Ebbie

Title:

Ebbie

Format:

TV movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

Crescent Entertainment, for the Lifetime cable network

Year:

1995 (first broadcast on Lifetime on December 4^th that year)

Length:

96 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary United States

Background:

The cable network which became Lifetime had been set up in the US as BETA and then Daytime in 1982, gaining the name Lifetime the following year. Since the start it has been aimed at women, with programmes based around women’s issues, but was initially mostly a non-fiction channel with various discussion and health-related programmes. In the late 1980s they began to show more drama, repeats of older series but also new original commissions, which became more central into the 1990s. These would usually have female-led casts or be based around issues which may be more of interest to women, and Ebbie was a festive offering for 1995.

Cast and crew:

Susan Lucci stars as Elizabeth Scrooge, known as ‘Ebbie’, which as with some other female versions of the character seems to be needlessly pushing it a bit. Lucci is evidently a bit of a television legend in the United States, having starred in the daytime soap opera All My Children from 1970 until 2011, at one point apparently earning over $1 million a year for her role, which is pretty good going by any era’s money.

Canadian actress Wendy Crewson as the Cratchit character is worth mentioning as she has some pedigree with Christmas films. The previous year she had co-starred in The Santa Clause, and would go on to appear in its two sequels. Made in Canada, Ebbie also has a Canadian director in the form of Hungarian political refugee George Kaczender, who’d made Don’t Let the Angels Fall in 1969, the first Canadian film to be entered into the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Writers PaulRedford and Ed Redlich were both fairly early in their careers at this point, but would go on to write scores of American TV drama episodes between them. Redford in particular would carve out a niche working on Washington-set shows, working on The West Wing, Madam Secretary and Designated Survivor.

Jeffrey DeMunn as Jake Marley.

Underdone Potato:

This version takes place in a department store, Dobson’s, owned and run by Scrooge. We begin with her walking around the store handing out rather meagre Christmas bonus envelops to employees, with her assistant Roberta Cratchit in tow. Ebbie’s nice niece Frannie comes to try and persuade her to come round the next day and is rebuffed, as are two rival store owners who want her to contribute to fund for the needy.

Ebbie also fires the store detective, Luther – a man who looks about as inconspicuous as Blackadder’s giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar bears-only golf club – and tells Cratchit that she has to come in on Christmas afternoon to help prepare for the launch of the big Boxing Day sales. Not that I suppose they call them Boxing Day sales in the US.

A bit of info-dumping during the charity section tells us that Marley died just one year ago rather than the traditional seven. After Ebbie goes home for the night, Marley shows up in her TV set and then takes her on a ghostly elevator ride, while being badgered on a mobile phone by his mysterious boss. He warns her that she has to ‘take three meetings’, at the oddly specific times of 12.01, 1.11 and 2.15. She asks if she can take them all at once, as a ‘conference call.’

The Ghost(s) of Christmas Past.

Past:

It’s always nice to be surprised by a version of the Carol, and I was here. Several versions show the ghosts as other characters before they visit Scrooge, but it’s done with a touch more subtlety than usual here (and certainly more so than, say, the 2004 musical managed), so I hadn’t predicted that the two employees from the perfume counter were going to turn up as the Ghost(s) of Christmas Past. Once they had done it was easy to then guess just from the look of him that Luther the store detective was going to be the third spirit, but I couldn’t work out the second.

Having two of them is a nice change, and there’s an interesting habit they have of changing costumes for each different vision that they show Ebbie. We see a glimpse of her childhood and her abusive father, her life seemingly kept happy by her older sister; also called Frannie, and played by the same actress who portrayed her daughter, Ebbie’s niece, earlier on.

We visit Frannie’s ‘tiny’ flat – actually enormous and quite plush-looking – later on when Ebbie is now a young woman, and as begun working at Dobson’s. Frannie is heavily pregnant and not feeling well, but insists that Ebbie go to the party, the equivalent of the Fezziwig Christmas ball.

The Dobsons themselves are a nice couple, with Marley one of their main employees who is teaching Ebbie some of the tricks of the trade. At the party – which Ebbie had joked to her sister about being the ‘belle of the ball’ at – we meet the Belle equivalent, Paul, who actually comes over as something of a sleaze. It probably isn’t helped by the fact that they do such a good job of making Lucci look much younger for these scenes that Ron Lea as Paul actually looks far too old for her.

When Paul drives her back to check on her sister after the party, it turns out that she’s been rushed to hospital, where her baby has been born early but Frannie herself dies in Ebbie’s arms. Ebbie becomes a much harsher and harder person after this, culminating in Paul leaving her and then her and Marley buying the Dobsons out of their own business and taking the store away from them. I wondered if this latter aspect were perhaps inspired by what Scrooge and Marley do to Fezziwig in the famous 1951 film version.

We then come almost up to date with Marley’s death the previous Christmas, as he sits down to dinner with Ebbie. As illness overtakes him he seems to have something of a reflective epiphany, reminiscing about the old Christmas parties they used to have in the Dobsons’ days, and asking Ebbie what she’s actually saving all her money for. It’s quite an effective scene and is perhaps my favourite addition in this version of the story.

Christmas present, get it?

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present takes the form of Rita, another of the employees Ebbie was short with earlier on. She takes the ‘Christmas present’ idea almost as literally as The Jetsons’ version does, with a costume consisting of wrapping paper, pairs of scissors, etc.

We see Roberta’s apartment, once again described as being a poor and humble place, and once again flippin’ massive and luxurious. She has two children, Martha and Tim, but no sign of a Mr Cratchit nor any explanation for his absence. Martha goes on about what a bitch Ebbie is for making her mother working on Christmas Day. Tim has the requisite crutch an once again a mystery, sinister illness. He rather loses sympathy when he starts some treacly singing, however – yeuch!

We drop in on Frannie’s, and her drip of a husband’s. She toasts her aunt’s health but Ebbie notices she doesn’t take a drink and thinks she doesn’t mean it – but it turns out that she’s pregnant! This upsets Ebbie, but the spirit assures her that Frannie is a strong, healthy woman.

We also get an interesting version of the second Belle scene, transplanted from past to present as was also done in the 1979 version. Paul is in his happy family home, contemplatively looking out of the window, and he explains to his wife that he was thinking of an old girlfriend with whom he split up at Christmas. On the basis of seeing her for about ten seconds, Ebbie decides that Paul’s wife is ‘lovely’.

We finish off the section with a bit of Ignorance & Want, with the latter renamed ‘Poverty’ in this version. The two raggedy children do a spot of interpretative dance, and the present draws to a close.

If this doesn't work out, he can always try for a job as a
Commander Data impersonator.

Yet to Come:

Luther the store detective turns up, without much to say but fully visible, similarly to how the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is depicted in some other US TV movie versions with contemporary settings.

He shows Ebbie that she is eventually forced out of Dobson’s in the same way she and Marley forced the sweet old couple out, with the store being bought-out and closed-down to make way for a multiplex cinema. Ebbie then gets herself run over, and dies alone in hospital without anybody coming to see her or being at her side when she dies.

What’s To-Day:

In common with Ms. Scrooge from two years later, we see Scrooge laughing in delight and joy when she wakes, a laugh referred to in the book but only sometimes shown on screen. Instead of calling down to a boy outside the window, she buzzes Ralph the commissionaire at her apartment building on the intercom to find out what day it is.

Weirdly, she still has the red dress that she went to the Dobson’s Christmas party in all those years ago – she specifically says it’s the same one – but it’s at least impressive that she can still fit in it, I suppose. Quite often in these adaptations when Scrooge goes around buying presents for everyone you wonder where was open to sell them, but at least in this version there’s the convenient fact that she owns her own department store.

She makes amends with her employees and with her family, visiting the Cratchits and Frannie, before going back to the Cratchits for dinner and another chorus of Tim’s saccharine bloody song.

Review:

Quite a well put-together version with nice modern equivalents for a lot of the situations and lines. The fact that original lines from the book only occasionally crop up in their unaltered form is more forgivable in a contemporary adaptation than one set at the time of the book, and somehow lends those few lines more power here when they do emerge – most notably Marley’s ‘mankind was my business!’

Lucci and most of the cast are excellent, although I’m not convinced by the character of Paul. As I mentioned above, he just comes across as a bit of a sleaze, and is only really effective in his more reflective scene with the woman he eventually married when he’s thinking back about Ebbie on Christmas Day.

Tim and the Cratchits may be a touch too saccharine – are they ever not? – but the character of Frannie the niece is quite sweetly winning. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised given that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by others in this sub-genre, but this is another contemporary US version with a female lead made as a cheap-and-cheerful TV movie but which is actually rather better than you might expect.

In a nutshell:

Not a classic, but neither is it awful. Probably not worth making a special effort to seek out, but amiable enough if you happen across it on TV one afternoon over the Christmas holidays.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

Ms. Scrooge

Title:

Ms. Scrooge

Format:

TV Movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

Power Pictures, for the USA Network

Year:

1997 (first broadcast on the USA Network on December 10^th that year)

Length:

87 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary United States

Background:

One of the major general-interest cable channels in the United States, the USA Network was also one of the first, being founded as a sports network in 1977 before transforming into its current more mixed format in 1980. Through the 1980s is began investing in original scripted programming, and by the 1990s was a major player in America cable ratings and a commissioner of various series, miniseries and TV movies such as this seasonal offering for Christmas 1997.

Cast and crew:

Scriptwriter John McGreevey was a very experienced hand in American television drama, having written for series going all the way back to the early 1950s, including twenty episodes of The Waltons in the 1970s. Ms Scrooge was his final credited work, produced when he was 75 years old. Director John Korty was an Academy Award winner, although not for a dramatic work – he won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Who Are The DeBolts? in 1977. During his career he also made animated  shorts for Sesame Street and directed the Ewok-based Star Wars spin-off Caravan of Courage in 1984.

Cicely Tyson stars as the rather-forcing-it ‘Ebenita Scrooge’; a hugely experienced and acclaimed performer in film and television, she had been nominated for an Oscar for her role in 1972’s Sounder and had previously worked with director Korton when she starred in his TV movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which also garnered them both much acclaim.

Katherine Helmond as ‘Maude Marley’ was known for her starring role in the American sitcom Soap, and had also been a regular in Who’s the Boss?, the sitcom which was remade in the UK in the early 1990s as The Upper Hand.

Underdone Potato:

Ebenita Scrooge is a loan shark in Providence, Rhode Island, who runs a business giving loans to the desperate and needy and making a tidy profit in return. She has a few more employees other than Bob Cratchit, although he is the one of whom we see the most through the whole thing. There are a few other differences, too – it’s Marley’s name first in the business, although this is later explained, and Maude Marley died ten rather than seven years ago.

Nephew Fred is Reverend Luke here, the first sign that this version takes a more explicit leap into Christian territory than most versions of the Carol usually do, and perhaps even more so than Dickens’s original did.

There are some oddities once Scrooge has made it home for the evening. She has a cat, Mortimer, which she genuinely seems to have affection for. This seems an odd move as it gives her perhaps a chink of sympathy to her character a bit too early – the same issue caused by Scrooge being kind to a mouse early on in the 2001 animated version.

She also has various odd little novelty money boxes around the house, into which she puts various coins at the end of the day, which again seems a bit frivolous for her character. Speaking of money boxes, when Marley appears the boxes on her chains have been replaced by more modern-day items such as mobile phones. Oddly, although she draws attention to the chains almost immediately, they aren’t subsequently commented upon or explained in any way.

There’s an interesting difference to Marley here, too. Which in the original Marley says Scrooge’s chance at redemption is “a chance and hope of my procuring,” (one of my favourite lines from the book) here Marley’s motivations are much more selfish. If Scrooge is redeemed, she will apparently no longer have to walk the Earth – although Maud has it easier than the literary Marley, as she evidently only has to walk out once a year, at Christmas.

Maude Marley; a more selfish version of the character than usual.

Past:

The Ghost of Christmas Past is a jolly-ish late middle-aged man with the odd cutting remark, although he doesn’t actually appear all that much. Most of the past scenes are simply shown to us, with Ebenita and the spirit only occasionally present, with voiceover often being used instead of seeing them in the scenes.

We see Ebenita as a child, presumably just after the Second World War as her father mentions using his GI grant to start up a shop. This is also the only element of the story where we get any hint of racial tension – you might expect this to perhaps be more of a theme when the story is about a black woman who grew up in the American south in the middle of the 20^th century, but although it’s touched on here it never becomes a major theme of the piece. Of course, just because a story focuses on a black character it’s not somehow compulsory that it has to tackle racism. But it does enough to give the context of the time, I think, acknowledging it without it being a focus.

Ebenita’s father had given her the best Christmas she ever had as a child by giving her a puppy as a present, but gets himself into debt trying to start the shop, and then dies in a fire when it burns down. The fire scene perhaps echoes a similar event in An American Christmas Carol from 1979, one of the best-known US-set versions.

We then see Ebenita having moved north as an adult, having a romance with a man named Steve and getting a job working for Marley. Marley in this version combines both the traditional role for the character and that of Fezziwig, although with none of Fezziwig’s jolliness. Marley is hard and pragmatic, and these traits start to rub off on Ebenita. When Steve decides to move back south she doesn’t go with him, receiving a promotion in Marley’s firm but a couple months later learning that her brother Perry has been killed in action in Vietnam.

The Ghost of Christmas Present. I'm not sure about that baseball cap...

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present is played by Shaun Austin-Olsen, an actor about whom very little information appears to be available but who seem like the sort of person you’d get for a role where you can’t get hold of Simon Russell Beale. He’s British, middle-aged, only moderately bearded and not particularly jolly. Intriguingly, he mentions that he usually resides in a “toasty place,” suggesting that he is doing this as penance for his own failings.

We see Bob sliding on the ice with Tim, who unusually in this version does actually have his illness specified – it’s a slow-growing tumour. His crutch does look very Victorian, perhaps either a hint at how poor the Cratchits are or else a deliberate throwback to the original version. There’s the toast scene at the Cratchits, with Mrs Cratchit – actress Arsinée Khanjian, whose accent I couldn’t place so looked her up afterwards and found she was Armenian-Canadian – being irritated by it as per the book.

We are taken to nephew Luke’s, but of course him being a reverend it’s not a party we’re dropping in on, but a church service. He tells a story I remember being told in primary school about everyone in the afterlife having to eat with very long cutlery, but those in heaven feeding each other while those in hell go hungry.

Looking like Death-not-even-all-that-warmed up.

Yet to Come:

Julian Richings as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come looks like an undertaker, and it’s no surprise to learn that he does seem to have made something of a career out of playing Death. Although his face is seen he is still mute, similar to what was done with James Cromwell in the 2003 A Carol Christmas.

Fred knows the Cratchits more than he does in the book, as they go to his church. Rather than seeing the aftermaths of Tim and Scrooge’s deaths, we actually see them dying, with the Inland Revenue Service taking all of Ebenita’s money, much to her disgust. There’s an interesting line from Cratchit when he turns up at her funeral as the one and only mourner – even though she had fired him – when he tells Fred that he “grieves for who she might have been.”

What’s To-Day:

Tyson does a good job of Scrooge being overtaken by a joyous laugh after she awakes, and the boy – or “young man” – outside of the window gets a name in this version, Chris Logan. He’s sent to the supermarket to buy the turkey for the Cratchits, and has a fun line when he gets back with it about the person in the store at first not having believed the fifty dollar note Scrooge gave him was real, or that he hadn’t stolen it.

As the Cratchits receive the turkey, Scrooge makes amends with some of those she wronged or turned down for money at the start – although not all of them, which makes me wonder whether some material was cut here for time – and leaves bonuses in envelopes for her employees to come into on Boxing Day.

One employee receives a personal visit, however – Bob, whose wife at first thinks she’s come to fire him, until Tim points out it must have been her who sent the turkey. Scrooge doubles his salary, makes him vice president of the firm and says they’ll be instituting a healthcare plan. She also has presents for all and sundry, including a Punch & Judy toy referred to by name, which surprised me as I didn’t think they had Punch & Judy shows in America. She also gets Tim a puppy, echoing her father’s gift to her all those years ago, which must have been in that box for a hell of a long time before she gives it to him, but it seems happy enough.

The film ends with Scrooge paying a visit to Fred’s church service as the choir is in full song with Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he’s surprised but pleased to see her arrive.

I bet the Cratchits were *thrilled* that she got Tim a puppy without even asking them first.

Review:

This is a pretty well-done contemporary version, and it makes an interesting comparison to ADiva’s Christmas Carol from three years later. Both contemporary US-set versions with female leads made for American cable television channels – and both shot in Canada – and both managing to tell decent versions of the story in very different ways

Whereas A Diva’s Christmas Carol goes primarily for the comedy, here scriptwriter John McGreevey has very much gone for a serious version of the tale. Neither approach is more valid than the other, of course, but although I can appreciate the work done here I actually probably found the fun of Diva a little more to my taste.

But that’s not to say this is in any way bad. It’s not. It’s a good film, and more directly acknowledging the Christian aspect of Christmas marks it out from a great many other versions. As a serious US-set version, however, it’s probably somewhat in the shadow of An American Christmas Carol, which I don’t think it quite manages to match.

In a nutshell:

While it’s not in the first rank of Carol adaptations, it’s certainly not bad and worth a watch if it happens to be on.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

A Carol Christmas

Title:

A Carol Christmas

Format:

TV movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

MAT IV Productions, for Hallmark Entertainment

Year:

2003 (first broadcast on the Hallmark Channel in the USA on December 7^th that year)

Length:

85 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary United States

Background:

I think I ought to create a new category here on the blog for ‘Contemporary US adaptations with a female lead’. There have been several of them in TV movie form since the 1990s, creating their own sub-genre of Carol adaptations. This particular one was made for the Hallmark Channel, a US cable network specialising in miniseries and TV movies, and who have often commissioned festive-themed efforts which turn up on TV at Christmas time on other channels around the world in the following years. The similar It’s Christmas, Carol! from 2012 is another such example, which I reviewed back in the first year of this blog. And like that one, this also has a sci-fi superstar dropping in…

Cast and crew:

He’s not the main star, but undoubtedly the biggest name here is Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, as the Ghost of Christmas Present. The star, Tori Spelling as this production’s version of Scrooge – ‘Carol Cartman’ – was also best known for a TV role, in Beverley Hills, 90210 in the 1990s. Shatner’s in esteemed company among the spirits, with Oscar nominee James Cromwell popping up as Yet to Come.

Childhood sitcom star Gary Coleman is another of the ghosts, making this something of a collection of well-known US TV faces. Michael Landes, who played Jimmy Olsen in Lois & Clark (or The New Adventures of Superman as it was known in the UK) until he got fired for looking too much like the star Dean Cain, here plays another Jimmy.

Director Matthew Irmas had written, produced and directed three films of his own in the 1990s, but A Carol Christmas appears to be the last major credit on his CV. Writer Tom Amundsen has a slightly more extensive list of credits, mostly on various American TV series.

She's called Carol, and it's Christmas, get it?

Underdone Potato:

Carol Cartman is the star of her own self-titled daytime TV chat show, based in Los Angeles. We meet her when she’s preparing for a live Christmas Eve special, generally being rude to her staff – including personal assistant Roberta and… um… Jimmy, whatever the hell Jimmy’s job is, it’s not clear – and buying all the crew soap for Christmas. Why she’s left it until Christmas Eve to sort out their gifts is a bit of a mystery.

She gets a visit from her sister Beth, who brings hand-made presents from her niece and nephew, which Carol coolly dismisses. Beth invites her to “Christmas Eve dinner,” as if that’s a thing, but is sent packing – although Carol does send Roberta to buy gifts for her niece and nephew, so right from the start we’re shown she’s not completely heartless.

As Carol lies down for a nap before the special show, she’s haunted by the spirit of her Aunt Marla, who helped propel her into showbusiness and was a producer on the chat show until she died – we’re never told how or why exactly that this happened. Perhaps it was scenery-chewing and she choked on something; her warning that the first spirit will arrive when the clock strikes 12 is so hammy that it looks like a parody. Which may perhaps be what Grease star Dinah Manoff was aiming for with the part, but I don’t think it’s what the film-makers intended with the rest of it.

"What'chu talkin' about...?"

Past:

Gary Coleman arrives in Carol’s dressing room basically playing a version of himself, and takes her back to her childhood, showing her Aunt Marla pushing her into the lead role in a nativity play as a child even though it upset a recently-bereaved child who was mean to be playing Mary. Marla is shown throughout these visions as being controlling and manipulative, having exploited Carol for her own ends.

We then skip forward to Carol at drama college, where she meets John, a man who looks twice her age and runs a homeless shelter. We’d seen in the opening section how this drip of a Belle had won a ‘Good Guy of the Year’ award, and we now get a soppy montage which again veers well into unintentional self-parody to show his and Carol’s love for one another.

Carol becomes the star of a series called The Tillys of Bel Air, which is presumably intended to be a parody of Spelling’s 90210 role. We suffer through dialogue such as “are you so cruel that you’d make her choose between us?” as Marla splits her and John up, and there are lashings of the Nutcracker on the soundtrack.

Marla dies, after having signed up Carol for a chat show which the visions reveal producer Hal wants to basically turn into a Jerry Springer-style freak show.

"Beam me up, Christmas!"

Present:

There is one joke I quite liked in this section, with the original Spirit’s “touch my robe” having been translated into Carol having to touch his braces whenever they are transported somewhere because he doesn’t want to take her hand due to a fear of germs. Speaking of transportation, there is a Star Trek reference with the way in which the Spirit – who has taken the form of ‘Dr Bob’, a personality on a rival TV show – takes Carol from place-to-place, with a Trek-style transporter effect.

We see the poor conditions in which Roberta and her daughter Lilly – who unlike Tim in the original, isn’t ill – live, and Roberta’s burgeoning romance with Jimmy who works on the show. All this looks set to be ruined by Lilly’s father, Frank, who wants to take custody of her. We also visit Carol’s sister and her family, with a truly sickeningly scripted pair of the most unnaturalistic children you have ever seen on screen in your life.

This section establishes that A Christmas Carol exists in this universe – although in that odd way Americans sometimes do, they refer to it as The Christmas Carol – with Beth’s family reading it together as is evidently a Christmas Eve tradition for them. Carol herself, however, doesn’t seem to be familiar with the story, or at least she never comments on the similarity of what’s happening to her to it.

Yet to Come:

James Cromwell is probably the best of the three spirits – a silent, imposing, deathly-looking chauffeur driving a black stretched limo. There’s a decent little joke where Carol tries to engage him in conversation, asking him whether he prefers to be addressed as ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’, and what the different implications of the two terms might be.

There’s an oddity in that we’re shown the future Carol presenting the full-on ‘freakshow’ version of her chat show, with the day’s topic being ‘I Hate My Family’, and then quitting because she doesn’t think it’s right – which presumably shows she has some morals without the ghosts visiting her anyway. It rather lessens the effect of the story, but perhaps for a piece of Christmas froth they didn’t want her seeming too unlikeable.

We’re then shown further in her future, where as a grey-haired old lady she’s doing sparsely-attended personal appearances at a retirement village. We then see her even more sparsely-attended funeral – only Roberta and Jimmy are there, both not looking anywhere near as aged-up as Spelling just was in the previous scene. Roberta reveals that after she lost custody of Lilly, the two of them rarely speak any more.

The end of this section sees the most amount of dialogue from the book – apart from when the beginning was being read in the ‘present’ sequence – as Carol has the lines about whether these are things that may be or will be, and asking why they’d bother showing her these things if she were beyond all hope.

"What the hell am I doing here? I was nominated for an Oscar once, you know!"

What’s To-Day:

Carol awakes, it’s still Christmas Eve, and she hasn’t missed it. This part goes on for rather longer than it does in other versions, as we see her make amends with Roberta and Jimmy and the rest of the team, and even promise them all a free trip to Hawaii.

It all gets a bit over-the-top and sugary really, especially when she then goes to her sister’s house. Her old flame John turns up, and they all end up reading A Christmas Carol on the sofa together while the three ghosts look on appreciatively through the window, lined up as if they’re the Force Ghosts looking at Luke at the end of Return of the Jedi. Although of course it’s not unheard-of for the spirits to pop up at the end like this in some other versions.

Review:

This really is very poor indeed. If you were being charitable you might say that it was deliberately intended to be a parody of ‘modern TV movie version of A Christmas Carol’, but it slips so haphazardly into and out of that tone, and is never done with a nod and a wink to the audience, that I really do think the writing and direction simply is that bad.

You might say, ‘well what do you expect from a lightweight TV movie?’ But having only a few days ago watched A Diva’s Christmas Carol from three years earlier, it’s quite clear that you can make exactly the same type of film with a lot more skill and style than this.

It’s a shame really, as it seems a waste of several talented actors who could have been put to much better use.

In a nutshell:

Even just taking it for what it is, a very poor effort. There are much better contemporary-set US TV movie versions of the story with female leads than this.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

A Diva's Christmas Carol

Title:

A Diva’s Christmas Carol

Format:

TV movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

Viacom Productions, for VH1

Year:

2000 (first broadcast on VH1 in the USA on December 13^th that year)

Length:

89 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary United States

Background:

If you’re anything like me you’ll have been slightly taken aback at the network this was made for, thinking, “Hang on, VH1? Isn’t that / wasn’t that a music channel?” The answer is yes – a sister channel of the pioneering MTV, it was originally designed to attract an older audience. In the 1990s they began producing more programming such as documentaries rather than simply airing videos, and in 1999 expanded into drama with their own original TV movies under the ‘Movies That Rock’ brand, usually biopics of bands or musicians or films which at least had some sort of musical theme.

Cast and crew:

The relevant ‘Movies that Rock’ boxes are ticked here by several members of the cast being better known for their musical careers – Vanessa Williams, of ‘Save the Best For Last’ fame, is the star of the film as conceited pop star Ebony Scrooge, and also performs a couple of original songs and a cover of ‘Sleigh Ride’ for the soundtrack. Duran Duran bassist John Tayor, of all people, pops up as the Ghost of Christmas Present, with Rozonda Thomas from TLC as Marli Jacob (see what they did there…?). There’s even a guest appearance from Nile Rodgers.

Richard Schenkman both wrote the screenplay and directed the film. Perhaps a flavour of his background can be given by looking at some select credits from his CV – Playboy: International Playmates… Hmmmm, okay, perhaps that was a one-off… Er… Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies, anybody…?

Viva the Diva...

Underdone Potato:

We begin with Ebony – almost always referred to by her first name alone, Beyonce-style – shooting a music video for a cheesy Christmas song in Paris, during a stop of her European tour. It’s made clear that she is an absolute megastar of a league above what Williams had achieved in real life, but also that she’s a complete… well… diva, as you probably guessed from the title.

We also learn that she hates Christmas, and is not only selfish and narcissistic but also immoral, or at least amoral, as well, deciding to have a charity gig in New York on Christmas Day but wanting to make very sure she skims off most of the profits and that very little will actually end up going to charity. She also makes her band and tour staff stay in poor-quality accommodation, and there are no complementary tickets to the charity gig so that they can at least have their families with them on Christmas Day.

Her tour manager is one Bob Cratchett – note the variation on the spelling – who seems to be an old friend of hers, but there’s also an odd moment once she’s in her hotel in New York when he tries to massage her shoulders, which sits oddly given that we have been shown he has a wife at home and of course a sick child called Tim.

After a visit from her niece Olivia inviting her over for Christmas the next day, when Ebony is alone after pestering hotel staff about her food she is confronted by the ghost of her former bandmate Marli Jacob. Marli does wear chains to represent the wrongs she did in life, but rather than the clanking money boxes trailing behind of a traditional Marley figure, they’re instead figure-hugging and looking more like some sort of BDSM fetish gear – although the script does have the wit to have Ebony comment on this.

There’s quite a horror movie-type scene of Marli removing her own head to prove to Ebony she’s a ghost, but when she then goes on to tell Ebony that the good condition of her face is just a mask she wears for Ebony’s benefit, they shy away from showing us the horror, only shooting it from behind. It’s probably more effective that way, but I wonder if there was originally going to be a shot that they deemed either unsuccessful or just too gory to use?

Marli's chains!

Past:

The Ghost of Christmas Past initially appears as a room service employee before quickly revealing who she really is. She seems to have something of the… erm… spirit of the ghost of the past from Scrooged, although she’s less shrill and more pally.

We learn that Ebony had an abusive father who hit her older brother, in what’s probably the only scene of the film that I felt didn’t work very well. Something about it just felt a bit over-the-top and not-quite right – suggestion rather than showing might have worked better here.

She and her brother were split up in care, with him later dying, very much the traditional Fan role. We also learn that Ebony was originally part of a trio called Desire along with Marli and another woman called Terry, all of them having grown up together. After Marli was killed in a car crash in which two innocent people also died, Ebony abandoned Terry and went solo, and we see the dire straits to which Terry has now been reduced.

It turns out that Bob Cratchett also, perhaps uniquely, fulfils the Belle role here – before just being Ebony’s tour manager he had also been her boyfriend. I’m not sure I would have been too thrilled about him carrying on working for her all this time if I’d been his wife, especially given that weird shoulder massage scene earlier, although nothing more is made of that and I think it was simply a clumsy attempt to hint at what’s revealed here.

Present:

John Taylor makes for a fairly striking Ghost of Christmas Present, with his hat, manner and accent all suggesting another familiar figure the Great British Christmas – Slade guitarist Dave Hill. If you’re anything like me, it will be an impossible impression to shake throughout the whole of the present segment.

He does the present / presents gag which I’d only seen before in the 2006 animated version – as this is a far better script than that, I do wonder whether or not it was a direct lift, especially given something else which happens in the final section which we’ll come to in a moment. Quite why the spirit is a louche rock star is never made clear, but on the other hand it just sort of works and fits in with the general tone of the whole film. The transition sequences of them zipping around New York at super speed, as opposed to flying as might more usually been depicted, are quite a fun idea.

We get fairly typical Carol scenes of how badly ill Tim is, and Ebony being gently mocked at her niece’s Christmas Party, as well as being very openly mocked by all of her band in their shared hotel room. At the end of the section, the spirit gives a mention to Ignorance and Want, but doesn’t show them – and actually, Want’s name is changed to Greed, which suggest either a slightly different intention or a minor misunderstanding of the original, as surely the ‘Want’ in the original is as in being in want of something, not as in coveting something?

Ebony and Dave Hill The Ghost of Christmas Present

Yet to Come:

In quite a clever move, the spirit here doesn’t speak, and yet it does; it isn’t a single figure or a person at all, but a television set. It shows Ebony a documentary – a Behind the Music programme on VH1, of course – about her, which it quickly becomes apparent has been made after she has died, showing how disliked she was and how quick her former associates are to take advantage of her death for their own profit.

The programme does contain the word “miserliness”, which I don’t believe any real VH1 programme in history has ever used. Well, apart from this one, obviously! But given that it was a phantom vision rather than a real documentary we can probably let it off.

Ebony is confronted with her own dead body, and as with Marli at the beginning they don’t go close up to see any detail. However, having insisted in a panic that the documentary she was shown must have been about Celine Dion, there is then a nice moment when Ebony sees the decaying corpse and cries, “It is Celine Dion!”

What’s To-Day:

There’s a lot of fun material in this section, starting with Ebony calling down to the ‘boy’ outside and responding to his complaint that he’s a fully-grown man by apologising that she doesn’t have her contact lenses in yet. I also very much enjoyed the way she genuinely doesn’t seem to know what to do, as Scrooge claims he doesn’t in the original, even pleading for help somewhat maniacally in a live TV appearance on Christmas morning about what she should do next to help people.

She does, of course, eventually figure things out, making sure all of the concert money goes to charity, that her team can have their friends and family there, and she even flies in Bob’s wife and son to save his marriage and allow Tim’s unspecified illness to be treated at a top hospital in New York. There is, of course, lots of showpiece concert footage – including Terri making a guest appearance, somewhat recovered from the precarious state we’d been shown she was in the preceding Christmas. Marli’s ghost watches them sing, in a white dress this time having perhaps been freed of her chains because of Ebony’s redemption, an idea also used in the 2006 animation which adds to my suspicion that someone working on that had seen this one.

Unusually, we get a ‘one year later’ coda scene, with Ebony and her great-niece and all her friends and family enjoying Christmas together.

Review:

I had not expected very much from this at all. In fact, to be absolutely frank about it, I had expected it to be awful, schmaltzy rubbish, a typical pile-them-high, sell-them-cheap American TV Christmas movie.

But do you know what? It’s actually quite good.

Not, of course, the most faithful adaptation of the Carol you will ever see, but it’s surprisingly sensitively updated for its contemporary setting. Schenkman is clearly a genuine admirer of the book, and gets in all sorts of references to and adaptations of its original dialogue that most such versions wouldn’t bother with.

There are occasional misfires – the Bob/Belle thing didn’t work for me, and as I mentioned the depiction of Ebony’s father just seemed wrong somehow, as well. Almost as if it had been dropped in from a different film. But overall, the year 2000 seems to have been a good one for modern-day versions of the Carol, with this and the ITV version showing that you can use the power of the story to tell an effective new interpretation in a modern setting.

In a nutshell:

Much better than it has any right to be. If you’re interested in seeing a version of the Carol in a non-traditional setting, then you could certainly do much worse than this.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

It's Christmas, Carol!

It was happening across this version online a couple of years ago which actually first planted the seed of the idea in my mind for this blog - the fact that there are just so many vastly different versions of this one story doing the rounds...

 

Title:

It’s Christmas, Carol!

Format:

TV movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

Entertainment One Television, for the Hallmark Channel

Year:

2012 (it was first shown by Hallmark in the USA on November 18^th that year)

Length:

90 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary United States

Background:

Since it was launched in 2001, the Hallmark Channel in the United States has devoted much of its programming in November and December to seasonally-themed fair. These have included the commissioning of various of its own new Christmas-themed productions, of which It’s Christmas, Carol! was merely the latest in a long line. This wasn’t the first time they’d made a TV movie updating A Christmas Carol to a contemporary American setting with a female lead, either, having previously done the same with A Carol Christmas in 2003, which we will doubtless come to on here in due course!

Cast and crew:

Canadian actress Emmanuelle Vaugier stars as the film’s Scrooge figure, Carol Huffler. She has the sort of face that made me convinced I’d seen her in something else before, but looking through her credits there’s nothing that seemed familiar to me. She has the look of something of a cross between Angellina Jolie and Star Trek: Voyager’s Jeri Ryan, though, so perhaps it was just that. She’s had recurring roles in a variety of popular US TV series, including CSI: NY, Two and a Half Men and Smallville, though, so will indeed be a familiar face to many.

She’s quite engaging as Carol when she’s an unpleasant character at the beginning, but less convincing when she’s nice and friendly following her redemption, especially in the scenes when she’s now being nice to her staff – the character is a successful publisher in this version. One of said staff is the character of Fred, a link to the original book in name only. Fred is played like an over-the-top stock camp character from the 1980s by Carson Kressley, not primarily an actor but evidently something of a reality TV star in the US following his appearances on the show Queer Eye.

By far the most famous performer here though is Carrie Fisher, of Princess Leia fame, who takes the Marley role as Carol’s late boss, “Eve” – another Christmas pun, you see…

Director Michael Scott seems to have made a career of undistinguished TV movies, while screenwriters William Penick and Chris Sey don’t seem to have done a great deal of anything else at all – or that’s found its way onto the IMDb, anyway.

Underdone Potato:

We’re in modern day USA and the world of publishing, here – it’s not made clear in the film, but I have read that it’s supposedly Chicago. Carol is a successful but unpleasant publisher, so mean to her staff that several of them are on the point of walking out to form their own company, a plan formed during a drunken piss-up on Christmas Eve. Her Bob Cratchit figure is her assistant, Kendra, whom Carol refuses to allow to have a transfer to London to go with her boyfriend who is moving there with his job.

One noteworthy aspect of this film is that it’s set in a world where A Christmas Carol exists and is known about, and Carol becomes fully aware that she is experiencing her own personal version of it. Early on, we see Carol’s mother and her carer watching an adaptation on television – I think it’s the 1935 Seymour Hicks version, from the brief glimpse shown. Later in the film, Eve claims that spirits have been visiting the Earth in this fashion for centuries, and that “Chuck was just the first person to write about it.” I’m not sure I approve of Dickens’s imagination being denigrated in such a fashion, or the over-familiarity of referring to him as “Chuck”!

Past:

After appearing to Carol in the toilets at a swish publishing do, her former boss and mentor Eve – chainless, and not at all an unpleasant character – takes on the role of all three spirits, past, present and future. She first takes Carol briefly back to 1985, where in a nice little gag we see a big sign for Back to the Future playing at a cinema. We see how hard her mother worked to support her as a child, then we fast forward to the year 2000 as book-loving Carol meets fellow bibliophile Ben in a bookstore. Ben – the Belle character here, obviously – is the wettest drip you can imagine, and quite why anybody would fall for him is a mystery.

They exchange some horribly wooden dialogue about how great books are, written by people who seem unlikely ever to have read any of the authors mentioned – the most accurate line probably being Ben’s “you just listed all the greatest writers ever.” Yes, presumably after Penick and Sey Googled “best writers ever.” Still, at least Dickens gets a mention.

They move in together, but we see them split up in 2002 as Carol moves on with her career while  Ben continues to struggle to be a great writer.

Eve takes Carol back to 1985.

Present:

It’s only at this point that Carol realises “I know this story…” Eve teasingly wonders if she means Miracle on 34^th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life – both of which have their own shades of the Carol to them, of course – before perhaps inevitably mentioning Star Wars.

There’s a “landing in a pile of snow” scene which seems to be something of a common feature of many adaptations of the tale, as they travel to one of the locations Eve wants to show Carol. We see the struggles of Tanya, a woman Carol fired, as well as how her attitudes are hardening Kendra and how much her mother misses her.

Yet to Come:

The Yet to Come section is possibly the best part of the film, and the one point at which they attempt to do something interesting with the story and to put their own mark on it.

Carol having to look up the plot of the Carol online to find out it’s the future next perhaps makes her seem a bit slow on the uptake, but the gag of Eve pretending to be a reaper-type spirit is quite good fun. Where this section scores is the fact that Carol isn’t the least bit surprised by being shown her grave – “I know I die in the end,” is her pragmatic response, and unlike so many of the more condensed adaptations of the take, simply the sight of her own grave isn’t enough to scare her into being a better person.

There’s also a nice idea in that she is shown a potentially happy future, with friends and family around her at a pleasant Christmas, and told this is merely one potential future, not necessarily what will happen. Mind you, why anyone would want a lifetime with drippy Ben and then her over-sugary grandchildren around her is beyond me.

What’s To-Day:

There’s no boy to call out of the window to, but a nice modern equivalent is found in Carol phoning directory enquiries to ask what day it is, before offering a cheerful “Merry Christmas!” then having to apologise and offer a “Happy Hanukkah” instead.

She then manages a whirlwind tour of Christmas merry-making, with employees apologised to, a whole load of Christmas provisions bought for them (that was some doing on Christmas Day) before managing to get to her mother’s who she hardly ever visits yet seems to live close enough to get there and back to in not too much time, and then to Ben’s sister’s for the big make-up with him.

There’s a very weird bit in Ben’s sister’s house where she asks to be left alone with Ben’s typewriter with all the reverence of someone asking for a few moments alone with a deceased loved one’s body.

Review:

This lacks most of the soul and all of the wit of the original story, although it’s not completely and utterly charmless. There are a couple of nice gags and one or two interesting touches, but it certainly lacks any of the punch of the original, and as you’d perhaps expect for something made for a greetings card company it’s all incredibly saccharine.

But it certainly looks very nice, and even though it was probably quite a cheap-and-cheerful TV movie by US standards, the production standards seem high across the board. Aside from the two main male characters – drippy Ben and camp Fred – the cast are all quite amiable and well-performed.

In a nutshell:

There are worse TV movies, and probably worse adaptations of the Carol, but this isn’t a version I would recommend anybody other than a fanatical completist seeking out.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb

Hallmark Channel