JASON AND JONNY, BOY DETECTIVES

JASON: Come on in, Jonny. Get comfy by the fire while I get you some egg nog. I invited you over to the hearth for a convivial chat about the movies we'll be enjoying this holiday season. Everyone knows that Christmastime is when all the best movies come out. Though we've got no more Lord of the Rings movies until Peter Jackson finishes his roller-disco adaptation of The Hobbit, there's plenty more to look forward to. Remember: a Tim Allen movie is a gift that just keeps on giving.

JONNY: Thanks buddy... to your health. Hey, did you notice that after that Botox injection, Tim Allen starts to resemble Shatner even more than he did in Galaxy Quest, where he played a Shatner-esque figure? Christmas With the Kranks looks like your typical selfish-yuppies-try-to-skip-Christmas-and-then-learn-the-true-meaning-of-it holiday comedy, and I guess they dropped the original book's title, Skipping Christmas, to avoid confusion with Surviving Christmas, which opened two months before Christmas to avoid confusion with, well, anything good. And though this Christmas' movie stocking looks like thinly packed, for the Scrooge factor I'll put my money on Jim Carrey in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Could be the new Harry Potter (but don't listen to me, I haven't actualy seen any of those movies either) meets The Addams Family meets Beetlejuice... BeetleScrooge?

JASON: Ain't that a venereal disease you get from Ringo Starr? Me, I Wish that Carrey was playing Andy Kaufman playing Count Olaf - that'd be hype. We'll roll it into a double feature with the live-action version of Fat Albert. Well, mostly live action - I heard they're using a computer-generated Mushmouth. The technology cost the studio $100 million, but that's money well spent.

JONNY: Hey hey hey, it's meta-tastic! Cute as self-referential `70s cartoons are, I don't see how this works as a Christmas movie. Actually, almost everything seems inappropriate at Christmas. Shouldn't we being staying at home and thinking about the baby Jesus? Mel Gibson has spared us more Christian suffer-porn this holiday season, it seems, but there is the filmic Phantom - which may match The Passion in pain!

JASON: Jonny, if I top up your eggnog, will you sing to me the music of the night? I know The Phantom of the Opera will give me great pleasure - it's like Jesus Christ Superstar, except with a French mutant and a falling chandelier! Still, it's a shame Joel Schumacher didn't cast the actor who played the role when it wowed me at the Pantages: Paul Stanley. He was, in a word, electric. Come to think of it, Gene Simmons would've made an awesome Count Olaf. Then the title could have been A Series of Unfortunate Events... In My Pants. Christmas would never be the same.