This is more or less the last “real” Friday of 2009-and the decade!-as next week begins the annual process of half-assing your way to the holidays. E-mails will go unanswered, work will be put off until the depressing post-New Year’s return, and even the most minimal of efforts will seem somehow superhuman. So a quick note to those of you who still have jobs out there: You might want to sneak out early. Like right now. Because today’s pretty much the last day they can lay you off, and they probably won’t do it if you’re not there. Let’s meet at a bar somewhere and celebrate, this urinary tract infection of a year is ALMOST OVER.

Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) will retire next year after spending nearly a quarter century in the upper chamber, but if this video is any indication he is already running out the clock. Because, seriously, could he have made LESS of an effort on this thing? He could have made a big doody in the middle of the floor, pointed to it, and said, “See that? That’s what I don’t give about this video” and we would have gotten the point more quickly.

The rebound starts at the top, thanks to this year’s massive stock market gains of the last three quarters (the Dow: up 4000 since March). And so: “Finance foot soldiers expect payouts that will ‘make up’ for the anemic year-end checks of 2008.” Thank God they’ve recovered from the recession! Don’t worry, it’ll trickle down in ’10. Or not.

by Daisy Klaber

14. Doorbells
13. Silver-white winters that melt into springs
12. Cream-colored ponies
11. Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
10. Raindrops on roses
9. Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
8. Warm woolen mittens
7. Sleigh bells
6. Whiskers on kittens
5. Crisp apple streudels
4. Bright copper kettles
3. Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
2. Brown-paper packages tied up with string
1. Schnitzel with noodles

Previously: The 30 Best Punk Songs Since 1979 Available on YouTube, In Order

This movie makes me emo. Thinking about it makes my nose do that chloriney thing you get right before you start crying. I am SO GAY for this movie that I can’t stand it. And you know what? Having finally seen it, I don’t even care what the haters have to say. I am a happy meniscus that your spite sauce slides off of. I’m lifted.

I waited three hours in July San Diego sun to watch 27 minutes of this movie. I had to cross the street from the convention center to where the line serpentined to the water by the Hilton to catch the Cameron panel at Comic Con. I sat ON GRASS next to a very nice but distinctly aromatic 19-year-old quasi Juggalo who worked in human resources at a tech firm and wanted to talk the whole time to get my ass into Hall H and my eyeballs behind some 3D specs and I’ll tell you what, it was worth it.

I have zero idea why they bothered with a trailer. It confounded me that they then rolled out the extended trailer, almost as if they’d anxiously detected the ire with which the first trailer was received. That fools had the gall to even BEGIN to form noisy opinions about the movie based on some analog shitstain smearing across their janky computer screens made me want to smash and kill. I was even mad at the movie for being such a pussy as to question its own awesome.

I can’t even tell you how insane I feel trying to rock up a buncha words to ya’ll in some sufficiently synergistic configuration that’ll convey what makes this movie so rad. I feel ridiculously ill-equipped. It’s a joke. The words don’t have one million motion-capture dots on its face with a squillion teeny cameras trained on just their eyeball areas with the whole thing plunged into a gigantic motion-capture volume set. The words won’t peel their skins off and spazz for you in waves and particles and alchemy and phosphorescent flowermagic and hypercolored superdinosaurs and I feel shameface about it because they’d need to ferry a petabyte of information to properly get my point across. I feel like I’m trying to tell you in mashed potato.

“Avatar” is staggering. It’s seismic. Evolutionarily speaking it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap. Punctuating the balls outta equilibrium. Think about it: You can’t bit torrent this shit. And even if some very industrious pillager cops the glasses and figures out how to do it in the way it was intended to be seen, that person is a hope rapist that should be shot in the face for dream treason because James Cameron and a gang of wizards made this beautiful, beautiful thing for us-in 2009 of all years. We should ALL hold hands about it.

Yes, the Na’vi look like giant Matthew Lillards (and circa “Hackers” too, since there is long hair involved). Sure, the dialog has the subtlety of dubbed German porn and granted, the narrative is basically a cave drawing of a mother and child since it better make sense in Kerala as well as Kansas but here’s why THIS DIRECTOR, your man who sat there in that pulsing convention hall at SDCC with his grown-out silvered skaterdude hair, was the one to make this movie: James Cameron is a fanboy.

A fanboy’s heart is filled with love, enthusiasm, and insecurity. Duly, he flexes the SHIT out of the technology. Cameron waited 15 years to get it right and grabs you by the neck and takes you on an EPIC tour. He starts with the rinkydink usual chicanery-some “Final Destination” shit-making things fly towards you. He moves us through lucite. He shows us holographic computer interfaces where you can just grab something from your screen with your hand to slide-copy it onto a tablet. Whatevs, “Minority Report” OS 2.0 zzzzzzzzzzzz.

But then he shows us Pandora. This planet that he made for us. And it overshadows every suspension bridge, pyramid, and skyscraper all at the same time because I swear to God, THIS is what makes me want to have a kid. And I love bridges. I want to get to be the one who adds this to their source material. I want them to draw from it when figuring out what to love about life. And I want that love to determine their life’s work. THIS IS MOVIES KICKING VIDEO GAMES’ ASS.

As a shit-ton critics have already described there is incandescent flora and a Pantone seizure of fauna. They’re pretty great. You should check them out. It’s an insanely tactile experience that makes me wish they could score it not just with music but a sequence of smells. There are sparkling waterfalls and because Cameron knew we’d love to, he lets us careen through, past, and underneath them on mythic FLYING creatures in this reality where everyone gets their own special one and there are these mountains that have been magically uprooted (though it’s a terrestrial and myopic failing to consider that they’d ever have to be grounded) that are breathtaking to almost crash into when you get to be the hula hoop to the supine floating magician’s assistant and poke around to see if there’s fishing wire.

The locals are awesome. They’re tall and have these spooky braids that have tentacles that curl out and do synaptic axon/dendrite neurotransmitty stuff but like in alien. They do it to animals and plants except they don’t do it to each other which is weird because I’d bet it would feel like sexdrugs. We don’t get to see them actually mate which sucks and we don’t get to see a pregnant one which also sucks because that would’ve been neat. But we do get to see some babies. They’re cute.

They have clear tears but it’s hard to tell and I don’t know what color their blood is. They have a language that the human dorks will adopt. Their eyes emote like ours. It would be hard to break up with one because you can totally tell what they’re feeling. You might have to text message it to them. They have this tree made of souls and light and God and it’s a big deal. There is a battle of dinosaurs vs. robots. I have nothing more to add to that sentence because you’re dead inside if you can’t get what’s cool about that.

Here’s the nut. You know the best part of the superhero narrative? The part where the hero discovers the power and learns to use it and you get to be along for the ride and it’s the funnest thing ever like when Spider-Man first goes flinging himself allover Queens? Well, that’s Queens. This is that, times a billion. It’s on another fucking planet, and the whole thing goes on for almost 3 hours and short circuits your brain because your mind’s eye has NO IDEA what’s happening because this is the glamour of its life. If there was a button that I could push that would agog my brain to the level that I felt first seeing “Avatar” in its entirety and another one for food pellets, I would die of starvation.

The secret to my stunning efficiency: “A new study has found that while drinking a lot of bourbon can cause a worse hangover than drinking a lot of vodka, impairment in people’s next-day task performance is about the same for both beverages.” No word yet on which liquor causes you to make poorer decisions, but I’m sure they’ll do a follow-up. [Via]

This VOLUMINOUS interview with “Wire” creator David Simon contains several spoilers, so if, like some people we know, you’re still working your way through the show, you might want to save it for later. The rest of you are all clear.

‘Avatar’ Part 2, with David Cho: Who Remembers ‘District 9’?

So as not to be confusing: I definitely think you should go see Avatar as soon as you can, if only because of what it does visually by creating a completely new world that is really amazing-especially the 3D, it’s all very, very cool and mind blowing! That being said (SORRY LARRY DAVID AND/OR JERRY SEINFELD), when watching Avatar, I was never really invested in any of the characters or emotionally compelled by what was happening on the screen. I walked away thinking that I had never seen anything like that ever in a movie, while at the same time also very reminded of another movie from this year, that did a lot of what I thought Avatar tried to do but with much better results: Neill Blomkamp’s District 9.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. I swear I’m really not. I completely agree with all of what’s being said about how much of an EXPERIENCE it all is, but here are my main qualms with Avatar:

1) The characters are a bit like what you would expect from the characters of the Squaresoft-era Final Fantasy series circa the late 90’s (think Final Fantasy III/VI), which is fine if you’re a Super Nintendo game, but less so if you’re being lauded as one of the greatest movies ever.

2) The dialogue-well, there’s a lot of times where what the characters say sounds like what a foreign person probably thinks an American would say in the various situations-especially the military dialogue.

3) Both of those things conspire to really telegraph where the story’s headed. (Obviously the articulation of that resolution is a really gorgeous sequence of events.)

In a lot of ways, Avatar and District 9’s plots are pretty similar, especially in how they’re structured. Without giving too much away (NO SPOILERS FOR EITHER MOVIE AHEAD!), both movies deal with the unlikely protagonist and audience being thrust into an already existing world of foreign creatures and the situation forces the hero to grow and change accordingly. The main difference however, is how much tension District 9 and its characters created. You care about what they’re all experiencing, and a lot of times are even conflicted because there are so many different emotions in play. Whereas with Avatar, particularly at the slower, dramatic bits, I caught myself just marveling at how interesting and cool the really specific details of this new world were-and not really giving two hoots about what the characters going through.

There are more than a few comparable moments in the movie, but one of the most similar ones is found in the last hour of both movies. At this moment, there’s a lot at stake for the characters involved in both movies, and they’re both visually incredible and impressive, but one film has great tension and the other doesn’t. If Avatar is a fairy tale, then District 9 is a home movie.

It’s questionably relevant to have a bias like this, but while Avatar’s production budget was somewhere between $250 and $350 million dollars, District 9 was produced for something like a tenth of that: just $30 million. And while Avatar does not waste any of that money, District 9 looks much, much more expensive than it is. A lot of comparable movies from this year with a lot more money, have looked much, much worse. (Terminator Salvation, production budget: $200 million).

Sidebar: I watched a “making of” Avatar piece on 60 Minutes after I had seen the movie, and while watching, I didn’t realize how much of the CGI’d characters faces were taken from the facial movements of the actual actors. I was especially confused/surprised/bewildered when I saw sensors all over Zoe Saldana’s face, because she is about 500 gajillion times hotter in real life than her on-film blue-person counterpart. Just saying.

So all I’m trying to say is this: go see Avatar and really be amazed that technology and James Cameron have put a lot of time and work into creating a really photorealistic future that is unlike anything you’ve ever seen and appreciate it for that. But you know what else? Go check out District 9 again, or maybe for the first time, and enjoy that spectacular movie too.

Um, this is one you’re probably just going to have to read for yourselves, but here’s a taste: “[A] barefoot man wearing a barrel and a Santa’s hat threw red paint on the front of the ‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’ sign and black paint on the back of it.” Also: The man-named Joe Pepitone, although presumably not that one-”who was half-naked, said he had lost his job and gambling winnings.” And: “Pepitone tripped and cried after defacing the sign, and he complained of ear ringing, so an ambulance transported him to a local hospital for treatment.” Okay!

The opinionated nutcracker enthusiasts over at Topless Robot rank the nerdiest holiday nutcrackers.