ah, xmas

My weekend? It was Xmas. The four days off work were much appreciated. I mostly avoided family entanglements (lunch with parents, sister, niece, and uilos on the 26th), spent Xmas Day gaming (as it should be), and saw a bunch of good people. I slept "late" (all the way through until nine-thirty, at least once) and made real breakfasts, which is how I can tell I don't have to be anywhere in the morning and can relax. I gave a couple of awesome gifts, and got some in return. Overall, pretty good.

Now I just have to talk myself out of brain-vacation mode. So far I've had limited success, and it's already Tuesday. Patience.

fox / plane / goats

Wes Anderson (dir.), Fantastic Mr. Fox

Less fantastic than advertised. The stop-motion's good, a lot of the long shots look taken directly from Quentin Blake's illustrations. It's very funny in places, in short bursts. It also had a tendency to drag and/or grate. This may just mean that I'm not a Wes Anderson fan (this is the first film of his that I've seen). Saying "look at these unhappy people" doesn't get you a story unless the people change in some way, and these didn't.

Also, many of the funniest bits were in the trailers.

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Jason Reitman (dir.), Up In the Air

A sharp, witty movie about a guy who's taken Robert De Niro's advice from Heat to an extreme. Ryan Bingham spends most of his life traveling, fires people for a living, and has almost no interpersonal attachments. His goal in life is to hit ten million frequent flier miles. Over the movie he deals with Natalie, a woman just out of college who's got a scheme to replace him with a videoconferencing rig, and Alex, who seems to be a female version of himself. As the movie progresses he starts to suspect that there might be some point to all that messy baggage people tend to saddle their lives with. . . and then instead of a storybook Happy Ending, he gets the metaphorical rug yanked out from under him.

Ryan tries to change, and watching that attempt in process makes for a story. He ends up back where he started because it's the only thing he knows. (And there are hints that he /has/ changed, if only a little.) Natalie certainly changes over the course of the film. And Alex. . . well. Our perception of Alex changes, which is enough.

It's funny, it's well-paced and well-acted, and perhaps most importantly it's sympathetic towards everyone involved. Even the legion of fired employees aren't played for laughs: they're treated with dignity. This is serious for them, as serious as Ryan's conversation with the head of the airline when he hits his ten millionth mile. It's no less serious just because we only see them for that short time.

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Grant Heslov (dir.), The Men Who Stare At Goats

What an odd film. It's clearly a comedy; at the same time it doesn't really have "jokes" as such. It's just absurd. Sometimes comically absurd, sometimes dramatically absurd, and mostly its own thing. Mostly it's a lot of fun watching George Clooney and Jeff Bridges and Ewan McGregor be Very Serious about their alleged Jedi powers in the middle of a) Iraq 2003 and b) Fort Bragg 1973-1980.