Made-for-TV Christmas 2004

In scanning the TV listings for new Christmas movies this year, two stood out to me as having some Yuletide cheer potential so I splurged and watched both. The first one, THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS EVE, has a clever premise, stolen from GROUNDHOG DAY: a man (Steven Weber), too busy on Christmas Eve attending to business to pay attention to those close to him, is hit by a giant finger (part of a store sign) and wakes up in a hospital. His nurse (Molly Shannon) tells him he has 12 chances to relive that Christmas Eve and get his priorities straight. He tries hard but keeps messing up one way or another and winds up back in his Cosmic Hospital bed with Shannon pressing him to get it right. Weber is OK, though his heart doesn't seem in it; Shannon is oddly subdued, which at first I thought might work, but by the end, I was missing her zany energy. Vincent Gale is a standout in the supporting cast as Weber's business underling. Weber's character is not especially Scroogish, which is a nice touch, but he's not developed well enough for us to see him as a person who is badly in need of ghostly rehabilitation. [USA Network]

KARROLL'S CHRISTMAS is the better film thanks to its star, Tom Everett Scott, and a great production design--lots of gauzy shots with bright colored Christmas lights galore. The plot is a nice twist on Dickens: spirits haunt a man on Christmas Eve in order to make him a better person, but they get the wrong guy. Scott, a writer of greeting cards, is having a bad holiday, mostly due to his neighbor, cranky old Wallace Shawn. The ghost of Jacob Marley and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future mistakenly appear to Scott when they were meant for Shawn. In the process of the hauntings, both Scott's and Shawn's lives are examined and Scott finds out why Shawn (the former owner of the greeting card company) is so bitter, and on Christmas Day, Scott manages to "fix" his own life and Shawn's as well. The ghosts (Larry Miller, Alanna Ubach, and Verne Troyer) are all quite good and they have fun with the updating of several traditional "Christmas Carol" bits: Jacob Marley is a Rastafarian, two of the ghosts are Jewish, and a remote control zapper is used to get through time and space. This is the first time I've see Troyer, best known as Mini-Me in the Austin Powers series, actually get much dialogue and he's good, even game enough to go along with a couple of references to his Mini-Me self. Deanna Milligan is lovely as Scott's girlfriend, and Shawn is his usual reliable self, but the handsome Scott carries the show with his essential sweetness coming through all the job, love-life, and yuletide frustrations. The last 20 minutes feel rushed, with some plot loopholes and unexplained actions, but this one might be worth having on DVD next year (Oy, those commercials!!) [A&E]