Creepy 'Christmas'

There are four ghosts in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," but most movie versions have downplayed the story's pee-your-pants potential.

That changes with "Disney's A Christmas Carol," a Robert Zemeckis animated movie that uses the latest 3-D and computer-graphic artistry to bring up the scare quotient in Dickens' classic story.

If you're Marley's ghost, you haven't rattled chains until you've thrust them forth from a 3-D screen, held them in front of some kid's face and shaken them in 60-channel IMAX sound.

"Mark me!" bellows Marley, green and phosphorescent and see-through.

The words might also be coming from Zemeckis, who's using the same motion-capture technology he used in "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf," and who's desperately eager to prove it's the future of motion pictures.

He's in puppy love with this technique, to the point that he sees all of its potential (there's no limit to what the camera can do) and ignores most of its obvious flaws.

The most obvious being there's a reason they call it motion-capture and not emotion-capture. Zemeckis photographs real actors wearing sensor suits, then channels that data through a computer, where facial expressions are added, and backgrounds are created.

You get to place these digitized actors in any position and "shoot" them from any angle, and there's some dazzling stuff here. But you get creepy, dead-eyed and inexpressive performances - even sympathetic characters end up looking like the ventriloquist's doll in that Anthony Hopkins movie.

That's not always a problem in "A Christmas Carol," which is about creepy old Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) again visited by the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future and taught a lesson in compassion.

Carrey also does the voice of Christmas Past (who looks like Reddy Kilowatt) and Present, while Gary Oldman does both Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim.

Again, I don't know if you can call these anything more than vocal performances. To me, the downside is still too obvious - Oldman's a great actor, but the technique drains all the nuance from his face and replaces it with something that looks like latex stretched over a mannequin.

And poor Tim! Zemeckis, preoccupied with set pieces like the red-eyed devil horses that escort Scrooge to his own grave, almost entirely forgets poor Tiny Tim.

A big image for any "Christmas Carol" filmmaker should be the empty chair and the crutch without an owner in the bereft Cratchit home. Zemeckis almost forgets to use it.

It's a little Scrooge-like, whether your obsession is money-capture, or motion-capture.