Javier is awesomely, creepily evil. But he wasn’t the most evil thing in the theater.

Every year I try to get ready for the Oscars by seeing as many of the nominated films and performances as I can. The Oscar noms aren’t released until February, but you can often anticipate what they’ll be, especially with the help of the Golden Globe and SAG nominations. Getting Oscar ready is my favorite thing about the early weeks of the new year. It’s what keeps my evenings overloaded and my Netflix queue overflowing. It’s what allows me to stop being so sad that Christmas is over. It’s what makes me get really annoyed that independent films almost never come to theaters in Corncob, PA!

My headstart began over the Christmas break when James, Kris, Jackie, and I went to see No Country For Old Men. The movie was fantastic, probably the best I’ve seen all year. Josh Brolin was awesome, Tommy Lee Jones was great, and Javier Bardem will be giving me nightmares for weeks. He clearly deserves an Oscar. Clearly.

But all this is beside the point. The point is, that it is evil, EVIL to talk in movie theaters. As my cousins and I sat in the darkened theater, enjoying the Coen Brothers’ latest offering, we heard the unwelcome sound of a voice behind us. I immediately recognized the sound of evil. A woman, on her cell phone, was saying, “Call me back. My number is 412-6…” I didn’t hear the rest of her number because I too busy hissing, “Shhhhhhhh!!!!” She took her voice down a notch, but she continued the call. She. Continued. The. Call.

Evil.

Upon later analysis, my cousins and I realized that she did not receive that call in the theater. She placed that call. If she had received it, she wouldn’t have had to give her number to person on the other end. So, not only did she place a call in a movie theater, she solicited a return call IN THE THEATER. These are the kinds of people we should have detained in Guantanamo Bay!

Jackie said that I should have sat there quietly, listened to her phone number, and then called her phone to tell her to shut it. I can just imagine it now. “Hello. You don’t know me. I’m calling from the left side of the theater, about five rows up, and I just want to tell you to shuuuut uuuuup! And that you belong in an internment camp in Cuba.”

That would have been classic, but my urge to shush has no patience. It seeks out noise and pounces on it. And until we have the good sense to lock up these evildoers somewhere where they can’t pose a threat to society, I’ll be here, shushing away.

Once

I finally got to see the film “Once.” This film is impossibly beautiful. Just impossibly beautiful. It’s one of those rare, perfect little films that trips into your life and makes you so happy you found it. And it’s filled with music that’s so lovely, it pierces you. This was a marvelous cinematic start to 2008.

Simply perfect.

Impossibly beautiful.

Happy New Year.

It makes an excellent addition to your Festivus celebration, as well.

Why is is that all the really good things are only available to us at Christmastime? Lit up houses, 24-hour marathons of brilliant movies, free days off for non-essential federal workers courtesy of our generous Commander-in-Chief? (I totally got Christmas Eve off and I love it!)

Well now there's one more item to add to the list: Starbuck's Limited Edition Dark Chocolate Peppermint Mocha Frappuccino. I purchased a four-pack last night, frankly, because I liked the red on the packaging. What a brilliant decision on my part! This stuff is a Christmas delight. Rich chocolate, refreshing peppermint, and more caffeine than you could shake a stick at with your jittery hands. Go now! Get some!

And to all those people who think Starbucks is trying to take over the world, I say let them. As long as they provide me with delicious, caffeinated treats, I will happily be their robot slave.

Apparently the Chinese think I'm selfish

So here's the fortune I got with my sweet and sour chicken tonight:

"Perhaps you've been focusing too much on yourself."

What the crap?

Oh man, I got so played.

So I was trolling the Sci Fi channel website, trying to find out when they're going to supply me with a new season of BSG, and I saw a preview for a TV movie, Tin Man, a modern take on the Wizard of Oz. It looked interesting and I like Zooey Deschanel and I really like Neal McDonough, so I decided to check it out. Things were going smoothly, but as I approached the two-hour mark, and I started to get this feeling, like "Hmmm, how are they going to wrap this up in the next few minutes?"

You know that feeling. Nothing good ever comes of that feeling. That feeling immediately precedes the "To Be Continued" screen. So I was annoyed that it was a two nighter thing, but I somehow got sucked into the second night anyway. Imagine my shock, nay, my horror, when it all happened again. I was approaching the four-hour mark, and that awful feeling came back. I sat up on the couch and shrieked, "How can they be doing this to me again!" I checked the TV guide, found that the third night was the last, and buckled down to invest two more hours, because I was not prepared to cut my losses. After four hours I deserved to see how it ended.

Well, my long national nightmare is finally over, and now I realize that I just invested six hours, six hours in something that wasn't all that great. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great, or even terribly good. That's time I could have invested a repeat viewing of Pride and Prejudice, or half of Band of Brothers, or 12 consecutive viewings of that episode of Sports Night where Isaac takes Luther Sachs to task on the air for supporting a university that flies the Confederate Flag. Oh man, that episode is so, so good.

And now I find out that the new season of BSG isn't coming until March, when I was previously promised January. Oh Sci Fi, you got me good. You played me like a cheap piano. I hope you're proud of yourself!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that annoying dead people should stay dead.

Okay, Heroes people. This is simply not fair. For so long I've been waiting for a certain annoying someone to finally bite it, and just when it looked as though that someone was gone from my TV forever, you had to revive that certain someone with some magic blood. (I promise, potential viewers, the storylines on this show are actually better than I'm making them sound.) That is not fair! You can't kill someone and make me do the happy dance and then just undo it all. It's just not right.

I've been waiting for that fake accent to make everything good again...

So I finally got caught up on all the Heroes episodes I missed while in Europe. Do you all remember when I squealed and squee-ed and was just generally obnoxious in my delight that David Anders was guesting on Heroes? And then I asked if it was possible that he could become a regular character and fabulously evil? (Well, I did. I said it. It’s all right there in a previous post.) Anyway, to quote Penny Lane, it’s all happening! David is out of 1600s Japan (don’t ask), into the present day, looking like a regular character, and totally being evil. At the same time, the second season of Heroes has finally ceased to suck. Coincidence? Doubtful.

It makes me wonder if I have predictive powers. Very specific predictive powers, applicable only to snarky British characters.