I dunno if anyone else saw it, but I was ‘forced’ to see it with my family, and it sucked… it sucked REAL bad. 

Visualization/Graphics:  Pretty good, but it saddened me that with all the tweaking you can do with a movie that you can’t do with a game… HL2 looked almost as good. 

Story:  Loosely strung together tripe… which is almost understandable considering it’s derived from a children’s book less’n a hundred pages long… still there’s no excuse for shoddy writing. 

Meaning:  This is the part that fucking pisses me off.  It was all commercial bullshit.  The stuff that makes me hate Christmas in the first place. Gifts, and nothing else but gifts, were the most important part.  Sure they threw in some references to love, joy, peace and all that other bullshit, but the one moment that movie COULD have shined (but didn’t) is the little poor boy, lived in a shanty, pretty obviously didn’t have money for presents.  Well, he’s sad pretty much the whole movie because he gets nothing anyone else gets for Christmas and, justifiably, he’s upset about it.  Well, what did they do to fix it?  Give him presents! Kid is now happy, end of story.  What… the… fuck? 

Conclusion:  I am of the opinion that The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (Jim Carrey’s live action version) is THE MOST fucking AWESOME Christmas movie made in recent times.  Hell, even the old animated one they still show late nights on TV is better than this crap.  Also to its credit: Both these movies were made from source material and both were better due to some awesome writers.  Both movies had good actors (except perhaps the animated version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, but I really don’t know who did the voice overs for THAT), the live action version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas had Jim Carrey, The Polar Express had Tom Hanks… it wasn’t the acting that killed The Polar Express, it was the shoddy writing and overt commercialization.  Actually the voice overs (and the Hobo) were probably the only redeeming qualities of this movie. 

Closing Statement:  This movie sucks and presents don’t make everything in life better.  Christmas should be about more than buying shit from stores.  The Polar Express fucked this up while The Grinch Who Stole Christmas got it right (even after he stole the presents, they still got together and started to celebrate).  This is the ‘Best Children’s Book Turned Into CGI Commercialized Movie Tripe You Should Never See.‘