Excellent performances by all concerned almost make one forget the equally important fact that this is the first movie in a long time to treat Edward VIII’s abdication of the throne as the act of gross selfishness by a narcissistic asshole that it was, rather than some grand self-important gesture.

I’ve been reading some zombie novels lately; among others, I’ve read ‘Dead City’, ‘The Rising’, and ‘Day By Day Armageddon’…and I have to say, at the risk of offending authors who have some online presence (and plenty of online fans), most of them are really not that good. The current crop of zombie books tend to regurgitate Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, with a dash of “28 Days Later” for that bioweapon flavor and a generous helping of Mary-Sue-ism to boot. (One exception is David Wellington’s “Monster Island” and its sequels, which do some eye-poppingly clever things with the zombie apocalypse concept.)

And yet, the whole reason I picked them up is that I love zombie movies…and I gotta say, I love the cheesy ones just as much as the brilliant ones. “Nightmare City”, “Hell of the Living Dead”, “The Dead Next Door”, “Feeding the Masses” (which actually had a brilliant script, let down by sub-pornographic actors)…bad or good, I cheerfully watch them from beginning to end. Sometimes, the worse they are the better they are. “Diary of the Dead” is never going to match up to Romero’s earlier masterpieces, but I guarantee you, you will never find a movie with a more bad-ass Amish farmer or drama teacher.

So what’s the difference? Why do I love a bad zombie movie, but grow furious at the lack of ambition and drive behind the majority of most zombie novels? The answer, and I think a lot of readers will find it obvious, is the level of investment needed to finish a movie versus a book. A ninety minute movie lasts ninety minutes, and then it’s over. Whether that ninety minutes is filled with “Shaun of the Dead”, or “Shadow: Dead Riot”, they’re both done when the credits roll.

But a good 300-page book and a bad 300-page book…the former flies by almost on its own, as your mind pictures the story so vividly that you don’t even notice turning the pages. Whereas the latter crawls past at a snail’s pace, as your brain rebels at the thought of reading even one more sentence. You find yourself easily distracted, making excuses to put the book down…and yet, when you work up the nerve to get back to it, the book is right there waiting for you exactly where you left off. It’s like a movie that pauses itself whenever it thinks you’ve stopped paying attention.

And a horror movie can descend to the level of “so bad it’s good.” Inept comedy is merely excruciatingly dull, while inept horror can sometimes become brilliant comedy (which is why the movie “The Mad”, with Billy Zane, failed so badly. But I digress.) But the failings of prose are different than the failings of film, and what can inspire you to watch a bad movie again and again merely inspires you to throw a book at the wall so hard it makes a dent.

It’s a curious difference, the way that engaging with a work of bad art can produce such different effects in different media. The bad zombie movie only attains its true potential as entertainment when the audience engages with it, refusing to passively accept it and instead dealing with it on their own terms. But with bad zombie books, the more you engage with it, the worse it becomes. The only way to succeed is not to get involved at all. (Especially ‘City of the Dead’. Sorry, Brian Keene, but it was a mistake to try to get a sequel out of ‘The Rising’.)

I’ve been deathly ill the last few days, hence the lack of content, but since it is the season and all:

Best wishes to all, and I’ll be back to posting when I am done opening my presents.

And for those who are going to complain about Gwen Stefani, well, here:

Yes, of course I saw it again. I’ve been waiting for it since I was six.

1.) I think the “this movie has no plot” line a lot of people are using is unfair. It has a straightforward chase movie plot, for the most part: once Sam gets inside the Grid the entire movie is “survive until you get to X, then to Y, then to Z.” There’s nothing wrong with it, and the movie underlays the chase element with a nice dichotomy of Flynn’s relationships with his two “sons” (Sam and CLU). A more thorough explanation of Flynn’s within-the-Grid powers would have been nice so that the ending makes more sense, but other than that the plot is really very straightforward.

2.) A fairer complaint is that the information that drives the plot isn’t what people wanted. A common issue I’ve seen raised in many places is that there’s no mention of the internet or anything similar, no serious discussion of the revolutions in computing as it relates to the TRONverse, but instead some vague technobabble about the Isos. (Actually, the movie is correct in that abiogenetic digital life would in fact be a Big Deal, but it doesn’t really explain it properly.) This is reasonable and I can definitely sympathize with it. To which the only answer that can be made is: they didn’t want to make that movie. They wanted to make this one: a story about a long-divided father and son. The sealed system of the Grid as ruled by CLU simply doesn’t work with the internet, and if Flynn had been in digital form on the net he likely would have been able to talk to his son somehow.

3.) On a second viewing I really appreciate Jeff Bridges’ dual performance more. Shifting gears from maniacal, desperate-to-prove-himself CLU to Zen Kenobi Flynn couldn’t have been easy, but he really pulls off both roles; CLU’s cover of his own personal insecurity is particularly evident in Bridges’ body language, and the Flynn performance manages to be magnetic without sacrificing the essential techno-hippie nature of the character. He really manages the awkward bits of dealing with a grown son magnificently, too.

4.) Daft Punk’s score for the movie ranks in my top five artistic achievements in film for the year. It really is absolutely superb: it both matches itself to the story and stands up as a musical work in its own right to boot. They need to score more films.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I am happy because this week I had the chance to reference the old “Give Like Santa, Save Like Scrooge” commercials Canadian Tire did every Christmas when I was growing up:

And we may joke about the prices back then for a Commodore 128 (and I had a Commodore when I was growing up and it was the best computer ever, dammit), but what strikes me is that this advert dates itself not by what’s being sold so much as the fact that they actually mention the specific prices in the ad. That just doesn’t happen any more.

Part of me wants to say, in answer to the post’s title, “Then go ahead. What are you waiting for?” Bond is not exactly a continuity-heavy, mythology-dense series, whether you’re talking about the books or the movies. It was originally a series of cheap pulp paperbacks, the kind of thing you buy in airports, and it’s become a series of pacy action movies, the kind of thing you go to for fun. Neither one of those things lends itself to a series you have to work to get involved with.

But maybe you’re really just interested in dipping your toes into James Bond. After all, it’s still 22 movies and 35 or so books, not exactly the sort of thing you can just polish off in a weekend. (For the record, I find the books to be a bit of a curate’s egg. Without an actor playing the character, Bond tends to come off as remarkably unlikeable, which makes them difficult to get into. Feel free to try them if you want–they’re all short reads–but don’t be surprised if you come away disappointed. That said, the baccarat sequence in the novel of ‘Casino Royale’ is much better than the poker sequence in the 2006 film.) So what are some of the highlights, the quintessential Bond films if you will?

When it comes to Sean Connery, who is agreed by most to be the “definitive” Bond, two movies stand out above all the rest. ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’, between the two of them, pretty much define the “spy movie” genre, and most of the iconic moments of the Bond franchise come from one or the other of these two films. You’ve got the gold-painted girl, Oddjob throwing his hat, Bond strapped to the table with the moving laser, the villain petting the white cat, the hidden base inside the volcano, the bad guy dropping his henchmen into a piranha tank…pretty much the whole spy package. And you also get the unintentionally spectacularly racist sequence where Bond is made into an Asian through the cunning use of make-up.

Beyond that, there are two other good Connery Bonds (‘Dr. No’ and ‘From Russia With Love’), one mediocre one (‘Thunderball’) and one that feels like a canonical Bond parody (‘Diamonds Are Forever’, easily one of the lowlights of the series.) Oh, and George Lazenby tried his hand at Bond between ‘You Only Live Twice’ and ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, but despite being a decent actor, he wasn’t able to convince audiences that he was Bond.

The next Bond, Roger Moore, was a great light-comedy actor who unfortunately wound up doing an action hero part. This resulted in a number of “comedy” Bond moments, all of which fell pretty flat. Despite that, and despite some more spectacular unintentional racism (‘Live and Let Die’ is all about Sinister Black People, ‘The Man With the Golden Gun’ is all about Asians Who Know Kung Fu) he did have his moments. ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ has a great moment when Bond agrees to hear the villain’s demands, only to discover he really doesn’t have any–he just wants to blow up the world with stolen nukes. And despite its poor reputation, ‘Moonraker’ is full of classic Bond moments, from a stunning opening where Bond skydives without a parachute to a villain who delivers classic lines like, “Ah, Mister Bond. You have all the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.”

Then we have Timothy Dalton, an awesomely underrated Bond who was better than his scripts (but anyone who’s seen him in classics like ‘Flash Gordon’, ‘The Rocketeer’, and ‘Hot Fuzz’ knows how great Dalton is.) He only did two Bond movies, the very good ‘The Living Daylights’ and the somewhat less good ‘License To Kill’ (which is fun, but feels a bit too much like a “Miami Vice” episode to be a true Bond classic.)

And then, after a long pause, we got Pierce Brosnan, who had been touted as a potential Bond for about a decade by that point. He had one genuine bona fide classic, ‘Goldeneye’, which examined the relevance of Bond (and by extension, the spy drama) in a post-Cold War world, and then a slow decline through the entertaining ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ to the implausible ‘The World Is Not Enough’ to the ponderous and uninspired ‘Die Another Day’. That was about when they decided to reboot the franchise.

The reboot got a great Bond–Daniel Craig–but the movies to date haven’t lived up to their actor. (Although the 2006 ‘Casino Royale’ is certainly head and shoulders and chest and stomach and groin and thighs and knees and ankles and toes above the 1967 version.) And with MGM teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, we might not see another Bond movie until after Craig is too old to play the part. Still, it’s bound to go on in some form or another. James Bond isn’t just a franchise, it’s an institution.

Of course, these are just my picks for the quick and dirty version of the James Bond franchise. Everyone’s got their own opinions as to the best Bond movies to give you a condensed version of the franchise, and I hope to see them all in the comments!

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

So apparently the big thing in hot American restaurant desserts is “crack pie,” which commands $44 per pie. Because I was intrigued, I made it for a dinner party we had last night.

It is basically a giant butter tart with a cookie crust rather than a pastry shell. I’m not gonna lie: the cookie crust definitely adds something to it. Of course, I knew that the first time I made cookie-crust butter tarts, which was maybe a decade ago.

In short, we did it first and we didn’t pretend it was worth $44 per pie, because that is not how Canada rolls.

Well, we’ve definitely had a banner week here at the site with all the image-looking (and some leeching, which I’m not too happy about and have to work on), so now that Alignment Chart Week is over, it seems like an ideal time to point out the old Amazon wishlist, for those so inclined to make holiday purchases, or alternately there is always the Paypal button at right.

Donations to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association are good too, although I would like an iPad and I bet I would make the world a better place with it, and so forth.