make millions of dollars in additional profit for his company and decides to steal some of it. As the story continues, Russell returns to being a con man while Morris enjoys the benefits of a luxurious lifestyle.

Carrey does an excellent job in his lead role, especially with the story’s physical comedy. Carrey is wacky, wild, and wonderfully charismatic. He presents Russell as an intelligent and shrewd con artist who can convince people to do whatever he thinks they should.

Unfortunately, Ewan McGregor isn’t given much to do with his supporting role as Russell’s often-neglected boyfriend. Morris is a blatantly one-note character who doesn’t realize how untrustworthy Russell is. Even when Russell blatantly lies, Morris doesn’t ask a lot of questions. He just goes along with it.  When Russell tells Morris that he received a Christmas bonus in the middle of the summer, Morris accepts it as truth, and the same goes for everything else Russell says.

In addition to story’s lame gay jokes, the comedy of I Love You Phillip Morris relies on a sense of meanness. For instance, after they become cellmates, Russell hires someone to beat up a “screamer” who keeps Morris and other prisoners up all night. When Morris finds out about it, he tells Russell how romantic a gesture it was to hire someone to bash another person’s face in. Later on, the film takes aim at the state of Texas and its former Governor, George W. Bush.

Although Jim Carrey is great in the lead role, I Love You Phillip Morris is too mean-spirited and some of its characters are too one-dimensional for this film to be worth anyone’s time. It’s hard to like Phillip Morris.

On December 3rd, it’s Jim Carrey’s and Natalie Portman’s turn to flip the script on their personas. As a gay con artist named Steven Russell who will do anything to be near his cellmate and true love (played by Ewan McGregor) – even repeatedly breaking in and out of prison – in “I Love You Phillip Morris,” Carrey regains the wild, anything-goes zeal of his early movies while taking chances that more serious-minded actors wouldn’t even attempt. Case in point: the graphic sex scene in which Carrey announces to the viewer in jubilant voice-over narration, “I am gay, gay, gay, gay, gay!” (The only graphic scene in the movie, by the way).

—–

On the other hand, Portman makes her bid to break out of the young-actress pack and reinvent herself as an acting powerhouse with her turn as an emotionally unbalanced ballerina who goes batshit-crazy under the pressure of a high-profile lead role in “Black Swan.” Whether cutting herself, trying to purge herself with bulimia, getting high as a kite on a laced drink or engaging in a tawdry girl-girl sex scene with costar Mila Kunis, Portman’s performance almost literally shrieks “Look at me, Oscar!” when she isn’t shrieking at her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) in the film’s many argument scenes.

To be sure, these are wildly ambitious films for their genres – and, in the case of “Black Swan,” it’s a genre-defying attempt at art altogether. With the almost-impossible true-life tale “Morris,” Carrey is able to show off his anarchic comic mastery in a series of hilarious con and fraud scenes as he shows how Russell got in over his head while trying to live a life of glamorous excess on a sheriff’s salary. He then goes even funnier in depicting the countless ways that Russell tried to trick his way into or out of the prison walls where his true love Morris (McGregor) was either being held or freshly released.

But it is in the film’s quieter moments, where he shows the pain of a man who only found true love after breaking out of a lifetime in the closet and a long-term attempt at hetero marriage or lays bare the longing he has for Morris, that Carrey integrates deeper emotions better than any of his prior attempts at dramas in films like “The Majestic” or even his acclaimed “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

It’s a shame that the masses won’t have much of a chance to see his terrific performance, however, as the major studios all ran in fear from releasing “Morris” despite rave reviews at Sundance, a fairly successful overseas box office run and the fact it was written and directed by the hot team of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (“Bad Santa”). Instead, indie distributor Roadside Attractions has stepped in to give it a shot, and if you can handle the subject matter, “Morris” is well worth seeing. As Russell spirals into obsession with Morris, the film does show that a relationship rooted in the wrong things (Russell is always working a con) can never truly blossom in a healthy way. On the other hand, Russell’s initial deep feelings for Morris, and the sweet and simple love Morris shows for him in return gives a real humanity to both the men and their relationship.

—–

“Black Swan,”meanwhile, is getting a much-higher profile thanks to a big Oscar campaign from Fox Searchlight that’s also playing up the inherent cult-classic status that any film made by its wildly talented director Darren Aronofsky (“Requiem for a Dream,” “The Wrestler”) receives. For most of the film, Portman is a wonder to watch, expertly careening between the natural vulnerability of young dancer Nina as she tries to hide the cracks under surface, and the total command of the stage she’s required to show in the iconic title role of the Black Swan, in Tschaikovsky’s classic ballet “Swan Lake.”

Kunis and Hershey also shine with their characters, as Kunis (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “The Book of Eli”) plays a rival dancer whose friendliness comes under suspicion by the paranoid Nina, and Hershey (“Beaches”) has fun with her meatiest role in at least a decade. Vincent Cassell, a French superstar who tore up the screen in the two-part Gallic crime epic “Mesrine” a couple months back, delivers another rich performance, veering between smarm and genuine passion, as the sleazy yet brilliant director of Nina’s production.

Yet while many critics have raved about “Black Swan” so much that it seems to share event status with the Second Coming of Christ, its last half-hour doesn’t hold up to the initial 90 minutes. Instead, Portman starts shrieking almost every line between her dance scenes, and the series of bizarre and brutal physical mishaps that seem to suddenly afflict her alternate between being laughable and deeply unpleasant. Most filmgoers will likely be either confused or weirded out by this final stretch, as the film takes a swan dive from potential greatness into lurid pulp fiction.

Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), The Sound of Music (1965), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Ten Commandments (1956), Titanic (1997), Jaws (1975), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Exorcist (1973), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1939), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Ben-Hur (1959), Avatar (2009), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Sting (1973), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), The Graduate (1967), Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), Fantasia (1941), The Godfather (1972), Forrest Gump (1994), Mary Poppins (1964), The Lion King (1994)

If you said they all made scads of money, bravo — they are the top twenty-five domestic box-office champions of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course).

But consider another similarity: surprisingly few of them relied on established A-list movie stars — the most famous, the highest paid — for their moneymaking prospects. Gone with the Wind had Gable, yes. The Sting had Newman and Redford. The Godfather, Brando.

As for most of the rest, they either featured no A-listers at all, or used them before they became bonafide movie stars. In fact, many of those pictures can take credit for sending now-famous actors into the celestial Hollywood firmament in the first place. Gone with the Wind made Vivian Leigh known to the world. The Ten Commandments did it for Charlton Heston. The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman. The Godfather, Al Pacino. Star Wars, Harrison Ford. Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews.

Meanwhile, I note that Will Smith, the current top A-lister, is nowhere to be found on this rarefied roll call. Nor is Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Jim Carrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Julia Roberts, or many others whose compensation has, at various times, made gasp-worthy headlines. Of the modern crop of top-salaried men, only Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, and wee Leonardo DiCaprio are up there, and only for movies where it can be argued that genuinely astonishing special effects and epic spectacle, brought to life by proven audience-pleasing directors, served as the real stars.

(It’s telling that four of those behind-the-scenes men — Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, and Walt Disney — are responsible for over half of the list all by themselves.)

Is this being too dismissive of the contributions of highly-paid thespians to a movie’s bottom line? I don’t think so. Do you honestly think that Jurassic Park suffered at the box office because Harrison Ford turned it down and was replaced by Sam Neill? Or let’s go straight to the very heights of heresy: if you took Gable’s indelible, iconic performance out of Gone with the Wind, or Brando’s out of The Godfather, and replaced them with other well-regarded actors, would the movies still have made that Top 25 list? If the presence of these vaunted personalities is so magical in and of itself, how does one explain all the flops starring these very same actors?

There are other considerations that trump the movie-star effect in terms of improved profits. Consider that eight of the top twenty-five films were rated G, and eleven PG (four others had a PG-13 rating, and a paltry two were rated R). It’s clear common sense: make a movie suitable for the whole family, and you’ve just doubled or tripled your ticket tally, not to mention all the extra popcorn, soda, and candy getting sluiced through the digestive tracts of America’s moppets in direct violation of nanny-state health doctrine. That’s not to say that there’s no place for R-movies, just that a film’s potential for profit should always remain a healthy multiple of its budget.

Given all this, it’s high time that the stumpy tail of A-list Hollywood stops wagging the studio dog. Ten or twenty million guaranteed, up-front dollars to an actor for any movie (much less an R-rated one) is fiscal insanity. It’s the quality and appeal of the movie as a whole that counts. Once one comes to grips with this, paying a huge salary to a well-known celebrity begins to seem like a far poorer use of a studio’s money than spending the same amount of dough on better special effects, larger advertising buys, a great script, and/or a quality crew of cinematographers, editors, sound designers, and musicians.

Patrick Goldstein, who gets a lot of criticism round these parts, wrote an excellent article last year about the trend towards reduced star salaries. Music to my ears. Movie stars will always be with us, and at their best they add a great deal to a film’s artistry. But perhaps they will once again assume their proper economic place in the hierarchy of moviemaking (less money, less creative control), allowing Hollywood’s much maligned product to get better as a result.

While I found “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” to be quite funny, to me it worked because I never expected the character to actually be a good detective. In other words, Carrey’s stupid-funny antics worked because his character was actually stupid-smart. But it’s a sloppy movie, everyone else in the cast from Tone Loc to Courtney Cox stands around watching Carrey do his thing.

I initially liked “The Mask,” but remember a critic for my college newspaper opining that critics were too kind to the movie because they didn’t want to feel too out of touch with audiences. Looking back, I agree. It’s a slicker movie than “Ace Ventura,” but its stupid humor is forced and often aimed at five-year-olds.

“Dumb & Dumber,” however, is aimed solidly at a more mature demographic: twelve-year-olds. Announcing their presence with the authority of a Nuke LaLoosh fastball, The Farrelly Brothers unleashed their debut fart and burpfest onto the mildly suspecting public in December of 1994, solidifying Carrey’s launch to super-stardom. For the uncultured few who haven’t seen the film, Carrey plays Lloyd Christmas, who partners with his best friend Harry Dunne (the under-appreciated Jeff Daniels) to return a briefcase to Christmas’ dreamgirl in Aspen, CO. Hilarity in the form of pee and poop jokes and stupid sight gags ensues when they hit the road, unaware that the dreamgirl doesn’t want the case back – it contains ransom money meant to free her kidnapped husband.

The Farrelly’s were a perfect fit for Carrey: they too would do anything for a laugh. The stuff that works far outweighs the stuff that doesn’t, and there are jokes that work only because of the casting of Carrey and Daniels. Hell, there are lines that aren’t jokes that are somehow funny because of the casting of Carrey and Jeff Daniels. There’s a line in the first third of the film that sold me on Carrey’s comic brilliance – at least for a while. It’s not a punchline, it’s not a joke of any kind, but with these words…

“I like it a lot”

… Jim Carrey managed to elicit HUGE laughs from me and a theatre packed with twelve-year-olds. Somehow, this line kicked the movie into high gear for me, and for the next hour and some-odd minutes, I proceeded to embarrass my future wife nearly to death. For my money, Carrey’s never been better than in “Dumb and Dumber” at putting an exclamation point on laughs. The fantasy sequence where he imagines himself the life of the party, bringing erudite sweater wearing snobs to fits of laughter, is a case in point.

What I continue to love about the movie, despite its thin story and only moderately passable production values, is that Harry and Lloyd constantly surprise the audience with just how dumb they are. Pulling consistent laughs from such a flimsy conceit is more of an art than people realize. Their cluelessness and stupidity reveals itself in every gesture, every reaction. Right this second, I’d have to say my very favorite scene is when Harry falls victim to a mugful of laxative. Jeff Daniels takes an already funny scene to hilarious heights of hilarity with his body, ahem, language.

The Farrelly Brothers pushed the boundaries of the PG-13 rating with the under-performing and wildly underrated “Kingpin” two years later. Creatively, “Kingpin” is perfectly cast, but with “Dumb & Dumber,” they managed to surf on the wave of a star with two other hits in the same year. Not so with “Kingpin.” With “There’s Something About Mary,” they got dirtier and sweeter at the same time, resulting in a word of mouth monster hit that hung around the box office top five for several weeks before finally sneaking into the number one spot. “Dumb & Dumber” is not their best movie, but there’s an infectious, fun quality. You can almost feel their desperation to make you laugh and to make their mark.

Mission Accomplished.

And how does the former Playmate turned warrior mother feel, now that the basis of her argument has yet again been debunked?  She and boyfriend Jim Carrey released this statement:  “It is our most sincere belief that Dr. Wakefield and parents of children with autism around the world are being subjected to a remarkable media campaign engineered by vaccine manufacturers…”  It is clear to me that anyone who holds “mommy instinct” in higher regard than years of vaccine research is irrational and dangerous.  Yes, McCarthy and Carrey are dangerous on many levels.  They don’t know when to stop.  Unfortunately, people will continue to listen to their tales of diets curing autism and how Big Pharma is poisoning our children. 

I know there are some rational people left in Hollywood and the media and it’s time for them to speak out against pseudoscience. Greg Gutfeld may have taken some comedic liberties in his piece “Celebrities that Makes Kids Sick” but his intent was dead on, in my book.  I just hope Mr. Gutfeld doesn’t feel the wrath of the anti-vax crowd as Dr. Paul Offit has.  Dr. Offit is the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine.  When his book, Autism’s False Prophets was released, he refrained from doing a book tour for he received too many death threats.  And you thought politics were rough. 

Not every parent is fighting for a cure.  In fact, there are parents, like my husband and I, fighting for society to accept autism as a disability rather than an illness to be cured. We have adopted a philosophy similar to any responsible parent.  We celebrate our autistic son’s strengths and try to improve on his deficits.  We continue to be encouraged by the results and are devoted to supporting him whenever and wherever possible.  We are tired of listening to celebrities that claim to speak on our behalf while making accusations that carry little weight and incite emotional responses.  We do not think our child is trapped inside a shell or has been taken from us.  In fact, we find this message extremely detrimental to the development of our child and the way society views him.  

We need a paradigm shift in the way we view autistic individuals and I refuse to let media and celebrities frame the debate unchallenged. Autism awareness should not be aimed toward a world without autistic people, but that is exactly what organizations like Autism Speaks promote.  Autism Speaks supports research that will inevitably lead to selective abortion, the same so-called “cure” that is often used for Down Syndrome.  Recently they aired a video directed by Alfonso Cuaron and Billy Mann at the World Focus on Autism event that depicted autism as a demon that will rob your child and your family of any chance of happiness.  Celebrities flock to Autism Speaks and the general public donate millions of dollars each year. Very little money goes back into the community or into improving the quality of life of autistic people. And how can they call themselves Autism Speaks when they don’t have one autistic person in a decision making position to determine where they will spend their money or how they will portray autism in the media?      

Recently, HBO premiered Temple Grandin to rave reviews from the autism community.  Claire Danes beautifully portrayed the brilliant and fascinating Dr. Temple Grandin, an autistic woman that had to overcome all odds, not to cure her autism but to be the best in her field. It was inspirational, intriguing and refreshing to see a film from the perspective of an autistic person.  I would encourage Hollywood and the media to explore this side of autism a bit more.  And then maybe, the autism community will get the help and support it deserves.

Now this would really be great news, if the study had not come out, oh, 12 years ago. It’s really scary that it took a medical journal over a decade to admit what nearly everyone else with a working brain knew: the study had more gaping holes in it than Tom Sizemore’s septum.

But sadly, although the study author has also been discredited for this harmful crud, it doesn’t matter. People who believe in junk science will continue to believe in junk science, because their egos won’t allow any other option. And so they will continue preaching to parents a dangerous and false belief that ends up killing kids.

I speak of Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and all the saps at the Huffington Post who by their own earnest idiocy, misled the public into skipping vaccinations. The potential result: measles outbreaks all over the globe – and ultimately, dead kids.

It’s hard to make jokes about that, so I won’t.

But I will make jokes about gasbags like Carrey and McCarthy, two cretins who can’t be content simply making us sick to our stomachs with their work – they also gotta make our kids sick with ego-driven medical advice. Now, I’m not a celebrity, but here’s my medical advice for this sort of behavior: whenever a star offers an opinion on important health matters – citing flawed studies they know a nearly comatose Larry King won’t bother checking – they should be given a vaccination of their own. It should be full of lead and shot straight up their ass.

And if you disagree with me, you’re probably Arianna Huffington.

Tonight, Congressman McCotter also joins us! To see the rest of the guests, look below!

Also, check this piece I did on the autism/vaccine link. Like my current underwear, that piece is over two years old.

Tonight we’ve got the lovely Reshma Shetty (from Royal Pains), the witty blogmaster Alex Blagg, Congressional candidate from that delightful country, Hawaii, Charles Djou, and a special guest to be named later.

Add his own piece of dialogue trashing organized religion.

First off, I want Zemeckis to know he didn’t get me. Oh, hell yes I was ready for it. After a decade of watching this industry crap on its own art and box office in order to childishly get off on insulting their customers, you need not be a genius to understand that there was no way a story with a number of overt positive Christian moments could survive intact.

Oh, Zemeckis gave it everything he had to lull me into thinking this one was safe: A soundtrack loaded with classic carols about “Christ being born” and all that, but I’m not Charlie Brown with the football, and sure enough…

Because I was scribbling notes, there’s some paraphrasing here, but the set up for the leftist sucker shot went a little something like this…

Scrooge (the voice of Jim Carrey) and The Ghost of Christmas Present fly high above the city. The soundtrack blares a beautiful version of “Christ is Born in Bethlehem” and then they hover for a beat near a large lovely cross set atop a church steeple. Scrooge says, “Quite beautiful,” and they fly on.

At this point you can practically hear Zemeckis chuckling as he imagines all us racist, tea bagging, Christianists smiling warmly … right before he strikes.

Scrooge and the spirit hover above a bakery, and then from completely out of nowhere comes the following:

Scrooge: Spirit, these poor people have no means to cook their food and yet you seek to close the only places in which they can warm their meager meals every 7th day.

Ghost of Christmas Present: Hear me scrooge. There are some upon this earth of yours who claim to know me and my brothers and do their deeds of ill will and selfishness in our name. These so called men of the cloth are as strange to me and my kin as if they never lived. Charge their doing to them, not us.

Gotcha’ teabaggers! You thought this one was for you? Are you crazy? We is Hollywood! Bwahahahahahaha….

For the record, here’s what Dickens wrote:

There are some upon this earth of ours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.

Dickens was no fan of organized religion either, but as you can see Zemeckis thinks he knows better and took it upon himself to change a general warning about hypocrisy into a very specific slap at organized religion — at “men of the cloth” in general. No qualifiers, no “some” men of the cloth… Nope, the whole lot of them. 

Why do it, Bob? (That’s a rhetorical question)

For the same reason “The Blind Side” had to take a shot at George W. Bush. Either driven by his own bigotry, a need to inoculate himself in a town full of religious bigots who wouldn’t appreciate a purely pro-Christian film, or both — it was mandatory that something offensive to the tens of millions of us stupid enough to believe in organized religion rear its story-stopping, heavy-handed head.

From a purely artistic standpoint, to say this where-the-hell-did-that-come-from moment sucks all the goodwill out of the story is an understatement. And “goodwill” was all this soulless production had going for it.

This is the most clinical, uninspired, by-the-numbers adaptation of the Dickens’ classic yet. And to use a style of animation incapable of bringing life to the eyes of your characters in a story brimming with humanity might be the dumbest  big studio decision of the year … even dumber than the sucker shot and a couple of silly, unmotivated chase sequences.

When you add advertising expenses, Disney’s “A Christmas Carol” probably cost a total of $300 million, which means it will have to make close to $600 million just to break even – and thus far, after over a month in release, the worldwide box office has yet to crack $250 million.

If you had to clear over a half-billion dollars just to break even, would you allow an out-of-nowhere shot at organized religion in your Christmas film?

Not if profit was more important than ideology.

I’m not saying Zemeckis’ artless insult is why this Disney production is in deep, deep financial trouble, but it sure as hell doesn’t help that someone like me is spreading the word right before their last-gasp weekend to clean up some of that red ink.

And please do tell me again how Hollywood is money driven…

Anyway, in the spirit of the holiday season and to quote the mighty Clark W. Griswold, I’d like to say to Leftist Tinseltown:

Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, kiss my ass. Kiss his ass. Kiss your own ass.

…and in the spirit of adding my own little slice of dialogue to a classic: Don’t forget to go to Hell.

Reuters:

“Hollywood studios are now thinking twice about splurging on A-list movie stars and costly productions in reaction to the poor economy, but also because of the surprising success of recent films with unknown actors. …

“Last weekend, comic actor Jim Carrey’s “A Christmas Carol” became the latest celebrity-driven movie to stumble at box offices, opening to a lower-than-expected $30 million.

“Aside from Jim Carrey and “Carol,” which cost at least $175 million, A-listers who suffered box office flops recently have included Bruce Willis (“Surrogates”), Adam Sandler (“Funny People”), Will Ferrell (“Land of the Lost”), Eddie Murphy (“Imagine That”) and Julia Roberts (“Duplicity”).

“‘The (major movie) machine didn’t fly last summer, if you look at the movies and the names, they were not star-driven movies, they really weren’t,’ said Peter Guber, chairman of Mandalay Entertainment and former head of Sony Pictures.

“Hollywood insiders say A-listers currently are having trouble with salary demands in the $15 million range or participation approaching 20 percent of gross profits — deals that were once somewhat common for top talent. Instead, they are being asked to take less money upfront and greater compensation only if a film breaks even.”

You can read the full article here.

When it comes to celebrating Christmas, actor Jim Carrey says he prefers the “Christian” traditions he and many other people in America grew up on as children.

“I’d hate to miss Christmas,” he added.

Carrey, who gives a remarkable performance in A Christmas Carol, the new brilliant masterpiece of the beloved novel by Charles Dickens from Disney and Writer/Director Bob Zemeckis, spoke about the movie at a recent press conference Movieguide attended in Los Angeles.

At the conference, Carrey also noted that he loves redemptive stories like A Christmas Carol.

“Everyone loves a good transformational story,” Carrey said. “You know, somebody who sees the light, who finally finds out what’s important in life. And, this is one of the greatest ones ever written. It’s just a beautiful story of redemption.”

“It might be the greatest time travel story ever written in the English language,” added Zemeckis, who’s also known for his entertaining time travel stories in the 80s, the Back to the Future trilogy.

“This story definitely influenced my other time travel stories,” he said.

Zemeckis also said he thinks A Christmas Carol is a perfect story for the motion capture process he used to good effect in The Polar Express and lesser effect in Beowulf. This process involves actors performing entire scenes while hooked up to computers that can record their every movement. Once recorded, that’s when the animators, working with computers and other animation technology take over.

Zemeckis noted, “The book hadn’t been realized before in the way that it was actually imagined by Dickens as he wrote it. I said, okay, this could be a perfect way to take a classic story everyone is familiar with and re-envision it in a new and exciting way.”

And indeed, the movie, which should become a Christmas classic, brilliantly takes moviegoers back to a bygone era, Victorian London, with amazingly detailed set designs.

The motion capture technology also allows the filmmakers and actors to interact in new ways with the world envisioned by Zemeckis through Dickens, including the wonderful special effects of ghosts, spirits, and supernatural events that Dickens describes.

In the past, some have complained that the motion capture technology makes human actors too wooden, but, here, Zemeckis, Carrey, Gary Oldman (who plays the crucial roles of Bob Cratchit and Jacob Marley), and the animators do a wonderful job of bringing life and true humanity to their characters.

It also helps that Carrey not only plays Scrooge, the misanthropic protagonist. He also plays the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Present, who teach Scrooge some invaluable lessons.

And, Carrey also plays the silently menacing and terrifying Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come, who teaches the miserly, hateful Mr. Scrooge the horrors that await him if he doesn’t change his ways.

The fact that the movie is animated helps Carrey, Zemeckis, and the animators carry off the scenes between Scrooge and the spirits without stretching credulity.

Such a disconnect often happens in live action movies with lots of special effects where, all too often, the actors don’t seem to be in the same room or location as the special effects surrounding them.

“Certain aspects of the technology make things easier,” Carrey noted, “to get a lot of scenes done, to do a lot of material at once. A lot of aspects make it hugely easier to create the world you want.

“For an actor, there are actually challenges. You have to create the ambiance and the belief in your surroundings in your head. But, once you go into it, the process is very comfortable, and Bob [Zemeckis] was great.”

Zemeckis added, “I loved every morning I got to come in and I’d say, ‘Jim, who do you feel like today?’

About playing Scrooge, Carrey said, “I wanted to have that feeling that causes rheumatism, that eventually will eat you alive from inside. I based the character from the get-go on the lies that we believe about ourselves. Obviously, Scrooge felt he was unworthy of love, so why should love exist for anybody?”

Carrey also said that doing all the different roles in the movie, including the younger versions of Scrooge, was “a dream come true” for him, including the physicality required for playing Scrooge and the three spirits.

It is the three spirits who teach Scrooge the real reason for the season, Jesus Christ and his salvation message of love, in this terrific, beautiful, powerful family movie.

A Christmas Carol is one of the few movies that Movieguide considers a “must see,” not only for people who love movies but also for people of faith and values.