On the 5th day of Christmas … I watched the indie movie Happy Christmas

  The confounding of expectations, at a time of the year when they are at their zenith, is at the heart of Joe Swanberg’s Sundance-screened Happy Christmas, the follow-up to last year’s well-received Drinking Buddies, his most accessible and successful film to date. The film’s title is an ironic one, of course, given Continue Reading

On the 3rd day of Christmas 2014 … I read “A Very Klingon Christmas” by Paul Ruditis / Patrick Faricy

  It’s not often that you pick up a Christmas book and find every last one of your assumptions about this most sacred of Christian holidays gleefully shattered into a million small and pointy, could-be-weaponised pieces. But that’s what happened when I picked up a copy of A Very Klingon Continue Reading

On the 2nd day of Christmas … I watched “Its Beginning to Stink a Lot Like Christmas” (The New Adventures of Old Christine)

  Poor Christine “Old Christine” Campbell. Try as she might, and frankly she really doesn’t try all that hard – particularly not if there’s wine or sex with the Christmas tree guy to be had instead – she can’t actually manage to actually lead the sort of life she thinks Continue Reading

On the 1st day of Christmas 2014 … I aurally orbited Pomplamoose’s Christmas in Space EP

  Regardless of the time of year, Pomplamoose (real life couple Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn) are a lot of fun. Their music, which is released to fans via an innovative patronage system called Patreon, merrily skips from genre to genre, drawing in jazz, ’80s synth pop, big band sounds to Continue Reading