From Professor PZ Myers:
Note from Ray: A wonderfully vicious, hilarious review
Sometimes I wonder if I just have bad taste, or if everyone else in the world does. My wife and I were beguiled by the advertising and reviews for this new movie on Netflix, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, “An instant classic!”, one review crowed, so we watched it the other day.
It jingle-jangled my brain.
OH MY GOD IT WAS SO BAD. This is a movie that tries desperately hard to be cheerful holiday fare that it crosses right over the line into creepy, and I was appalled in the first five minutes. All the characters have these intense nonstop grins splitting their faces and are so enthusiastic about everything that I was confident that the entire stage had been doses with smilex gas, and the show was a race to reach a conclusion before everyone collapsed in cackling death. There was no acting. There was only grimacing.
The plot: it’s about a toymaker who is famous for his inventions, although we’re not really shown any talent, or even any comprehension of what a child would want. In the opening, he builds a tiny and hyperkinetic matador doll that talks…and proves to be so egotistical that he ought to run for president, but has no personality other than an overwhelming narcissism. This creation is supposed to be the great new toy that will make him even more famous, but really, it’s a toy so lacking in charm that you just want to smash it. It might be a fine example of the worst evils of AI you can imagine, but nothing more.