in town, no-one can hear you huff impatiently

One of the things I always enjoyed about christmas shopping as a child was the mental and physical challenge of going to EVERY possible shop on Lincoln's high street several times to compare things/prices/availability then doing a final sweep of everything as closing-time neared to get the chosen items. It was fun dodging in and out of the slower-moving old people at an extremely fast walk, plotting a course through the constantly-shifting crowds and calculating routes, things to avoid and so on.

It's still just as much fun now.

Almost every major person be-presented in one day is reasonably satisfying even if three of them were on the internet at the end of the day after the real shops didn't have the correct things. All things which need to be posted are now bought, most of them are wrapped and all the manual snailmail cards have been found or bought and mostly written and mostly stamped and addressed. Even Nicky's mum's birthday present is ready to post on Monday for her inconveniently christmas-proximal birthday. To think some people get in a flap because they haven't started their shopping by the end of September...

Popped to see Beowulf: into the z-axis in the evening seeing as a few people and Empire reckoned the 3D version to be worth seeing. They were almost right; if you live near an IMAX I'd give it a go there but on a small big screen the effect was sometimes a little bit cheap-eighties-sweetie-packet-hologram-sticker with a few distinct layers though the rotating-viewpoint intricate interaction bits with lots of fingers were OK. There were a couple of obviously-deliberate "OOOOOH"-attempts such as things being flung at the screen, zooming back through branches and one bit with a bloke holding an apparently gyroscopically-stabilised spear an inch from the virtual camera. I've never seen a standard two-colour 3D film so have nothing to compare the non-aligned-polarisation technique with but it would certainly be interesting to see it on a live-action film (or even a decent CG animation, particularly if Lucas ever fulfils the rumour of re-doing some of the CG space battle bits in 3D-IMAX). Without the 3D I'm not sure it would have been particularly watchable; whilst they'd obviously spent a lot of time on some of the intricately-textured mo-cap facial sequences there were lots of horribly wooden pre-Shrek-1-era rubbery faces and mechanical horses. The Queen's face was particularly unlifelike though 'Opkin's digital eye-creasings were rather well-done. The beastie was quite good though its mother a little odd; one has to wonder why anyone would build horrible siliconèd lips into a CG model. As for the accents... a couple of people had gone for Standard Odd Ancient (as strangely employed by the likes of David Wenham in LotR and 300), heavens only knows what Malkovich was aiming for but it worked quite well, 'Opkins stuck to Welsh (maybe that's what Danes used to sound like) but Winstone's mockney just sounded daft.