Christmas always brings us back to the same stories, from ‘How beautiful it is to live!’ to the different adaptations of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens. Be careful, no problem with that, they are classics for a certain reason. That is not why the body stops asking that, even if they finally give it the same thing, they give it to it with a little twist more than shock a little or remove the spiritnot just hot.
But our Christmas holidays are about to have a little more twisted fun and a bit of bad slime thanks to the latest streaming news. The recent arrival of ‘Two good guys’ on Amazon Prime Video is joined by another fresh proposal for these datesalthough it comes from 1988. It is about the wonderful labor satire ‘Ghosts attack the boss’.
Chinese Christmas stories
Richard Donner’s film has just been added to the HBO Max catalog (it’s also on Amazon Prime Video) just in time for the dates. One of his best approaches to comedy which, furthermore, was the more than expected return of Bill Murray after a sabbatical after the success of ‘Ghostbusters’ and two failed projects that he took very seriously.
Here Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ is updated with a set in carnivorous corporate America plus a lot of added metalinguistic layers. Murray is the president of a powerful television network (which also prepares its version of ‘A Christmas Carol’, no joke) who has forgotten his humble origins on his greedy path to success. Before the end of Christmas Eve, he will have the visit of three representations of the past, present and future that will make him have important reflections on life.
The satire of the world of television and successful America that Ronald Reagan promised does not cut it at all. It’s not that he throws darts, he throws machetes at a supposed entrepreneur who is nothing more than a cruel exploiter who is almost impossible to redeem. Screenwriters Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue (the latter one of the most corrosive writers on Saturday Night Live who was not shy about ridiculing the person who wrote the checks) almost do their job too well in the section of showing the unpleasant part of the protagonist.
‘Ghosts attack the boss’: corrosive satire
Fortunately, Murray is the kind of comedic star who can land such a project, as he manages to make even the most superb characters charming and, why not say, jerks. There is also Richard Donner, with a Sensitivity well adapted towards the general publicwhich helps bring to fruition the film’s shift towards redemption that ‘A Christmas Carol’ has to have.
Murray would undoubtedly be stuck with doing something that went even further with what was shown in the first acts, and that clash of intentions makes the update not round. But yes interesting, and also fun from start to finish. It is a more than great proposal to see the same story as always, but different.