Mainlining Christmas

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This was an enjoyable, though not amazing, entry into the genre of ‘Christmas war movie’. Joyeux Noël is a French movie based loosely on the Christmas Truce of 1914. if you were asleep in history class and a dozen other pop-culture references, the Christmas Truce refers to a series of informal cease-fires along the front lines of World War I. We think this movie did a really good job of conveying aspects of that event, mostly around the way it probably felt. The surreality of the situation was compelling, and the tension was well done around what a person is told to feel toward people of another country, versus how they react when face-to-face. Also I liked the fact that different minor characters reacted completely differently. The movie followed a half-dozen or so characters from three units. I did really like how multilingual the movie was. No characters speak an unnatural language for the courtesy of the audience. So we have two brothers and a preacher from Scotland, a lie

UPDATED : Voting is open on the Nerdtivity contest. Head over to this page , pick your favorite, then comment with the corresponding number. Our entry (same as the above image) is #26. Between now and Christmas, we'll be posting a "Nerditivity" scene every night at midnight. Don't think that means we'll be slacking on the rest of our Christmas duties, though - this is going to push to us to a minimum of four posts a day instead of three. Tonight, I'm presenting our entry to the " Kevin and Chuck Want You to Make a Nerdtivity Contest ", which is what inspired all this. Also, it added the word "Nerdtivity" to our lexicon, for which I'll be forever grateful. We're calling this one, "Away Team in a Manger," and I'll leave it to you to revisit the question, "Whose child is this?" In case anyone's wondering, all the Nerdtivity scenes we're posting were done without digital alteration beyond cropp

Background information on this episode is hard to come by. Wikipedia has some notes on the series on the article about Liberace, but the show doesn't even have its own page. IMDB fares a little better, though not much. We're not actually sure if the year for this is correct - IMDB has it for 1953, but the stamp at the end of the version we saw said '54. It's not difficult to understand why: very little of what we saw qualifies as memorable. Mostly, it was just Liberace playing the piano. Sometimes he was joined by other musicians. He didn't choose particularly interesting pieces, either, though some of the medleys were fun. But I definitely could have lived without listening to his generic rendition of "White Christmas." Come on - that was already cliche in 1954. The episode played like a stage show, interspersed with the occasional camera trick. But most of the "effects" were theatrical in nature. The background would light up to display a

At 5% Fresh, Rotten Tomatoes underrates this movie. Based on similar films, I'd have expected 7% - perhaps even 8% - positive; not 5%. Critics seem to have punished this movie more harshly than it deserves on account of its horribly disgusting message, along with the fact that it does, in fact, suck. But these things all come down to magnitude. Christmas with the Kranks sucks less, not more, than Surviving Christmas , which is far overrated at 7% fresh. If I were the Kranks' two-bit hack of a director, Joe Roth, I'd be angry at this injustice. Let's back up a bit. The movie stars Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple who decide to skip Christmas. It's based on a book called, "Skipping Christmas." Why the title change? Because it was released the same year as Surviving Christmas , and the names were too similar. Once again, the Universe is a cold and unfair place for Joe Roth. Of course, "Skipping Christmas" is a shitty title,

This year, I am taking on The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries , a 674 page tome containing 59 individual stories about the Christmas season. Conveniently, it’s broken up into blog-post sized sections. Here’s section six. (Section 1 , 2 , 3 & 4 , 5 ) A Scary Little Christmas The Carol Singers , Josephine Bell - A well told tale. I liked the extensive picture of the victim before the real plot. Waxworks , Ethel Lina White - Creepy. I liked it, except for a hint of period-typical sexism. Cambric Tea , Marjorie Bowen - Weird pacing, weird ending, a bit deus ex machina. The 74th Tale , Jonathan Santlofer - First piece of true horror. The Uninnocent , Bradford Morrow - Decent tone, but unsatisfying. A bit ‘mystery for it’s own sake’. Blue Christmas , Peter Robinson - Nice vignette of melancholy and hope. There’s a bit of everything in this section. The two that didn’t really work for me were "Cambric Tea" and "The Uninnocent". "Cambric Tea"

It was time. We've been doing this blog for five years without a Nativity Set, and it was time to correct that oversight. We'd have gotten one earlier if it weren't for the fact that they're overpriced, we're not religious, neither of us have any emotional connection to these things, and we consider them - as a rule - horribly ugly, chintzy pieces of garbage. In fact, if I were to refer to them as a blight on Christmas decorations, I'd consider my appraisal charitable. But, beyond that, we really have no excuse for waiting so long. At any rate, a friend (thanks, Cybil!) pointed us towards Kevin and Chuck Want You to Make a Nerdtivity Contest . A "Nerdtivity" seems to be defined as a geekily re-imagined Nativity scene. This isn't actually my first introduction to the concept, though the name's new. A few years back, I entered (and lost) a similar contest over here . If you visit that link, I think you'll agree that one of the main d