Tag: Christmas

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For various reasons, braved the crowds at South Coast Plaza yesterday. Oddly, it’s the easiest mall I’ve parked at all weekend. Getting to the Marketplace was a disaster, but that’s just because the streets are wholly inadequate to get cars in and out of the parking lot, and the Village (formerly the Mall of Orange) was just plain full.

At South Coast, as part of their Christmas decorations, they had these giant, shiny, 14-pointed stars hanging from the ceiling in several places.

Stars of Doom!

Classic Christmas, but when you go down to the first floor and look up, there are all these giant, gleaming spikes hanging over your head.

Death (star) from above!

It’s a little disconcerting. “Death from above!” is not something I want my holiday decorations to invoke.

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As of two weeks ago, DC was still talking about its upcoming Infinite Christmas special. Yesterday, the book came out, complete with a logo based on the Infinite Crisis logo.

Only it had been renamed the Infinite Holiday special, ruining the joke.

No word on why they changed it, but someone on the Newsarama forums suggested “Christmas on Infinite Earths” would have been even funnier.

Note to those who are likely to cite this as more evidence for the non-existent “War on Christmas:” Most of the stories in the book are Christmas stories. Many of them with the word in the title. And in a country where atheists are the most distrusted minority, the idea that Christians are being persecuted is laughable. (Why do I think this footnote is going to get more comments than the actual post?)

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This weekend we went out to see The Prestige, which was quite good. The next theater over was running The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D, and we figured, what the heck? After the first movie, we got tickets for another.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorite movies, but for some reason the 3D release didn’t really interest me when I first heard about it. It felt too gimmicky, like when they project a regular movie on an IMAX screen even though the movie itself isn’t really made for that format.

I got a little more interested when I read an article about how they did it. ILM essentially re-did the entire movie as a computer-animated film, matching each frame exactly, then shifted the virtual camera over a bit. One eye gets the original film, and the other eye gets the CGI copy.

I was astonished at how seamlessly they matched. I couldn’t remember which eye got the original, and I honestly couldn’t tell. Most CGI-animated films have a cartoony, sort of vinyl look to them, which would not blend at all, but ILM is used to matching their CGI to photographed actors and sets, which I suppose makes them the ideal animation studio for this sort of thing. It had to be the most effective reformatting of a film that I’ve ever seen—compare it to colorizing movies, or the Star Wars special editions (which were done by the same effects house, but with older technology)—because it didn’t detract (or distract) from what was there in the first place.

Of course, it wasn’t long before I stopped looking at the technical merits and just settled into watching the movie.

Having re-watched it, I’m now very interested to see what director Henry Selick does with the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book, Coraline

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The Macy’s in the Laguna Hills Mall has a small storefront for seasonal products. In the lead-up to Christmas it’s full of decorations, ornaments, wrapping paper, and such. During the summer, it was swimwear. (I’m not sure what they use it for in winter.)

I walked by today, and they seem to be in transition:

Macy's Swim... with Christmas Trees!

The mismatch was so odd that it didn’t even hit me until several minutes later that this was the earliest example of holiday creep I’ve ever seen.

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While Christmas shopping, I kept seeing things that made me wish I had brought my camera. The ridiculously giant Christmas tree at Fashion Island was not one of them; all I needed was a picture demonstrating its height.

Giant Xmas Tree

A toy store yielded a number of amusements (appropriately enough), in the form of a series of unconventional action figures—Jane Austen, Leonardo DaVinci, Mozart, Charles Dickens… and of course talking Jesus and Moses figures. And then there’s the Avenging Unicorn!

Historical Action Figures

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