The whole opening feels like the movie might be a total rip on the style of Zemeckis’s Polar Express, a movie I found a little cold and even creepy.  Once the “action” starts, though, we really get a flavor for the scale and tone that Zemeckis is going for.  

Most of my fears of Jim Carrey yucking it up in the main role seem unfounded, and the design (especially of the three ghosts) might be inspired.  It won’t be the intimate, small-scale tale of a man’s life we’ve come to expect from most versions of this tale, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Of course, the trailer is pretty terrible quality…and it’s in Italian…so I guess I shouldn’t get carried away.  Take a look and let us know your thoughts below.

I’m still not sold on this movie. I mean, after they do a muppet movie about something, I kind of think the “re-imagining” mill should be closed. How many versions of this story have been put to screen now?

It might be good…it might be bad…but I’ll bet it will be mostly forgotten pretty quickly.  Still, I do kind of wonder what Jim Carrey is going to do with what has traditionally been the  straight role.  I’m guessing he goes all over-the-top Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Here’s the poster, courtesy of DVD-Forum.at.

First today, we got this lovely little picture over to the left that you can take a better gander at by clicking upon its mighty surface. It’s the first official image of the animated version of Jim Carrey playing Ebenezer Scrooge and it’s actually not too shabby looking, in my humble opinion.

Then came a big, fancy 19-second clip from the film. Something about it looks a little grainy, a little choppy, maybe a little bit unfinished? But it’s kinda cool and kinda funny, either way. I think Carrey may turn out to have been a solid casting decision. But again–this is 19 seconds that we have to judge from. 

In it, we’re also getting a taste of who I think is Gary Oldman as Jacob Marley, although I’m having trouble making him out under all the…y’know…computer animation. (Carrey, oddly enough, is still pretty recognizable.)

Check it out below!

Here’s the first poster released for this winter’s 3D-motion-capture-animated version of the story that will star Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge as well as the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. To further the casting craziness for this one, Gary Oldman is playing Bob Cratchit, Jacob Marley, and Tiny Tim! Woah.

It’s been directed by Robert Zemeckis, who has fiddled with motion-capture in the past on the films The Polar Express and Beowulf. This one could really go either way, I think. I’ll withhold judgment until I see a trailer.

The poster is below and looks exactly like what any decent Christmas Carol poster ought to look like. Click and it shall grow.

According to Variety, the Jim Carrey-Ewan McGregor film was picked up by Consolidated Pictures Group and is setting the film far away for a Valentine’s Day 2010 release.

It’s a little frustrating, as I’m tired of waiting to see this movie, but I can’t help but smirk nonetheless at the bold marketing of a film that was initially thought to be ”too gay” to get a distribution deal.

Written and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (screenwriters of Bad Santa), it’s the true story of Steven Jay Russell (Carrey), a con artist who escaped from prison multiple times in pursuit of Phillip Morris (McGregor), the former cellmate he fell in love with.

Check our an unfortunately low-quality trailer right below!

When I was a kid, I have to admit to having been quite the Jim Carrey fanatic. I was a rabid whore for all of his movies and was totally sold by his goofy gangly cartoon-man schtick. And I’m not totally shunning it today, either. A lot of those movies still kinda hold up for me on a certain level. I still love my Ace Ventura, and my Dumb and Dumber, and my The Mask. They’re funny little movies. But is there still a place for the Jim Carrey comedy vehicle, or has the world moved on?

If you’ve seen a trailer, a commercial, read a review, heard the title, or saw Liar Liar, then you already know what Yes Man is about. Carrey plays Carl, a loan officer who is always telling everyone “no” about everything. He turns down party invitations, new opportunities, phone calls, everything. His “best friend” (Bradley Cooper, Midnight Meat Train) complains to him that he never hangs out with him. I can’t wonder how they were ever friends in the first place. Carrey’s close-mindedness is kinda cartoonishly exaggerated so that when he later becomes a “yes man,” it’s that much more of a cool new thing for him.

One fateful day outside his place of business he runs into an old acquaintance (John Michael Higgins) who tells him that life is full of great opportunities and adventures, if he’s just willing to say “yes” more often and be…(come on, all together, everyone!)…a YES MAN! He gives him a flyer for a seminar being put on by motivational speaker Terrence Bundley (Terrence Stamp) and through some inevitable last-straw plot points, Carl decides to go. And soon after he challenges himself to become the titular yes man.

From here on out, we basically watch Carl living his new fulfilling life and all of the stupendous joys and amusing encounters it brings to him. He meets Zooey Deschanel’s character, Allison, and the two begin dating, frequently going on spontaneous flights of fancy and conquering the world one irresposible decision at a time.

I hesitate to call Yes Man a “bad movie,” although there’s certainly some really bad stuff in it. For one thing, the whole concept is obnoxiously contrived, and that bugged the crap out of me. But after awhile it settles in with itself and becomes what we were all tapping our watches and waiting for it to become: one giant montage. The movie exists to show us Carl doing this, Carl doing that, Carl doing another thing, and Carl learning a lesson from it all.

It has a very similar structure to Liar Liar (except that Liar Liar was much better). They both sort of have inexplicable supernatural elements to them. In Liar Liar, whatever cosmic forces there are that control these things are controlling Carrey’s ability to tell a lie. In Yes Man, as soon as he says no to something, bad things start to befall him as if it were karma. (The explanation for it is this whole freaky Terrence Stamp “you have to keep a promise that you make to yourself” kind of bullshit.) And of course they both follow the Jim-Carrey-has-to-make-this-wild-and-crazy-lifestyle-change-for-awhile formula. But Yes Man is seriously lacking in the comedy department. It doesn’t have a single scene that is nearly as good or as funny as that Roasting the Boss scene from Liar. To this day I still find myself randomly shouting “Simmons is old!” Funny shit.

Some of the movie is kinda funny, but on paper it must have been absolute trash. It’s really a film full of bad material being made not-excruciating by good comedic performances. Carrey is doing his Carrey thing, and sometimes it’s a little annoying (a little on the this-was-funny-ten-years-ago-now-stop side), but sometimes it’s pretty funny. In a dream sequence where Carl’s friends find him dead in his apartment, Carrey’s oddly contorted corpse face is rather priceless and classically him. And there are some other funny bits with Deschanel, Cooper, Stamp, Higgins, and Rhy Darby (Murray on Flight of the Conchords) who plays Carl’s nice but squirrely boss who just wants to be his friend. There’s also an obligatory everyone-singing-together moment where Carl helps talk down Luiz Guzman from jumping off a building that I have to admit to finding kinda enjoyable.

But as much as I did sort of enjoy some of this stuff and have acknowledged it as funny, I wasn’t really laughing and neither was anyone else on the plane who was bothering to watch it. My reactions came more as acknowledging smirks, if that. Maybe the Jim Carrey brand of comedy has just sort of run its course. But if that’s true, why does Ace Ventura still hold up? Nostalgia? Must be. At the end of Yes Man, kinda like at the end of Bruce Almighty (a film that also followed the Liar Liar formula and no wonder–it was the same director), I was overcome by how aggressively disposable it was. It almost felt like it didn’t even happen. Hell, maybe it didn’t. Beyond a certain point, there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with it–it’s all harmless enough and there were even some clever touches towards the end–it’s just so damn forgettable.

The DVD hit streets this past Tuesday. Special features consist of a few featurettes entitled “Downtime on the Set of Yes Man with Jim Carrey,” which I suppose is what it says it is, “Extreme Yes Man,” which is about all of Carrey’s physical stunts, and a featurette about Deschanel’s fictional band from the film, Munchausen By Proxy, as well as a few music videos.

So, like the the headline says: slide this in your machine…or don’t. Either way, you ought to know what you’re getting yourself into.                           

The movie, to be written and directed by the Farrelly brothers, will be produced for MGM.

So, who’s playing who?  Del Toro is going to be Moe, Sean Penn will be Larry (you think he’d settle for anything less?), and it looks like Carrey is in the process of packing on an extra forty pounds in order to portray the Stoogiest of the Stooges, Curly.

I have so many questions about this project.  And a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.  The Farrelly brothers?  Really?  We can’t find someone with a bit more of a style or unique feel?  Will this basically be a modern-day Stooges tale where the three of them are after the same girl or are running away from hit-men and have to learn “the true meaning of their friendship?”  I sure as hell hope not.