Starring Jason Lee and Jane Lynch. Rated G. Opens Friday, December 14, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

It was 50 years ago today, Ross Bagdasarian Sr. taught the band to play…

Actually, they weren't technically a band, because he did all the music and vocals himself, in an irritating yet peculiarly alluring style. One could say he was the Beck of his time. Instead, we call him Dave Seville and the Chipmunks, whose 1958 novelty tune, "Chipmunk Song", is about to vibrate our inner ears for yet another Christmas season.

Thanks to computers we can now see the Chipmunks cavorting about in glorious semirealism on our cinema screens. In Alvin and the Chipmunks, they're introduced doing a screechy treetop version of Daniel Powter's "Bad Day". Your reaction to that sentence will pretty much determine your interest in seeing the animated/live-action film. Personally, I was riveted.

Jason Lee costars as Dave Seville, the buttoned-down yet bellicose songwriter and father figure of the troupe. Lee's everydork appeal gives his blundering, unfriendly character more charisma than he deserves, seeing that he's a composer of ponderous dirges and a man of such obtuse wit. For instance, he actually tries to hide the fact that he knows intelligent speaking rodents from a girl whom he is trying to impress.

The Chipmunks–naive Theodore, bookish Simon, and wisenheimer Alvin–are presented as fully functioning adult personalities, but they quickly revert to childishness, as signalled by a devotion to SpongeBob SquarePants and toaster waffles. This is so the movie (directed by Tim Hill) can repeatedly hit us over the head with the message that family is all-important and that even freakishly talented rock stars should forgo touring to cheer up an ungrateful, slobbish adult.

Thanks to Lee and David Cross, consistently hilarious as a cheerfully villainous A&R man, these dialogue scenes are pretty entertaining. So is the music, apart from the vaguely racist "Witch Doctor", which suffers from a horrific "hip hop" rearrangement about as hip as the Love Boat theme.