Going into Disney's A Christmas Carol, I was expecting a lot of wacky slapstick comedy, because when you put Disney and Jim Carrey together, that's what you get. But even though Jim Carrey provides many of the voices and a lot of the visual inspiration for the characters, there was hardly any wackiness to be seen. In fact, most of the movie is pretty dark. If you've seen Robert Zemeckis' previous animated feature, Beowulf, you can get a pretty good idea of what to expect here, although the character designs are a bit more exaggerated, and some of their movements a bit more cartoonish. Still, this was one of the creepiest versions of A Christmas Carol I've ever seen, creepier by far than my two reigning favorites, Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol. And you know what? Creepy ain't always bad.

There have been many great adaptations of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The updated comedy Scrooged with Bill Murray is a modern classic, and The Muppet Christmas Carol alternates between Michael Caine's fine performance and the Muppets' rampant silliness. And the more traditional interpretations are numerous. So when we heard that the newest interpretation would be fully animated -- by Robert Zemeckis, who last directed Beowulf and The Polar Express -- and most of the roles would be played by Jim "The Grinch" Carrey... well, we got a little nervous. Vloggers Omar G. and Pablo G. watched the same trailer we did, and they have similar reservations. See what they have to say about the level of detail on Scrooge's nose and the imagery of Scrooge shooting through the sky on a rocket in the latest episode of "Trailers Without Pity," embedded below for your viewing pleasure.

Only eight days left, and it will be here: Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's visionary, big-budget adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book. Now, we really don't know what to expect -- we love the book, and we love Jonze's previous films Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, but can you really make a full-length movie out of 20 pages of illustrations, a barely-there story and the voice of Tony Soprano? We certainly hope so, since the commercials practically have us in tears already, but we're keeping our hearts locked up just in case -- after all, this wouldn't be the first time they were broken by a lame film adaptation of a favorite childhood read. Check out our guide to the Best and Worst Children's Book Adaptations and see which ones made us Mr. Happy, and which were simply terrible, horrible no-good, very bad movies.

Are you optimistic, or do you already know it will suck? Let us know below.

Toys and board games are sweeping through Hollywood as the next big marketable properties, and the optimistically named HIT Entertainment has landed themselves a doozy. He's Thomas the Tank Engine, the cherub-faced locomotive who pulls cars around the English countryside and chats up his similarly smiley-faced (or frowny-faced) colleagues in his successful TV series and omnipresent toy line. Thomas has had model-scale movie adventures before, but we're curious how it might translate to a live-action-mixed-with-CGI adaptation, so we looked to some of the great "train" movies to see if they would have been improved with the addition of Thomas' smiling face.

Depending on how you feel about security guards, Lyme disease, Matthew McConaughey, claymation, Avatar and the French, this is either a very good week for DVDs or the worst week ever.

Look out, San Diego Comic-Con -- this past weekend, Disney held their own convention in Anaheim, and it had more Disney-related celebrity panels and announcements than you could shake a stick at. While a lot of the show was simply fan service -- merchandise, collectible pins, a look at new theme parks and attractions in the works, a Miley Cyrus concert -- there were actually a lot of great announcements about upcoming movies, and we thought we'd run down some of the bigger ones below.

Angela Lansbury, Jason Statham and Valentino Garavani walk into a bar. The bar explodes. End of joke. Start of the weirdest week in movies on DVD ever.

Who could have predicted that James Cameron's follow-up to Titanic would take 12 years to realize and would be entirely about blue aliens living on another planet? A lucky few got to see 20 minutes of preview footage in IMAX theaters across the country on Avatar Day, but the rest of you have had to content yourselves with the online trailer, which has a lot going on in it, a lot of which looks kinda familiar. Luckily, Omar G. and Pablo G. watched it as well, and they talk all about in in their latest video installment of "Trailers Without Pity"... or, rather, their blue, animated avatars talk about it, which makes the whole thing very derivative. Like Avatar! Check it out below!

Today, the news broke that Disney has bought Marvel Entertainment, lock stock and barrel, for $4 billion. That includes Marvel Comics, with over 5,000 characters, and Marvel Studios, with the successful Iron Man and Hulk film franchises, plus the upcoming Thor, Captain America and The Avengers. It seems like it's a win-win scenario -- Disney gets a boys' brand to bookend the Disney Princesses, and Marvel gets some global multimedia clout -- but what does this really mean for our beloved Marvel superheroes? As fans, these are just a few things we're worried and/or excited about.

In the past, we've wondered if James Cameron's project, Avatar, could really live up to the hype. Even the trailer, released last week, left us feeling kind of meh. But on Friday, Cameron released 20 minutes of 3-D footage in IMAX theaters nationwide, and it was instantly apparent why Cameron felt an Avatar Day was necessary, and why non-3-D footage of the movie doesn't convey how amazing the movie looks. Not that the movie is some groundbreaking piece of cinema: the storyline is a sci-fi take on Dances With Wolves (with a dash of Soul Man), the designs for the aliens and the military vehicles are old hat, and some of the dialogue is horrible. But when you're watching naked, blue versions of Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington running around the jungle in high-definition 3-D, all of these worries melt away. Read on for a day-after description of the footage; I may be hazy on some details, but it's mostly the same as the footage that was shown at San Diego Comic-Con. And don't worry about spoilers, as a 3-D James Cameron informed us a the beginning that these are all from the first half of the movie.