I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
Till ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,� I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.�
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.�
Adapted from “Christmas Bells” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Just like 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, Superbad starts off as a silly comedy before slowly transforming into a really sweet film, this time about male friendship and leaving boyhood behind.
A bit dopey after the high water mark set by Ocean’s 11. They also squander some of their amazing backdrops — if you’re actually going to drop the crazy money to film at Lake Como, show us Lake Como!
Jenn, who is a big Bea Arthur fan (probably the only 30 year old who can say that), recently rented this DVD set from Netflix. It’s a bit dated, but still very funny stuff.
But, wow, how many spin-offs did All in the Family have? The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times, Archie Bunker’s Place I knew, but Wikipedia also says there were three more. Norman Lear is like the Chris Claremont of sitcoms.
I admit, I was nervous about Joss returning to Buffy. Not because I haven’t been eager for his return to the Buffyverse, far from it. But I didn’t really love Angel (too campy, too many cheap-looking sets, too much soap opera, too much focus on sunlit fantasy instead of gloomy horror) and didn’t know which Joss we were going to get here.
It turns out that Season 8 holds up to the best of the original series and is substantially better, in pacing, theme and tone, than the last few seasons. We jump forward in time (apparently about a year) from the 2003 end of the series, find out how much of what we thought we knew about Buffy’s fate from the final season of Angel was true and immediately plunge into a new saga that both spins out of what’s come before and stands alone as something new and different.
The dialogue is letter-perfect, as it should be, the art is almost perfect (Jeanty, strangely, can’t draw a recognizable Andrew, and it took a phone call sequence for me to figure out who he was supposed to be) and Joss uses the unlimited special effects of comics to give us otherworldly menaces with nary a rubber suit in sight.
The worst part of this TPB is that the wait for the next volume will be so long. But that’s a good problem to have.
Unreservedly recommended to fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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