well, it’s about that time. finishing up the last few little tasks at work this week so i can hop on a plane tomorrow morning for a nice long relaxing visit to the homeland. really looking forward to seeing all the friends and family i only get to see a couple times a year, and giving and receiving some sweet presents. oh, and lots of beer drinking. and homemade cookies. and and and… yeah, it’s just gonna be great.

meanwhile i’m liking the rush of holiday covers that always pops up around this time of year. as someone who graciously suffers through ‘a very country christmas’ and other such fare around the holidays, i brighten up whenever i hear jimmy eat world or rilo kiley or whoever doing their much more hipster-friendly versions of holiday tunes. i even, i’ll admit it, enjoyed hearing this dusty old blink 182 track on kroq the other day. i almost fear to go on record as saying this, but as a person who went through high school right during their heyday, a lot of their tracks have aged pretty well. i mean, this one’s cheesy and juvenile, but hey, so is christmas, and i love that too.

anyway, thought it would make a fun pay day song since i couldn’t find it anywhere else on the net and had to pull out an old, old mix cd just to hear it. enjoy and happy holidays if i don’t make it back to a computer through my sugar-and-alcohol-fueled haze before the big day.

if you’re bored — as i sometimes get, despite how cool and constantly fun-filled my life must seem if you read this regularly — you should take some time to check out this this funny column written by a friend of ours. no, you know what, even if you are never bored, you should make time to check it out. i know it’s on suicide girls, so some of you with more big-brother-ish site blockage at work may not be able to, but rest assured that if you do, there’s nothing naughty to get you in trouble on his page. well worth it.

oh, and also we did a rare thing and went out to a weeknight movie this week…

juno – 4 stars

this is one of those movies that looks so cool — not necessarily great or profound, just really cool — you want it to be pure goodness. sadly, it’s not quite that, but at the end of the day, it’s fully worth seeing. if you were interested in seeing, you definitely should, even if most of what follows is a litany of things that could have been slightly better and pushed it from really good to really great.

the good parts are that it’s clever, the main character is adorable and funny, all the supporting characters are really good, and you want everything to work out for everyone in the movie.

the major flaw, i thought, was the choice of focus. maybe it’s just me, but when you have michael cera in a movie, you damn well better use him. he’s too good to be wasted. but instead of giving a fair share of screen time to his relationship with juno, as the source of the pregnancy and her maybe/sorta boyfriend, i think they made a mis-step by instead putting so much focus on the adoptive father played by jason bateman. not that he’s any slouch either, and i did like that dynamic, but it seemed almost like the movie got distracted from itself by leaving the teen romance card mostly off the table. heck, you could just extend the movie, which wasn’t that long, by 15 minutes and build up that relationship a little more without losing any of the existing scenes. you’d get a much stronger, fuller story.

and of course, i’m nitpicking now, but the same goes for the father, played by the guy who fucking ruled as both j jonah jameson in spider man and the tobacco executive in thank you for smoking. he’s a scene-stealer, a home run hitter, why not put him in the game more?

and i agree with the LA times review i read as well, that occasionally the writing is just so whip-smart, it almost sounds like the actors are having a hard time spitting it out. no human can be that pithy that often, you know? normally i’m a sucker for that kind of super-humanly clever dialogue (i really like kevin smith movies AND watched studio 60 through to the finish), but there were a few times it felt awkward instead of witty.

in the end though, i really did enjoy it. ellen page will be one to watch. not a single person in the movie did a bad job. and even through the obvious flaws, it was still a success. jason reitman’s looking like a director to keep an eye on, and i certainly plan to.

so, after getting together with gino and brendan friday night to try out that rock band game all the kids are talking about, i realized that guitar hero was but the tasty morsel of an appetizer to the grand multi-course feast of possibility. we played for several hours, rotating instruments and generally kicking ass.

the weak-willed person that i am, the next morning’s christmas shopping excursion to best buy rapidly became an excuse to indulge my desire to have this marvel for myself, and bring its sweet joys into my own home. many hours were lost over the course of the next few days to its pleasures.

the funniest part was when stacy dropped by to play and we decided to tackle the ‘tour mode’, where you start a band and play various venues and cities to gain more and more fans. her suggestion of ‘no douchebags allowed’ as a band name (shortened to the first two words for brevity’s sake), was met with this hilarious message:

and so the world will never know the antics of the rock superpower that is no douchebags. alas.

oh, and we also went to one of the best parties of the year at amanda’s on saturday night: the kind where everyone brings a bottle of wine apiece, we gorge ourselves on her decadent cheese plates, and i wake up feeling, as i told jessica, ‘like my brain is full of pudding’.

overall, a lovely weekend.

i found this fun blog about being allergic to cats. man, i hate cats. i can totally relate to this.

i also found this fun video for the new hot chip single, which gets me really excited on several levels. one, i like the song (even though it rocked more live). two, that means the album is on its way soon. and three, he’s dressed as the joker which is hilarious when combined with the line ‘you’re my number one guy’, which you may or may not recognize as related.

most important thing first…

COACHELLA POOL 2008 BEGINS NOW.

music-loving readers, please direct yourselves to the season’s best opportunity to prove your taste-maker status, talk mad shit on other hip concert-goers , and win their money to pay for your rock and roll lifestyle.

in other news, college football is almost over, which is a let down — fuck UCLA! to honor its passing, i think some serious beer pong and nacho cheese are in order, which we plan to make happen in a serious way.

at work this week we also found out a bit of disappointing news that will essentially be a breaking point between my career up to now, and my career moving forward. not necessarily in a terrible way, but certainly in a substantial one. more on that as it develops. the important thing is that no, i am not looking for a new job, which would be a pain in the ass.

oh and lest we not forget the pay day song, i have to tell you it’s rare that a song is so stuck in my head that i have a hard time getting to sleep. but the cheesily catchy chorus to muscles current internet hit, sweaty has taken hold of me this week in a serious way. that amount of unabashed dopey fun cannot be ignored, and i encourage you to give it a few tries before dismissing it as stupid to work its way into the very pleasure center of your dance-party cortex.

Awwww… Our first christmas tree together in the new apartment. So precious! (please ignore the nerdy collectibles in the background)

oh, what a holiday weekend. i do love the long breaks where we don’t have to travel or do too much and just get to hang around lazily a bulk of the time. it’s a glorious feeling.

not that we didn’t get out plenty. for the half day on wednesday stacy and i were sitting on the patio at el toro with a taco and a beer by 2 o’clock, then playing beer pong at a bar on melrose called el guapo in the evening with jessica. thursday we had the yummy thanksgiving dinner at jessica’s house, then closed out with drinks and christmas carols on the stereo over at gino’s. then saturday i managed to squeeze in a football game & pizza with the guys before heading out for korean bbq and karaoke (again, already) later that night, during which jessica had so many drinks she started stumbling around and babbling a little bit, which was adorable.

yeah, friday and sunday we did almost nothing, except start the christmas shopping — all online though. you couldn’t pay me to fight those crazy people that go to all the stores at 4am just to save 50 bucks on a laptop or whatever other crazy deal they think they might get.

other than that, i spent an unfortunate amount of time trying to finish some really punishing sequences in the skateboarding videogame that owns my soul, skate. i literally tried for nearly three hours to do a certain 30-second run of tricks that just NEVER…CAME…TOGETHER. oh, it was brutal. i still haven’t done it. but i did skip past it to some other things and after a long break for dinner and dexter with the ‘family’ (jess, gino, and sarah), i went back in for a different one and at least this time after trying for two hours i finally succeeded. whew.

anyway, back to work — but for only three weeks until the next break. excellent.

well, let’s just go with beirut again for the pay day song. their latest album is the only newish thing i’ve been listening to at all lately, and i have to say i’ve found myself softly moaning/wailing the refrain from a sunday smile to myself fairly often. it’s strange because at first i found that section of the song almost annoying, but then it ended up being the one that stuck hardest into my mind.

and speaking of sunday smiles, here is what i did this weekend:

no country for old men – 5 stars

this is a tough one, because it’s easy to see why most reviews of this movie could easily be, ‘a great first two thirds of a movie that ends in a disappointing non-ending’. and my first gut reaction at the pivotal moment was very much just that.

but i’m an open-minded guy, willing to see the reasoning for what might be controversial choices in telling what up to a point seemed like a fairly straightforward suspense story. plus, i love and respect the coen brothers, so my first instinct is to see the good in what they’re doing instead of dismissing it.

getting the less contentious parts out of the way first, the majority of the film is an excellent thriller. the bad guy is one of the baddest you’ll ever see, and he fucking sells it like no other. even if you don’t love the movie, it’s worth seeing just for this guy’s pure, cold-hearted deadliness. plus the supporting characters all have the coens’ famously rich local dialect and vernacular, this time of working class texans. the scenes are shot beautifully whether they’re in the wide-open brush or seedy motel rooms. and tommy lee jones is rarely a let down when taken seriously. his part adds enormously to digesting the actions of the evil character he’s after.

then there’s this breaking point, which i won’t spoil, but which throws all your expectations of how a thriller is supposed to end out the window. not in the ‘twist ending’ kind of way like seven or sixth sense; more in a way that just sidesteps entirely what you think this type of movie owes you in its final act. and that’s where the great acting and character of TLJ comes to the forefront to really sell the path the story goes for its last bit.

in the end, the satisfaction you get isn’t the tying up of a narrative arc like you’re expecting over the course of the movie. the satisfaction is in the emotional reaction to what’s happened, what you wanted to see happen, and what didn’t happen at all. you may walk out, like i did, mulling over what you just saw and finding it a little difficult to process. i think that’s part of the point. but one thing you certainly can’t say is that it wasn’t a powerful, memorable film, for which i found myself loving it despite even my own inner protests.

i finally did it! all the tokyo pictures are up!

there is extensive caption text — maybe i went overboard, so what? — mostly because i didn’t want to forget anything we did and not be able to tell about it later. no one anywhere is under any obligation to read it all, but there are definitely some great photos to check out.

i’m kind of scratching my head right now for a pay day song, seeing as how that’s today, cause i haven’t been listening to anything new at all in weekks. i guess i should stop being so lazy.

speaking of which, captioning all those tokyo photos, to actually explain what they’re pictures of, takes some work, i’ll tell you that right now. i think i’m about three quarters done, so maybe tonight i’ll finish and post up the link.

last night we watched my newly received dvd of everything will be ok by don hertzfeldt, which i knew was awesome from seeing back at the last animation show, but which i was thoroughly reminded of upon reviewing. man, that guy can do a lot of cool stuff without a computer. it’s so funny and sad at the same time, i love it.

tomorrow is a business trip — hours of driving for a one-hour meeting, oh boy — but thankfully coming home to a nice game of poker with the buddies. saturday, who knows what, there’s no USC football game to watch. i might get desperate and read a book instead of being drunk by 5pm… weird.