📺🍿🎄 Watched The Naughty Nine.

This is a heist movie about kids on the naughty list breaking into Santa’s workshop. It honors all the heist tropes and is super fun. Watch with a kid if you can.

📺🍿🎄 Watched Reporting for Christmas.

I really like this one. A hard-hitting Chicago reporter heads to a small town in Iowa to cover the 40th anniversary of the local toy company’s most popular product. Life changes ensue.

Super cute, winning cast.

📺🍿🎄 Watched A Biltmore Christmas.

Mostly for Jonathan Frakes & Robert Picardo 🖖🏻 but I ended up really liking it. There’s a lot of 40s Hollywood glamor. Also, I love Biltmore. I’ve been there only twice but I still love it.

📺🍿🎄 In the movie A Timeless Christmas, I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that a man time-traveled from 1903 to 2020, but asking me to accept that his love interest is a shoe-in for a history faculty job simply by virtue of having a PhD is a bridge too far.

🍿📺🎄 Watched A Christmas Frequency. A radio producer sets her show’s host up on on-air blind dates to save the show from the slump it’s in because the host is no fun after separating from her husband. It’s not a solid movie but I liked it because the cast is adorable.

📺🍿🎄 By the way, time travel is a whole subgenre of holiday made-for-TV movie. See:

📺🍿🎄 I was watching Hulu’s A Christmas Frequency and everything was going great but then it shattered my suspension of disbelief by having one guy give another guy an expense report, printed on paper.

🍿 Saw Wish. A story full of good ideas. Music nice but not as memorable as, say, Encanto. Chris Pine is, of course, a delight. Full of beautifully casual representation.

I often find myself watching movies in 22-minute chunks, partly because of being a parent and partly because of having a short attention span lately. I do TV shows with act breaks, so 3 or 4 breaks as I watch where commercials would be. It’s been liberating to realize I can do this. 📺🍿

🍿 Watched Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie.

A reimagining of the TV show. I loved how well it used the Palais Garnier. Sweet story and you get all the emotional payoff fans of the show had to wait 5 seasons for in only 105 minutes.

🔖🍿 Read Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a Fascinating, Spectacular Philosophical Experiment by Olivia Rutigliano (Literary Hub).

Well, I was already interested in seeing Barbie, but now that I know it’s about existential crises, I really want to see Barbie.

🍿 Watched Howard.

It’s always striking when you realize the outsize influence an artist has had on you, and watching this it really hit home what an influence Howard Ashman has been on me. I think tomorrow is its lady day on Disney+. I hope they’ll release it for purchase after that. I’d buy it.

Response to Charlie Jane Anders's "What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures"

🔖📝📚📺🍿 Read What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures by Charlie Jane Anders (Happy Dancing newsletter).

Anders talks about the way a universal translator gives us shortcuts to understanding other cultures that don’t really show how hard it is to actually understand another culture.

She offers a lot of examples of this and asks,

How is it that Han Solo understands Chewbacca, but doesn’t speak Wookiee himself? And vice versa?

It’s been a long time since I was getting my Master of Arts in teaching and had to take a course on how Language Acquisition happens (almost 20 years), but I recall that we tend to understand much more of a language than we can speak, and I’ve certainly found that to be true recently.

For W’s Fulbright, we spent two months in the Netherlands, and had learned some very basic Dutch using Duolingo before heading over there. I often didn’t understand what people were saying, but I always understood more of what they were saying than I could ever speak myself.

Our first week there, some young people overheard my son saying his favorite Dutch word, “kat,” on the bus. They asked us about our being Americans and then one of them wanted to know if we were full of “kattenkwaad.” We didn’t know this word, and the person who asked didn’t know English well enough to explain it, but his friend tried.

I asked if it meant behaving like a cat, and he indicated not exactly. He tried to explain by example: pushing the stop button on the bus, then not getting off when the bus stopped.

“Oh, like, pranks!” I said.

“Yes, like pranks.”

“Mischievous,” my sister suggested. He wasn’t sure about that one.

Weeks later, I found this book in the shop a short walk from our house:

Dutch book: Eerste Hulp Bij Kattenkwaad - First Aid for Mischief

Google translates this title as “First Aid for Mischief: The Survival Guide for Cat Parents.”

I don’t think it captures the sense entirely, based on our bus conversation, but it’s hard to be sure.

🍿 Want to watch: Tully.

🍿 Watched Bert Williams - The Poker Game.

Stunningly good object work.

🍿Watched Mantan Moreland & Ben Carter - Indefinite Talk.

This bit is so fun. Ought to be mentioned in the same breath as Who’s On First?

🍿 Watched Glass Onion. Had fun. Still adore Benoit Blanc.

🍿 Watched Santa Games (Hulu).

Super cute. A sweet story about family & the power of second chances mixed with a funny take on social media, livestreaming, and reality competitions. A mostly Black cast which is rare in TV holiday movies.

🍿 Watched Falling for Christmas.

I’ve been an unironic Lindsay Lohan fan since I saw Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, so I was delighted to see her in this adorable trope-filled bit of holiday fluff. Cute & funny.

🔖🍿 Read The Mom in ‘Home Alone’ Is a Messy and Magnificent Model of Motherhood.

It’s easy to forget how hard Kate McAllister works to make sure her kid is okay. I probably need to watch Home Alone again. It’s been decades.

The lyrics from Disney's Disenchanted that make me sob. 🎵

Spoilers for lyrics from Disenchanted follow. Without context they only mean a little but if you’re avoiding spoilers, just move along…

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Are you ready to be spoiled?

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It’s how I’d make a world for you
That never breaks your heart
Where you can grow and thrive
And your every wish can flower
I will always love you, Morgan
I’m so proud of how I know you’ll carry on
I’ve known a lot of magic in my life
But never anything as strong
Love power
My love for you has power
And you’ll have it there inside you
When I’m gone

These lyrics make me sob as a mother AND as a daughter because of course this is what I want for my kid but the “When I’m gone” part hits extra hard when your mom has leukemia and chemo/TKI complications you know?

This is a big cry I’ve been saving up since January as I kept it together for everybody else.

Okay, time for me to go strike now.

🍿 I’m about 30 minutes into Disney’s Disenchanted and while it definitely doesn’t have the magic of Enchanted, Amy Adams is still a gd delight and I think if you’ve ever had postpartum depression or anxiety you’ll totally get Giselle’s feelings.

🍿 Watched Eve’s Christmas.

This & Back to Christmas have similar premises.

If I woke up to discover I’d had a successful second chance at romance but missed the time between when I traveled back to make the change & the present, I’d be sad.

🍿 Watched Back to Christmas. Jennifer Elise Cox steals the show. I was hoping Michael Muhney (Sheriff Lamb on Veronica Mars) would get to play someone nice but no luck. If you like these kind of movies, this one is inoffensive.

🍿 Watched Snowbound for Christmas (on Amazon Prime). Based on the book Snowbound with the CEO. A lot of changes from the book. Cute enough, though.