Don’t forget that the good folks at NORAD are putting the U.S. nuclear defense umbrella to use tracking Santa’s flight path tomorrow night.

Merry Christmas!

Everybody’s going crazy over this clip from Kick-Ass:

To be honest, it doesn’t do much for me. At all. I’m a giant Matthew Vaughn fan and I’ve been with Millar’s book from issue #1. And I still think that this movie is going to stir up a giant discussion about comic books and the popular culture.

But that isn’t quite what I pictured. It’s cartoon-y, but in all the wrong ways. Maybe it’ll play better in context.

Galley Reader J.O. writes in:

poured a cup of coffee at about 6:30 this morning and here was the lineup on the only MSNBC show I watch, “morning joe”:

Brzezinski
Carl Bernstein
Tina Brown
Stephen A. Smith

Awesome. The only Green Room story I have that comes close is this: Several years ago I was slated to do some morning show. In the Green Room was Henry Kissinger, Jenna from the first Survivor, and me. We sat on three sections of a U-shaped couch silently, just blinking at one another. Eventually I introduced myself to Kissinger and tried to make small-talk. Jenna, clearly having no idea who he was, simply looked away disdainfully. She seemed a little irked at having to be around people who weren’t famous.

At least the science of Avatar gets a friendly review:

Pandora is a moon of Polyphemus, a fictional gas giant orbiting Alpha
Centauri A. I’ve always wanted to know what the view would be from
the moon of a gas giant. Can you imagine a quarter of the sky being
taken up by a massive cloud-covered planet visible night or day? We
get to see it in Avatar, and since Jupiter is the king of the gods,
maybe majestic is an appropriate word to describe it. I wonder if
Cameron’s choice to set this on the moon of a gas giant wasn’t a slap
in the face to Lucas, as if to say “this is RETURN OF THE JEDI done
right.” (I know it is ambiguous in the Star Wars universe whether or
not Endor orbits a gas giant.)

But what had me really geeking out is the choice of the star system.
Alpha Centauri A is perfect.

This time, a game theory explanation of Han Solo’s decisions in Episode IV:

Hamermesh downplays the real game theoretical reason why it’s rational for Han to fight: His contribution is likely to be decisive to the outcome. After all, he’s got “the fastest ship in the galaxy,” and it can make mincemeat of Imperial tie-fighters (as we already saw earlier in the movie). Hamermesh’s payoff matrix implicitly represents this by positing that if Han fights, he increases his own payoff from 5 to 8, and that of the Rebels from 7 to 10. In truth, however, Han’s contribution might well make the difference between victory and total defeat (as in fact happens). Moreover, the speed of the Millenium Falcon minimizes the risk that Han takes should things go badly. He has a good chance of running away unscathed. I’ll ignore the fact that he also times his arrival at the battle perfectly, such that it’s clear exactly what he has to do to ensure victory at little risk to himself; if it looked like the Rebels were going to lose, he could have just as easily have destroyed Luke’s fighter instead of Vader’s and then claimed he was there to help the Empire all along.

Well, now my environmentally conscious friends are going to have to give up their pets, too, if they want to halt climate change. But something tells me that, like non-essential air travel to vacation destinations such as Los Angeles or France, this little bit of environmental responsibility will be glossed over, too.

It’s enough to make you wonder if even they really believe any of this stuff.

Lots of “Best Of” lists everywhere the next couple weeks, which is fine–and often fun. But I’ve always thought that the more interesting list would be “Most Influential.” As in, what were the most influential movies of the decade, as opposed to the “best.” I suspect that there wouldn’t be much overlap between the two.

As a for instance, some version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy shows up on almost everyone’s “Best Of” list. It certainly would be on mine. But I don’t know that those movies were particularly influential, either on movies themselves or the industry at large. By contrast, the first X-Men now looks fairly influential because it proved that even a troubled, mid-budget superhero movie could make money. Which lead to the explosion of comic-book movies; the giant grossing Spider-Man series and Dark Knight; and the eventual independence (and then acquisition) of Marvel. Not a great movie, but a very important one for the business.

Artistically, I’m not sure what the most influential movies of the decade would be. Maybe someone else (Santino?) has thoughts on the subject.

Update: Galley Friend DR has an interesting version of this: A list of the most detrimentally influential movies of the decade. He includes 300, The Ring, and Saw.

Peggy Noonan on the NFL Network.

Sheer, utter genius:

As America sits, in the snow, tired, and perhaps hungry—not for change, anymore, but hungry perhaps for optimism, or hungry to once again love and respect and feel warmly toward our on-air talent—what do they really want, besides a rest, for a bit? I think they want to watch professional football on a Saturday. Snowy professional football. And, I think, they are wary of digital satellites.
***
When I was a girl, America watched football for free. President Kennedy told us to be proud of our Founding Fathers, our moral courage, our free market of ideas, and as he instructed us to look to the stars, America received football from the sky, with rabbit ears and pride. Sometimes we drove cars and listened to football. I wonder—have you listened to football, in a car, recently? Has anyone? Did we lose something, as a country, when we stopped listening to football? I think so, sometimes. But some didn’t. Some still do.