Hello again, and welcome back to the sixth installment of the Screengrab's trip through some beloved (and some not-so-beloved) holiday film fare, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon.  While, technically, the twelve days of Christmas extend all the way into January and culminate in Epiphany, I'm sure you'll all be too hung over by that point to be able to deal with any Christmas cheer.  Plus, most of us will be back at work by January 6th, and we don't want to be the movie-blog equivalent of that one guy on your block who annoys the whole neighborhood by leaving his Christmas lights up long after the joy and wonder of the holiday has vanished.  So we've got a lot of movies to get through in the next three days.  Let's start with the 2003 Will Ferrell vehicle Elf, which is now general considered a canonical new-classic Xmas flick.

In the spirit of full disclosure, and to further reinforce my reputation as Bob Cratchit and Scrooge inhabiting a single body, I'll admit that, as big a sucker as I am for Christmas movies in general, I didn't think much of Elf when I first saw it in a theater.  I was in a bit of a lousy mood at the time, but that doesn't alter the fact that there really is a lot to dislike here:  the delicate balancing act between po-faced sincerity and winking, snarky sarcasm, for one thing, doesn't always work, and the movie's tone can come across as artificial.  The pace is a bit manic, the premise is undersold, and Ferrell's performance is unneccessarily called upon to carry the entire movie, which is a shame, given that he's surrounded by tons of extremely capable actors.  And Jon Favreau's direction can be charitably described as 'clunky'.

The story of Buddy, an orphan child who crawls into Santa's bag one lonely Christmas and ends up the only stranded human at the north pole, gets some early-running gags -- some predictable, others hilarious -- out of the notion of a normal child (especially one as hulking and clumsy as Ferrell) being raised among the elves.  Not enough time is spent on this appealing notion, which is especially regrettable given that Buddy's father is played, in a rare screen appearance, by one of the absolute masters of awkward comedy in the person of Bob Newhart.  But one of the appealing things about Elf, which becomes much more clear on repeat viewings, is how economical it is:  it's constantly making a dollar out of a quarter, milking the script's gags for more than they're worth and making the most out of Ferrell's screen presence.

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So as I write this (on Saturday), Variety is reporting The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian “will easily take the weekend crown, and its B.O. will only gain momentum from Saturday and Sunday family matinees,” although the pic’s “opening day haul came in slightly lower than industry expectations” and behind its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.  Nevertheless, we here at Screengrab feel confident this weekend now puts us three-for-three in our summer box office predictions!   Woo-hoo!!!!

As for the actual quality of said movie...well, let me put it this way:  I started reading The Chronic- (wha?)-cles of Narnia way back when I was a mere yoot, and I vividly recall The Lion, The Witch and Etc., but I petered out somewhere between Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, remembering no details about them except (spoiler alert!)...

...well, actually, I hate those spoiler alerts where they say “spoiler alert!”, like, two words before the spoiler, after you've already seen it in your peripheral vision, so let's just say I didn’t really remember very much at all about the actual plot going into Disney's film version of Prince Caspian.

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If you've been to the movies a few times in the last twenty years, you've probably seen Richard Jenkins. Trust me. Jenkins isn't a household name, and he doesn't really have a household appearance, either: he's tall, bald, and bland-looking, and at 60 doesn't appear all that different from when he first started popping up in movies, in such roles as the doctor in Hannah and Her Sisters who gently breaks its to the hypochondriac played by Woody Allen that he doesn't have a malignant brain tumor. Yet Jenkins is a crackerjack actor, capable of using what God gave him to surprising effect. His ability to suggest something cracked or wild inside a businesslike frame has made him a favorite of such directors as the Coens and the Farrellys, and David O. Russell, who used him in Flirting with Disaster as an FBI agent who wanted to adopt a baby to raise with his professional partner and lover, Josh Brolin. His best-known role may be the patriarchal undertaker in the HBO Six Feet Under, where his character was dead from the start of the series and still usually seemed to be the only person on the show who was having a good time. In the new movie The Visitor, which was written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, Jenkins has his shot at carrying a movie, playing a widowed economics professor who has disappeared inside his own orderly world.

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