"A holiday movie for
all of us," notes the tag line on
SCROOGE & MARLEY's poster. Well, yes, and especially if we're gay. The real question, however: Can
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol hold up in an all-GLBT context? Hallelujah -- it (pretty much) does. The story itself, in just about any version I've read or viewed, is one of those sentimental, can't-miss tales of a reprobate's redemption, set during the annual outpouring of holiday cheer. One great, nonstop cliché (though maybe it seemed original back in Charlie's day), it has here been given a second helping of cliché that has been placed atop the first in such a way as to somehow disguise both. Either one hides the other, or maybe cancels it out, in the same odd way that two wrongs sometimes make a right. Or the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
In any case, yours truly found himself surprisingly amused and then even moved by these typical goings-on, as well as by the way in which the co-directors
Richard Knight, Jr. (above, right) and
Peter Neville (above, left) and co-writers Knight (again), with
Timothy Imse and
Ellen Stoneking have rung their funny, ditzy changes on the old, old story.
