I Wonder, Wonder Who, Who-oo-ooh, Who (Who Wrote the Book of Life)

I wanted to like The Book of Life a lot more than I did but I could not help having quite a few reservations. For example, there is a scene in the early part of the film in which a group of schoolchildren encountered a mysterious blonde museum guide. Despite my being the type of person who was once accused by a Hispanic co-worker of waving the Mexican flag, I could not help but find some of the comments this guide made about Mexico in this scene to be a bit over the top. (For that matter, I found it a bit odd that the guide was voiced by the same actress who played Kelly Bundy, but that's a topic for another day.)

It didn't help that we're never told where that scene took place or whether those children the museum guide talked to were supposed to be American or Mexican. Plus some of the story elements (the affection the kids had for Lady Death or the apelike image of one of the Mexican hero's ancestors) seemed deliberately calculated to raise an eyebrow or two.

That said, I liked it more than I expected to and my inner Percy Jackson fan especially liked the fact that the old Mexican folklore tale that allegedly inspired this movie was in fact an old Greek myth. (What? You don't think Hispanics can be familiar with Greek mythology? Please think again.)

Of course, the Ray Bradbury reference at the end was also a nice touch.

If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how this movie compares to Coco. Especially since most of the TV ads for that movie make it seem like The Book of Life II.

I Not Only Survived Surviving Christmas -- I Also Lived to Laugh About It

I'll admit it. I did not have very high hopes for the 2004 film Surviving Christmas the first time that I watched it and I watched it with low -- very low -- expectations. Ben Affleck was not exactly my favorite actor, Christina Applegate did not exactly have a good record when it came to picking movie scripts and the very idea of a Christmas movie being released in October just seemed weird.

Yet for some reason I found myself chuckling during this movie far more than I had expected to. I am not saying that this movie is in any danger of replacing Miracle on 34th Street as my favorite Christmas movie or even nudging its way onto my list of all-time favorite holiday movies. Yet I found Ben Affleck a lot easier to take as an obnoxious rich guy (the role he was born to play?) than he was as a superhero in Daredevil and the film did a good job as long as it attempted to be an outright farce. Some elements like the cyber-porn subplot were in questionable taste and the fashion shoot sequence -- obviously meant to be a sendup of Glamour Shots -- needlessly humiliated one of the main characters in a way that was not at all funny. But the film did not really get into trouble until it tried to take its own plot seriously.

Let's face it. Some plots are not meant to be taken seriously, and the plot of this movie -- which involves a young rich executive attempting to create his own Christmas from elements of other people's lives and literally paying people to pose as his own relatives -- was definitely one such plot.

I doubt I will be remembering this film any more fondly than I do similar mediocre holiday fare like Jingle All the Way. But for a Christmas flick that was released out of season, it was not that bad. Besides, I can't help thinking that the most obvious pitch for this movie involved the success of the movie Scream. After all, if a Halloween movie like Scream can hit it big at the box office despite being released in December, then why can't a Christmas movie being released in October achieve similar results?

TV Quote of the Week

Spanish? I thought they were just English words I didn't know.
--Christina Applegate, Married... with Children, “Old Insurance Dodge”