Oct 082000
 
toxic

A green creature (Jim Carrey), abused as a child and publicly humiliated recently, takes his revenge upon the shallow residents of Whoville by stealing all of their Christmas presents and decorations.

If, while watching the 1966 animated version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, you thought, “this isn’t bad, but what it really needs is someone, for no particular reason, kissing a dog’s ass” then the 2000 remake is the film for you.  It removes all the charm and dilutes the clever sing-song poetry of Dr. Seuss with an hour and a half of frenetic movement, broad faces that might have been fitting in Ace Ventura, drab dialog, and pointless additional characters.  Half the film appears ad-libbed, which could have been acceptable had the ad-libs been in character, funny, and even a fraction as witty as the book’s dialog, but they are none of those things.  Did director Ron Howard edit anything out of the footage that was shot each day or did he just pull it out of the camera and stick it into the final film?

It would be hard to enlarge the story, told perfectly in twenty-six minutes, to feature length, but Howard and company fail in incomprehensible ways.  Why give us a sad childhood for The Grinch to explain why he hates Christmas (when Dr. Seuss states no one knew the reason) or the nasty, anti-Christmas exploits of the Whos (don’t they need to already understand the meaning of the season for the story to work)?  And from what pool in Hell did Howard pluck the idea of giving The Grinch an erotic love interest?  Christine Baranski does her best in that hopeless role, reaching near orgasm whenever The Grinch in nearby; if only she could have been breathing heavily in another film.  How the Grinch Stole Christmas isn’t just a horrid Christmas film, but is one of the ten worst films ever made.

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