Hah! Humbug: The Muppet Christmas Carol with Michael Caine as Scrooge.

My reaction to "Disney's A Christmas Carol," the motion-capture animation released today, was that the Robert Zemeckis version of Charles Dickens evergreen was, "too much Halloween night and not enough Christmas morning." (Read my review here.) I scribbled in my notebook, "What would  Dickens think?"

Mr. Dickens is, of course, no longer with us. But his great-great grandson Gerald Dickens, 46, was happy to speak with Flickgrrl by phone from Oxford. (Not coincidentally, the actor will be touring the U.S. with his one-man show of A Christmas Carol next month and will bring it to Byers' Choice in Bucks County on December 11 and 12.) Dickens has yet to see the Zemeckis version, but among the many movie versions of Carol, he's fond of "the classic Alastair Sim version" (1951, by Brian Desmond-Hurst), because "it has the joyousness and captures the point that nasty Scrooge must get terrified and change his ways."

"I also enjoyed the George C. Scott version, with Scrooge as a big brash businessman of the sort you might see on Wall Street rather than this weaselly sort," Dickens  reflects. He has no thoughts about the 1988 Bill Murray update, Scrooged.

"But when it comes right down to it, you can't beat The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), can you?," asks Dickens rhetorically. He thinks that if his ancestor were alive, it would probably be his favorite, too. "He was fond of color and splash."

Your favorite? While I like the 1951 verson and also the 1970Albert Finney musical Scrooge, I think the most effective cinematic Carol is the free adaptation: It's a Wonderful Life. You?

Risk: The Movie. Do you cast Djimon Hounsou to play Africa?

In recent years, moviegoers have seen theme-park rides adapted to screen (Pirates of the Caribbean) and popular toys become the stars of summer blockbusters (Transformers). And even though Clue: The Movie wasn't a hit, it was just a matter of time before Hollywood producers rifled through their kids' toy chest s to consider the big-screen potential of other  board games. 

As was reported by the Los Angeles Times this summer, Transformers' Michael Bay has been linked to a Ouija movie, Pirates'  Gore Verbinski has expressed interest in a Clue re-do and Hancock's Peter Berg wants to board Battleship. One might well joke, what's next, Candy Land? Except that Enchanted's Kevin Lima has his dibs on that and Gladiator's Ridley Scott on - this is not a joke -- Monopoly.  (Expect Baltic Avenue to be as tough a proving ground as the Roman Forum in Gladiator.)

Still, I was surprised at today's news that Risk has been optioned for a screen adaptation by Sony Pictures. What's left? Scrabble? (I can think of a couple of actors suitable to be cast as the blank.)

Your thoughts? Is there a game you'd like to see adapted?  Should the movie Monopoly chronicle  Donald Trump's real estate adventures in Atlantic City? Flickgrrl welcomes your riffs.

The Alec and Steve Show, Part I

With last week's announcement from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association that Ricky Gervais, the Great White Snark, would emcee the Golden Globes, I thought that HFPA had trumped the Oscars. Then yesterday, announcing Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin as Oscar co-hosts,  Academy Awards producers bet that on awards shows, as in poker, two kings of comedy are better than one.

The frequent Saturday Night Live fixtures  -- who shared a memorable SNL skit on who was a better host of the late-night show -- have a comic competition going. Martin greeted yesterday's announcement with, "I look forward to co-hosting the Oscars with my enemy Alec Baldwin."

Martin previously emceed two Oscar ceremonies with great aplomb, ingratiating himself both to home audience and that in the auditorium. For me, he's the best Oscar host since Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal, able to rib the big egos in the room because he himself is one of them. ( It's a skill that Chris Rock and Jon Stewart, hilarious as they are, do not possess.) Martin's understated delivery should play well off of Baldwin's bluster. (Still, I wish it was Tina Fey, Baldwin's 30 Rock co-star , instead of Baldwin who was tapped instead of Baldwin.)

Martin and Baldwin co-star in the upcoming Nancy  Meyers comedy It's Complicated  in which they play the ex- and  current bf of Meryl Streep. At next year's Oscars, there will be Streep jokes, to be sure. (And perhaps a Streep win for her jolly role as Julia Child in Julie & Julia.) So: Your favorite Oscar host? Why? Or is the discussion of best Oscar host ludicrous as that of best Titanic skipper?

Taylor Lautner and his tenpack. Is this the kid who played Sharkboy?

The shirtless cute boy is a pinup who displays his sixpack (or in the case of  New Moon's Taylor Lautner, pictured, his tenpack) for the delectation of his fans. It's the male version of a starlet (Megan Fox, anyone? everyone?) posing in a string bikini for Maxim or Sports Illustrated. Lately the vealcake on parade (vealcake being the teen version of beefcake) is inescapable. You can't open a magazine (or an Internet site) without seeing a shirtless cute boy (Zac Efron? Corbin Bleu?) bare abs and assets. It's not a new phenom: These male starlets are just giving us the shirt off their backs as Paul Newman (Cool Hand Luke), Burt Reynolds (The Longest Yard), John Travolta (Saturday Night Fever), Denzel Washington (Glory) and Brad Pitt (Thelma & Louise) did before them.

While neither a consumer of beefcake nor of cheescake, I suppose the shirtless cute boy is an index of gender equality in that males as well as females are objectifying themselves. But isn't this as dubious an achievement as actors being as ready as actresses to have face work done?

Are you a fan of the shirtless cute boy? If so, which pin-up is indelibly burned in memory? Not a fan? Why? While I have no objections to nudity in films when called for by the narrative, to me there's something self-conscious and gratuitous about pinup shots. I can think of an exception to this: In Alien when Sigourney Weaver walks around the space ship in her bikini underwear, the viewer is so distracted by her body that the shock of what happens next is doubly shocking.

Leslie Nielsen, surprised by his comic skills

 I think of myself as an omnivore -- both of food and film -- but am allergic to certain actors. Maybe it's an allergy to certain actors in certain roles. Watching the World Series last night, I got hives from the ad for the forthcoming A Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey (in four roles). While the allergy didn't prevent me from enjoying The Truman Show or Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, (films in which the funnyman dials his Jimness down to three on a scale of ten), it distracts from the experience of Carrey flicks such as Liar, Liar and Dumb and Dumber. I also have a partial allergy to Kevin Costner: While I thoroughly enjoy Bull Durham and Tin Cup, Costner's self-importance in The Postman  and Waterworld has me reaching for the Benadryl.

My self-diagnosis: I'm not completely allergic to actors but might have Leslie Nielsen syndrome, named for the wooden straight actor of the '50s and '60s who re-emerged in the '80s as the deft farceur of The Naked Gun flicks. Don't think much of him in drama and melodrama, but as a comic he's divoon. In other words, I am allergic to certain actors in certain types of roles, for instance, Jeanette MacDonald, who made frothy comedies for Paramount early in her career and wooden operettas for MGM in her later years. Love her Paramount comedies, can't watch the MGM operettas. Similarly, love Wesley Snipes in White Men Can't Jump and Jungle Fever but cannot cannot cannot watch him in the Blade movies.

I may be completely allergic to Nicole Kidman, who not only played a Stepford Wife but seems like one on screen. Yet I thought she was the only good thing about Eyes Wide Shut. In terms of classic stars, just don't get June Allyson (except in Good News), Robert Taylor (too pretty, but perfect in Camille), Luise Rainier and Danny Kaye (though I have a soft spot for Merry Andrew). 

Do you suffer from Leslie Nielsen syndrome? Which actors or actresses trigger it? Are you completely allergic to a performer? Who? Why? 

It’s safe to say that Michael Jackson’s This Is It fulfills multiple functions. It permits fans (as well as the merely curious) to bid farewell to Mister Never Can Say Goodbye. It will almost certainly defray the losses of the promoters who lost a bundle on Jackson’s last concert tour that never happened because of his untimely death (not to mention bring a few million simoleans to the Jackson estate). Most of all it gives us a peep into the creative process of the prince of pop.

Director/choreographer Kenny Ortega makes a virtue of the unfinished. From over 100 hours of rehearsal footage he edited the passages so that they play as an unfinished symphony to an unfinished life.

I enjoyed this rough work-in-progress more than I would have the polished show, for the ragged process tells us more about the perfectionist Jackson and his relations with his singers and dancers than the razzle-dazzle of the concert, which would have been spangly and clockwork in its pageantry.

Do we learn anything about Jackson in the process? A little. That when giving direction to his musicians and dancers, he favors cooking metaphors like "simmer" and "sizzle." That he defied his Skeletor presence with hoofer’s gusto. That he husbanded his voice, letting rip only on "Human Nature" and "Beat it." That even in rehearsals, he carefully dressed, coiffed and made-up as for cameras. (He commissioned videographers to tape the rehearsals as reference material for future work.)

For those of who witnessed Jackson on screen, stage and tabloid over 40 of his 50 years, Kenny Ortega’s tribute is so concentrated on the performer that there is little time to think about the three-ring circus of Jackson’s life. (OK, once I gasped when I saw his Barbie-doll nose swimming in the face reconstructed to resemble that of Elizabeth Taylor. It was like seeing a Roman statue with the nose broken off.)

Walking out of the theater I felt the contradictory satisfactions that a) Michael Jackson  was still alive and that B) he died doing what he loved most.

The undersung Kenny Ortega, the guy who choreographed Dirty Dancing, who directed High School Musical and directed productions for the likes of Miley Cyrus and The Jonas Brothers, did a masterful job. I gasped a second time at the realization that he lost both Swayze and Jackson this year.

The film’s funniest moment comes when Ortega affectionately mimics one of Jackson’s grand semaphores, causing the performer to giggle, "I love the way stewardesses do that."

Are you in a Jackson hole or will you see this? Favorite concert film?

The "Freaks" of Tod Browning's 1932 film made "normals" look aberrant.

What makes your skin crawl? Ghosts? Monsters? Bio-horror?

What unnerves you? Terror without a face? That figure in the shadows? Gore?

No sooner did my colleague, John, and I debate nominations for scariest movie ever than totalscifionline.com e-mailed its slate of The Hundred Greatest Horror Movies. I'll let you guess what tops the list. But while I find said movie completely creepifying, it doesn't give me the shivers the way that Freaks (1932) -- cast with real-life sideshow grotesques who take revenge on a devious "normal," Olga Baclanova -- or Psycho (1960), where the horror is less in what is shown and more in what you imagine in your head.

Horror should be heard but not seen. I realize this is counterintuitive -- especially for the fans of modern torture horror, or "gorno," flicks, as the wags call gore that verges on the pornographic.  The more the viewer has to infer from what is suggested, the more the movie worms its way into said viewer's nervous system and psyche. For this reason I've always been more vulnerable to the implicit horror in the 1940s movies from producer Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Seventh Victim) and the hints of horror in Steven Spielberg's Jaws than I am to the explicit horror of The Exorcist and Hostel. Of the more recent terrormeisters, no one creeps me out as thoroughly as David Cronenberg, the implications of whose bio-terror flicks such as Rabid, They Came from Within and The Fly give me night terrors. For me, the threat of the monster or violence is much more unsettling than its results.

So, what scares you? Why? Your nomination for scariest movie?

Amelia Earhart and Hilary Swank

Amelia Earhart (1897--1937), the aviatrix who broke records and hearts, had  an aerodynamic "shingle" bob and a streamlined figure. She was built for the speed, altitude and endurance records she set. Given her celebrity during her lifetime and her influence on the pilots, male and female, who flew in her slipstream, it's curious that her first fullscale big-screen biography is Mira Nair's barnstormer  Amelia (opening October 23), starring a weedy Hilary Swank. (Pictured, right, next to the real-life Earhart.) Maybe this is Earhart 's renaissance year, as she also figured (played by Amy Adams) in A Night at the Museum 2: The Battle for the Smithsonian earlier in 2009.

Though Earhart was the subject of two movies-of-the-week, Amelia Earhart (1976) with Susan Clark and Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight (1994) with Diane Keaton, her life was more often the stuff of fictionalized accounts of modern adventuresses. Most famous was Dorothy Arzner's Christopher Strong (1933) with Katharine Hepburn as Lady Cynthia, a dashing aviatrix who gets involved with a married member of Parliament and contrives a unique way to put an end to the affair. (Memorably, Hepburn dons a sleek silvery jumpsuit that makes her resemble a moth drawn to the flame of love.) There was also Women in the Wind (1939) with Kay Francis as the flier trying to earn prize money to pay for her brother's surgery. After Earhart's demise, Rosalind Russell played an Amelia-inspired pilot lost in the South Pacific while doing covert intelligence work for the U.S. Navy.

I'm guessing that this year's Earhart revival has less to do with the aviatrix than it does with filmmakers -- such as Anne Fontaine who directed Audrey Tautou in Coco Before Chanel and Nora Ephron who helmed Meryl Streep in the Julia Child film Julie & Julia -- interested in 20th-century heroines who trailblazed new careers for women. Your thoughts?

Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in "Pride of the Yankees"

Few movies have the suspense and thrills of Thursday night's NLCS game between the Phillies and the Dodgers. But for sports fans who crave celluloid pennant races and World Series to fill up the time between actual pennant races and World Series games, may we suggest:

* Alibi Ike (1935) Rubber-faced Joe E. Brown as a rookie hurler for the Chicago Cubs who always has an excuse when he messes up. From the Ring Lardner story.

* Damn Yankees (1958) Aging baseball fan sells his soul to get a decent slugger (Tab Hunter) for the Washington Senators. Gwen Verdon as the Devil's Candy.

* Eight Men Out (1988) John Sayles' absorbing period piece about the 1919 Chicago White Sox team whose members throw the Series stars John Cusack, Charlie Sheen and D.B. Sweeney.

* Fever Pitch (2005) Appealing rom-com starring Jimmy Fallon as a Boston Red Sox diehard and Drew Barrymore as his baseball-averse sweetheart, set during the Sox 2004 miracle season.

* It Happens Every Spring (1949) Charmer starring Ray Milland as a professor -turned-pitcher, creator of a chemical that makes baseballs repel bats.

* A League of Their Own (1992) Penny Marshall's vibrant account of the All-Girls Baseball Leagues stars Geena Davis and Lori Petty as catcher-and-pitcher sisters who face each other in the League World Series.

* The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (2000) Aviva Kempner's terrific documentary out the Hall of Famer who led the Detroit Tigers to multiple World Series while fighting anti-Semitism.

* The Natural (1984) Based on Bernard Malamud's allegorical novel, the film stars Robert Redford as a disappeared baseball legend who returns as the chivalrous slugger of the New York Knights who face the Phillies in the pennant race and the Pirates in the Series.

* Pride of the Yankees (1942) Terrific biopic starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, the Yankees Iron Man who, despite a bad medical prognosis, felt he was the luckiest man in the world. Dare you not to cry.

Your favorites? What am I missing?