Stop the press. Guy Ritchie in New-Film-Not-Crap schocker. Cor Blimey, Guv-nor. Granted, it’s Batman Begins transplanted to 19th century London (plot to destabilise social fabric by chemically terrorising the establishment, reveal of master villain at conclusion to set up a sequel, preternaturally gifted detective whose attendant is more socially capable and reasonable than he is…), but it moves at a good pace and remains just about old-fashioned enough to entertain without “re-imagining” (that noxious neologism beloved of marketing copy-writers eager to play down the shafting they’ve just given to a famous name) the Holmes franchise.

The first thing that you’ll notice is the bitter-chocolate colour palette that makes everything a bit muddy.  Publicity stills from the film cover this up, brightening the tone and colourising its murk. Initially, it felt like the dirtiest, ugliest-looking mainstream blockbuster I’d seen in years (I mean that in a good way), but it’s very effective in breaking many associations with other depictions of 19th-century London. Even if it doesn’t convey a strong historical sense through verisimilitude, it manages it through strangeness and the refusal to dress up like a BBC Dickens series or a Tim Burton fantasised tour of London streets. It’s all let down a little by the contractual obligation to end on a famous landmark (the partially built Tower Bridge, which is signposted at various points in the movie), but for the most part there’s an impressive continuity of visual tone.

The plot, alarmingly, concerns a secret religious sect planning to seize the reins of British power by supernatural means. It’s a bit much, when a more intimate bit of murder mystery would have done for starters, but it allows for an interesting clash between Holmes’ extreme, if eccentric rationalism and the spectre of superstitious terror against a backdrop of a newly industrialised England. I wish they’d explored that angle further, but you can’t have everything, right?

Robert Downey Jr was a wholly logical choice for Holmes, the fictional character more frequently portrayed onscreen than any other (IMDB lists more than 200 portrayals); he’s a distinctive, charismatic presence enough to distinguish himself fearlessly from all the other Holmeses, giving the detective an obsessive compulsive energy that serves as an explanation for his brilliance: he just can’t help trying to explain unresolved phenomena that pass before his sensorium, sorting them into stories that make sense. Arthur Conan Doyle’s books eulogise Holmes as an intellectual genius; this version reclaims his abilities as closer to other movie superpowers – useful, but accursed. An early scene shows him alone in a restaurant, struggling to still his twitching impulses to study the people around him, fighting his compulsion to examine the sounds and gestures that assail his eyes and ears. It’s a highly efficient way of getting to the nub of the character and describing his need to surround himself with people who “get” him, even if it compromises his integrity. Downey Jr seems to have been channeling his energy away from substance abuse and self-destruction and into these kinds of nervy, big-gesture  acting jobs, so there was always a danger that he wouldn’t inhabit the role of Holmes, but rather straddle it like Slim Pickens on a nuke, kicking it to giddy-up. Thankfully, he pitches it just right, staying charmingly unhinged, believably driven, without tipping over into Jack Sparrow panto-damery (although they share a puzzling penchant for guyliner).

One of the few traces of Guy Ritchie’s previous form (the others being a number of mockney thugs and a slow-fast-slow-fast camera during action scenes) is the complete lack of interest in the agency of women. Poor Rachel McAdams, made up to look uncannily like Kylie Minogue on the promotional poster, and a bit more like Brooke Adams in Days of Heaven in the film. Her Irene Adler is meant to be a feisty, brilliant match for Holmes, her former lover, but she is used mainly to prove his heterosexuality in the face of an obvious dependency on Watson that might  otherwise have spilled over adventurously into sexual ambiguity, and finally as a bargaining chip between enemies. Similarly, Kelly Reilly (who I’m told is a fabulous, acclaimed stage actress yet to find a role to adequately show off her talents) is used only as a pivot point for the Holmes/Watson relationship.

I can’t be the only one who was surprised to see Hans Zimmer’s name on the soundtrack album, because it’s mostly excellent folky jigs that keep step with the lo-tech approach to the story, but there are some excesses of rhythm and synths towards the end, in sympathy with the visuals’ inevitable slide into ropey CGI and vertiginously placed showdowns. That the film survives these compromises without too much stink is a sign of Ritchie’s grasp of the material – there is still way too much brawling for my taste, when the real pleasure of Holmes stories was always the baroque mental intricacy of his deductions, but at least it is built not on franchise frameworks of conventional plot developments but on the steady banter of two lead actors (I still can’t muster the enthusiasm to say a lot about Jude Law, but he’s perfectly solid here, unstretched and all the better for avoiding any grandstanding attempts to bring Watson to the fore or even give him a strong personality – he knows enough to let Holmes play the star attraction). It’s not a great film, more of a trial run for a possible series of more interesting sequels (acknowledged in the way they save the big reveal of the obvious star villain for the follow-up…), but could it be that Ritchie has deliberately spent the last decade knocking out worthless, parasitic movies in order to soften up audience expectations for his mainstream breakthrough? No. But it’s a thought. Certainly, it would be nice to think that his separation from Madonna freed his mind and allowed him to … Hey! We don’t do celebrity gossip here at Spectacular Attractions. Let’s just say that Guy Ritchie no longer being a stooge for the Kabbalah cult makes it  newly OK for him to make a film in which a religious con artist and his secret sect attempts to take power in London and gets his ass kicked by a bit of rational inquiry.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Thanks for visiting Spectacular Attractions and making it such a success in 2009. I look forward to hearing from you in 2010 and developing this thing even further. Stand by for the New Year, which promises more and better stuff from this blog, including exciting experiments in podcasting. However you’re spending the next few days, I hope it’s peaceful, relaxing and beautiful. Failing that, I hope you get to eat a pie of some sort.

[I may expand this post, or tidy it up a bit, at a later date, but I wanted to publish some initial responses to Avatar quite quickly. Sorry if it reads like a disjointed series of comments, but I haven't yet distilled my review down to a cohesive argument. ]

Do you feel like the game has changed? Are we in a new age of spectacular cinema, freed from technological limits? That’s what was promised, but has Avatar rescued us from our humdrum lives of everyday movies with everyday special effects? My initial verdict is, well … sort of.

First things first (and here’s where you’ll find the greatest concentration of potential poster-quotes) Avatar looks astonishing. Really. It has wondrous moments when you momentarily accept the tangibility of the lanky blue folk on the screen, and it makes perfect sense that these are couched in a narrative about a man exploring a new world via a new body: Cameron meshes together the diegetic events and the experience of their spectacles perfectly, so the spectator’s exploratory view of Pandora (where the film takes place) can be focused on discoveries of plants and species that are, at the same time, discoveries of CGI novelties. It means you don’t have to feel bad about stopping and staring: it makes gawping at stuff feel like a plot point. But the plot is so stale that it might even be seen as a deliberate strategy to choke off any sense of suspense or complexity and force the audience to focus on the immediate splendour of the present moment: don’t worry about what’s going to happen, just check how good it looks as it’s happening.

The rush to get to grips with the arrival of Avatar, and the accompanying upheavals that extreme novelty might bring, has lead many commentators to try and describe it in terms of its resemblance to other things. It’s a souped up Ferngully, Dances with Wolves in space, Dances with Smurfs in a hilarious South Park episode, a Yes album cover, a plagiarised 1957 novella etc. One more comparison that occurred to me as I was watching is Anders Rønnow Klarlund’s marionette movie Strings (2004). It is also built around a quasi-mythical tale of a wandering warrior sheltered by a tribe he has previously thought of as primitive barbarians, and gaining respect for their culture and their one-ness with nature. There’s even a similar sex scene tangled up in strings. And, of course, Strings is made using puppets for actors, and we could justifiably consider the motion-captured CG bodysuits worn by the actors to be a kind of hi-tech puppetry, worked by their own frames but endlessly malleable in post-production. Here’s how are some of the stages that show how it’s done, moving from the performance capture of Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington, with the suits recording the co-ordinates of points on their bodies while the cameras in front of the faces capture the detail of their expressions…

… to the digital models of their Na’vi bodies in a lo-res version that can be viewed on a monitor and directed live on the set.

… Weta Digital then developed these templates with more detail (note that this has to be done for the background environments, too) and finished off the fine-tuning on the animation of the performances …

… before the final levels of detail, shading and skin tones, reflections, shadows etc. are added:

Some of the non-Na’vi scenes are shot against greenscreen with all of the backgrounds and sets added in afterwards. Why travel to another planet to make a movie when you can stay him and draw your own?

Much will no doubt be made of James Cameron’s form of feminism, whereby his female leads get to do as much heroic jumping and kicking as any of the boys, and indeed the image of a tiny little Sam Worthington cradled in the arms of his giantess mate (Zoe Saldana) is a striking one, suddenly embodying his species’ physical inferiority and visualising her statuesque prowess. Saldana gives, and I’m assuming that we can attribute most of this work to her, a wonderful physical performance; you can see her gestures and body language pushing through the technology to invest Neytiri with layers of passion and detail.

You can almost see a resemblance under the techie prosthetics, but Cameron favourite Sigourney Weaver is much more clearly apparent in her avatar:

Michelle Rodiguez is surely one of the most typecast actress in Hollywood, and once again trots out her usual tough-girl act, which I hope she’s at least enjoying doing while it lasts, because it would be great to see her stretching herself a bit. She doesn’t have a lot else to do except instigate the “I-didn’t-sign-up-for-this” change of heart that helps out in the rebellion against the military, and provide the kinds of cleavage shots that really show what the future of 3D is more likely to end up becoming. That sounds a bit facetious of me, but her body seems to have been used at times to deflect some of the attention away from the amazing physiques of the Na’vi, who appear to have no nerds, slobs or munters amongst their number: Cameron is in danger of sentimentalising, via body-fetishism, the alien clans and the purity of their race, and I like to think that he reserves some fascination with human females and their contribution to physical spectacle. In any event, this is feminism with boundaries and sub-clauses, ultimately clearing the path of the hero’s journey towards knowledge and superiority.

Is it prurient of me to wish that they’d gone further in depicting the “mating” between Jake and Neytiri? No, I don’t think so. All of the sexual interest between them is displaced onto their competitive mastery of hunting skills and the taming of wild beasts, so it’s almost like we don’t need to see them explicitly bumping uglies (But hang on a second – stop me if I’m a bit slow on the science but if the avatars used in the research programme are created using human DNA, wouldn’t mating with the Na’vi pollute their gene pool with all that feeble human stuff?), but if  Cameron truly wanted to break new ground and show us that the technology was fully mature, why not have a go at some challenging intimacy in CG? The bodies of the Na’vi are the centrepoints of the film’s spectacular project, and you’re invited to inspect their flesh and marvel at their anatomical superstructure and acrobatic grace – forgive me, but isn’t the usual next step to wonder what they’re like in bed? Why else make them kinda sexy, lithe and sultry if you don’t want to encourage such a reaction?

Seriously, though, it makes perfect sense that Jake Sully himself is curious about Na’vi sexuality: thankfully, though perhaps disappointingly, they do it just like people, or at least people in movies do, with vigorous snogging and heavy breathing until the inevitable fade-out or pan across to a bedside table. Where would be the harm in indulging that natural instinct, except that it might delay getting round to the real task of blowing stuff up.

Cameron has built an impressive world and taken the trouble to have its flora and fauna meticulously designed so that it feels like a cohesive eco-system, but the downside might be that it feels overdesigned at times. It’s a perfect environment, and it works like a kind of organic world wide web: the Na’vi can jack into the planet and its wildlife with a kind of fibre-optic ponytail that lets them feel its memories and to communicate more intimately with its creatures. This is a fascinating idea, and it backs Cameron out of a few corners – the Na’vi gods are real, measurable and demonstrable. Of course, I don’t believe that the non-existence of gods is justification for kicking any peoples off their land, but it does mean here that the moral odds are stacked unequally in favour of the Na’vi.

(Aside: Has there ever been a film this expensive that’s had to labour under such an inept marketing campaign? The half-face posters did nothing to convince you that this wasn’t going to straight to video (or that it hadn’t done so 20 years earlier), and even the tie-ins couldn’t be bothered to think up anything interesting – waiting for the film to start, we were “treated” to two ads, one for some kind of mobile phone, the other for Coke Zero, but they both resorted to exactly the same device of the slack-jawed average-joe customer finding himself sucked into the world of the film. Ooh, d’you get it? It’s, like, totally immersive and stuff. But was there no communication that might have flagged up the fact that they were making the same commercial, or maybe the “sucked-into-the-movie” template is the default setting for these things. In any event, given Coca-Cola’s record of shafting indigenous communities to let them set up their sugar-water bottling plants, it stinks to high heaven that they should have been allowed to associate themselves with a film that sets out to make your heart bleed for a bunch of natives whose natural resources are being ravaged by corporate interests. I’m just sayin’ is all.)

And what was the point of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a film if you’re just going to invite James Horner to sully it with a disastrous score. It’s a lazy musical mish-mash of borrowed ideas (including his own – the main theme even quotes the chorus of My Heart Will Go On) that wobbles incoherently between Carmina Burana and Pan Pipe Moods. It’s a hackneyed bit of quasi-ethnic gestures, and at the very least it should have been cut back to let the soundtrack breathe from time to time. The visuals may be 3D, but the soundtrack struggles to create a comparable sense of spatialisation. Think how effective sound could be used to make Pandora seem tangible, lushly present if only we could really hear the brush of leaves against skin. This may be part of a bigger problem, and one that I’ll admit might sound picky at first: Avatar does a great job of creating a spectacle to behold, but we always feel shut out, distanced from it by its immaculate composition. While it wants to appear real, what it actually achieves is a temporary renegotiation of what we might want to think of as real – the prioritisation of the visual plays down the significance of the other senses in developing a sense of presence and physicality.

The problem here centres on Cameron’s easy summation of the drama as a clash of civilisations, with a militarised, corporate-sponsored colonial mission from Earth over-riding the rights and dignities of an indigenous tribe of spiritually-enlightened natives. I can’t help noticing a double-standard that makes Avatar feel a bit cheeky. Cameron has invested enormous amounts of money in fabricating a “natural” world, one that feels organic, lush and earthy, so that we can really give a crap whether or not it gets bulldozed. He wants us to celebrate nature, but has to redesign it along his own imaginative lines in order to make it worth our while. It’s all been made to measure to his specifications, which surely avoids some of the chaotic, bizarre and unpredictable qualities that distinguish nature from, say… technology. Cameron’s grudge is against the corporate interests that always twist the science of progressive idealism into a brutally self-serving ideology of progress and expansionism at any costs. Nobody would really argue with such a noble sentiment, but this director doesn’t seem to want to untangle or investigate the moral ambiguities at the centre of technological debates – is scientific progress possible without compromises to human nature? Is militarisation readily divisible from technological investment and production? Even if he were to always proselytise in one direction, there is at least some dramatic mileage in the posthuman debates that his film touches upon without running with (apart from being a bit tired and disorientated, Jake doesn’t seem faced with any existential crises over his transferral to another body), and if Cameron wants to earn his reputation as a visionary futurist, he might want to pause playing with the gadgets and consider the complexities of the human/machine interface, or the paradoxes of the miltary-industrial-technological complex, not because it’s his moral duty, but because it might be really exciting and interesting. Otherwise, we’re just left with another tale of noble savages being noble. He had a similar problem with Titanic, when he wanted to condemn the corporate corner-cutting that sent an unsound ship to sea, but ended up dazzled by the magnificence of it all.

Looking back over what I’ve just written (hard to believe, I know, but I do it sometimes), I realise that I’ve criticised the film quite a lot. I should point that Avatar was a thrilling experience, both in terms of the spectacular action it conjured, and the excitement of seeing technological obstacles surmounted so effortlessly. Having one’s own skepticism dispersed is always a pleasant feeling. But when the 3D specs come off, and the film becomes a memory to be pondered and pored over, without its powers to overwhelm and bedazzle, it has to stand shivering in the harsh light of critical customs, and the truth is that it’s a  flaccid piece of drama with a this-will-do-till-a-script-gets-here approach to dialogue. It’s one of the most deliciously sweet, confections on the menu, but you’ll crave some roughage soon after.

OK, those are my initial thoughts. Wanna talk about it?

• Update 28th December: Ben Childs at the Guardian Film Blog asks whether Avatar will put actors out of work. My own short answer would be “no”. Such a possibility is regularly trotted out as part of the techno-hype that goes into the shaping of expectations for these kinds of special effects showcases. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, and I’m sure it’s easy to see how this relates to Avatar: http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/how-special-effects-work-2-virtual-actors-are-on-the-way/

2012 is not a film that has divided critics. Most people think it’s crap. I was undecided about Roland Emmerich. Is he just another Michael Bay, marshalling expensive mayhem and ill-gotten sentiment painted by numbers to a strict blockbuster formula? Or is there some wit and irony folded into delirious excess of the whole enterprise? Emmerich seems to be making the same film again and again, continually dressing up one idea of global catastrophe’s effect on families in ever bulkier clothing. I myself can’t quite decide. I oscillate between giving it some credit for fabricating a committed deconstruction of the blockbuster disaster movie, and trying to pretend that I ever went to see it at all. So, maybe you too can indulge your indecision, or flatter your hardline opinions with another of Spectacular Attractions‘ patented “Build Your Own Review” posts. Think of it like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” approach to film reviewing. That way, you won’t be distracted by the sight of me weaseling out of my responsibility to give my own view…

Roland Emmerich

1. Why don’t they put on the posters “2012: From the director of Ghost Chase.” Because Ghost Chase was crap. Really crap, to the extent that it couldn’t possibly be a mistake on his c.v., but more likely an indicator that Emmerich struggles with deficiencies in the talent department. His films are repetitive, and they don’t develop or get more adventurous: the escalating scale of his disaster movies indicates that all he knows how to do is make everything the same but bigger, making 2012 an index not of his development as an artist, but of the fattening of his wallet and the stultifying bloat of his imagination.

2. It seems unfair that Emmerich gets compared to Michael Bay, who lacks any sense of wit or self-aware humour, when we might just as easily give him the same credit that critics have routinely afforded Paul Verhoeven, who similarly subverts Hollywood genres by replaying their cherished conventions as vulgar, excessive, ethically troubling fantasies. A generous critical reappraisal of his work will one day reveal him to be a cunning and self-reflexive trash auteur, skilfully moulding a cohesive body of work that critiques the values of late capitalist society by demolishing its achievements. Don’t be surprised if someone describes him as the Douglas Sirk of disaster movies a couple of decades from now.

Politics

1. So, what are we to assume from this film? The wealthiest people in the world get to buy their way out of inevitable doom, and we’re supposed to consider this a hopeful ending just because John Cusack’s little girl no longer pees her pants? Now that’s moral relativism. The world’s governments successfully hide their plans to save their elites and let the rest of the world perish (because they would only panic like the troublesome individuals they are), though I’m sure they don’t tell the world to stop paying taxes and enjoy themselves, because that would leave less money for them to build themselves needlessly lavish arks filled with all the modern conveniences and control-room equipment so that their lives need suffer minimal disruption due to apocalyptic annihilation. This is nothing short of monstrous, the single-most contemptuous act committed by world leaders in any film ever. And yet it is never met with comeuppance. Sure, the proud elites feel about sorry about what they’ve done, but they don’t actually do the decent thing and throw their old bonebag bastard selves into the nearest hole in the ground. There’s a gesture towards egalitarianism in the elevation of Cusack’s lowly chauffeur to the status of action hero, but there’s no attempt to overthrow the super-rich international cabal that conceals the true fate of the planet in order to give themselves a headstart on survival at the expense of everyone else on Earth. They get away with it. Except for the fat Russian. And it’s all forgotten by the end – there’s no global stench of death or the calamitous spread of disease that would inevitably spread with six billion bloated corpses bobbing around in the surf. There are no consequences here, just an optimistic sunset and dry knickers.
2. The only way to deal with this film is to take it as satire. As with other Emmerich films, there are a number of political gags that cue the spectator that there is an underlying political bite to it all: Governor Schwarzenegger caught in a lie and sucked into an earthquake; humankind upended and sent begging back to Africa; the White House swatted aside by its proudest piece of military hardware. These are all moments of retributive destruction that show Emmerich using his spectacular mandate to dish out justice to the deserving, smashing the hubristic and humbling the mighty. Yes, a more sensational ending would have seen everyone destroyed. Picture a final shot of an unpeopled Earth, its babble silenced, its dramas concluded, inherited by fish and whales who can now go about their business unharpooned. That might have been daring, but we’ll have to make do with what we’re given, I guess. It’s not the job of a blockbuster movie to flatter all of our ethical preferences and settle all of our political disputes.

Plot

1. There was a plot? I suppose it has some very simple narrative set-ups in order to manouevre all the characters into position to be destroyed or escape. Mostly, this involves having family members separated from one another, gesturing in the direction of sentimentality but never truly interested in studying those relationships.  The underlying theme of families whose estrangements and disagreements are thrown into perspective by the collapse of the ground beneath their feet might have been a potent dramatic base, but instead it’s nothing more than an excuse to pretend that there’s more going on than a bunch of stuff noisily falling falling over.
2. Emmerich stages his disaster scenes on the framework of families in peril. He has to personalise the destruction to make the omniscient, global perspective more affecting. Many scenes show people communicating from around the world – this is a disaster that affects everybody, and Emmerich focuses on the tragedy of seeing all of the structures of family and society put under stress. Just as disaster separates family members, it can also unite them, as with Cusack and his estranged wife. Hey, you may find it schmaltzy, and it’s certainly idealistic, but you can’t deny that it’s there.

Special Effects

1. Let’s cut to the chase – the visual effects in this film are impressively staged by expert technicians, but that’s where the compliments have to end. They are used to replace the need for plot, dialogue and character nuances, and are delivered with such monotonously gargantuan force that they are overwhelming rather than engrossing. It’s also repetitive. John Cusack manages a last minute take-off from a crumbling city at least three times. There’s only so many times you can watch a bunch of stuff falling over before you get the point and have to move on to something more substantial.
2. Analysts of popular culture seem ill-prepared to think about special effects without falling back on rudimentary rhetoric about the depletion of narrative. Rarely are spectacular visuals considered as valuable ends in themselves, permitting viewers to indulge in fantastic rehearsals of annihilation, or adding a new depiction of the apocalypse to our cultural pool. As john Cusack’s plane takes off through a collapsing Californian city, we get a vision of tumbling bodies, subway trains, buildings and earth that rivals Hieronymus Bosch for its compendious  pile-up of incidents of doom. These are visual effects that enunciate a terrible vision, a fantasy space that can’t be  compared to any realist tradition, and needs to be considered a spectacular means of communication on its own terms.

Genre

1. Borrowing scenes from every other disaster movie (The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Volcano…) doesn’t constitute a postmodern remastering of genre conventions. It’s evidence of a paucity of ideas, plain and simple. Emmerich springs no surprises, breaks no rules; his only engagement with the disaster movie genre is a kind of visual-effects pissing contest where scale and noise are the only values. Unable to do anything clever, he just inflates everything out of proportion and makes it all the same as the other films, but bigger.
2. By knowingly re-iterating genre conventions in an extreme, camp tone, Emmerich reveals their constructedness and their inadequacy at communicating truths about the world. He demythologises genre by refusing to honour or defer to it. All of this catastrophe is supposed to represent the wrath of a disinterested universe, but it seems so aestheticised, so carefully laid out that it actually ends up feeling directed, designed by some intelligent force of natural vengeance. This is most obviously pronounced when the Sistine Chapel splits in two, and a crack runs across the cieling between the fingers of God and Adam. What are we to make of this clash of the secular and the spiritual? These are moments of religious iconography rendered malevolent; for all their terrible weather and rising seas, the key points of spectacular escalation come when these natural forces run into man-made things, revealing them to be utterly perishable. It is in his particular imagining of “natural” disaster that Emmerich imposes a powerful sense of malicious, downbeat doom amidst the apparently safe fun of the whole enterprise.

Only one week to go until Christmas. Scary, eh? I’m sure you didn’t need a reminder that you’re behind schedule, but how about this picture of sketches  from Chuck Jones‘ 1966 film of Dr. Seuss‘ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the seasonal tale of a scrooge-like green dude confiscating presents from the townspeople of Whoville to prevent them from having Christmas fun. Of course, like all other scrooges in all other TV specials, from Charlie Brown to Alf, he learns that stealing presents is not enough to dampen the celebrants’ spirits, because the true meaning of Christmas resides in the hearts of families and in friendship and in goodwill and ….zzzzzzzzzzz… Let’s face it, the Grinch is much more fun when he’s mean. Ebeneezer Scrooge is a more dramatic and intriguing figure when he’s bitter and twisted – a happy Scrooge is a creepy, suspect Scrooge. Beware of Grinches bearing gifts. Merry Christmas, one and all.