News Bites: Minions and Mutants

Another week with a lot of news, especially on the television front once again. A lot of this just came in yesterday and this morning, so it can be considered “hot off the presses” if there were a printing press actually involved here. A lot of this week’s news is science-fiction related, and of course, there are the usual updates on comic book superheroes coming to the big screen — as well as a superhero of a different stripe coming to the small screen. I’ll be out most of the day, so it may take me a bit to respond to comments, but there’s a lot to discuss, so read on!

My Movie Alphabet

Mettel Ray has started an interesting blog-a-thon at her site: “My Movie Alphabet”. The concept is pretty simple and straightforward: for each letter of the alphabet, plus one for numbers and symbols, choose something movie-related that fits that letter and represents some corner of your movie viewing. It sounded like fun, so I’ve decided to take a crack at it. It proved challenging in places, and I know a lot of this is subject to constant flux, but here’s my list.

Elf

So, it’s December 4th, exactly three weeks until Christmas Day (well, Christmas night). I’ll admit I’m not quite ready to go into all-out Christmas mode yet. I’m easing into the Christmas music, letting it be randomly selected by Windows media player among my regular mix (in fact, it just queued up “Christmas Dreams” by Trans-Siberian Orchestra as I typed this), but I’m not totally switching over to it yet. I know some people don’t even wait until Thanksgiving to put up their lights, but I’m not going to festoon my blog with holly leaves just yet. But it is time to start filtering a few films with festive feelings into my reviews. So while the Christmas blog banner isn’t on the main page yet, it is here to be hung above the holiday reviews, and a category for Christmas Cinema has been added.

First up is a film I’d avoided for some time, 2003′s Will Ferrell vehicle, Elf. I had stayed away because the promos seemed like it would wear thin on me quickly, that it would be an extended Ferrell sketch. But my brother kept insisting he thought I would like it, and so eventually I relented. I did, however, idly wonder as I started the movie how long it would be until I hit the first bit of toilet humor.