Happy Thanksgiving!

Isn't It Too Early For Christmas?

That headline pretty much sums up everything I'm thinking right now. My workplace has been playing Christmas music over the PA system for the last week, and a local radio station has already started their annual tradition of playing Christmas music 24/7 until New Year's. Can't we wait until Black Friday before we start with all the Christmas stuff?

Hollywood's already started with the Christmas movies too. Case in point: A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas seeing its release this past Friday. I enjoyed the first Harold & Kumar movie and thought the second one was okay, so I figured what the heck, I'll go check it out. So I headed out to the theaters yesterday afternnon, and I liked it quite a bit. It's not as laugh-out-loud funny as I'd hoped it would have been, but it's still good for quite a few laughs nevertheless.

The only real problem is that with the exception of the Christmas jokes, a claymation sequence, a lack of a fourth wall, and an unfunny subplot involving a toddler hopped up on various drugs, it's pretty much more of the same. If you've seen the first two Harold & Kumar movies, you've pretty much seen the third one. And the 3D doesn't really add much to the movie outside of an extra $2.50 premium to the ticket. They do some amusing gags with it, but there's really no other reason for it to be in 3D. I will say that I enjoyed the jokes they made about 3D being kinda played out, though. At least the movie was self-aware about it.

The long and short of it, though, is that A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is just an okay movie. It's not a bad movie, but it's not as good as it could have been. So I'm going to give it three stars and advise you to check it out at a matinee so you don't spend a ton of money on it. I enjoyed the movie, sure, but I don't know if it was worth the $9.50 I spent on it.

And really, folks, can we cool it with the Christmas stuff until Thanksgiving? I love Christmas and I'm in no way ready to celebrate it yet. Is it too much to ask for some time dedicated to Thanksgiving?

Ten Years of Talk

Ten years.

That's how long I've been running the MSX. Through a number of name changes in the early days and a transition from a Tripod.com hosting service over to Blogger, the MSX has withstood a lot over the last decade. And as the blog has changed, I too have changed since that fateful day in a college dorm room in 2001. I'm still a total kook, but I like to think that I'm at least slightly more mature than I was back then. Just slightly, nothing tremendously game-changing.

And although I spend most of my blogging time working on my movie review blog, the MSX is still a special part of my online life. And I couldn't go without saying at least a little something about it on its tenth birthday. So happy birthday, MSX, and here's to ten more.