Finally, Dickens' vision, complete with TARDIS, has been broadcast...
The Doctor Who Christmas Special aired (it being Christmas and all), and it began in space... the final frontier. Kind of. You have to love fanservice that gives you a pseudo-Star Trek opener (bright white bridge, exploding control panels and all) where the Doctor saves the "Enterprise" (or whatever it was called), though I don't think even the original Enterprise-D had a Honeymoon Suite (but whatever the Holodeck was used for, I'm sure it was sterilized afterwords on a regular basis). The only way it could have been better is if the credits had included "with special guest star, Patrick Stewart." Ah, well. Maybe next year. I'm also impressed with how much the new Who can put into only an hour. It also flipped some things around: The Sonic Screwdriver managed to not work on something and someone's timeline was directly changeable (though on a macro level, the Doctor seems to change history all the time). Anyway, it was one of the better Christmas episodes, and Matt Smith once again proves himself a worthy (if by some measures premature) successor to David Tennant.
So over the holiday, I bought a recent DvD release based on the fact that it made critic David Edelstein's (movie critic on NPR's "Fresh Air") top ten list. Plus, it's animated, and the wife and I were watching "kid" movies together long before Josh came along. It was "Despicable Me," and we loved it. This is in spite of a lot of the elements being formulaic: The happy ending you can see coming a mile away, the fact that Gru isn't the ruthless villain he thinks he is, etc. Steve Carell did a great job as Gru, and I had to actually check IMDB to be sure that the only character with a British accent (the ancient and scooter-using Doctor Nefario) was actually Russel Brand; I can't decide if they altered his voice or pumped him full of Nyquil to pull off his performance, but it worked well. I'm still not clear on how the economics of super-villainy works (or what Gru's minions actually were), but I enjoyed the chrome-with-fins designs they gave to all of Gru's vehicles and gizmos. It's worth picking up if you enjoy a light-hearted film with cute orphans and freeze/shrink guns tossed in.
So it's almost 2011, and I miss the Weekly World News' grocery-store newsstand headlines about psychics predicting what would happen in the year to come. So I consulted my garage-sale Magic 8-Ball (you get a lot more information if you try to pick words out of the gurgling noise the liquid makes as you shake it rather than going by what the polyhedron under the glass tells you), and here's what it says is in store:
1. Video games will be required to have a number given in years and months in the EULA called the RVW rating. This represents how long it will take for your brain to recover and pull you out of such diversions as "Minecraft" and "Dragon Age" games, returning you, "Rip Van Winkle," to full consciousness. Initial time measurement concepts based on beard growth or accumulated body odor will be discarded.
2. The comic book industry will demand a bailout from the federal government as monthly issue sales continue to decline. Congress will refuse, but the printed refusal will fetch $95 by 2012 if graded and slabbed at 9.5 or higher. Someone will invent and market an iPad case that looks like a comic storage box. They will be beaten to death by three dealers, two laid-off artists, and Rob Liefeld at the Wizard World Con in Chicago.
3. The Steam online game service still won't figure out that being able to hide how many hours you've played a game or the mile-long list of achievements you've "earned" on it would be a great thing, especially if your spouse is a "friend" on their network.
4. Someone very dear to you whose stats you rolled up will die.
5. The hacking community known as "Anonymous" will officially attain the status of "Trickster God," escalating their tendency towards ironic and zealous justice that occasionally has collateral damage for bystanders.
6. Just to reinforce the horror of knowing the future, Tommy Wiseau's unintentional comedy, "The Room" will be re-released in 3D.
7. The villain for the next 'Star Trek' movie will be 'Beiber X.'
8. Everything you like to watch on SyFy, if anything is left, will be canceled. This prediction was made without psychic powers or tools of any kind.
9. George Lucas will announce his next movie, "Indiana Jones and the Saber of Light." Nerds will eschew rioting and complaining, as they begin to look upon George as a demented relative who "just does that kind of thing, it's sad, really."
10. It will be discovered that time spent reading blogs and webcomics are not deducted from your lifespan. Time spent fishing will sue for breach of trademark.
So you can take those predictions as having the same validity of any psychic you care to name (except for #6, which appears to be inevitable). I hope everyone at least has fun ringing in 2011 in whatever fashion you deem acceptable and/or fun. I'd list some resolutions, but I think I've concocted enough fictional lists for one entry; perhaps I'll resolve to do it next time. :)
I do resolve to keep up this sort of nonsense:
- Personally, I'd rather eat a soggy pizza box than gingerbread (most times), but I love the shiny things you can make with it.
- Gingerbread can occasionally regenerate, so I'll wait for it to turn into sugar cookies. :)
- John Barrowman says Torchwood could run another seven years. How about just getting us the next freakin' season, Captain Harkness?!
- I have to admit I've been lukewarm on the idea of a Wonder Woman movie, but if they cast the right person and get the right costume, I'm in.
- "The Asylyum," the film company that briefly left making making films that were coincidentally similar to big-release movies has returned to the realm of coincidence with "The Almighty Thor." I'm sure Kenneth Brannagh is deeply concerned about the effect it'll have on his film's performance.
- It's a bit late, but here's Santa Can Fly, an upgradable launching game where your goal is to propel Santa as far as possible (you'll have to tolerate the frequent display of a typo'ed spelling of "enough," but be charitable, it's the holidays).
- DARPA is working on giving soldiers 360 degree vision, among other things.
- And a robotic development makes me think that those plunger-hands on Daleks might not be so off the mark after all.
- Click this next link and kiss several hours good-bye. TVTropes has a nifty section called useful notes that tries to debunk and inform about media and narrative. It's also just fun to read through.
- A bit of a gore (though cartoony) warning on this game of survival: Paranormal Shark Activity. See how long you can leap from float to float and stay out of the approaching tooth-filled maw. Kind of appropriate, given the Doctor Who Christmas Special, though you don't have a sonic screwdriver to help you out.