Thankful, not the one by KC
Before we left town for multiple Thanksgivings, I got most of the Thanksgiving movies squared away. Marisa and I saw Love and Other Drugs so I could review it for PopMatters, and PopMatters also hooked me up with the chance to see Faster and review that, too. Love and Other Drugs may qualify as above-average for its genre, though it doesn't really work for me, while Faster has actually garnered similar reviews, including the better-than-the-genre-average notices that made me wonder if these people saw the same well-shot but extremely crummy movie that I did. And I like The Rock and was totally up for his return to action movies. The Rundown, yes. Walking Tall, even kind of yes. Faster, no no no. Billy Bob Thornton is pretty good in it, though.
Burlesque was put on hold until we could see it with Katie, which left only Tangled to see with Marisa on Wednesday afternoon in glorious 2-D (the Regal in Times Square is showing it this way, and while cartoons generally take to 3-D better than just about anything else, I appreciated seeing the lush colors of this movie pop without the 3-D glasses haze). Between this and The Princess and the Frog, Disney has made two of their very best in-house cartoons of recent years; they seem to be stepping out of the doldrums that plagued the uneven likes of Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt, movies that swung anywhere from decent to low-key Disney-ish misfires to blatant DreamWorks copycatting. You can feel the studio getting more comfortable in its own style again, after years of Pixar comparisons: Princess had that lovely old-fashioned hand-drawn style but a little bit of that post-nineties franticness, while Tangled was produced on computers but never feels crowded with characters or antics. It's a retelling of Rapunzel, with the requisite more-independent princess (with Mandy Moore's voice! Swoon!) and wisecracking guy hero (with Zachary Levi's voice) and goofy animal sidekicks, but every element is executed with more skill than you might expect. Nothing gets pushed too hard with that familiar cartoon desperation to please; the writers and animators seem to be confident about how charming their movie is. And it's quite charming: Moore and Levi both give excellent vocal performances; the animal sidekicks are beautifully animated and get laughs from that animation, not celebrity voices; the story doesn't scale anything too big or broad, and even conjures some subtelty for the relationship between Rapunzel and her villainous captor. It's a notch or two below the very best Disney movies like Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast: the songs aren't as good as you might hope, although Moore's voice makes them go down easier, and maybe I'll like them more if I re-listen a few times. But it's really a pretty delightful movie.
On Thursday, we went to Chester for actual Thanksgiving with Marisa's family, and then drove on to Saratoga on Friday. We brought Nathaniel with us so he could experience a nice frigid semi-upstate-and-actual-upstate Thanksgiving far removed from the warm Arizona holidays of his youth. On Friday we had to drive directly to the state park for the annual Black Friday frisbee game, which I'm always convinced won't come off, and always does. This year we had Tim & Nicole, Rob, Jason, and Ofie, among others, and even got to play five-on-five for awhile, which is a lot better than three-on-three. Playing frisbee for 80 minutes or so also briefly created the false impression that it was warm outside, which it was not. Everybody won! Then we went to my mom's for soup and babies (I know that only one of Jeff and Amy's two kids is technically a baby, but I'm instituting Marisa's general rule that cousins/nieces/nephews/friends' kids are collectively referred to as "babies" until they are about eleven, and then "kids" until they are about 25).
The lack of frisbee during the subsequent cold days kept us from doing much in the way of walking or spending time outdoors. In fact, the four-day period of Thursday through today contained less walking than any similar period of time throughout 2010, and that's including the three weeks I spent in the movement-restriction boot. This meant that Nathaniel missed out on several Saratoga/Thanksgiving activities, most notably: going to bars downtown on Friday night and seeing pretty much everyone from our high school (anyway, this seems more fun when Chris and/or Derrick are coming along, and they weren't in town for Thanksgiving this year). Instead, we had more selective reunionizing based around Rob and Sabrina's house, which is conveniently located the bowling alley. Nathaniel did get to see the bowling alley, the best Price Chopper, and the toy store where my mom works, and we even did a drive-by of the far-nicer-than-when-I-went-there Saratoga High School, so he got a decent Saratoga tour even if he missed Uncommon Grounds, Congress Park, and D.A.'s, and only saw Stewart's from the car.
We also had two additional Thanksgiving dinners, with my mom and sister and sister's boyfriend and brother and then with my dad and his lady friend. Nathaniel made pumpkin bread and Marisa made banana-nutella bread and I had three or four kinds of pie and it might take until Christmas for my body to feel normal again.
It was fun, though! Take a look!
More pictures at the click and welcome to Christmas season, let's do this!
Burlesque was put on hold until we could see it with Katie, which left only Tangled to see with Marisa on Wednesday afternoon in glorious 2-D (the Regal in Times Square is showing it this way, and while cartoons generally take to 3-D better than just about anything else, I appreciated seeing the lush colors of this movie pop without the 3-D glasses haze). Between this and The Princess and the Frog, Disney has made two of their very best in-house cartoons of recent years; they seem to be stepping out of the doldrums that plagued the uneven likes of Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt, movies that swung anywhere from decent to low-key Disney-ish misfires to blatant DreamWorks copycatting. You can feel the studio getting more comfortable in its own style again, after years of Pixar comparisons: Princess had that lovely old-fashioned hand-drawn style but a little bit of that post-nineties franticness, while Tangled was produced on computers but never feels crowded with characters or antics. It's a retelling of Rapunzel, with the requisite more-independent princess (with Mandy Moore's voice! Swoon!) and wisecracking guy hero (with Zachary Levi's voice) and goofy animal sidekicks, but every element is executed with more skill than you might expect. Nothing gets pushed too hard with that familiar cartoon desperation to please; the writers and animators seem to be confident about how charming their movie is. And it's quite charming: Moore and Levi both give excellent vocal performances; the animal sidekicks are beautifully animated and get laughs from that animation, not celebrity voices; the story doesn't scale anything too big or broad, and even conjures some subtelty for the relationship between Rapunzel and her villainous captor. It's a notch or two below the very best Disney movies like Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast: the songs aren't as good as you might hope, although Moore's voice makes them go down easier, and maybe I'll like them more if I re-listen a few times. But it's really a pretty delightful movie.
On Thursday, we went to Chester for actual Thanksgiving with Marisa's family, and then drove on to Saratoga on Friday. We brought Nathaniel with us so he could experience a nice frigid semi-upstate-and-actual-upstate Thanksgiving far removed from the warm Arizona holidays of his youth. On Friday we had to drive directly to the state park for the annual Black Friday frisbee game, which I'm always convinced won't come off, and always does. This year we had Tim & Nicole, Rob, Jason, and Ofie, among others, and even got to play five-on-five for awhile, which is a lot better than three-on-three. Playing frisbee for 80 minutes or so also briefly created the false impression that it was warm outside, which it was not. Everybody won! Then we went to my mom's for soup and babies (I know that only one of Jeff and Amy's two kids is technically a baby, but I'm instituting Marisa's general rule that cousins/nieces/nephews/friends' kids are collectively referred to as "babies" until they are about eleven, and then "kids" until they are about 25).
The lack of frisbee during the subsequent cold days kept us from doing much in the way of walking or spending time outdoors. In fact, the four-day period of Thursday through today contained less walking than any similar period of time throughout 2010, and that's including the three weeks I spent in the movement-restriction boot. This meant that Nathaniel missed out on several Saratoga/Thanksgiving activities, most notably: going to bars downtown on Friday night and seeing pretty much everyone from our high school (anyway, this seems more fun when Chris and/or Derrick are coming along, and they weren't in town for Thanksgiving this year). Instead, we had more selective reunionizing based around Rob and Sabrina's house, which is conveniently located the bowling alley. Nathaniel did get to see the bowling alley, the best Price Chopper, and the toy store where my mom works, and we even did a drive-by of the far-nicer-than-when-I-went-there Saratoga High School, so he got a decent Saratoga tour even if he missed Uncommon Grounds, Congress Park, and D.A.'s, and only saw Stewart's from the car.
We also had two additional Thanksgiving dinners, with my mom and sister and sister's boyfriend and brother and then with my dad and his lady friend. Nathaniel made pumpkin bread and Marisa made banana-nutella bread and I had three or four kinds of pie and it might take until Christmas for my body to feel normal again.
It was fun, though! Take a look!
More pictures at the click and welcome to Christmas season, let's do this!