Images and Well Wishes for the Christmas Holiday

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—For all you last-minute shoppers out there on this Christmas Eve, I hope, in your quest to track down the perfect gifts for your friends and family, you don't all look too much like this:

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

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By the way: This week somehow turned into "catching up with, or planning on catching up with, old friends" week...and all that catching up and planning—all while working at The Wall Street Journal and plugging in last-minute viewing holes on the 2010 new-film-releases front—took away more time for blogging than I had expected at the beginning of the week. I apologize for that, faithful readers; I guess it's just that time of year.

I hope next week will be more fruitful in that regard. It ought to be, anyway; that's when I plan to finally get around to summing up my year, both in film and elsewhere. It's been quite an interesting year, cinematically and personally.

Until then...merry Christmas to you all! I hope the holiday brings you all lots of warmth and good cheer.

Hey, if even those brooding spoilsports Mulder and Scully can get into the Christmas spirit, you can too!

From "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas," a holiday-themed Season 6 episode of The X-Files

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Oh...and as you can tell by this post's dateline, I'm not back home in East Brunswick, N.J., just yet. I'll be heading back home tomorrow, on Christmas Day, and sticking around 'til Sunday night. In the meantime, though...tonight I'm celebrating Christmas Eve by watching this:

No, I'm not watching the classic original Die Hard (1988) on DVD or Blu-ray; I'm seeing it at New York's Landmark Sunshine Theatre at midnight tonight on the big screen!

I've seen this film countless times on video—in a way, it was another one of those formative movies of my budding cinephilia—but never in a theater. And, as I've learned this year time and time again, films you thought you already knew and loved on video can play differently projected on a big screen. Will this happen once again with Die Hard? Maybe. Maybe not. It should still be a ton of fun anyway.

Maybe next year, Die Hard 2 on a big screen? One can only hope. Or, at least, I hope so...