Average Runtime

We find ourselves at the merciless, yawning precipice of another Holiday Season. I realize this used to start with Thanksgiving, but as it stretches out, creeping northward on the calendar year by year, now it means Veterans Day, Halloween, Columbus Day and whenever they change the menu colors at the Starbucks.

Of course this is a period steeped in tradition and expressions of tradition through decoration and ritual. There are the obvious lights and wreaths and other types of wreaths and trees made out of the stuff we made the wreaths out of, plus the gifts and the cards and the inescapable social compulsion toward near-pornographic displays of communal gluttony. In between there are the sometimes joyful, sometimes excruciating obligations to meet and mingle with family of varying degrees, but that's where the food comes in. It's both the draw and the salve. Everything is more palatable with enough turkey gravy.

Me personally, I find the whole project existentially terrifying. I'm OK with birthdays, but the holidays bring the whole calendar year to a rushing, bustling, blurry close, like a fucking cannon shot between the end of summer and the New Year. That's when I feel the hour-hand of my mortality clock ticking over, progressing in its inexorable unidirectional circle toward the doom of permanent midnight.

Also that's when fun movies come out! Let's preview those instead! Everything's OK! Everything's OK!! Everything is going to be perfectly OK!!!!!

Thor: Ragnarok (Nov. 3): I'm not sure if this is an action movie or a comedy or... both? Which is perfect. Galaxy Quest is a great movie. Nothing else has really touched it in terms of daring to try to be both things. Director Taika Waititi is a genius and Chris Hemsworth, for all his other gifts like being a Platonic ideal of the male physical form, is a deeply gifted comedic performer. Asshole. This movie seems to have been made specifically for me.

Murder on the Orient Express (Nov. 10): Apparently there's a... murder on the... train of some kind? The cast is stacked AF. I don't know the story. I don't read Agatha Christie, OK? What am I, a hundred?

Justice League (Nov. 17): I thought Batman v. Superman was an idea of a movie made specifically for me, but that movie fucking sucked. So far the promotional materials have been impossible to avoid, so I'm compelled to form an opinion which is: we'll fucking see. If it weren't for the magic of Wonder Woman earlier this year, I'd have gone to see this with arms crossed the whole time, daring it to impress me. Now I know at least I'll be happy to see Gal Gadot punch shit.

The Current War (Nov. 24): Oscar bait wherein Edison fights Westinghouse fights Tesla. If nobody shoots anyone else with lightning coming out of their hands and/or eye sockets, fuck this movie.

The Shape of Water (Dec. 8): Guillermo del Toro film wherein a woman bones a fish-man. Not bones as in "removes the bones from," I mean as in "spawns as the salmon do." Also it's probably emotionally compelling and beautifully shot. But I was serious about the fish-man boning. You were warned.

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (Dec. 15): Will this movie be good or terrible? Come on, you know it doesn't matter. I will see it minimum five times in the theater, even if just to solidify my opinion that it sucks (should it do so). This is the only film that matters. Until the next one. And no, I don't mean you Solo: A Star Wars Story.

There are many options we have to stave off the intellectual contemplation of the certainty of death. You do your way. This will be mine.