The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Zeitchik reported this morning that Robert Zemeckis and Jim Carrey‘s A Christmas Carol, the 3D motion-capture pic opening Friday (11.6), “is a faithful retelling (in tone and dialogue) of the Dickens classic” and “a technical marvel, uncannily beautiful and attentive to detail. But narratively, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s visit to his past, present and future feels less compelling.

“Some of the biz and media people we talked to at Wednesday’s screening weren’t showing overwhelming support,” Zeitchik writes. “The buzz was of a masterful filmmaking feat that’s nonetheless lacking in charm. (The movie has its dark moments, and while it’s not like we wanted easy uplift, it still feels like only a wonderfully constructed series of set pieces without the emotional and storytelling swells you’d want from a story like this.)

“Meanwhile, the kids — or at least the kids sitting behind us — could be heard registering several times that it was ‘scary.’ Which is fine if your movie is Paranormal Activity and your target audience is 16-year-olds, but it’s less encouraging if your movie is a holiday tale and your target audience is 8-year-olds.

I’m ignoring the paragraph that suggests that a film filled with wintry snowfall moments might have a problem coming out in early November with jacket-and-sweater only just beginning…that stuff doesn’t matter.

“:If Disney did manage to turn the film into a hit, then it would validate Zemeckis — who, strangely, sees this brand of motion-capture filmmaking as the future of the movies (after Beowulf two years ago failed to do same). And it would reinforce the 3D-first strategy increasingly adopted by studios. There’s also a comeback story for Jim Carrey, who’s had two consecutive live-action underperformers.

“But the fact that there’s so much riding on it also has is downside. If it’s not a hit, some of these ideas/people could be…well, Scrooged.”

Which reminds me that the finest Christmas Carol ever made — the 1951 British version with Alistair Sim — has a Bluray version coming out on 11.3

Here’s another prime example of a clever European TV commercial, the slightly risque kind you’ll absolutely never see in this country. Ancient (i.e., 17 years old) but brilliant. Okay, one of the nuns is a bit too broad, but Mother Superior nails it.

Willem Dafoe, Michael Sheen, John Lasseter, Jane Campion and others have shared their feelings with USA Today‘s Suzie Woz about this year’s ten Best Picture nominations (as opposed to the usual five).

In a 9.12 piece called “Sumptuous Devastation,” I described John Hillcoat‘s The Road (which I had just seen) as “two hours of rotted, ash-covered, end-of-the-world remnants captured in ravishing, desaturated, ugly-beautiful photography with highly admirable production design. Viggo Mortensen and the kid are very good…yes, fine. But what they bring isn’t nearly enough.

“I read Cormac McCarthy‘s novel for the exquisitely plain prose, but the movie is quite unnecessary. It really and truly goes nowhere, enhances nothing, offers no poetry of any transformative value and adds nothing to the conversation. Plus it has a lousy story. You can have it. I’ll never watch The Road again. You can give me the Blu-ray and I’ll never pop it in.”

After being shown “a few minutes of footage” from Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones (as well as “an exceptionally handsome trailer”), N.Y. Times writer Terrence Rafferty writes that Jackson “appears to have made the attempt to be faithful to Alice Sebold‘s wistful, lyrical tone, but there are indications, too, that he hasn’t entirely abandoned his hyperbolic horror style: the looming close-ups, the ominous shadows, the fast, vertiginous tracking shots.

The Lovely Bones star Saoirse Ronan.

“It’s always tricky for filmmakers who have earned their reputations in fantasy and horror to go respectable without losing the disreputable vigor that made their work worth paying attention to in the first place. And Mr. Jackson’s early career is more vigorously disreputable than most.”

Exactly. This is what I’ve been saying all along. Jackson has gotten to a point in his career in which subject matter or theme or tone, even, matters less than it used to. There is really only one law, one rule — he must be “Peter Jackson.” He must underline, be frenzied, be show-offy, whip up the lather, goad his actors into emphatic modes, etc.

BBC News has announced that Nowhere Boy director Sam Taylor-Wood, 42, is engaged to Aaron Johnson, 19, who does a decent job of playing the lead role of John Lennon in the film. I wouldn’t make it legal if I were Johnson — I’d just cruise along and see where it all goes. No guy should get married at this age. I just asked a ladyfriend about this; she says “younger boys like older women because older women know what they want in the sack, and a lot of younger girls don’t.”

Nowhere Boy director Sam Taylor-Wood in a pose for a current issue of Bazaar.

In a recently posted riff called “The Rules of Ten,” MCN’s David Poland says two things about Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker. (1) “Among the fifteen or fewer serious contenders for [Best Picture] nomination, it will certainly be amongst the best five, by most standards of quality.” (2) “In years past…a movie like The Hurt Locker would have a very hard road, no matter how good it is, because of its lackluster box office run.”

In other words, he seems to be saying that a standard Academy rule-of-thumb — i.e., if a great or near-great film hasn’t made a hefty pile of dough, it is automatically degraded as a potential awards contender — doesn’t apply as much this year. Is that what he’s saying? I’m not quite sure.

Either way you have no sense of humor if you don’t laugh at this equation. Near-great film opens, is praised to the heavens, makes very little money because the Eloi are too coarse or stupid to sufficiently support it. Awards time rolls around and the likelihood of this same near-great film being nominated for Best Picture is open to question because the Eloi were too coarse or stupid to sufficiently support it.

In the view of Steve Mason, the weekend’s #1 film — Michael Jackson’s This Is It — is a shortfaller due to $8 million earned yesterday and a likely 5-day cume of $33.2 million by Sunday night.

That’s well short of the $31.5 million earned over the first three days by Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (Disney) in February ’08. That film earned a little more than $65 million by the end of its run. So is Mason saying that This Is It won’t make it to that figure? His point seems to be that the potential business indicated by the Jackson doc’s opening-day business hasn’t been fulfilled.

The weekend’s really big box-office story, meanwhile, is Paramount’s Paranormal Activity — made for $15 grand, acquired for $300,000 and destined to reap $83.5 million by Sunday night. It’ll easily crest $100 million.

Keep in mind, by the way, that Couple’s Retreat was trashed by every critic in the country and will still have a Sunday-night tally of $87.2 million. Business is flat this weekend — $2.4 million yesterday, a three-day projection of $6.7 million — but still, $87.2 million ain’t chump change.

Where the Wild Things Are is also dead at this stage — $2.2 million earned yesterday, a likely $6.5 million for the weekend — but a $63.2 million total doesn’t sound too bad from an armchair perspective.