Fierce Anticipation: Dec. 5 – Dec.7

A blogumn by Ryan Dixon

George C. Scott in A Christmas Carol
You can have Seymour Hicks, Alastair Slim, Albert Finney, Mickey Mouse and the Muppets, I’ll take George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge. The elaborate 1984 TV movie that starred the always cantankerous (and often drunk) Mr. Scott arrived upon the Dixon family’s TV set at Christmas time with the same clockwork regularity as the annual post-presents brawl between my sisters and I over, well…just about anything. And while it’s always a special treat to watch the criminally underused David Warner (as Bob Cratchit), Scott’s performance stands out both as a showcase for a rare feat of onanistic scene-stealing and because his character seems just as grumpy, deranged and misanthropic after finding yuletide redemption as in the early goings when he gives the Christmas spirit the smackdown. Thus, Scrooge’s shout-out to the poor street Urchin on Christmas morning, “Boy! What day is it?” — it’s very hard to transcribe any dialog George C. Scott ever said without italicizing it — is delivered with all light-hearted élan as the opening speech in Patton.
Airs on AMC Sunday, December 7th at 7pm and Monday, December 8th at 12:15pm

Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
While countless articles have tried to zero in on the reasons for Harry Potter’s popularity, I’ve always thought that Stephen King went to the heart of the wizard’s success in his NY Times review of Goblet of Fire:

“Although they bear the trappings of fantasy, and the mingling of the real world and the world of wizards and flying broomsticks is delightful, the Harry Potter books are, at heart, satisfyingly shrewd mystery tales.”

Often times I find that those who love contemporary fantasy literature do so because they enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth of the authorial imagination; they would much rather dwell upon descriptions of vaulted arches in castles, the metallurgy of elfin daggers, and the consistency of dragon snot rather than enjoy a tightly constructed plot. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to share the joy in reading this type of descriptive diarrhea and most fantasy novels put me to sleep. However, Rowling’s genius was that she plopped her readers in a plot driven roller coaster that roared through the fantasy exemplifications. The relentless narrative drive of the Potter saga is one of the major reasons I devoured the books with the rapidity usually reserved for when I have the all-too-rare pleasure of eating a McRib. It will be interesting then to see how engaging her Herculean imagination is when the machinations of a traditional plot are replaced with the story book/ anthology format of the newly released Tales of Beedle the Bard. Of course, even if the book isn’t gripping on a purely narrative level, the meta-addition of notes and commentary by Albus Dumbledore should do a decent job of preparing our youth for their eventual journey into Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
In Bookstores Now

Punisher: War Zone
Aside from using Adderall to suppress appetite and lose weight, Hollywood’s newest fad seems to be the movie “reboot.” Taking a cue from golf, studios have created their own version of a mulligan and the reboot bug seems to have infected comic book movies more than any other genre, perhaps due to the fact that on both page and screen, this genre has always been the most narratively fluid and open to this kind of reinvention. Thus, this past summer’s The Incredible Hulk started off seemingly where Ang Lee’s Hulk ended but, on the promise of receiving “action-packed fun!”, we were politely asked forget the previous film’s origin story regarding Banner’s transformation and the Oedipal struggle with his Wild Man of Borneo of a father played by Nick Nolte.

So far, the record for the most contemporary reboots belongs to another Marvel Comics character: the Punisher. Going by the name of Frank Castle, this skull-shirt wearing vigilante is essentially nothing more than a roided-up version of the character Charles Bronson played in five (five!) Death Wish films and Punisher: War Zone is the second official reboot for the character in the last twenty years. The first version in 1989 offered us a Blue Period Dolph Lundgren and Louis Gossett Jr., who, after co-starring, must have resigned the right to ever again have “Oscar Winner” affixed to his name. Then, 2004’s version 2.0 starred T[h]om[as] Jane, Rebecca “Don’t Call Me Stamos” Romijn and an in-between comebacks John Travolta. Luckily, for those audiences members who have bravely trudged through the previous two iterations, the behind-the scenes battles on War Zone (a writer taking his name off the movie / the director being kicked out of the editing room / the daunting task of making any film series at all passable after it has been violated by Dolph Lundgren, Louis Gossett, Jr. and John Travolta) bodes well for a smooth arrival for reboot 3.0 in 2012.
Now in Theaters

The 1989 Punisher Trailer: