Mainlining Christmas

Still on the lookout for last minute gifts? This little lady is just three bucks at Target this year. Monster High dolls are VERY popular, and thus they're expanding rapidly from the original doll line into every conceivable bit of merchandise. These little Christmas-themed figurines aren't fantastic quality, but again, they're only three bucks. The back of the package shows all the choices. Each one is an established Monster High character, with a few appropriate holiday-themed additions. I chose Abbey because she already had a bit of a winter theme, being an abominable snowwoman and all. It's just a short step to give her a little holly and her friend there a Santa hat to make her a Christmas character. She stands about 3 inches tall, and is permanently attached to her base, which features the Monster High logo. The paint work is far from perfect, but I've seen much worse on things this size.  The snowflake piece is made of flexi

Do you remember the scene in the first Home Alone movie where Kevin tied a bucket of paint to a rope and swung it at the robbers? Have you ever stopped to consider what the entire movie would have been like from the perspective of the paint inside the bucket? I mean, I assume it would have started absolutely still and sat that way for hours on end, before being slightly jostled. Then, a few hours later, it would have sloshed around, before splashing against the wall. Finally, it would have settled again. Mostly, it would have just been still. It would probably have dried a little as the movie progressed. Not a lot and certainly not quickly, but an imperceptible quantity of paint would have dried up. While that's not the plot of the fifth Home Alone movie, I think it offers a nice encapsulation of the experience of sitting through the film. That's another way of saying this movie isn't as shockingly awful as its predecessors. And that this improvement is a very, ver

This movie can best be described as a pretentious art film trying to masquerade as a cult hit. The vast majority is in black and white and attempts to duplicate science fiction films from the 50's and 60's. They actually did this pretty well, setting aside the copious cursing. Oh, and the marching band with vaginas for heads. Sorry. Probably should have put a *spoiler* warning before that. At any rate, most of the visuals were in line with old movies. Based on still images, you could even be convinced you were getting ready to watch something campy or at least interesting. Instead, imagine a dimly-lit empty corridor made to look like a 60's SF set. Now imagine someone walking down it slowly while looking downcast. That's about two-thirds of the movie. God! I'm sorry. Again, I forgot that *spoiler* warning. There's very little narrative glue holding this together, and it's a bit of a stretch calling the malformed story line a plot at all. With tha

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 the seventh post, section nine. A Puzzling Little Christmas Sister Bessie , Cyril Hare - Not bad. Not awesome. Somewhat expected tragic twist. That’s the Ticket , Mary Higgins Clark - Ha. Not a bad little story, cute resolution. Death on the Air , Ngaio Marsh - Fine resolution, pace was a bit off. The Thirteenth Day of Christmas , Isaac Asimov - Super cute bit of fluff. The Christmas Kitten , Ed Gorman - A lot of buildup for not much substance. The Santa Claus Club , Julian Symons - *snurk* the butler did it, naturally. These were a little bit of a let down after the last section, but most of these stories were still pretty decent. Similar to the “Surprising” section, all of these stories had at least a bit of a twist or a reveal near the end. “Sister Bessie” follo

For the last week and a half leading up to Christmas, we're posting a "Nerdtivity" scene every night at midnight. Tonight's picture features spacecraft* from six different geeky properties - go ahead and look. Five are pretty obvious, but I'll be impressed if you can spot the sixth. *Okay, so technically the Batwing isn't a spaceship. But it counts anyway, because Batman can breathe in space .

A Merry Friggin' Christmas  is a direct-to-video movie starring Robin Williams and Joel McHale. It's one of Williams's last films, which netted it some publicity prior to its release. If you've seen the trailer, you're likely expecting a slapstick comedy in the vein of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation . That's certainly what I was anticipating, and I hate   National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation . If you skim the one-sentence blurbs over on Rotten Tomatoes, you get the sense that's what the reviewers were expecting, too. Those reviews are almost uniformly negative - only 18% Fresh at the moment - and the primary issue seems to be that this movie just wasn't that funny. In my opinion, this is another case of critics missing the point. This wasn't all that funny, because it wasn't slapstick: it was a Christmas dramedy. And I thought it was a pretty decent one. The movie focuses on the relationship between its two leads. Williams

I’ve been trying to think how to describe this show to someone who’s never seen it. I suppose it’s a sketch comedy, in that each episode consists of a series of short skits, each generally with a punch-line or six. But it’s closer to a hybrid with a sitcom than any other sketch comedy I know of. There are consistent characters, plots carry from one bit to the next, and there’s even sometimes a hint of pathos, or at least you can become sympathetic towards the characters. The characters in question are the men of Possum Lodge, both the name for the building and the club. It’s also a show-within-a-show, in that the characters are mostly aware they are being filmed, for the “show” they produce locally, the segments (many repeated in each show) are named on screen, and they directly address the camera. The repetitive structure is also reminiscent of many children's shows. The repeated skits are things like a guess-the-word game, or ‘Handyman’s Corner’, wherein Red builds something

Lindsay and I reached dramatically different conclusions on this; probably as extreme as anything we've ever seen for this blog. That said, we can't actually point to many details we're in complete disagreement on: we simply weighed the positive and negative aspects of the special differently. Extremely differently. This is a sequel to The Snowman , a British Christmas special that's been around for three decades. The original is hands-down the best animated holiday special that I've ever seen, and I've seen damn near all of them. If you haven't seen The Snowman , just... no. Stop reading this, track it down, and watch it. I don't care if it's late, if you're tired, if you came across this write-up in the middle of April, or any other excuses. It is required viewing. It's also something that, by all rights, should never be touched again. Before we put this on, the very notion of a sequel didn't just feel unnecessary: it was blasp

So once upon a time there was a gorgeous piece of art, The Snowman . And some people saw T he Snowman , and thought, hey, we should do a sequel! We’ll get the creator on board, it’ll be great. Two years later, The Snowman and the Snowdog was born. And.. it’s not terrible. GOD F*CKING D*MN IT. Because if it were terrible, I could just tell you it was terrible and we could all move on. But no. I enjoyed it. However, as I told Erin after the movie: “I liked it the way I feel emotional at Pixar movies even if the scene isn’t actually any good.” The writers did an excellent job checking off all the boxes and twisting the emotional beats to create a perfect facsimile of The Snowman . It’s like the uncanny valley. It’s almost perfect, but there’s something unsettling. Something wrong. This version stars a new little boy, which I liked. And I liked a lot about the animation. The building of the snowman especially was very well done. This was clearly carefully created. I was

This was one of those times Lindsay and I spent the first half of an episode trying to figure out what the hell was going on, because it's mid-series and not particularly interested in recapping. Afterward, I skimmed part of the Wikipedia page and learned that several of the main characters were alien/human hybrids who were cloned from a royal family of extraterrestrials which... to be honest, I stopped skimming around that point. It's not that I don't like this kind of stuff - I'm a lifelong geek. But, frankly, the episode we saw didn't leave me enthusiastic about the series. It's not that it was awful: it wasn't. It was, however, dull and rather tedious. It felt like an "intro to genre" series: something that might have appealed to high schoolers who had never gotten hooked on X-Files, Star Trek, Babylon 5 , or Buffy , but who might have some interest in science fiction, provided it spent most of its time exploring teenage life and relation

We've been running "Nerdtivity" scenes every night. This one is for all of you who didn't get enough Ridley Scott holiday cheer from watching  Prometheus  (which would have been much improved with the special guests in the picture above, I might add). By the way, this is your LAST CHANCE to vote for our first Nerdtivity scene in the contest that inspired all this madness. You can view all the pictures and  vote for your favorite here . Once you've looked at the options, just scroll to the bottom and comment with the number for your pick. Our entry, Away Team in a Manger, is #26.

As far as I can remember, this is the first episode of Mork & Mindy I've ever seen. It was a fairly significant show in that it was Robin Williams's first major role. For better or worse, the series also paved the way for shows like Alf , 3rd Rock from the Sun , and even things like Invader Zim . If you've never seen Mork & Mindy , the series is a bizarre spin-off of a character who appeared in what was originally a dream episode of Happy Days . Mork is an alien who's come to Earth to observe humanity, and the vast majority of jokes concern his odd behavior and misunderstandings of our nature and customs. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the Christmas episode was probably fairly representative of the first season of the show (my understanding is that it transformed pretty dramatically from season to season in an attempt to hold ratings). The episode opens with Mork initially mistaking Christmas for some sort of contagion. They run with this joke

I’ve seen a few minutes of The Catherine Tate Show . It’s a sketch comedy show. I was not prepared for this. Some explanation that I wish I’d had going into this: This special is one long story based on one of the recurring characters that Catherine Tate plays. This character is an abrasive, obnoxious grandmother. I suppose it’s funny to some people? It’s really not my style of humor. Because it’s A Christmas Carol, we have to set up that Nan is a horrible person by having her be rude to carolers, steal from her neighbors, and toss relations come to stay with her out on the street. This takes entirely too long and is dull as dishwater. FINALLY, we get to the ghosts. At this point the pace and the humor finally start to pick up. Marley’s place is taken by her late husband, and that scene made us both sit up and pay more attention. Then the Ghost of Christmas Past has a bit of trouble impressing Nan, and we started to laugh. Past brings Nan to her childhood and also shows her oth

Turn yourself into a perfect facsimile of Santa Claus with this undersized hat and crappy, inflatable beard.

If you thought my Christmas music write-up was a little short this year, it means you probably remember my write-ups from past years, which were ridiculously long. This year's initial article looked at 20 CD's I bought between last Christmas and the start of this season. That's a fraction of what I've bought in previous years, but there's a reason for that. Amazon Prime. Earlier this year, Amazon expanded Prime benefits to include free streaming music. I know there are plenty of other streaming services out there, but I never jumped on for a few reasons. First, some don't seem to be geared towards building playlists and listening to one album at a time (much less keeping track of which albums you've listened to and which you haven't, which is essential for this exercise). Second, I was already paying for Prime, so the added features were essentially free. The free music is limited to select albums, so you're not getting total access to Amazon&#