Weekend Movie Forecast: Precious or The Men Who Stare at Goats

After Beowulf and before his remake of his own Who Framed Roger Rabbit? comes Zemeckis' newest CG-Motion-Capture fetish piece A Christmas Carol. The newest iteration of this perennial classic casts Jim Carrey as the penny-pinching, apparition addict Ebenezer Scrooge. Although critics are still coming to terms with Zemeckis' pixel phase, many are finding that the technique works with the story: Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York says: "The unspoken theme underlying Dickens’s prose—that the money-grubbing Ebenezer is conversing with semblances of his own self—finds near-perfect cinematic expression through Carrey’s efforts. Despite his character’s strangely pliable exterior, Carrey endows the miser with a seamless depth of feeling—a quality only enhanced by the fact that he also plays the three spirits (Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come) who haunt Scrooge and push him toward redemption.

"But the biggest surprise of Carol is that this frustrating auteur [Zemeckis], so often in thrall to his digital palette, here uses it to freshly illuminate a time-honored text."