*The "Goddamnit, It's After 7 pm, So Why Am I Not Drunk or Asleep Yet" Edition!!!

First of all, I would just like to say thanks to everyone who came and bounced upon my knee last night at the Northwest Film Forum Holiday Party, where I played the role of Drunk Lady Santa. You were all very enthusiastic, and only a handful of you were gropey. My lap is thoroughly bruised and chafed now. Happy holidays!

Opening this week:

We've got a couple of great web-only reviews that I want to draw your attention to. First, Charles Mudede unravels the mystery of Beyoncé in Cadillac Records:

Forget Beyoncé. She can only sing. Even when she is acting, she is singing. In Cadillac Records, she appears late in the film as Etta James. But nothing like Etta James comes out of her performance. All we see is Beyoncé singing something about having a mean white father, a mother who was a prostitute, and a heart that's been broken by so many men. When Adrien Brody, who plays Leonard Chess, the founder of Chess Records, the label that helped launch the rock-and-roll moment in pop music—when Brody holds Beyoncé in his arms, he is not holding a person but a piece of music. The thing that does not know how to stop singing—this is Beyoncé. A being that talks like a tune, walks like tune, looks like tune—this is Beyoncé. Pop is her blood.

And Paul Constant does not hold back his many, many feelings about Punisher: War Zone:

Besides Ray Stevenson's herculean efforts to bring credulity to a character who's thinner than the pulpy paper he's printed on, all the other actors—especially Doug Hutchison as a maniac who does eeee-vil things like shoot a little girl's dolls for the fun of it (because he's eeee-vil!)—fall prey to the awful script. At times, the dialogue is so bad it's funny ("Don't die on me!" the Punisher barks at a guy with an axe in his chest, and when the guy coughs up some blood to protest, Punisher snaps at him, "Shut up, kid, you're gonna be fine!"), but more often it's just pathetic (Hutchison tries to make "Yummy yummy yummy in my tummy tummy tummy" sound menacing. He fails.)

Then, in the print edition, there's Charles on Nobel Son ("Science has turned into a madman, cultural studies has become a cannibal, and poetry finds its end in a madwoman who paints in a dark room with other mad people"); Eli Sanders, quite briefly, on Stranded: I've Come from a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains ("It's hard to believe they survived, but it's even harder to believe how powerfully articulate they are about their ordeal and how much they have to teach us about what it means to be alive—and human"); and Brendan Kiley on Great Speeches from a Dying World ("It strips away the crust of history and sterility from the words, making them unsettling—and dangerous—all over again").

David Schmader did a nice Q&A with one of the creators of the Found Footage Festival, which is over now, but still worth a read:

There's this video that's made the rounds among touring bands, a fan video sent to guitarist Steve Vai, that's become kind of legendary. It's this woman who says that to impress Steve, who makes all sorts of funny sounds with his guitar, she's going to make all sorts of funny sounds with her vagina. And she's sort of staring into the camera vacantly while she does this, and she's clearly got a few screws loose, and it's just more weird and creepy and disturbing than funny. To us, it has to be funny. The whole point of our show is comedy.

And in Concessions, I ate fondue and fell in love with an extremely fancy recliner:

I know your secrets, rich people, because I was one of you yesterday for a few short, sweet hours in the cool, slate-tiled confines of Gold Class Cinemas at Redmond Town Center. GCC (I call it GCC because we are that kind of casual bros now) is a luxury movie theater for luxury people who want to enjoy Hollywood movies without the mess of dung-encrusted riff-raff—their clouds of flies and squiggly stink lines obscuring the screen; their pet chickens and barnyard mannerisms; their banjos and shotgun weddings; their overalls and lassos; their empty, sad, and doubtless chicken-fried wallets. GCC costs $35 a ticket. Suck it, poors!

In Limited Runs, um, I have a headache (the aftereffects of too much nog). So instead of me typing them out, you can look them up in our complete listings here. I am sorry. It is time for this Lady Santa to recline.

HO HO HO!