Will Ferrell: so hot right now!

Everything Will Ferrell touches turns to funny. From Saturday Night Live to Zoolander to Old School, Ferrell has shown both an aptitude for portraying characters with an almost unrivaled consistency, proving to be continuously hilarious in a way no one else can.

Ferrell brings his unique energy to Elf and creates his most memorable characters in one of the most pleasant holiday movies, one that truly has the possibility to be enjoyed by every member of the family.

Ferrell plays Buddy Elf, a human adopted by an elderly elf, known only as Papa Elf, who is employed at Santa's workshop. With a characteristic stutter and dour expression that only masks his inner sweetness, Bob Newhart brings this part to life. Papa Elf also is the narrator of the story that follows Buddy as he traverses the globe on foot. Setting out from the North Pole, Buddy Elf eventually walks through the Lincoln tunnel in hopes of finding his father in New York City.

Unfortunately, as Santa warns Buddy ahead of time, Walter, Buddy's real father lay on the naughty list in what can only be seen as an elaborate joke. Walter, played viciously by James Caan, neglects his family, is unscrupulous, self centered, and to top off the irony, is an executive for a company that publishes children's stories. It gets even better, Caan portrays a man who would rather publish a children's story missing two integral pages, than spend the extra money to reprint it correctly.

Walter is the exact opposite of Buddy, who has mastered the number one talent of Santa's elves: spreading Christmas cheer. Ferrell seems like a giant six year old; he eats nothing but sugar, insisting on putting syrup on everything. His train-of-thought switches gears in a matter of seconds, and he looks for every opportunity to simply play. In one scene where Buddy answers the telephone, he says enthusiastically "Buddy the elf! What's your favorite color?"

Known for his skill with physical comedy that he uses to infuse and enliven his characters, Ferrell is at first awkwardly humongous when in the North Pole, where everything is sized for the petite elves, and then like a kid in the proverbial candy store when in New York, running through revolving doors and showing off his deadly accurate snowball fight technique.

As is often the case with Christmas movies, the plot of Efl centers on threat of a destroyed Christmas. In Elf the threat stems from a dearth of Christmas cheer needed to power Santa's Sleigh. Somehow the elves manage to construct a sleigh that is powered by the collective mood of Christians during December; however, as cynicism has been running rampant of late, Papa Elf must attach a jet engine to the sleigh as a replacement - and even that does not even seem like enough power to get through the season.

Of course, Buddy is the one person with enough Christmas cheer to power a Boeing 747... so you can probably see where this is going. However, the film does a great job of infusing even those moments on the brink of becoming unbearably cheesy with surprising wit, and while you generally may be able to guess what will happen next, you can never guess how.

The best and most original aspects of Elf come with the fun it has with the assumption that all the myths of Christmas are true, and also with the depiction of the actual logistics of the North Pole. There is something undeniably great about Will Ferrell sitting on an elf toilet barely big enough for one of his cheeks. The North Pole is filled with every Christmas clich?©: there is the talking snowman, and his talking artic animal friends; Buddy embarks on his journey to New York by hopping on an ice berg and just floating away; Santa actually eats all the cookies you put out for him, and so on and so forth.

In the end, Santa's sleigh once again is able to ride on Christmas cheer, and a case could be made that this is a movie about faith: as Santa explained, he could never reveal himself to the world -- it is more important for people to believe in him without evidence. Perhaps as technology abounds in the new millennium and people have a growing need for instant gratification, as communication through computers becomes more cold and impersonal, and as life becomes extremely fast paced, we all need to remember that the spirit of the holiday is really all about Christmas cheer. Whether you believe that or not, the implications are still clear and we could probably do a better job of spreading peace and love.

More importantly, Elf shows us that if elves that made toys so a fat man in a red suit could deliver them to kids really did exist, and they adopted a human child and raised him in their culture and then he went back to human culture to find his real father - well, it would be pretty damn funny.