christmas

Christmas
Christmas was good. I don’t know when it actually happened, but somewhere in the last few years the joy of Christmas morphed from one of getting to one of giving. This year that joy was so vivid it was almost tangible, like a blanket up in which you could wrap yourself to keep warm. I absolutely love my family, and I enjoy little more than trying to make them happy. In the Midwest, families are normally insulted when showered with gifts as it serves to both seem to objectify a life in which hard work and values should take precedence over material things and also serve as an insult to the recipient. The one exception is Christmas, and I always enjoy exploiting it, while still staying barely on the respectable side of protocol.

My girlfriend and I ended up giving each other not only watches, but Citizen Eco-Drive watches. It’s tough to handle the situation by showing the correct amount of surprise and appreciation when you know that in a few moments she’s going to open essentially the same thing.

Honestly, I suck at giving gifts. I have absolutely no sense of style or taste. The one exception to this general rule is gadgets. My habit of keeping up with the latest and greatest cool shit gives me the mone advantage of knowing what the most popular battery-using presents are at any given time, and I took full advantage of that talent this year.

We watched a movie on Christmas eve. Here we go.

300
Like a pop-country song, it pretty much sucked. Aside from the quasi-accurate historical account and the admittedly impressive special effects, both devices were used to present a movie focused more on the latter than former, with little attention paid to a well-developed plot or storyline. I fell asleep during the middle, which somewhat invalidates this review, but when I woke up I didn’t really feel like I missed anything. The movie went pretty much like this.

• Set the small background story.
• Prove that the Spartans were much bigger bad-asses than the rest of the Greeks.
• Have a bunch of Persian attackers attack the Spartans and get slaughtered.
• Repeat ad nauseam.
• Heroes die.

It was the first full-on nude sex scene that I watched with both my sisters, my girlfriend, my father and my sister’s fiance. Objections couldn’t really be raised because my youngest sister was the only one who had already seen the movie. I think it may have been at that point I decided to go to sleep.

This Christmas break, enhanced by the divine convenience of landing on a Monday and Tuesday, was one of gifts, new media and giving. The most novel gift, given me by my girlfriend’s grandmother, was one of those remote control helicopters. Too small and light for any obviously useful purpose like strapping a camera to it as was my first impulse, one is resigned to simply enjoy flying it. I have been doing just this activity, and as I do I continue to be more amazed at the simplicity of such enjoyment.

I watched three movies over the course of the last weekend. I’ll be discussing all of them here over the next few days. The first to the plate was National Treasure: Another Bad Movie with Nicholas Cage.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Having watched the original National Treasure only a few weeks before and initially dismissing it as a “poor man’s Di Vinci Code”, for some reason I went in with high hopes for the sequel. I left amazed that a movie with such a budget for special effects spent so little of it on the writing and screenplay. If I watch Transformers and the new National Treasure in the same weekend and find Transformers easier to believe, something is wrong. Now I know that the movie is fiction and based on manufactured stories of treasures and clues and hidden…things, but that basis is not the source of my complaint. The movie asks the readers to believe that a geek can hack, in no perceivable time, the most secure IT infrastructures in both the US and the UK, as well as believe that in England they have no cops patrolling the streets. The enormous amount of damage done to public property during the car chases and break-ins goes unpunished for the hero, nothing more than a rogue historian. The notion that this historian can singlehandedly gain access to, much less kidnap, the president of the United States is laughable. However, all these plot problems aside, in a world where people want to believe in conspiracies and base the believability on the special effects budget and speed of the car chases rather than the evidence and arguments, this movie is bound to be a hit.

This video will blow you away.

Merry Christmas