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I know it sounds a little harsh, but after spending the past few days in chilly, snowy Ohio for the holidays, we’re glad to be back in Florida.

We spent Christmas Eve day doing some last minute shopping and preparations, which included cooking lasagna (in our hotel room) to take to dinner at my aunt’s place.

Christmas Day was relatively relaxing. After church and an early lunch a few of us went to see “The Princess and the Frog,” which my daughter enjoyed (it was a very different type of Disney princess movie … I particularly enjoyed the musical score and the trumpet-playing alligator). We cooked Christmas dinner at my brother’s and sister-in-law’s place and spent the rest of the day with the immediate family.

On the 26th, we had a family photo taken at a local Portrait Innovations studio. The place was pretty small, and apparently had a 40-person occupancy limit so they were asking people to wait outside (in the cold!) until they were called. Overall it was a poorly organized way to get a picture taken, but the end result was worth it. We spent that evening at another aunt’s house to visit with my mom’s side of the family.

Sunday? More visiting with family, of course! That’s also when the real winter weather started to move in. By the time we left my sister’s place that evening a good half-inch or so had fallen (and it was still coming down) so my daughter had her first experience with a snowbrush as she helped clean off some of the cars.

The drive back to the hotel was slow due to the deteriorating road conditions. Of course, we had to take advantage of the snow once we got back to the hotel: my daughter and I had a serious snowball fight, which was a lot of fun (mostly for her), and she got to make a decent snow angel.

Luckily, when we woke up early this morning to head to the airport, it was just freezing cold and no longer snowing. The crews had done their job overnight and the major roads were clear. Once we dropped off the rental car and got into the airport, though, the “fun” began. Thanks to the two Northwest Airlines incidents, security at the airport was crazy! You’d think the airport would have been prepared, but the line was a  mess: it switched back on itself several times so it was almost impossible to find the end. Plus it went past all the other lines to check-in so people were constantly cutting through with their baggage, causing general confusion. 40 minutes later we were finally through, without major incident (although once we got to our gate and settled down my wife realized she had accidentally left an opened bottle of apple juice in her carry-on that went through the x-ray machine and wasn’t caught. Oops!).

We had no return flight issues except for the slight delay for de-icing. Once back in Florida and the 60-degree sunny weather, we heard from my sister that it really started to get bad after we left, so we had made it out just in time. To celebrate being home, we had lunch on the deck outside at a Bahama Breeze near the airport. Ahhh. And yeah, we rubbed it in for the family up north by sending a photo. Love you guys!

What could be better on a Saturday afternoon than a family trip to the movie theater for the Toy Story double feature? Seeing these classic Pixar films on the big screen again (and in 3D!) was great. It was also a fun first-time experience for my daughter who wasn’t even born when the movies were originally released.

You get the same pair of polarized 3D glasses Disney used for “Up,” which got a little annoying after almost three hours, but the resulting visuals were great. Since the original films weren’t animated with 3D in mind, there are no in-your-face-make-you-jump-out-of-your-seat gimmicks, just enhancements to the original film which make it a joy to watch.

In between the two films there’s a 10 minute intermission during which they show some Toy Story trivia. A clock in the corner counts down the minutes so you know exactly how much time you have to go to the bathroom, grab some new refreshments, etc.

The one thing that surprised me was the lack of a new trailer for “Toy Story 3.” I had read that a new trailer would be shown in theaters only, but the place we went to only showed the teaser trailer we had already seen before “Up.”

If you get the chance in the next two weeks to see the double feature, do it! Both movies for the price of one? It’s a no-brainer.

Check out the new trailer for Tron Legacy (aka, Tron 2):

Oh yeah! Can’t wait to see that …

The 1-2 punch of “TRON” in 1982 and “WarGames” in 1983 is what jump-started my computer hobby that turned into an addiction and eventually a profession. I also pumped a ton of hard-earned quarters into that video game (if you want to re-live some multi-player light cycle action, check out Armagedtron).

Listening to TWiT episode #204 the other day I heard (at about 40:47 in) Dwight Silverman mention  he had written a blog post some time ago about about 15 geek movies to see before you die that keeps resurfacing on Digg. He did say that he took a lot of flack for not including “Blade Runner” (and others) on the list. As with any “top xx” list, there will always be people who can’t believe you didn’t include this thing or that thing. Check out the comments on his post for other good movies he “missed.”

Anyway, on Dwight’s list there are only three recommendations I haven’t seen: “Brazil,” (which surprisingly I hadn’t heard of even though I’m a big Terry Gilliam fan),  “Dark City,” and “Repo Man” (Emilio Estevez … really?). I’ve added these to my personal “watch” list so I’ll get to them at some point and decide for myself if they belong on that list with the other twelve.

A few months ago my daughter and I watched “Star Wars: A New Hope” together. We had been playing through Lego Star Wars on the Wii and had ridden Star Tours together over at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and she was really into the characters. Considering I was younger than her when “ANH” was released (I remember seeing it in the theater with my parents and falling asleep during the second showing), I figured she was ready for the full experience.

She loved it!

Of course, she latched onto the whole Princess Leia thing, since she loves princesses, but she really got into the other aspects of the movie as well. By the end, when the Death Star exploded, we were both cheering together … it was a really cool bonding sort of moment.

My ultimate “proud father” moment happened early last month when she was selected as a padawan in the Jedi Academy show over at Disney:

This weekend, since my wife is away, we started watching the other movies. So far we’ve gotten through “The Empire Strikes Back” (she was floored when Darth Vader proclaimed he was Luke’s father, as I remember being when I saw it in the theater), “Return of the Jedi” (ugh, she liked the Ewoks, I’ll have to work on that but she was happy Luke and Leia were twins), and started “The Phantom Menace.” She’s very interested (as we all were) in how little Anakin becomes the formidable Sith Lord from the later movies.

It’s a cool experience, watching these again with her …

Today on Father’s Day we went and saw the latest Disney Pixar movie, “Up.” It’s an amazing stat: every one of Pixar’s movies have been consecutive hits. “Up” is the 10th and it keeps the streak going.

From a technical standpoint, once again the animation quality is incredible. Clouds, fire, sweeping vistas, the physics in a group of balloons … you’ll forget you’re watching something generated on a computer. And the 3D? It was cool … it wasn’t full of “in your face, try to make you jump” 3D effects, just added depth to these amazingly beautiful scenes. The entire movie wasn’t in 3D either (as my daughter attested to because some scenes “weren’t blurry” when she took her glasses off … I confirmed this myself) but wearing the glasses the whole time wasn’t really distracting at all.

What about the story? Let’s just say that the first 10 minutes is pretty powerful, emotional storytelling (moreso even than the first half of “Wall-E“). You might find yourself tearing up a bit …

Some random thoughts:

• this is the first time I can recall seeing blood (twice, no less!) in a Pixar film
• John Ratzenberger keeps his streak alive
• squirrel!
• caught a few Star Wars references
• why does every young woman in a Pixar film (i.e., Ellie)  look like Elastigirl?
• I want a few of those dog collars for my own pups

Strange cloud-related side note: one of the previews shown was for “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” the Pixar short before the film was “Partly Cloudy” and then the film itself had a lot of clouds in it. Coincidences?

We wrapped up work a bit early today (Memorial Day) so I decided to walk over to Times Square and catch the new Star Trek movie. I’m a fan of the original series and I have to say I was skeptical of what this “90210″ version of Star Trek was going to be like.

Well, I really enjoyed it. You can’t have a good Trek movie without lots of space battles, explosions on the bridge, and some sort of time travel. Luckily, this movie has all of that and more. Some random thoughts (warning, possible spoilers ahead):

• nice opening sequence! off to a good start …
• Vulcan bullies? Bullying doesn’t seem logical.
• why don’t Romulans ever look consistent in any of the movies or shows?
• love the look of the Enterprise: classic and yet updated and modern
• the audience is cheering and applauding at every classic line
• umm, Spock and Uhura … WTF?
• Spock’s Sylar moment

And some final, longer, thoughts.

On the matter of red matter: anyone who was a fan of JJ Abram’s “Alias” television series must have about choked on their popcorn like I did when Nero’s red matter turned out to be nothing other than a Mueller device! At that point I just about expected Sydney Bristow to show up (dressed as a Romulan agent of course) and start kicking ass. Maybe the smoke monster from “Lost” should have had a cameo as well!

As for the reboot: I haven’t read a lot about this (and I don’t want to put in any blatant spoilers) but it seems clear to me that this is a reboot of the franchise and obviously the vehicle for more sequels to come. The methods they used to achieve this will probably anger or alienate some classic Trek fans, but I think it was a neat way to do it. It probably helps that I already went through this kind of anxiety with Ronald D. Moore’s re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica. I loved the original series as a kid and really hated the pilot movie for the new series when it aired in 2003. The Cylons look like humans? Special effects cop-out! Starbuck and Boomer are girls!? I don’t think so. I almost didn’t watch the series at all (in fact, I was right here in New York, on a similar business trip when I watched the first three episodes on my laptop because I had nothing else to do!). I’m glad I did, though, because it turned out to be a fantastic, gripping show (well, except for the end). I can see the same thing happening to this new series of Trek movies. And as long as they’re still fun and exciting, I’ll keep going to see them … the even-numbered ones, anyway.

Wow … “The Matrix” was released 10 years ago. Today’s xkcd really sums it up:

I still use that DVD as my definitive surround sound test (specifically the bullet time sequence on the roof).

Announced in the current issue of the TiVo newsletter, Netflix integration will be available on the Series3 and THD boxes next month! If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you’ll be able to “instantly” stream movies from Netflix to your TiVo … for free.

I was a Netflix subscriber back in 1999 when I was still a traveling consultant. I would take the DVDs on the road with me to watch on my laptop and drop them in the mail as I finished each one. In those early days, you could go into your account on the Netflix web site and mark the movie as “I’ve mailed it back” and they would immediately ship the next one in your queue. That way when I got back home on Friday, a new set of DVDs would be waiting for me for my trip the next week. Once they switched to the “your next DVD doesn’t ship until we receive one back”-model, the service became less useful as there could be a week when I had no discs to take with me because they didn’t arrive by Saturday.

Once I switched jobs and stopped travelling, I just didn’t have the time to watch all of those movies, so I ended up cancelling my subscription and went back to the traditional Blockbuster rental method. Once Amazon Unbox (now called Amazon Video on Demand) appeared on TiVo, I started using that for the occasional movie rental. With Netflix coming to TiVo in December, though, I might have to consider re-subscribing.

Just in time for the holidays!

What timing … just last week I posted about the 20th anniversary of “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ and the (former) Best Brains’ current endeavor, “Cinematic Titanic.”

What should I find in my inbox this morning? An e-mail from CT announcing the release of “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” a true holiday classic that includes a young Pia Zadora. Fellow MSTies will recall that the gang already riffed this particular “film” (if it deserves to be called that) back in 1991 (season 3, episode 21), the episode that gave us “A Patrick Swayze Christmas,” Tom Servo’s snow globe head, and introduced us to Dropo (“Oh, Dropo!”).

I can’t wait to purchase and download this latest incarnation … I’m sure it’s going to be fantastic.

Hooray for Santy Claus! (cha cha cha)