I am 100% in the Christmas frame of mind. I wasn’t two hours ago, but I just went out and bought my tree. Sure, it’s still about a month or two away, but just I can’t wait any longer. I can’t wait to decorate, I can’t wait to give presents and I sure can’t wait to see Elf again. While it may be your first inclination to throw Elf off as another treacley, Santa Clause-type Christmas movie, well my friend, a lump of coal for you. Elf is the best present a holiday movie-goer could ask for.

Destined to rank up there with A Christmas Story and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation as a true, modern-day Christmas classic, Elf is no Jingle All the Way. But it easily could have been. This could have been horrible. This could have been a God-awful, flat, tepid, manufactured whimsy, assembly-line Christmas pic. It could have starred Jimmy Fallon, Eddie Murphy or even worse, Rob Schnieder. It could have been a script by John Hughes and directed by Howard Deutch. But no! Instead, it stars perhaps the greatest mainstream comedic actor since Jim Carrey-former SNL alum and current comedy genius Will Ferrell.

Let’s face it: Ferrell could read Things Fall Apart out loud and make it hilarious. Between his incredibly dead-on delivery and the fact he relishes looking like a fool to get a laugh, it all adds up to an hour and ninety-minutes of non-stop laughs. Not to mention his ability to play pure, childlike innocence but his ability to actually make you believe it, is some of the best acting all year. I’d even say Oscar nomination worthy.

Ferrell is Buddy, who, as a baby, snuck into Santa’s bag and was subsequently adopted by elves. Eventually, he learns that, in addition to being six foot five in a three foot world, he’s not an elf, but a human. With the blessing of his adopted father (Bob Newhart), he sets off to New York City to find his dad, an ***censored*** children’s book publisher (James Caan) who, much to Buddy’s terror, has made the naughty list.

Yes, this is basically the story, and yes is does seem rather routine. But you have to picture Farrell reacting (and over-reacting) to everything he comes in contact with. He answers the phone by asking “what’s your favorite color” and puts syrup on everything. He yells, he screams, he runs around like a madman, and yes, it should be annoying, but good-God it’s not. It’s infectious, it’s riotous and it’s truly, truly funny. Every moment Buddy is on screen, it’s a guaranteed laugh. As a matter of fact, the only time the film falters is when Ferrell is off-screen, which luckily, happens barely. Even an over-used, angry dwarf joke, that in any other movie would be incredibly lame, works here in spades.

Directed with minor flair by former Swinger Jon Favreau, the movie is kept at a tight pace, never limps and never slows.  It knows when to go overboard and more importantly, it knows when to stop. Zooey Dechanel is Buddy’s love interest, and while their romance is never really fully explored (or for that matter, even explained), it really doesn’t matter. Their date scene is worth the price of admission alone.

And while the rest of the supporting characters are all stock players (Caan, Newhart, Ed Asner), you didn’t come to see them. You came to see Will Ferrell get hit by a car or run around an escalator screaming.  There is just nothing bad I can say about this movie. Every facet of it is wholly entertaining, charming, and (yes heartwarming) and even has an appearance by Rankin-Bass characters. This movie should easily outshine the Matrix Revolutions and go on to be one of this winter’s biggest hits. If it’s not, I have truly lost all faith in the movie-goers of America.

Perfect for you, perfect for your kids, perfect for Jewish people. Give yourself a present and put Elf at the top of your nice list.

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Louis Fowler is a frequent contributor to Cinema Eye and Hitch Magazine. He is also the publisher of Damaged Magazine, a new issue of which is coming soon. 

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Love Actually is an intentionally overstuffed fruitcake of a holiday movie… but it makes no apologies. It’s as if director Richard Curtis took every cliched romantic comedy and holiday heart-warmer, diced them up and threw them together into one movie. Honestly, as a cynical post-modern cinephile, I don’t feel good about admitting how much I liked this movie. But, I will confess… despite an otherwise horrible movie-going experience Love Actually won me over.

Love Actually is not really a traditional story, but more of a theme piece about love. The film opens with documentary style footage of tearful greetings of family and friends at London’s Heathrow Airport. Hugh Grant describes the theme of he piece with a short snippet of narration: “General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. Seems to me that love actually is everywhere.” That sets the tone of the rest of the movie, over the course of which, writer/director Richard Curtis is earnestly determined to show us that Love IS EVERYWHERE.

Love Actually marks Curtis’ directorial debut, and while the film is hardly ground-breaking cinema, you have to give him credit for juggling dozens of characters and story lines in a manner that keeps everything clear. If you thought Once Upon a Time in Mexico had a lot going on, get ready for this: 

* An aging rock star (Bill Nighy) stages a comeback with a Christmas song he gladly admits is terrible.
* A recently widowed father (Liam Neeson) tries to bond with his son by helping him hook up with a cute american girl.
* Two movie stand-ins fall in love while naked and striking sexual poses for a camera crew.
* A new bride (Keira Knightly) discovers her husband’s best friend is in love with her.
* A novelist (Colin Firth) flees to France after a bad breakup and falls for his non-English speaking maid.
* A waiter is convinced his luck with girls will change if he can just get to America.
* A bachelor prime minister (Hugh Grant) falls for a chubby and foul-mouthed staff member.
* The prime minister’s sister (Emma Thompson) is worried about her husband (Alan Rickman)...
* ... who is struggling to resist the seduction of his hot secretary, while at the same time encouraging his star employee (Laura Linney)...
* ... to hook up with a fellow employee but instead of hanging out with her retarded brother all the time.

Sandwiched between these story lines are a few other subplots I have probably forgotten to mention. None of these story lines are in the least bit original on engaging on their own, but by throwing them all together they gain strength and resonance that they would otherwise lack. Curtis is also smart enough to know that he is working with some cliched material here, and he uses sharp humor to spin the scenes into unexpected directions. Curtis’ master stroke is setting the film over the last few days leading up to Christmas. Just by nature of it being a Christmas movie, the sentimentality is much easier to swallow.

And just like a Christmas movie should be, the film is overloaded with everything, including cast members. This many recognizable faces is usually the sign of a bad movie, but here it is necessary. There are so many characters in this film, audiences would be completely lost if the faces weren’t somewhat familiar. The performances themselves are effective, but nothing ground-breaking.

The break-out character of the film is Billy Mack (Bill Nighy), a crotchety rock star is competing with a pretty boy band to have the years #1 Christmas song—a cover of “Love is All Around” re-titled “Christmas is All-Around.” Billy Mack knows the song is terrible and he knows he is washed-up. Every time the movie has tugged on the heartstrings for a little too long, Curtis brings Mack back on screen to put things in perspective.

The film moves along at a brisk pace and gradually the loosely linked storylines come together bringing all the characters to a childrens Christmas concert. You can’t really go wrong with cute kids dressed as lobsters and other creatures totally out of place at a nativity play. Keeping his female audience members needs in mind, Curtis even throws in a couple of additional climaxes, just in case your heart-strings haven’t been tugged on enough.

By the end of the film, all the characters have been brought together and everything has been neatly and wrapped up. Sure, the film may be simplistic and corn-ball, but that may actually be the point. The film is so cheerful and optimistic, that you won’t find yourself worrying about the movie’s plot holes until the next day or so. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

As the credits begin to roll and the Beach Boys’ being to sing “God Only knows” over more footage of family and friends re-uniting… all but the most hard-hearted will have to admit that Curtis has made his point. Love IS all around us.

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With most of the buzz still floating around “Kill Bill” and the majority of derision being shouldered by whatever the latest Angelina Jolie introspective blood love flick is, it’s good to see something like “Elf” hit theaters, and not in a mad rush on Christmas Eve.

Normally, holiday movies are released with the full intent of scamming parents out of their money at the expense of both the audience’s intelligence and the attention deficits of the children watching. “Elf” is no different, offering a standard holiday formula. In a way, it’s a Christmas-themed version of Tom Hanks’ transformation in “Big,” but unlike that movie, the highlight in “Elf” isn’t watching two grown men do a Lazy Susan on a giant piano.

Will Ferrell plays Buddy, a human who, as a baby in an orphanage 30 years go, snuck into Santa’s sack of toys and has been raised by the North Pole elves as one of their own. As he grows, his disproportionate size becomes a nuisance to the real elves, whose eternally hectic schedule of preparing for the next Christmas season doesn’t allow for his awkwardness. When he cannot meet the vast quotas the elves have for toy production, his adoptive father, Papa Elf (Bob Newhart, still the king of deadpan stammering) decides to reveal Buddy’s true origins to him. With the truth and a snow globe in hand, he sets off to meet his real father in New York City.

Buddy discovers his father (James Caan) is a bigwig in a children’s book publishing company, falls in love with a department store wage slave (Zooey Deschanel) and befriends the neglected other son. James Caan in the father role is pretty much like James Caan as Sonny Corleone or the corrupt marshal in “Eraser” or his character in the new NBC show “Las Vegas.” He’s always snarling and ready to smash someone through a plate glass window; yet in “Elf,” heís destined ‘o discover that work is a secondary concern when faced with either being there for his family or impressing the snarling corporate fat-cat. Of course, his redemption comes just in time to prevent Santa Claus from becoming nothing more than a fanciful notion in the minds of men.

While most of the humor in the movie comes from Buddy’s alien responses to everyday things, some of the bigger laughs involve his constant desire to hug and eat sugarplums with his dad; a multi-cultural dance routine to “Whomp! There It Is” in a mail room; Buddy’s messy breakfast of spaghetti and every kind of candy topping imaginable; and a memorable scene involving the top children’s book author, a dwarf burdened with a huge, success-fueled ego, who beats up Buddy after he believes him to be an escaped elf. One of the surprises is Zooey Deschanel’s singing; as it turns out, it is a key factor in the resolution of the movie, and her voice is almost indistinguishable from Ella Fitzgerald’s. She does an incredible duet with Leon Redbone in the film’s credits, worth sticking around for.

The outsider-turned-redeemer device is Methuselan by now, but it’s Ferrell’s performance that makes this movie truly enjoyable. He is expert at infusing his character with a child’s optimism, and a genuine sense of amazement at experiencing the world outside the fantastic confines of the North Pole. You believe it when he explains his love for Christmas, and even the most canned of expressions seem fresh when he’s doing them. Luckily, the more child-friendly theme of the movie prevents it from dredging the easy material...with a rating of PG-13, I’m sure some writer would’ve thought an oblivious elf stumbling into a hooker’s bed would make for comedy gold. Instead, the focus is on Buddy’s infectious Christmas spirit, which although mundane in relation to the other elves, is something altogether foreign in the regular world.

So even though both the outcome, theme and message of “Elf” is apparent after only a few minutes, it proves something much greater—that Will Ferrell can pull off the leading role, albeit one suited for his abilities to establish a credible sense of bewilderment with his surroundings. He’s not destined for dreck like his “A Night at the Roxbury” counterpart, nor is he relying on a frenetic Carrey whirlwind to suck everyone in. He plays it wide-eyed and straight and, as his screen elf dad has always done, pulls it off masterfully. As long as Ferrell doesn’t start calling up Milos Foreman for dramatic roles, he’ll continue to find he’s far better suited for success on the big screen like fellow SNL alums Mike Myers and Adam Sandler. Let’s just hope no one tries to piggyback his success with a “Spartan cheerleader” movie.

This is Burke Hamblin’s first review for Cinema Eye, but you can read his rantings on a regular basis in the Cinema Eye forums.

Crispin Glover was born to star as Willard. Yeah, I know it’s a remake, but still, this is the role he was born to play. Glover is—in every sense of the word—Willard, a friendless, henpecked only child caring for his decrepit mother and hating his miserable existence at both work and home.

So socially inept is Willard that he forges a deep, loving bond with a white rat he finds in his basement and dubs Socrates. He promises to never let anyone harm Socrates and invites him to share his bed. Willard’s kindness to rodents brings them out of the woodwork, literally, and he spends his nights training them to obey his every command ("Up!" “Down!” “In!” “Out!” “Tear!"). When his boss (R. Lee Ermey, effective in yet another insufferable ***censored*** part) humiliates him one too many times in front of co-workers, Willard exacts some rat revenge by ordering his tailed charges to gnaw on the tires of Ermey’s new Mercedes. Before long, Willard’s madness has escalated to the point that he forgets about tires and sics them on Ermey instead.

As the film begins, Glover makes Willard entirely sympathetic. By the end, you don’t love the character so much as his grip on sanity weakens, but all the while, Glover throws his entire manic energy into it, giving a true performance similar to the kind Nicolas Cage did before he sold out. The movie itself is well-made and fun to watch, funny instead of scary, but it does run out of ideas by the final 30 minutes. The digital rats don’t look too bad, and though there are hundreds of them, they could have attacked more people for my money. Still, why this failed at the box office while director James Wong’s earlier Final Destination hit paydirt is beyond me.

The DVD boasts a feature-length documentary on the yearlong process of bringing Willard to life, plus a “Rats: Friend or Foe?” segment and a music video of Glover reprising Ben, the treachly song The Jackson 5 sang for the original film. It’s the strangest three minutes you’ll see until David Lynch makes something else.

Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

In Wrong Turn, a few healthy bodied young people find themselves stranded in the woods of West Virginia after a highly unlikely car crash, and then find themselves picked off by a trio of inbred mongoloid redneck (stop me if I’m being redundant) mountain men, given the none-too-subtle monikers of Three-Finger, Saw-Tooth and One-Eye.

Yes, the plot is that simple: Run away from the monsters, get found, run away again. You’d think that in these vast woods that go on for miles, the kids would be able to make an easy escape, yet the deformed villains always find them. It doesn’t help matters that they linger far too long where they shouldn’t. (Helpful hint: If you’re ever in a remote cabin filled with barbed wire, bones, blood and a fridge full of body parts in Tupperware, don’t stay to use the restroom, no matter how strong the urge to pee.)

Among the chased are the never-smiling Eliza Dushku from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the equally unamused Desmond Harrington of Ghost Ship. Their inhuman pursuers are creations of Stan Winston, yet look like slightly above-average Halloween masks. Wrong Turn purports to be an homage to `70s horror, but even that decade’s run-of-the-mill fare wasn’t this telegraphed or repetitive, not to mention bereft of gratuituous nudity. Cabin Fever and House of 1000 Corpses paid tribute far better on every level.

Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.