Scrooged

"We wrote a fucking masterpiece. We wrote It Happened One Night. We wrote a story that could make you laugh and cry. You would have wanted to share it with your grandchildren every fucking Christmas for the next 100 years. The finished film was a piece of unadulterated, unmitigated shit." So said co-writer Michael O'Donoghue. And I guess I'm glad his fucking masterpiece turned out that way, because if there's one thing that helps Scrooged work, it's that cartoonishly brutal and manic layering of episodes and subplots, the nature of which don't actually make any sense in the overall context and were obviously created by rather crassly slow-cooking the script and combining it with the need for all sorts of cameos and improvisations. By the way, I count 163 speaking characters in this Christmas family comedy (I'm home sick, what do you want from me). The ending is really awful, but if I expected it to be awful like this all the way through, then it from the middle onward, then from the last third... and ultimately it was just the end. (02/04/2021)