Moments from It's A Wonderful Life

Well, that's just one of the best movies ever isn't it?






God damn you Frank Capra - playing me like a man-sized fiddle.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Moments from Elf

I love Elf. And Jon Favreau's career as a director is constantly fascinating for me. I just always think of him as he appears in Swingers, no matter how many great films he directs.





Also Zooey Deschanel is so much better when she's underplaying the Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl role.

Moments from Bad Santa

Actually, according to the DVD case I was watching "Badder Santa: The Unrated Version". Having never seen the original I guess the difference was lost on me - I guess it was a highly profane piece of cinema, maybe there were even more F-words in this one? There certainly were a lot! Fuck!





It was good, if not great then certainly unique and entertaining enough to get a big thumbs up from me. And when Sheriff John Bunnell there turned up - that added a whole extra star on for me.

Bumper Christmas 8tracks!

Hey, I don't know about your advent calendar, but my advent calendar says there are only three sleeps until Christmas! (Ahem, as usual, I'm posing this... from the future, so let's just skip over any confusing about 'day counts' or whatever, ok?) And you know what I love? No, not that, something else. I mean, I love that, but I love something else too.

That's right! Christmas!

So I put twenty Christmas songs on a playlist for you to listen to!

And trust me when I tell you that they are all solid gold and shot through with the spirit of Christmas. If you don't like any of those songs, then I would ask you if you had ever been in the same room as Ebeneezer Scrooge before, and if not, then perhaps it would be clement for you to perhaps start questioning your own identity because it may be more than possible that you - yourself - are Ebeneezer Scrooge!

Or possibly The Grinch!

Christmas at Sapporo Factory Once Again

So it's December somehow or other, and you know what's in December? Andy's Birthday! And another birthday! Jesus's Birthday! To be honest I was gonna try and avoid harping on about Christm... AH WHO AM I KIDDING I LOVE CHRISTMAS I LOVE IT.

And I love almost everything about Christmas - even Christmas shopping in busy shopping malls. Maybe it's nostalgia for the classic tearjerker Jingle All The Way, but whenever I'm looking at larger-than-normal mall trees and fairy lights... all's right with the world.

I'm not even joking y'know. I'm putting together a Christmas playlist right now, so watch your asses.

Since I've come to Sapporo I always make sure to check out Sapporo Factory, where they have a big tree that plays music and does a light-show every hour. I'm not gonna deny that it's tacky and gauche, but there's no real need to defend it either.


Now, to be honest (and I need to go back and check the reference photos from last year) the Factory tree looks a fair bit smaller than last years. Looked pretty enough when the lights were on though.


Christmas. Commerce. Capitalism. And other words beginning with C.

Make with the words, Wordsworth

So that's it, Christmas wrapped up for another year. Back in the Old Country though it'll keep going until... what? The Epiphany? Is that right? There's a bunch more holiday anyway, but here in Japan Christmas is just this kinda silly fun thing where you can buy presents for people or eat fried chicken and cake and stuff. They do it with style, but their heart's not in it and of course the Christmas decorations are already being taken down on Christmas Day.

New Years is where it's at, next year's the year of the cow in case you're interested.

Last night's snowstorm was a real humdinger. We got about six inches and the sky was flickering with sheet lightning - in a snowstorm you know that means "business time". The temperature dropped savagely, and today it was a fierce day to be outside. We had howling winds and snow all day, it was positively arctic and someone mentioned something about highs of minus three.

Some choice presents from Santa this year included a seriously classy scarf, a boxing panda pen where the panda's eyes light up red when he punches (bad-ass), a map, a tourist guide from 1965 and chocolate.

Cadbury's chocolate that is, sourced in England, which reminded me that Cadbury's chocolate really is something to be proud of. You can pick it up here in Japan but it's all imported from Australia... and sorry but it's kinda lacking. I always heard that Cadbury's Australia have to add extra preservatives to keep the chocolate more stable in the heat, but that might be bull. I'm sure it ain't as good as the British stuff though.

Also Wovenhand - which put my mind at rest that David Eugene Edwards is still out there, using the bad side of the bible to warn us all. Also his new album sounds pretty much exactly like his old band 16 Horsepower, who were astonishingly good at their peak. He's got his badass French bassist back, which I think is probably a big part of it.

Christmas for real.

Ok, so it's Boxing Day now, but I still haven't gone to sleep so I'm still gonna call it Christmas Day.


For a while there it looked like were weren't going to get a white Christmas here, but around 7pm the temperature dropped and now it's piling up again. Apparently we've got a good few days of snow to look forward to. Sooooo good. And I made a Christmas Party that worked just great, and I got to see my family moving around on a tiny screen via the internet. So I'm pretty happy. Merry Christmas everyone.

It's Christmas Eve

It's Christmas Eve, shouldn't you be trying to get back to your family or something?


I'm still out here in Japan, working on Christmas day, but I'll be applying eggnog liberally to make it as festive as possible.

SMAP X SMAP Christmas Special

The SMAP X SMAP Christmas Special was just on, a timely reminder of the SMAPs at this, the most magical time of the year. It was the sort of thing they do for special occasions, a long live special where they duet with hit singers of the past on their most famous songs (sometimes in a medley!). They all wore clothes that pushed "stylin'" to it's very limits throughout, and although I couldn't get any good shots trying to photograph the TV, I still captured Nakai's "Tartan Pee-Wee Herman get up:


As I said before, I have a big ol' soft spot for the SMAPs, but that doesn't obscure the fact that they really can't sing, have no grasp of harmony and their dance-steps tonight were studiously unadventurous. But a lot of work must've gone into that wardrobe so maybe that covers it.

Christmas Tree Showdown!

Today your duty is to judge the festive battle of the century, if not the new millenium. In one corner, clocking in a really-fucking-tall and covered with approximately twice as many lights as there are stars in the night sky, it's the Sapporo Factory Christmas Tree:


It plays a Christmas medley every half hour and the lights blink and flash in time to the music. It's like the tree itself is dancing. Although I have to say the music this year was much more cloying and annoying than last years festive bell jamboree.

Aaaaaand in the other corner, clocking in at 30cm and costing the princely sum of 500 yen (around three quid) is my very own Christmas cracker:


Dwarfed by the secret santa present that I put next to it, "Small Tree" as I affectionately call it nevertheless brings festive cheer to my appartment as never before.

So decide, which one is the true spirit of Christmas?

Merry Christmas once again.

Some notes on Will Ferrell movies.

I watched three Will Ferrell movies in the space of 5 days last week. This information cause one M. Longarini of Sapporo to give me a quite genuine double take and a look of shock - but what can I say, I like Will Ferrell. As Matt said, he pretty much only plays one character but I'd argue he plays that same character in many subtley different variations. Imagine you have a Will Ferrell control panel with a number of sliders that you can adjust to suit your movie. You've got like, from Sleazy to Innocent, from Deadpan to Hysterical, from Jerk to Niceguy, from Lots of Shouting to Some Shouting. You can get a lot of mileage out of that.


Yeah, I didn't watch it in German but I like that poster. I really like Blades of Glory and it works so well because the entire cast sells it, especially Will Arnett. Man, I love him in this movie, and I want to see him as a ludicrous villain in many more.


Talladega Nights, however, sucked just like everyone says. And yes, everyone says it sucks. It's not awful by any means, but it's relentlessly uninspired - and wow, actually that sounds pretty goddamn damning. I like John C. Reilly, and I like Sacha Baron Cohen most of the time, but where the deliberately inane dialogue clicks in Anchorman or Blades of Glory, here it's just flat and dumb. The only time I laughed out loud was during the end credits where the alternative takes of some of the scenes seemed to be way funnier than what they actually included.


And of course I topped it off with Elf, because it's Christmas. Elf is great, and it pushes the Ferrell-Sliders all the way to cute and innocent. Coupla things - both this and Blades of Glory involve good gags involving escalators, which is... niche? Unusual? I wonder if there are other Will Ferrell escalator scenes... Oh and also Jon Favreau? He's a pretty great director huh? Nice step-up there sir.

Musical Christmas Portents

I'm gathering evidence that Christmas is almost upon us. Number one: it's snowing like a bastard right now - super light, fluffy, powder snow that jumps into the air when you stamp your foot in it. It's beautiful and it fell so fast, we went into a karaoke box for an hour and it hadn't even started. When we came out it was already more than an inch deep and bucketing it down. Of course it's all floating on a bed of ice so... down I went. Sapporo 1 - Alex 0. Ow.

Other Christmas signs - live music in the freezing open air:


School kids playing Christmas Carols on these little hand chime things. And outside PARCO department store a lady was playing the piano. She was wearing ear muffs, but her fingers must have been very cold.


Also I made the first batch of eggnog of the year and it went down very nicely indeed. Merry Christmas!

Christmas with KFC

You know, I'm still not sure whether KFC's position as Japan's staple Christmas family food is due to the lack of turkey here, some cultural misunderstanding whereby someone thought that the Colonel and Santa Claus were the same person, or if it's a massive hoodwinking being perpetrated on the people of Japan by KFC. Whatever the reason, as this chart shows:


If you want to pick up a Christmas dinner at 5pm on Christmas Eve you're shit out of luck. They've still got plenty of spaces left later in the evening though, and you could always pick it up at 1pm and slap it in the microwave later.

Just a thought.