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Here are a few pictures of us getting ready for Christmas.  We put up the tree and were a little relieved that Brendan still can’t quite crawl.  He can look at the tree and say “oh!” but that’s about it.  He really likes the train we put around the bottom of the tree.  We helped my mom put up her tree and took a picture of us and the cousins in front of it.  We also took a family picture in front of our tree.  We do this every year because we put the family picture in an ornament/frame and hang it on the tree.  Adam and I have discussed doing these family picture ornaments since we got married.  This is the first year they made it onto the tree.  It’s only been twelve years.  In our family picture, Jonathan is wearing the suit that he got when he was baptized.  He’s pretty close to being too big for it already.  We also had to teach Jonathan how to smile for this photo.  We had to practice not having the “crazy eyes” and the “glued on smile” that screamed, “I’m frozen in this position!”  He cried a little as we taught him this.  That’s why his eyes are just so darn “sparkly.”  Marissa is wearing the dress I made for her to match the headband in her hair.  Brendan is wearing the same off-white sweater that Jonathan wore at his age.  I can’t believe that we caught one where everyone is looking at the camera.

I’ve read three or four blog posts around the web recently that detail people putting up Christmas decorations. They all seem to have an air of guilt about using artificial Christmas trees. What’s the deal? A decent artificial tree runs around $200. A decent real tree runs around $30. That’s a 7 year payback if you don’t count the added cost in headaches of dealing with a real tree. Are they worried about the environment? Do people actually throw away their old fake trees? Growing up I’m pretty certain we had the same fake tree for about 15 years, maybe more and it got donated to a needy family when we were done. The first 8 or 9 years we were married we used a tree that was donated to us after serving for at least a dozen years in other capacities. I certainly don’t plan on throwing ours away for a long long time, and I will definitely recycle it when the time comes. Maybe I’ve missed the boat, but I stand proud and tall, just like my 7.5 foot imitation spruce.

While we were driving in the car to Nana’s, the kids were talking about stars.  Marissa suddenly said, “If you take away the ’s’ on star, it says ‘tar’.”

“Good job, honey,” I replied.

Then Jonathan chimed in with, “if you add a ‘d’ to the end of ‘tar’ it says, ‘tard’.”

Adam and I began to giggle.

“And,” he continued, “if you add an ‘er’ to that, it says ‘tarder’.”

Adam looked at me and said, “What’s more than a tard? Tarder.”

Erica took me to Quantum of Solace last Friday night as a late birthday present. We saw it at Larry H Miller’s Megaplex Theater at Thanksgiving Point. We’ve seen several movies there lately and can I just say how impressed I am with his theaters? They are well designed technically (Save for the digital projection, which I still have not managed to get used to. Doesn’t anyone else see the pixels?) so the experience of watching a movie is top notch, but the real killer feature is reserved seating. We bought our tickets online a few days ahead, chose the seats we wanted, right in the middle of the theater, went to dinner at Thanksgiving Point and then entered the theater about ten minutes before showtime, retrieved our tickets from the kiosk and went to our seats. No waiting in endless lines on premier night, FTW! Erica and I had the same experience watching Mamma Mia at the Thanksgiving Point theater and Jon and I saw The Dark Knight in IMAX at the Jordan Commons theater that way. Kudos to Mr. Miller for removing my biggest gripe from the theater experience.

Now that I’ve covered the theater, as far as the movie is concerned I went in with both high expectations after Casino Royale and low expectations after reading a couple of reviews and a smattering of fan reactions online. Quantum of Solace would have worked as a generic action movie. I can see it easily as a one-off, like The Rundown, or even as part of a sort of internationalized Die Hard-type franchise. It’s not worthy of being called a James Bond movie, and it’s especially unworthy as a successor to Casino Royale.

First off, the quick cutting has got to stop. I don’t know what the average seconds per shot was in the pre-titles scene, but it has to be somewhat less than the 2 seconds per shot average the The Bourne Ultimatum achieved, and that movie made some people sick in the theaters. The opening scene of Quantum is a car chase through the Italian Alps. It would have been ages better with even just a couple of wide, 8 or 9 second establishing shots thrown in as the cars careen around precarious curves set atop 100 foot high cliffs. As it is, it’s extremely difficult to understand what’s going on inside the cars or when the vehicles are seen maneuvering around each other.

The opening titles song by Alicia Keys has been much maligned across the web, so I won’t repeat any of that here. Suffice to say it is less than memorable at best, and complete drek at middle.

After the titles we’re treated to a foot chase under the ongoing Palio di Siena and across the rooftops and through the houses of that beautiful city. Of course, it’s cut so quickly that it’s near impossible to tell who is chasing whom and how far ahead the chasee is at any given moment. Some of the stunts were ingeniously put together, and evidently Daniel Craig performed many of them himself, but you’d have to watch it in slow motion to really appreciate the work he and the crew did. Erica’s comment was “Can’t they at least put one of them in a light colored suit so we can tell who’s who?” Hear, hear.

I could go on and on, but how about something positive? I like a couple of the throwbacks to previous Bond traditions, like the gathering of the baddies out in the open at a packed opera performance, and the bad guy’s lair (a pretty pathetic lair, however) exploding around him as he has a final duel with Bond, and the pretty local operative with a colorful name sent to escort Bond from the airport. The problem with that one, however, was that they never revealed her full name (Strawberry Fields) in the dialogue. You’d have to watch the credits to get the joke, and who, besides Erica and I, stayed to watch the credits?

What the film really lacked in comparison to Casino Royale, though, was the wonderfully slow and deliberately paced character building scenes. I missed Bond just chatting with his co-stars like he did his last time out. The filmmakers need to put a little more trust in their audience. Don’t force feed us quite so much exposition. We’ll figure out the plot on our own, just give us a hint or two every few minutes. Don’t spend quite so much time on mindless action. We know Bond can best just about anybody if you give him enough time.

When we walked out of the theater I had to do a double take when I looked at my watch. The showtime was 7pm and even after seeing trailers up front and staying through the credits, we were back in the car by 9:00. Quantum of Solace is 38 minutes shorter than Casino Royale.  It clocks in at 106 minutes, making it the shortest Bond film yet. I think it suffers for that. I want to know what was cut out. Was it the very element I missed? Maybe they shot those scenes and they just didn’t work. Maybe they listened to the couple of whiners on the internet who complained that Casino was too long? Hopefully we’ll get some idea of that when Quantum is released on DVD. In any case, I was disappointed even considering my lowered expectations going in.

I wanted to post some pictures of the kids all dressed up for church. I thought they looked very sharp together. Miles wouldn’t smile and when I asked Savanna to give Miles a kiss for one of the pictures, she smothered him! But at least you can see her cute hair that took me awhile and a lot of “hold still!” comments from me. I also wanted to share an experience we had the previous day. We attend the baptism of Austin Anderson, his dad Ben has been James’ best friend since they were kids. First of all it makes me feel very old that someone I went to high school with has a child old enough to be baptized! But secondly, it just goes to show how far we come in life and how quickly it goes by. The baptism was wonderful and Austin seemed very happy and proud to be baptized. He is such a nice kid and he loves little kids and tried to talk to and play with Savanna, of course she was putting on her I’m shy act, but it was cute anyway. It was a stake baptism, so of course there were several children being baptized. Their stake primary president (or counselor, I’m not sure) gave a talk on the Holy Ghost. To my surprise Savanna must have been listening because she said to me, what’s that mom? I said, the Holy Ghost?  Yeah, she says. So I told her that when you get older and dad baptizes you, you will get the gift of the Holy Ghost to help you feel safe and happy. She looked at me for a minute and said, no, I don’t want that. Oh well, I tried!

Sam only has one more soccer game left in the season so we thought we’d better hurry and get some pictures. This was from their game on Saturday. Sam in the middle of the action

Sam had a hard time getting the ball at the beginning of the season because he’s not naturally aggressive and physical. I think he’s got the hang of it now 🙂

Go…Purple Team!