Let’s all gather around the fake tree – the tattered Tannenbaum that no one will want to take down in January – and pretend we can’t wait to watch “A Christmas Story” for 24 straight hours on tbs. Fah-ra-ra-ra-ra.

It’s that time of year, when people stress out over their obligations to attend endless holiday traditions. A cursory glance at any local publication will reveal a festive season filled with so many freaking festive festivities that the Trans-Siberian Orchestra could barely hold a pyrotechnic laser beam to it.

How many festive open houses and festive holiday tours of festive decorated homes and mansions and historic landmarks can a person endure in three festive weeks?

How much spiked eggnog does it take to withstand another presentation of “The Nutcracker” or “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and God forbid your kid gets the part of a rapping Scrooge in the new drama teacher’s hip version of “A Christmas Carol.”  Has anyone ever not slept through “Handel’s Messiah?” Really? Bite me, Cousin Eddie.

What is the new holiday tradition this year? Flashing Santa. Yeah, Jerry Springer style. Then there is the “Ms. Santa Lingerie Fest.” And you can’t have your Christmas cookies without the pushed-up, wing-sprouting, Victoria’s Secret Christmas Fashion Show. No wonder the old fat man is so damned jolly.

There are so many Christmas parades the cops must be ready to pull out the 9 mm and uncork a six pack into Santa and his band of festive trolls waving to freezing families and hucksters selling inflatable candy canes and white, fuzzy-balled caps. Tensions run especially high at these parades. Do not pretend you have never elbowed a little kid so you could snap a shot of your old high school band playing “Deck The Halls.” I saw you do it.

Yesterday, in downtown Richmond, an angry guy with his sullen family struggled for a place beside Broad Street while and angry woman with senior citizen parents hogged the sidewalk, blocking his view. He finally yelled, “Go F#@! yourself!” His F-word was not “festive.” Nor was her response.

Of course every town has its own version of a tacky light tour where people who bitch about their electric bill all year try to max out the meter in one month while others who bitch about traffic all year happily endure snarls just to see an inflatable Santa swell up next to Rudolph humping a snowman out by the mailbox.

Just when you thought you had…oh, wait I have to go. Chevy Case is about to utter the most festive of holiday sermons from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation:

“Hey. If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I’d like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here…with a big ribbon on his head! And I want to look him straight in the eye, and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?”

If you have ever lived in certain parts of the South for any length of time, spend two hours watching this movie. If you have never lived down here, spend those same two hours getting acquainted with the landscape.

Winter’s Bone is proof that all you need to make a great film is a great story and people who know how to tell it. It should win more than Sundance.

If you haven’t seen Social Network, go now. Go tonight. Go tomorrow. It’s a heartwarming tale of genius and greed and betrayal, brilliantly written, directed and acted. No doubt, there will be soon be movies that examine Napster’s start (a bit of it is covered in Social Network), YouTube, Google and Apple.

In watching Mr. Zuckerberg’s behavior, both in real life and on the screen, it is not his eccentricities that stand out. In fact, I began to realize about halfway through the picture that it is really not about Zuckerberg at all. It is about us – all 500,000 of us and how fast we are willing to change every aspect of our lives to follow an idea.

Like Edison and his light bulb, eventually the idea’s birth and the inventor’s actions fade in the wake of the millions of people who are affected by the cultural shift that follows in the wake of the invention. Facebook is only six years old. YouTube is a year younger. Google is not much older than either. Apple is ancient in this new universe. By next year, something new will take a little more of our daily time.

Whatever you may think of him, in Zuckerberg, we see a piece of ourselves. In Facebook, you literally see every piece of us all, splayed out for people who may or may not really be our friends. Is it not irony that a person so socially inept could create something that forever changes the definition of “friend?”

The packed theater darkens. There are no previews. What flows across the screen appears to be 1930’s Tennessee. Accents like the ones I grew up with in Alabama pour from the Dolby speakers. My mind returns to the storytellers I grew up with, old men with ragged beards and the smell of dried sweat and Prince Albert tobacco ironed into their clothes by fourteen-hour days in Southern humidity. An old woman’s voice, not from the movie, but from my childhood, wanders through my mind to set the tone for what I am about to see long before the director gets his chance to spin his tale.

“There ain’t no stories like a lie well told around the truth,” she said as I drank warm scuppernong juice on her front porch while chickens pecked at dirt and a half-dead dog slept under the house. I have known people like this all of my life.

Robert Duvall plays Felix Bush, a real-life rural recluse who goes to an undertaker looking for a funeral party, an event he wants to attend before he dies, just to hear what people say about him – and perhaps to hear what he will say himself. The portrayal reminds me far too much of my grandfather to make the movie seat comfortable. His clipped language delivered through ZZ-Top-ish facial hair and his subtle gestures grounded in sedate passion pushed by desperate regret make me think the old man may be holding a statue instead of that shotgun by Oscar time. I respect the film too much to tell you too much about it. I’ll say the trailer above doesn’t do it justice.

“Get Low,” starring an 80 year-old Duvall and a very different Bill Murray as well as Sissy Spacek and a drawling Lucas Black, is a wonderful story if you can find it playing at a theater near you. And you may not. I had to drive to Northern Virginia from Richmond to see it. When a man is willing to torture himself for six hours driving back and forth on one of the most snarled sections of I-95, it is a testimony to how good the experience is. When was the last time you watched a movie and no one moved until the final credit scrolled and the lights came up? Everyone, including me, sat there, not a word, silence, just people sitting, starring straight ahead, savoring what they just seen. And what they had seen was very likely Robert Duvall’s last movie. After a long career playing some of the most memorable characters in the business, “Get Low” was a good one to go out on. It was especially nice to see a director, actors and a production company with the balls to forego millions in special effects to let their film live on the merits of a damned good story.

The new high-end LED/LCD, 3D HDTV’s are ruining my old school eyes, but not in a painful way. It is delightfully devious retina ruination, an eye-opening bite of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, like in Genesis. Instead of a snake, however, you are tempted by a remote – four of them, actually. A machine like the Samsung 55-incher is a peek behind the wizard’s curtain, a look up a tragically famous celebrity’s dress. I was blind, but now I see, and what I’m seeing has caused me to question everything I knew about visual entertainment.

When a movie like Public Enemies pours across the screen in such clarity that your nose bleeds from the sharpness, you know you have stepped into the next La-Z-Boy existence, a reality where the old concepts of film and grain and light are altered forever.

Coppola’s re-mastered Godfather films on Blu-ray take on a clarity, lushness and thickness last seen by Gordon Willis (Coppola’s DP) in a dark screening room as he squeezed the film fresh out of the canister. It looks like a completely different movie.

Wrap 7 Klipsch theater speakers tied to a 3-D Onkyo 7.2 channel network receiver around your head and that anger you felt earlier in the day at the office melts into a little puddle under your chair. I am sitting here now, barely able to type these words, as the Corleone Family does their dirty business in the most beautiful images I have ever seen, and I have seen this movie at least a hundred times. Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore. I have no idea where the hell we are, but I like it.

If you’re calculating what such a system will cost, just think about college football in 3-D. Just let that settle in for a few seconds before reading the next sentence. Think about Drew Brees throwing a tight spiral right through your living room, knocking over your beer and peanuts. There is Kobe draining a 3 in 3D from the top of the arc. Unspeakable imagery flows into my face from the screen and unexplainable sounds sneak into my ears from the speakers. It gets better – three years, no interest.  A few clicks on my Droid calculator assures me the whole set up costs less than eating fast food for lunch every day. So you get a great TV and feel better while watching it.

There is one drawback: the 3D glasses.

They work like a jacked-up border collie on a sheep farm, but I wear regular glasses all the time, so the idea of wearing two pairs of glasses is not exactly appealing, especially since the glasses I wear every day already help me to see life in 3D. With the digital glasses, I feel like LeVar Burton’s character, Geordi La Forge, on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Perhaps they will eventually have a 3D helmet where the entire visual/sound experience happens right around our heads.

I can see it now. We are all sitting around with our heads encased in brain cancer-causing 3D entertainment. I can’t wait.

I’m not going to mention the name of the movie we saw last weekend. It was on DVD and the title was intriguing and the picture on the case was an eye-puller. But this thing sucked. It sucked so hard I it pulled off one of my shoes. You have probably seen it. If not, you have seen several like it.

Movies are my family’s thing. We love them. Trolling Blockbuster is a biweekly event at our house. We can all watch a movie for about two bucks, compared to the $76 it costs to go to a theater.

“ Jumper. It’s Bourne meets the Matrix!”

In your mind right now, you can probably imagine exactly what is going to happen in this flick. I don’t even have to explain it. People want to see these weird combinations, like when Leno had Larry the Cable Guy, Russell Crowe, and Willie Nelson on the same show. It’s a train wreck of entertainment and we just can’t look away.

“It’s Saving Private Ryan meets Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner!”

Pathos and emotion oozes from that one doesn’t it?

“The Godfather meets The Simpson’s Movie!”

Even better. Homer makes an offer you can’t refuse.

“Mathew McConaughey meets Kate Hudson!”

Okay, there are about 10 of those out there, but wouldn’t you fork over $9.50 to see “Titanic meets The Sixth Sense” or “Rocky meets Tootsie!”?

Nothing goes better with a $6 soda and $9 tubs of 100-grams-of-fat-greased popcorn than “Bruce Lee meets Jackie Chan meets Jet Li meets Jason Statham meets Chuck Norris meets Ralph Macchio!” I can see that on several screens down at the multiplex – right next to “Gladiator meets Jaws, King Kong, and Jack Black at Adam Sandler’s house!” I’m swiping my Visa card to see that one, too.

Tell me you could resist “It’s the 40 Year-Old Virgin meets 300!”

I didn’t think so.

Let’s go for Boomers and imagine “Rambo meets The Bucket List!”

Sly stalks Jack and Morgan through a retirement village with a vengeance. “It’s Cocoon meets Nightmare On Elm Street!”

Or we cash in on some dirt: “It’s The Wild Bunch meets Platoon, starring Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.” If it sells tabloids, it will sell tickets.

This is how Hollywood makes movies these days. You walk into a studio and say, “It’s E.T. meets Goodfellas!” That’s all you have to do. Pick up your $100 mil budget at the front desk on your way out. Juxtapose two big box office movies on either end of the word “meets” and you have thirty agents and 19 directors jamming your Blackberry (if it’s working that day).

These people are wickedly busy eating tofu and getting Siberian massages, so it helps to have a star or two in mind to toss into the mix as well. Example:

“It’s A Wonderful Life meets Taxi Driver with Will Ferrell and Jessica Alba.”

You assemble some verbiage like that and you’ll have front row seats at the Oscars before you can say, “It’s Scarface meets Annie Hall!”

I tried to call several studios last week with some tantalizing combos and famous names.

“It’s Fargo meets Star Wars starring George Clooney!” No response. So I worked a little harder.

“It’s Easy Rider meets Dances With Wolves meets Fargo, Forrest Gump, and The French Connection meeting Silence Of The Lambs starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman, and David Hasselhoff!”

I got a call back from a guy who said he was Quentin Tarantino. We’re doing lunch next Friday.

There were also threats uttered by that same, disembodied voice from the projection booth. “If you don’t sit down and shut up, we will be forced to escort you out and call your parents to come get you.”

As serious as it sounded, that announcement never had its intended effect on the unruly perps in the back.

The Martin Theater was the only thing alive at night in Andalusia, Alabama, back then. The dank, curtained cave, fronted by fractured, angry neon and a lobby the size of an interstate rest stop gas station, but not as clean or aromatic, sat on the opposite side of the courthouse from the jail. I don’t believe this was a coincidence.

The theater hit you in the nose long before the movie reached your eyes. It smelled like Andrew Jackson’s men had urinated on the carpet in the early 1800s when they marched through Andalusia (giving the town its name) on their way to Pensacola. There was another odor, too. A pungent, Frito-feet funk emanated from the air ducts like a thousand little kids had stored their old shoes and socks up there.

The aroma of mildew was less rank than the week-old popcorn from last week and the unmistakable hint of deep-fried cockroach from nine minutes ago.

“It’s all protein,” said Mrs. Stroud, my biology teacher.

The slanted floor wasn’t just sticky from years of dropped gummy animals and soda spills, it was a biohazard of adhesive gunk that could suction off your Chuck Taylors no matter how tight you tied them. Every patron who entered knew better than to leave his or her feet still in one place unless they wanted to leave barefooted. A woman’s shoe was permanently attached to the floor in row 8, under seat 5. It probably belonged to a Civil War widow. It was filled to the brim with discarded wads of gum like a bowl of fondled mints at the checkout of a Chinese restaurant.

Hank Williams Sr. and Audrey probably saw movies there in the 1940s when they got married and lived in Andalusia. The red seats were the start of many a relationship that ended in marriage, divorce or death – and sometimes all three. My wife and I saw “Young Frankenstein” there on our first date.

It was rumored that a cat lived inside the darkness where the only light came bouncing from the screen from the old projector. Others swore it was a wharf rat with a hankering for sticky treats. My friend, Lewis, said it was a runt dog with a taste for stuck Chucks.

I saw something in the dark one night over in the right rear corner during “Paint Your Wagon.” It was either a squirrel or a woman’s coat collar, or a squirrel on a woman’s coat. It had a tail, I know that much. Only Eastwood’s tuneless rasp could wrench my attention away from a feral animal munching around loose in a theater.

Even with a taped-up rip in the screen and the rancid stank oozing from every row and the nightly hole that was burned in the film like the credits to Bonanza – I loved the place. It was my portal to the world of movies and people with heads the size of Ford Pintos, and I saw every single movie that rolled off its warped platters. Rachel Welch at 14 feet tall was a thing to behold to a 13-year-old boy in a textile-abandoned town.

No amount of determent could keep me out of that old theater. I even walked to it alone on a Tuesday night to see “Love Story.” Pathetically, I was the only person in the theater. The movie wasn’t very good but Ali McGraw’s eyes – as big as hubcaps – made the smells of the place seem to dissipate for a while.

When “Gator” and “White Lightning” were playing in the 1970s, the square was filled with Detroit steel and every seat was jammed with folks who would soon make Sam Walton rich. Andalusia loved Burt Reynolds. I loved the idea that somewhere, far away from the $1.90-an-hour world, a story could be filmed and end up inside my head in this funky place.

The images on that screen, though scratched and flecked with wiggling hairs the size of extension cords, were in Panavison color, and put our old black and white RCA portable to shame.

Girls might give you a kiss in a place like this if you took them to see “Romeo and Juliet.” They might hold your hand during “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry.” They might cry during “Sounder” and need a hug when Dustin Hoffman came of age in “The Graduate.” But when Bonnie and Clyde swallowed a car-full of bullets or Butch and Sundance stepped into the metal in Bolivia, I was the one with tears in my eyes. The Martin Theater wasn’t just entertainment; it was an education. In a 49th-ranked state where the motto was always “thank God for Mississippi,” we needed all the education we could get.

Short version: He was a creative director at J. Walter Thompson, an ad agency in New York, and after 25 years, he gets the Boomer Boot and finds himself unemployed. He doesn’t know his own children because he’s spent his entire life in a high-paying, high-privileged job. So for some reason, after he’s tossed, he gets his extramartial girlfriend pregnant and coos about the child’s first words, “da da,” two syllables his own children apparently didn’t get the chance to utter since he was living the high life at the agency.

So he takes a job at Starbucks with regular people. The manager is an African-American woman. It seems in his previous cushy position, M. G. Gill wasn’t aware that black people existed in management positions. M.G.G. learns to mop and do all kinds of little-people jobs, including waiting for trains and such. Regular people are regular for a reason. In summary, his book gets reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and Tom Hanks buys the movie rights to this story. Chalk one up for a turnaround tale. He has managed to pull off what every creative in advertising wants to do: Write a book, sell it as a movie and get out of the business. I salute him.

I have worked in a lot of advertising agencies north to south, East Coast to West. I worked in NYC for several years as well, so I get the story all too well. I can see the Scrooge/Dickens movie angle now, with Ben Affleck as M.G.G., who finds the true meaning of life for average people after sucking at the teat of affluence for so long he forgets we all bleed. Funny how bleeding enlightens a person.

Can’t say I identify with his “Mad Men” characterization of creatives in advertising, but I know the type. My experiences in advertising cover almost every level, but no matter what level I was on at the time, it was never an option for me to forget my less-than-wealthy past in a economically struggling rural town in the Deep South during a time when you had no choice but to be aware of those who were culturally different. I know how it feels to get the snub from the privileged. It leaves a mark.

If the book and movie are successes, M.G.G can go back to that life he knew so well for a quarter century. And maybe this time, he’ll know his child better too. I hope so.

Meanwhile, I am writing a book titled: “How Starbucks Frappacinos Cost Me $4 a Day and Ruined My Meager Retirement.”

Tom and Gene and Roy all walked this road and so did John and Clint. The Western is back on the screen and I am happy to see it.

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (maybe the longest title I have ever seen) brings us Pitt and a memorable Casey Affleck brooding across amazing scenery in a study of fame and misfortune.

“3:10 to Yuma” offers up Crowe as a not-so-vile villain opposite Bale’s one-legged decent man in a morality play first penned by then-Chicago ad agency copywriter Elmore Leonard. Peter Fonda gruffs through the first half as a Pinkerton agent who is so tough he takes a gut shot and refuses to die. But Ben Foster steals the show with his pinched face and more pinched voice.

The Cohen brothers (“Oh Brother, Where Art Thou” and “Fargo” to name a few) will release Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” in November. I have always wanted to see the Cohen brothers take on a McCarthy story, with its contradictory page-long sentences of sparse
language and chapters of raw violence.

Westerns are like American comfort food. A camp stew of characters who are all familiar yet always attractive. In our collective minds, few of us who saw them can forget minute details of Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in “Unforgiven,” when the act of killing a man is put into a single sentence that sums it up better than anything I have ever heard. I can see Val Kilmer saying, “I got your Huckleberry” in Tombstone. I can still see Clint spit that tobacco juice on the medicine hawker’s white suit in “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” I can shut my eyes and see Graham Greene in mental conflict in “Dances with Wolves” and recall Costner, not as the AWOL Union soldier, but as Jake in the earlier “Silverado.” And if you can’t remember Redford and Newman jumping off the cliff in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” then you need to tap Netflix right now and see the most successful Western ever made.

I don’t have enough room here to drag you through all of the great Westerns that have been made, but there are plenty. And oddly, foreign markets appreciate them better than we do. Ever seen the Japanese Western “Sukiyaki Western Django”? The actors speak English phonetically. John Ford would be proud.

Several years ago, I was on a Hollywood backlot. The old Western sets were all gone, scrapped for more modern subjects. “Nobody wants to see a Western anymore,” said the young guide.

Under my breath, I whispered, “I do.” I wasn’t alone.

There are a few good ones out there right now. And I am enjoying them all the way to Yuma.