SMALL FARE: As the father of a 19-month-old boy, I don't get out to see many movies. And over the years I've had so many bad movie experiences -- where I wondered why I bothered paying my hard-earned money for two or three hours of total dreck -- that I haven't much missed the theater.

Still, when I heard about ELF I knew I had to see it. After all, it had two big things going for it for me:

1) I'm a sucker for the smart kids' story that bears messages for adults. (Hey, I grew up on Bugs Bunny.)

2) Will Ferrell.

That's why it was such a disappointment to shell out the cash, sit through the flick, and discover ELF is just another in a long line of lumps of coal in my movie-watching stocking. It had everything I don't like: cheap, unearned sentimentality that, when the director sensed it wasn't working, tried to veer into irony; superfluous gastrointestinal punch lines; obviously and inelegantly borrowed plot/character devices from myriad other movies (e.g., a fat, loud black guy who's supposed to be comic simply by virtue of his fat loud blackness); and more.

I had a similar bad taste after another Ferrell vehicle, the 1/3 good, 1/3 mediocre, and 1/3 crappy OLD SCHOOL. It was like, "Hey, these guys are onto something here, so why'd they have to just half-ass it so bad?"

I won't pretend at movie criticism, trundle through the film and catalog its failures. I simply want to warn people: ELF is small fare, probably no better (and possibly far worse) than the "wears its stupidity on its sleeve" BAD SANTA. It is not that mystical, wonderful holiday fairy tale it aspires to be.