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By Vince Horiuchi

The Salt Lake Tribune

Charles Dickens' 19th-century tale of Ebenezer Scrooge's ghostly Christmas visitations is given the umpteenth Hollywood treatment, this time with a technological sheen as state-of-the-art as its lessons of greed and charity are classic.

But while the look of Disney's computer-animated 3-D version of "A Christmas Carol" works as digital eye candy with advanced motion capture for human movement, this new interpretation mostly fails at re-creating the story's human emotions.

At the least, however, it provides a tour-de-force showcase for actor Jim Carrey, who uses Dickens' timeless characters as a canvas for his wildly expressive face -- he plays not only Scrooge, but the ghosts as well.

The story is familiar,

thanks to the 1951 black-and-white Alastair Sim version, the standard all movie translations are compared to.

Overnight, the miserly Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Scrooge witnesses his childhood, broken marriage, his treatment of employee Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman) and the future.

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