Ce Noël qui a changé ma vie

I liked this modern telling of A Christmas Carol. Yes I Recommend it. James Welch Henderson, Arkansas. 11/14/2020

Last year I sat down for a Christmas movie marathon with my family, and "It's Christmas, Carol!" happened to be one of the movies that we got around to watching. None of us had heard about the movie, much less had any familiarity with it in any way.

It turned out that "It's Christmas, Carol!" actually was quite a nice surprise of a movie, and it actually was rather entertaining for everyone in the family. So yes, this is indeed a Christmas movie that is quite suitable for a family viewing during the holidays.

"It's Christmas, Carol!" is actually a different approach to the Charles Dickens "Christmas Carol" story. So one might ponder if meddling around with a classic is a particularly good idea. It turned out that writers William Penick and Chris Sey actually managed to pull it off quite nicely.

Carol Huffman is a busy publishing executive, whom is visited by her former boss on Christmas Eve, as Carol has lost track of what is important and lost perspective on what truly matters. Initially Carol was supposed to have a visit from three ghosts, but because of budget cutbacks Eve, Carol's former boss, is in charge of the visit to the past, present and future.

Sure, this is a predictable movie, and you know exactly how it will turn out from very early on in the storyline. And you are already more than well familiar with the Dickens tale, be it from the book or from one of the many movie adaptations available.

But at the same time, it is the familiarity in the story that makes it a good story, and the rewriting just adds a new twist on the classic. So on that account director Michael Scott pulled it off quite well.

The cast in the movie was fairly good and people did good jobs with their given roles and characters. It was, for me at least, Carrie Fisher who stole the screen with her role as Eve. And Olivia Cheng also did a good job, just a shame that her role was only a minor supporting one.

All in all, then "It's Christmas, Carol!" was actually a wholehearted and entertaining movie, and definitely a movie that is worth sitting down to watch during the Christmas season. However, it is not likely that this is a movie that you will watch more than just once.

I was hoping this would be so much better, but it was bad right from the start. The music volume was way too loud in relation to the rest of the audio and didn't get corrected until well into the film. But that was the least of the problems. The acting was out and out terrible and there was not a likable character in the whole film. Ben the writer/exboyfriend would lose an acting competition with a piece of lumbar and Fred, the over the top drama queen I just wanted to slap silly. The writing was poor and how does a publisher not know The Christmas Carol? How was this a comedy? It was like watching bad community theatre.

Another re-hash of Dickens' classic the has some interesting points but, as Don Adams used to say in the old "Get Smart" TV series, "Missed it by that much". I am a "Carol" lover and I own more than 20 versions so I can comment on this with a clear conscience. The idea of having Eve, Carol's old (and dead) boss take the place of Marley is understandable. The idea of her also taking the place of the three ghosts is less so. As in all the re-tellings of the story the protagonist, Carol, is Scrooge-like and pretty well hated by all the people who work for her. Again she sees the past, present and future but, unlike other tellings she doesn't gradually realize how nasty she is until the last moment and then she suddenly switches and is a nice person. This alone makes her transformation less than believable. Not a really bad movie, but it lacks the heart of several of the other versions. For the best see the Alastair Sim version with the George C. Scott and Patrick Stewart versions running a close second.

We all know the story once we figure out where all the new players fit. Carol is obviously Scrooge. But one of the first new things is there is only one Christmas ghost, and it is Carol's late partner, Eve. The real treat though is that it is Carrie Fisher. She even makes a Star Wars joke.

There is some good humor here and there. The story follows the general lines of the original so we won't be terribly surprised by much. The acting is good, especially Fisher.