December Media
The Usual Suspects
Elf
Christmas Vacation
A Christmas Story
A+, A+, A+
Holiday Baking Championship
Well, they did it. After how ever many years of watching these holiday baking shows – at least a decade – the Food Network finally drove me away. Following the semi-debacle that was this year’s Halloween Baking Championship, I was hoping things would return to normal for Christmas. Alas, based on the first episode it seemed like it had also been hammered into stupidity by the producers. Too many home bakers with more personality quirks or wacky backstories than baking skills. Too much emphasis on drama and cattiness. After watching the first episode I deleted the others already queued up and canceled future recordings. Time to re-discover the British Baking Show to get my fix, I guess.
Sad F
A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983): 20 CRAZY Facts You Didn’t Know!
20 CRAZY Facts About ‘‘Elf (2003)’’
20 Crazy Facts About ‘‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’’!
These pieces with the auto-generated narrators drive me nuts. There might be good content, but I can’t ignore the mispronunciations and little verbal ticks. Get off my lawn!
A- for content, D- for delivery
The Lost Version of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
Now this is fantastic! Both digging up some scenes that were cut from the theatrical release of Christmas Vacation and showing how brilliant John Hughes’ original script was.
A
Colbert’s Canceled Christmas: The Last Noel
Not sure this top’s Colbert’s first Christmas show, which featured John Legend’s immortal “Nutmeg,” but it’s a pretty good way to end his run.
A
Regular Stuff
Platonic, season two
Mostly enjoyable, although there were some odd choices along the way. Like the weird podcasting jag by one of the supplementary characters. Lots of sophomoric humor. And the fact Seth Rogan always has gorgeous girlfriends in his shows and movies kind of annoys me. He’s not an attractive dude and I’m sure he smells like weed all the time.
B+
A House of Dynamite
Sad that frightening movies about potential nuclear war are no longer speculative fiction, but once again cautionary tales. I’d feel much better about the world if Stringer Bell was our president than the person currently holding the office.
A-
Starting 5, season two
We have friends who lived a couple doors down from Tyrese Haliburton when this was filmed. They said they never saw him, but his girlfriend was often out walking their dog. So we looked for them in the background of neighborhood shots. Never saw them.
Netflix nailed this one, with two of their featured stars for this season, Hali and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, making it to the Finals against each other.
Shai’s act gets on my nerves a little. He has a Kobe quality where his every action seems calculated and refined. James Harden is more interesting than I expected. Jaylen Brown is a genuinely admirable dude. And Kevin Durant is one of the greatest personalities to ever play the game. And the Pacers’ ridiculous post-season run was front-and-center.
Put it all together and a pretty solid season two. Although I admit seeing the locker room scenes after Hali blew out his achilles was a little hard to watch.
A-
I cycled for 48 hours to get to work
Amazing Beau Miles bullshit.
A
Yacht Rock: A Documentary
We re-upped with HBO and I finally got to watch this amazing show. So much goodness in it. Not sure what my favorite part was: Thundercat. Steve Lukather’s hair. How crazy prolific the dudes in Toto were. Or how much Michael McDonald and the lead singer for Ambrosia have blown up while Kenny Loggins looks as fit as ever.
A+
Wake Up Dead Man
We watched the latest Knives Out movie with our guests from Denver, nine total people aged 54 to 13. The younger ones didn’t like it. Us old folks did. I missed the silliness from the first two, but this one felt more indebted to classic thrillers, and thus a little more substantial. And I enjoyed its examination of faith. It could just as easily have pissed off and delighted people from pretty much every religious perspective.
A-
Podcasts
60 Songs That Explain the ’90s: The 2000s – “Hallelujah”—Jeff Buckley
60 Songs is on temporary hiatus, but Rob Harvilla dropped this bonus episode last month. Timely, of course, because for some strange reason various remakes of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” have become Christmas songs over the past decade. Which strikes people like me as absolutely insane; while there is certainly a religious component to the song, it has nothing to do with the Biblical roots of Christmas. Harvilla gets into the back stories of Cohen and Jeff Buckley, how the original version of this song came to be, how John Cale’s 1984 rendition became the de facto standard that most future artists covered, and how Buckley’s 1994 recording brought it to the mainstream. It ends with a wonderful interview with filmmaker Amy J. Berg, director of the new documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.