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."

Scene-Stealers thinks the movie won't appeal to anybody: for adults "it's akin to seeing your favorite uncle drink too much at a wedding and embarrass himself on the dance floor," for kids "it's a gloomy, frightening experience fraught with purposeless eye candy." Bah, humbug! Well, maybe they just need a little time to get into the Christmas spirit.