Three Days of Christmas: Santa's Conquest: Part Three

frosty the snowman turned out to be foe

though santa flinched not; his friend had to go

victory achieved and presents to send

a war fought and a holiday to mend

Merry Christmas everyone! For those of you who followed along for the last few days, thanks for sticking with this albeit kinda of silly Christmas story. I hope the little poem underneath each was tolerable and wasn't eye-rolling in its execution. Anyways, I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas Day and you get everything you wanted. I hope that the year has been kind to you all and know I'm thinking of each of you today! So once more: Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and God bless us... everyone!

Three Days of Christmas: Santa's Conquest: Part Two

santa and the yeti, they shot and shot

saving christmas was good; some blood or not

thoughts of sad children fueled st. nick's great rage

the naughty list in need trimming a page

Three Days of Christmas: Santa's Conquest: Part One

he jumped on his robot with all due haste

for them a fireball was meant for to taste

screaming his eyes filled with such happy hate

for Christmas is no time's discriminate

Review: Avatar

Avatar is the new kid on the block. That movie you've all heard about that's supposed to change the way we watch movies, revolutionize cinema, and make you forfeit your religion and worship heathen computer generated gods of film. If you're anything like me, you really want to dislike this movie. The trailers aren't all that impressive, the CG doesn't look that groundbreaking on TV, and for some of you I'd gather that it looks like Dances with Wolves in space. On all three of those points, you'd be absolutely correct and if I were not to preface this review with the fact that I shared these sentiments as I walked into the film I would be committing a great omission. Instead, I believe it is important to acknowledge the decks stacked against Avatar by a large percent of its potential audience because when I state the fact that it almost effortlessly crushes all of these preconceived notions, I want you to realize the gravity of what I am trying to say.

Let's take a moment here to emphasize the absolute NECESSITY of seeing this movie in 3D. Don't be a fool and scoff at the extra three to four dollars you're paying to walk into the theater and put on the silly glasses. I actually hate to admit it, but this movie does things visually that will change your perception of what it is to 'experience' a movie -- and YES, I am perfectly aware of how pretentious that sounds. That's the thing I discovered early in Avatar and it will be a running theme of my review: for all the grand statements of revolutionizing movies and changing your perception of 3D and how horribly stock it all sounds; it's all shockingly and begrudgingly true. Visually at least. Critically this film had already gained some impressive inertia early on, and having read a lot of it I cynically assumed that it was reviewers being reviewers. Of specific note, a particular review boldly told me that there are moments in Avatar that will, regardless of the story, have you shaking your head in amazement at what you're seeing on the screen. This particular point stuck in my head as the movie progressed and even with that in mind there were moments my jaw almost dropped and I had to marvel at the scope that this movie was operating. Assuming you're not extremely jaded, this movie will grip you visually at some point or another. For me, it was early in the film during a nighttime run through the jungles of Pandora which at night apparently becomes lit by phosphorescent plant life and micro organisms. It's during these scenes that you suddenly feel uniquely drawn right into the scene in a way that feels ten times more immersive than any film I can think of in the last half decade. The film continues to impress as the movie bit by bit reveals more and more of the gorgeously lush and magnificent world that the filmmakers have crafted. Like I said before, I actually very much dislike to admit it, but this movie will knock you on your ass a few times.

All of this would be completely distracting if you could not get behind the main characters -- an entirely CG albeit motion captured race of nine foot tall blue aliens called the Na'vi. As a benchmark, I've considered Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy to be the most fully realized computer generated character of all time. Thinking back, I believe his effectiveness relied heavily not only on the skill of the technology, but the degree to which the filmmakers made him feel like he was in the world interacting with other characters and objects. To say the Na'vi have moments in which I had to stop and wonder if there wasn't at least some practical element to their portrayal is the highest praise I can think of. They feel tactile and weighty; their eyes don't seem 'dead' as with most of the Robert Zemeckis mo-capped films recently; and most importantly you start to believe this could be a real race on this planet. The amount of emotion displayed on their faces and the reality of their movements do wonders to immerse you as opposed to pulling you out of the experience (there's that word again).

You may notice at this point that I haven't really mentioned the plot of Avatar, but that's not to say it isn't worth mentioning. In the most sobering terms, the plot of this film is probably it's weakest link but it simultaneously demonstrates director James Cameron's greater strengths. The story itself is one that is pretty standard and it's been told many times over. Any reasonably astute viewer will be able to predict the film from the first moment to the last in the first half an hour, but the thing about good science fiction is taking something conventional and familiar and making it new again. Personally I took the fact that Cameron was able to take a plot I knew before the Na'vi had been properly established and make me genuinely invest and care in its proceedings was one of the more astonishing things happening in an otherwise astonishing film. It's been suggested elsewhere that the plot was knowingly simple in order to fully exploit not only the revolutionary setting constructed around it, but the various emotions intended to be evoked. I have to agree with this idea as its not so much about what is happening on screen, but the sum of everything together. Cameron seemingly takes something that in the hands of pretty much any other director would fall to pieces and mediocrity and handles it with such a degree of mastery and craft that you never stop to break it all down.

Of the few negative things I can assign to Avatar, many of them are minor enough to not detract from the overall experience. Firstly, a small deal of the suspense usually generated from such a huge movie is removed because of the decidedly generic plotline. Some would say Cameron overcame the same hurdle to a degree with his last movie, Titanic. Everyone knows at the end the ship is going to sink and a lot of people are going to die, but it's the 'how' of it all that Cameron proves to be in the most control and this carries over to Avatar as well. The second negative here is that if you're really scrutinizing there are moments when humans are interacting with Pandora at large and the Na'vi in particular where you definitely get the feeling that you're looking at CG elements mixed with green screened humans. It's easy to ignore, yet it's still a problem. Lastly, Avatar suffers from being a bit too heavy handed in it's allegorical elements at times and for those of you like me, this will be a bit tasking from time to time. The Na'vi in particular and their struggle to fight off more powerful usurpers heralds a bit too strongly to Native American archetypes, and obviously the idea of lesser equipped natives overcoming great militaries is as common as Return of the Jedi. The environmental allusions as well add to the moments that it feels like Avatar is trying to force-feed half heartedly veiled messages to you and it grates after a fashion.

All of these things aside, Avatar can be marked largely as a success. While watching the movie and silently reviewing it in my head as I watched (a funny habit I've developed since writing this blog), the word 'spectacle' continued to pop into my head. The movie is so epic in scale and scope that you feel dwarfed by the whole thing. The technology, in 3D of course, is enough to change the way you define the word 'epic' in correlation to movie going experiences and the story is primal enough that it speaks to parts of all of us regardless of how many times we've heard the tale. If you're on the fence about venturing out to give Avatar a try, I would wholeheartedly encourage you to make that venture because even if you go in with a jaded mindset chances are good you will walk out surprised in at least one way. Will this be the next cultural phenomenon some of the ads make it sound like? No, I don't think so. Is Avatar something special? I would like to think it is and worth seeing now so you can remember what it was like when 'epic' took on a new meaning.

Why We Eat the Holidays.

It's the holidays again and, for me at least, that means an excessive amount of opportunities to eat. Why is that I wonder? Firstly, I imagine that having Thanksgiving lead into a whole month of Christmas frenzy can only promote festive treats and festive meals of colorful cookies and candies. Secondly, and this point may indeed only apply to those of us living in the frozen North, winter is not the most friendly time to be going outside and partaking in various tangents. At the very least it becomes that much tougher to convince oneself to get up and go outside instead of just staying in, having a cookie or six, and watching an old movie. Food is such a fascinating social element in human interaction. Simply speaking we eat to give ourselves energy to keep living, but it's not hard to see that food and the consumption thereof has a much greater significance in the lives of almost everyone on the planet. We eat on a first date; we eat when we get together with family; we eat at work to celebrate nondenominational holidays; we eat when we're happy and sad; we even eat when we have nothing better to do -- people eat for so many reasons and factors that the idea transcends the act.

An average human being eats over one thousand pounds of food in a year. On the basic level, our bodies urge us to do this for 'building blocks' needed to grow and repair our bodies and for fuel to give us the energy to go about our business and eat more. But is this the reason we eat, and if so why then do we eat more during the holidays? Some have suggested that many times we eat in a 'zone' of 'biological indifference' wherein we are neither hungry nor sated. The next time you sit down to eat, examine if you're legitimately in need of sustenance or if indeed you are responding to environmental cues. "Environmental cues," you ask? These can be any number of things ranging from the company with which you dine to emotional state and even - surprise, surprise - the time of year (more appropriately categorized as 'social circumstance').

The holiday season in particular fires on all three of the aforementioned cylinders of the eating engine. Obviously during the holidays family is in town, old friends come home, and as previously mentioned there are an abundance of treats and sugars to ingest. If we meet with a group of friends at an acceptable social gathering place like a restaurant, the stigma falls to us that we are required to eat. We do so in most cases without even being aware of what it is we're eating or if we even need it. The very nature of the holiday season can evoke the emotional triggers that cause a flux in eating patterns. From experience the string of seasonal merriment can affect a range of emotions from bliss to absolute melancholy. Being such a staple of our day-to-day stimuli, eating easily becomes a safely habitual haven for those of us overcome by either end of the spectrum of feeling. Our emotional state and the amount and types of food we eat are so closely tied together largely because of a closeness in the experience of existing. In essence we eat to stay alive and we experience emotion because we live. The conflux of the two activities, while seemingly unrelated at first glance, inevitably becomes much more apparent given the greater complexities at work in our minds and lives on a continuing basis.

In most of ones life, eating is never such a pervasive topic in a normal day of thinking, but that is not to say it is not prominent in our thoughts. It is prominent but in an almost subconscious way. It is such a primal instinct that it bleeds through to the more actively engaged impulses in the course of a day. Simply because of this fact eating and, by extension, food affect and in turn are effected by almost every stimuli we encounter be it internal or externally prompted. These reasons are chief among the factors that make topics such as weight-loss and healthy diets so frustrating to corral. While it is easy to assign logic to how we should relate to food; the biological tangle of stigmas, environmental cues, and ingrained behaviors make it a much more complex topic.

So why are the holidays usually such a catalyst for us to partake in consumption? I think it comes down to a perfect storm of stimuli. Christmas time has a way of throwing everything that makes the act of eating part of our daily lives at us in greatly exaggerated amounts. To me, the increased frequency of eating indicates that we are indeed alive and living. If this is the case, it means that things could be worse and maybe we should all be looking forward to a new year and a chance to experience everything life has to offer while we have the opportunity.

Would you believe I write outlines for these kinds of posts?

Review: Paris, J'etaime... Oh, and You Too New York

I've been neglecting discussing media here lately, but that is not to say I haven't been seeing a lot of it. Unfortunately, when you wait so long to discuss something, the topics really stack up. Therefore, I will review two movies here and endeavor to cover the rest in a future post.

I heard about New York, I Love You about a month ago through the vast Internet and I was immediately intrigued. The premise behind this film is that it is actually a series of short, yet in some way interconnected, vignettes that in some way deal with love. Each short is directed by another person as well as stars some relatively big name in the world of acting. Obviously the bigger connective tissue here is that each story takes place within the backdrop of New York City. The stories in New York, I Love You range from intimate conversations between two people to slightly dream-like sequences that cover a more ambiguous aspect of love. A good portion of these stories are comical or have unexpected twists. I imagine this is a byproduct of two things. The first of which is that love and the pursuit of love are often laced with comedy, embarrassment, or misunderstanding. The second reason for their inclusion probably owes to the format of a short story. Under these confines, a director would be implored to do something to engage the viewer in a short time and leave a lasting impression.

New York, I Love You has more or less solid performances from the entire cast which ranges anywhere from Hayden Christiansen and Rachel Bilson to Shia Lebouf, Anton Yelchin, Bradley Cooper, Orlando Bloom, Christina Ricci, Ethan Hawke, Blake Lively and, my personal favorite, Natalie Portman. This list barely scratches the surface of talent in this movie, so if you're a fan of even one of these actors you will find some performance to like in this film. The main strength of each performance largely lies in the fact that they play it straight. No one's attempting to do any acting acrobatics here (with maybe the exception of Shia Lebouf), and it gives the film a very genuine feel that makes each tale that much more engaging. It also helps that none of the stories involved in this project drag or bore. Each one is distinct and different enough that you won't find yourself anxious for the next segment to begin.

The movie only benefits from being filmed intimately in New York City. Many of the scenes and venues are places that are often glossed over in classical portrayals of the Big Apple, and it makes everything seem that much more special. While the previous statement holds true, I also feel like to some extent the movie could have been filmed in any city and been the same. Perhaps the point is that these stories don't try and blatantly showcase NYC, but as a backdrop a more rich tapestry to paint against cannot be found. If I had one complaint about the film, and this complaint only becomes visible when juxtaposed with it's predecessor Paris, J'etaime (which I'm about to review!); it would have to be the fact that each vignette for the most part focuses on romantic love between two people. There are a handful of films attempting to stretch themselves into more introspective territory, but on the whole New York, I Love You is a movie about falling in love or being in love. Besides that minor gripe, the film ends with a story about an elderly couple that, unless you're emotionally dead inside, will tug at a heart string or two and reminds us that love is difficult, it's hard, it's funny, and it's enduring. I think that's a good message to leave an audience.

Paris, J'etaime is a movie I've been dancing around seeing for about eight months now. Torn between the impulse to see it because it sounded interesting and a general lack of want to go and seek the movie out, having seen New York, I Love You essentially cemented my resolve to see the original.

Right from the start, it's clear that Paris, J'etaime contains directors and short stories that are much more willing to traverse the subtle and sometimes bizarre in an attempt to examine love. Without spoiling any of the stories, I was most taken aback by a story about a martial artist beautician, a story about a vampire and its lovesick victim, and a story about the ghost of Orson Welles. Unlike its sequel, this film also has more stories dealing with love of other kinds. Off the top of my head I can cite the story of a grieving mother who is having trouble accepting the loss of her son and has a very surreal dream featuring Willem Defoe as a cowboy. The wonderful thing about Paris, J'etaime is that all of these high concepts pay off beautifully and never feel silly or forced. Each increasingly bizarre scenario only lends itself to a greater metaphor about love. Of course, there are an ample amount of straightforward short stories that entertain and surprise in more direct ways.

While this film also has a number of famous actors including Elijah Wood, Steve Buscemi, and Natalie Portman (again) I feel that Paris, J'etaime contains a much more recognizable list of directors behind the cameras. This fact perhaps explains the more lofty heights that some of the stories contained reach. This film also showcases its titular city in a much more connected way. Each venue chosen for each film feels like it supplements the story being told, as opposed to being a simple backdrop. If there is one complaint about his film, it would arise from the same juxtaposition with its sequel. While New York, I Love You from time to time either swaps scenes or characters between vignettes lending to a more connected and somehow meaningful throughline, Paris, J'etaime only decides to tie all its stories together in the last two minutes of the film. While the effect here is similar, somehow by subtly implying the connections the sequel leaves the viewer with a greater satisfaction at the deft weaving together of otherwise disparate plotlines. While New York, I Love You reminds us that love can be many things from confusing to hilarious, Paris, J'etaime demonstrates that love has no bounds and that its scope is endless in the span of a human lifetime. This sentiment alone is worth the price of admission.