SCROOGED
With Bill Murray, Karen Allen, John Forsythe, Bobcat Goldthwait, Carol Kane, Robert Mitchum, Michael J. Pollard, and Alfre Woodard.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Consider the overall context. A kind of ersatz Dickens adaptation (in contrast to a genuine Dickens adaptation like Little Dorrit, perhaps the best to date, which will open at the Fine Arts in the weeks ahead) with only a rudimentary relation to its model, Scrooged is one of several Christmas pictures shrewdly released before Thanksgiving in the hopes of reaping benefits throughout the remainder of the year. The others include Ernest Saves Christmas (a sequel to a feature-length spin-off of a TV commercial) and two cartoon features, Oliver & Company and The Land Before Time.
These are the kinds of everyday lies that are usually told to children in Disney features (Oliver & Company actually comes from the Disney studio and apes the late Disney manner of 101 Dalmatians; The Land Before Time comes from Lucas/Spielberg and aspires to the grace of a prehistoric Bambi), and the least that can be said for these two movies is that neither is especially moralistic. Scrooged, on the other hand, purports to take on the moral agenda of A Christmas Carol without sacrificing its yuppie priorities for an instant. This requires a sleight of hand that is a good deal cruder than anything Disney ever attempted, even when he was welcoming Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to Hollywood in the mid-30s.
There are a few half-funny moments in Scrooged, nearly all of them founded on cruelty: At one point Frank suggests using staples to attach fake antlers to the mice in his Christmas show, and Carol Kane’s Ghost of Christmas Present, dressed like a sugarplum fairy, kicks Frank in the balls and beats him black and blue, adding some tangy S and M to the holiday cheer. (There are also a disembodied eyeball and plenty of decaying flesh for horror movie freaks.) The jokes that aren’t cruel are mainly SCTV or Saturday Night Live staples, such as a TV ad for Bob Goulet’s Old-Fashioned Cajun Christmas, although for a pointed spoof of turning Christmas into coin, Stan Freberg’s 50s record “Green Christmas” has everything in this movie beat by miles.
