Every year around this time, I can usually be found humbugging about how people rarely watch holiday-themed films that were released after 1994. Sometimes I wonder if this is actually untrue and that the reason I think this way is that I’m old. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe people born in the 1990’s watch Ben Affleck’s Surviving Christmas on an endless loop while they’re chugging nog and tinseling their trees. Me? While I have no problem firing up the Die Hards every December I would love it if someone made a modern Christmas Classic. I even had medium hopes for The Christmas Chronicles 2 with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn but, honestly, I couldn’t even make it through the trailer. With the exception of Elf and Bullshit Actually, Xmas programming is still restricted to A Christmas Story, Home Alone, Christmas Vacation, and a small handful of other flicks from back around then. Scrooged, Bill Murray’s 1988 piss take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, definitely keeps company with that handful of flicks I just mentioned. Over the years, a lot of people have asked me for my take on Scrooged and I didn’t really think I had one. I saw it in the theater when I was 10 years-old and I loved it because Bill Murray was my Rushmore and thus incapable of disappointing me. But just last week a bold declaration caught my eye and made me think it might be time to reevaluate. I was thumbing through my copy of Robert Schnakenberg’s The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray and was rather puzzled by the author’s declaration that Scrooged is “easily the worst film of Murray’s career.” Easily!? This guy made TWO Garfields and that stupid ass elephant movie! He was in Barry Levinson’s Rock the Kasbah, which is one of the worst movies made by anyone ever. I decided to follow up with the late Roger Ebert, who called Scrooged “one of the most disquieting and unsettling films to come along in quite some time” in a scathing one star review. Dang, Rog! According to the interwebs, the film’s production was rocky. Like, Apocalypse Now-level rocky. Murray, who, it must be said, is so notoriously prickly that Danny Aykroyd nicknamed him the Murricaine, clashed furiously with Scrooged director Dick Donner (Superman, Lethal Weapon, lots of other movies that are not comedies). Donner’s idea of funny was to have Murray scream all of his lines at the top of his lungs, so that’s exactly what he does! The screenplay, by SNL O.G. Michael O’Donoghue, was neutered to the point of unrecognizability. O’Donoghue had this to say about what ended up on the screen: “We wrote a story that could make you laugh and cry. You would have wanted to share it with your grandchildren every fucking Christmas for the next 100 years. The finished film was a piece of unadulterated, unmitigated shit.” Holy smokes, people! Here I thought that everyone who isn’t New York Dolls bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane (more on him in a bit) LOVED Scrooged! Had I just misremembered the whole thing?? I decided to go ahead and give it another spin to see what was what.
Scrooged
Scrooged
Scrooged
Every year around this time, I can usually be found humbugging about how people rarely watch holiday-themed films that were released after 1994. Sometimes I wonder if this is actually untrue and that the reason I think this way is that I’m old. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe people born in the 1990’s watch Ben Affleck’s Surviving Christmas on an endless loop while they’re chugging nog and tinseling their trees. Me? While I have no problem firing up the Die Hards every December I would love it if someone made a modern Christmas Classic. I even had medium hopes for The Christmas Chronicles 2 with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn but, honestly, I couldn’t even make it through the trailer. With the exception of Elf and Bullshit Actually, Xmas programming is still restricted to A Christmas Story, Home Alone, Christmas Vacation, and a small handful of other flicks from back around then. Scrooged, Bill Murray’s 1988 piss take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, definitely keeps company with that handful of flicks I just mentioned. Over the years, a lot of people have asked me for my take on Scrooged and I didn’t really think I had one. I saw it in the theater when I was 10 years-old and I loved it because Bill Murray was my Rushmore and thus incapable of disappointing me. But just last week a bold declaration caught my eye and made me think it might be time to reevaluate. I was thumbing through my copy of Robert Schnakenberg’s The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray and was rather puzzled by the author’s declaration that Scrooged is “easily the worst film of Murray’s career.” Easily!? This guy made TWO Garfields and that stupid ass elephant movie! He was in Barry Levinson’s Rock the Kasbah, which is one of the worst movies made by anyone ever. I decided to follow up with the late Roger Ebert, who called Scrooged “one of the most disquieting and unsettling films to come along in quite some time” in a scathing one star review. Dang, Rog! According to the interwebs, the film’s production was rocky. Like, Apocalypse Now-level rocky. Murray, who, it must be said, is so notoriously prickly that Danny Aykroyd nicknamed him the Murricaine, clashed furiously with Scrooged director Dick Donner (Superman, Lethal Weapon, lots of other movies that are not comedies). Donner’s idea of funny was to have Murray scream all of his lines at the top of his lungs, so that’s exactly what he does! The screenplay, by SNL O.G. Michael O’Donoghue, was neutered to the point of unrecognizability. O’Donoghue had this to say about what ended up on the screen: “We wrote a story that could make you laugh and cry. You would have wanted to share it with your grandchildren every fucking Christmas for the next 100 years. The finished film was a piece of unadulterated, unmitigated shit.” Holy smokes, people! Here I thought that everyone who isn’t New York Dolls bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane (more on him in a bit) LOVED Scrooged! Had I just misremembered the whole thing?? I decided to go ahead and give it another spin to see what was what.