Christmas is over six weeks away, you say? Nevertheless, you can get in the holiday spirit early with Disney's 3D remake of A Christmas Carol, which comes out today. Critics have been total Scrooges about the film so far, notes Cartoon Brew, who watched just a couple minutes of footage but says it was "sufficiently inept enough to prevent me from wanting to see any more. What did it for me is the scene at about 1:15 in which a ghost floats rapidly towards Scrooge and knocks him backwards. Scrooge then does a backroll and pops up off the floor in a way that is so comically devoid of the laws of physics and inappropriate to the physical movement of a realistic human that all dramatic impact is instantly drained from the scene." But Movie Mom is blown away by the special effects: "It was not just that the Victorian setting was so meticulously created, though I plan to go back just to revel in the details. It was that I had never before seen a camera move so fluidly through so [many] different vantage points in the midst of a convincingly immersive 3D experience."

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke reported yesterday that Oprah is giving up her CBS daytime show and taking it to OWN, her Oprah Winfrey Network. "Leaving the extraordinary visibility she enjoyed through syndication for a nosebleed cable channel is a huge gamble for Oprah as a TV brand," Finke writes. "There's the possibility that OWN could distribute her new talk show for syndication. But I hear no one is talking about that now." "Adversely affected would be CBS, obviously," says NY Mag's Vulture, "but also the ABC stations that air Oprah, plus all of the other things on which she exerts an influence (so long, publishing industry!)." AdAge's MediaWorks reports that OWN's "launch date has also been a moving target--initially set for fourth-quarter 2009, then pushed back until summer 2010. Now reports are putting that date closer to early 2011 to accommodate a possible acquisition of 'The Oprah Winfrey Show.'" "This could be the end of an era (or lead to a true explosion in cable," remarks I'm Not Obsessed. "If it's true."