MOVIE: Klaus (2019)

KlausYear: 2019Rating: PGLength: 96 minutes / 1.60 hours It’s weird to me how many Christmas movies there are out there, and how few of them are any good. Fortunately, we now have a little gem with Klaus (2019). Animated in a beautiful 2D-esque style that uses 3D CGI as its base, Klaus works backward from what we understand as the current lore surrounding Santa Claus and develops a heartwarming story to explain all the little impossibilities that tie to the Yule tradition. And while it hits mostly predictable story beats, certain moments had me tearing up. What makes Klaus different from the rest of the Christmas-themed animated fare is that there seems to have been plenty of care devoted to the artistry of the visuals. It seems like most modern animated Christmas movies skimp on quality just to get something out to cash in on the holiday. The characters and character designs are unique and fitting to the story this movie is...
Read More

BOOK: A War of Gifts (2007)

A War of Gifts Year: 2007 Author: Orson Scott Card Length: 145 minutes / 2.42 hours Side stories are a somewhat odd occurrence in the literary world. They’re essentially like the “deleted scenes” from movies: they don’t add to the plot, even if they are interesting by themselves. A War of Gifts is a side story to Ender’s Game that finds the reader back at the battle school during Ender Wiggin’s training period. While Ender’s Game is a tight piece of science fiction, with no room for a Santa Claus sup-plot, A War of Gifts does require some knowledge of the source material in order to understand this sub-plot. I am always in awe of Orson Scott Card’s ability to take some of the most basic ideas and make them the most profound, most philosophically-intriguing debates. In the case of A War of Gifts, we have a fundamentalist Christian who was taught that the more commercial aspects of Christmas (like Santa Claus, for instance) are...
Read More