The Grinch is a jerk. Stealing Christmas in one thing, but in this live action adaptation, he puts a kids life in danger. As he first visits the town of Whoville, he hands a hacksaw to children, telling them to “run fast with it.” No wonder the citizens are terrified of this odd being.
There are other bizarre oddities in this unnecessary Dr. Seuss adaptation. As babies are flown into Whoville, a man opens the door to see his new child and states to his wife, “It looks just like your boss!” Funny… in another movie.
There is a bizarre side to this film that eliminates the innocence of Whoville. What seemed like fun loving, care free, happy types are turned into everyday humans with weird noses. They either get drunk before Christmas or have a key party, depending on how you view it. What happened to the Christmas-obsessed town multiple generations of kids grew up with?
Ron Howard’s unusually off-kilter direction utilizes goofy, odd angles that only make Jim Carrey’s exaggerated performance inside Rick Baker’s superb make-up increasingly frustrating.
The only benefit to the extended take on this short children’s tale is backstory on why the Grinch is focused on destroying Christmas, a plot point previously left to the imagination. This leads the film’s only bright patch, where an adorable baby Grinch munches on a Santa cookie, apparently foreshadowing his eventual turn.
Maybe that baby Grinch could star in a movie of his own. He is adorable, loveable, and charming, certainly more so than anything else in this rather hateful movie. That small infant rod puppet carries more personality than all of Carrey’s performance (despite his energy). That seems to be based around his usual over exaggerated antics with a constant need to grimace to the left. 
Universal apparently re-uses the DVD master for this Blu-ray release, the only logical explanation as to why this looks so poor. The VC-1 encode is littered with countless compression artifacts, clumping the grain structure and blotting out detail. Speaking of detail, almost nothing remains. Faces are flat, texture-less, and drab.
.jpg?t=20130517094513)
Article comments