How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

Christmas month starts in about 10 days.  I still haven’t had time to figure out what to do exactly yet and I already have two Christmas movie reviews up.  This is the second movie on the flight back that I saw, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I love Dr. Seuss and for many people reading my past blogs, you would’ve probably already figured that one out.  I’ve watched almost all the movies on Dr. Seuss in the recent years.  This year’s The Lorax was simply fantastic.  You can go and check out my review if you’d like.  I loved Horton Hears a Who!.  In 2000, How The Grinch Stole Christmas was released in human version.  I’m sure it was long awaited.

For those who don’t know, this is based on the Dr. Seuss children’s book about The Grinch that lived on top of the hill of Whoville and hated the noise and the presents that Christmas brought.  He lived with his dog and one day, he comes up with the idea that he will steal Christmas so that it would never have to hear all the joyful noise and music and fuss.  He swoops in and strips the houses of all its decorations and gifts and lights, even all the food.  The story is that he learns that Christmas isn’t about all these materialistic things but rather the spirit can’t die because it means more than that.  The animated version that plays on TV every year is very similar and has Boris Karloff that does the narration, pretty much a reading of the storybook and its quite memorable. It doesn’t escape my Christmas movie marathon every year.  Its tradition to watch it.  I’ll talk more about it when we get into Christmas month in December.

So here we have the revamped version with humans.  Jim Carrey plays the Grinch.  Cindy Lou Who is played by Taylor Momsen and a whole bunch of other actors that I can’t recognize.  It doesn’t matter and I don’t even want to look it up because this movie was pretty bad.  The only factor I thought was worth reclaiming a bit was Taylor Momsen as Cindy Lou.  I actually enjoyed her throughout the whole movie.  Well, maybe using “actually” is not a correct term.  Taylor Momsen is a young actress I do enjoy, even when I was watching Gossip Girl and her role as Jenny Humphrey.  As for Jim Carrey,  he did this role way over exaggerated and the dialogue sometimes was too much, the actions were too much, the additional parts was too much.  They tried to give the movie an extra storyline telling us the reason as to why the Grinch lives on the hilltop and hates the Whos and Christmas, and even went to the extent to give it a bit of romantic spark.  I’m not sure if that was extremely necessary but I guess when you do a full length movie, they had to, or else the source material wouldn’t have been enough to hold up without feeling like it was dragging.  Still, I probably wouldn’t watch this movie ever again.  I spent most of the movie rolling my eyes and thinking when it would end, hoping that maybe it’ll get better.  It didn’t happen.

Other than Taylor Momsen, the other part I’d give to this movie as a positive was the soundtrack.  I owned the soundtrack even before I saw the movie and its a nice one.  There are some fun tunes and nice rendition of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”.  Faith Hill’s version and the movie version of Where are you Christmas is definitely nice to listen to.  There are a few other tracks that I love.

With that said, the movie experience was pretty bad but feel free to go ahead and listen to the soundtrack.   It is a nice fun Christmas music sountrack.  Although, it is sad that I have to list one of Jim Carrey’s movies as bad as this because I really do like him as an actor ever since the beginning.

As usual, I’d love to hear what you think? Did you enjoy it? I want to hear what you liked if you did? Maybe I’ll see it in a different light, who knows, right?