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• FALLING UP: Mathieu Amalric as Henri

In Christmas movies, the spirit of the season inevitably trumps the personal conflicts that bedevil the characters. Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale feels like a yuletide miracle in reverse: Christmas remains in the background, no match for the wrenching problems yet stubborn togetherness of the Vuillard family.

Matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve, the de facto first lady of French cinema) discovers that she has a terminal illness and a transplant may be the only means of saving her. Two possible donors may be her alcoholic, contentious middle son Henri (Mathieu Almaric) and her troubled teenaged grandson Paul (Emile Berling). Any transplant carries the risk of “graft vs. host” disease, in one of the film’s many medical metaphors for the paradoxes of family life. Can’t live with them, can’t live without their bone marrow.

1. “Christmas Time is Here:” “In the first part of show I talk about when I was little and my family traditions, so I sing this from the TV special ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ Every time you bring up memories from childhood, it’s funny. Every year I try to watch 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' and 'Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer,' and I definitely watch White Christmas.”

2. “Santa Baby:” “I don’t like any of the Christmas novelty songs, like ‘Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer,’ except for ‘Santa Baby.’ Eartha Kitt definitely put her own stamp on it. I’m not trying to do a better version than her, I’m just trying to do it justice. It’s Eartha Kitt, for God’s sake."

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• FINAL ANSWER? Dev Patel as Jamal Malik (left) and Anil Kapoor

Few movie franchises can match the global success or irresistible watchability of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” which, according to the BBC News, has been broadcast as various versions of itself in more than 100 countries. No matter how little you care about quiz shows, if a few minutes of “Millionaire” catch your eye, you’ll quickly find yourself completely sucked in, screaming answers or instructions like “Phone a friend!” at the television.

The shameless melodrama Slumdog Millionaire uses the worldwide familiarity with the game show’s rituals to seize the audience’s attention. Slumdog, directed by English filmmaker Danny Boyle, takes place in India, so hapless young contestant Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) plays for rupees, not dollars, but the conventions prove completely the same. On the space age set, amid the dramatic sound effects and goaded by the bullying host (Anil Kapoor), Jamal looks like a deer in the stage lights.

Relocated in fresh digs, Saltworks Gallery opened its new Westside space last month with Perfect Distortions, a solo installation show by Atlanta art world fixture Avantika Bawa. Bawa mines the territories of architecture and abstract sculpture. The current exhibit takes on a pair of Atlanta’s Midtown icons: Ikea and Home Depot. Bawa is a professor in SCAD’s School of Fine Arts and is based in both Atlanta and New Delhi, India.

Describe the work that's at Saltworks right now.

What we have at Saltworks is a combination of installations, drawings [and] sculptures that seem functional but push the boundary of functionality. A lot of this comes from my previous work, which was kind of interested in modular structures, minimalism, and the intersection of architecture, furniture, sculpture and dysfunction. And, being that this new gallery is very close to Ikea . . . I thought it would be interesting to bite the bullet and address Ikea as fodder. And that's what I did. Ikea and Home Depot play a major role in this.

1) The Rosebuds play the Earl.

2) Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History continues at the Global Health Odyssey Museum.

3) Kristian Bush plays Eddie's Attic.

4) Paul Guest and Tom Lux hold a poetry reading at Decatur Library.

5) Local arts organizations perform Setting the Stage: Reflections on Human Rights, with an intro by Mayor Shirley Franklin, at Spelman College.

(Photo courtesy Merge Records)

1) San Serac and Wilderness play the Earl.

2) Invasion: Christmas Carol continues at Dad's Garage Theatre.

3) Milk continues in area theaters.

4) Atlanta Wind Symphony performs at Roswell Cultural Arts Center.

5) Twinhead Theater finishes its final performance of Choose Your Adventure: The Play at Eyedrum.

(Photo by Michaelann Zimmerman)

1) The American War: Photographs by Al Rockoff continues at Composition Gallery.

2) Make the long trek to Athens for Georgia vs. Georgia Tech, then stick around for Duke Spirit at 40 Watt Club.

3) The Silver Scream Spook Show presents The Crawling Eye at the Plaza Theatre.

4) Broke & Boujee play the Five Spot.

5) Shawn Mullins plays Variety Playhouse.

(Photo by Al Rockoff)

Remember Decatur Court? The mixed-use development proposed for the Wachovia building near downtown Decatur? The one that concerned nearby residents because they feared it would tower over their properties and not have enough parking to handle the new residents and workers?

Our dear friend Decaturite brings word that a consultant brought in to mediate talks between the developer and residents is giving it another look on Wednesday, Dec. 3 from 6:30-8:30 at City Hall. The development's also shrunk a wee bit.

In an e-mail from Otis White of Civic Strategies that Decaturite posted:

We are convening a meeting about the 315 W. Ponce project on Wednesday, Dec. 3 from 6:30 to 8:30 at Decatur City Hall. The meeting will be in the City Commission Room.

Background: A group of neighbors has been in direct talks with the 315 W. Ponce developer since our Oct. 15 meeting, and these talks are continuing. The developer presented a revised plan to this group in response to issues identified at the Oct. 15 meeting. While neighbors recognized the concessions being made by the developer, they identified problems with the new proposal. In response, the developer revised the original site plan that reduced the number of units from 218 to 160 units and eliminated the need for a parking variance.

Emphasis added. To check out the rest of White's e-mail, head over to Decatur Metro.

(Screenshot from JLB Partners)

Love him or hate him, former CL Senior Editor John Sugg never fails to get lips a-flappin' with his firebrand columns — particularly one published today, under the headline "Creative Loafing's death spiral."

The column talks about "the demolition of the newspaper’s once-outstanding journalism" (ouch!), how "the content eroded to a state that can only be called pathetic" (egads!) and that "the big losers are the readers" (sorry, guys!).

Other than Sugg's hyperbolic elegies, I have two issues with his column — the same two issues I had when Sugg presented the column to me three days before it appeared on the Sunday Paper's website.

My first concern is that Sugg used his column to criticize newspapers, including the Loaf, for "hanging on to printed editions long after consumers were decidedly digital." Basically, he's calling out CL for putting so much of its faith (at least in the past) in its print edition. Fair enough. Yet Sugg failed to disclose that he and a crew of fellow talented journalists are currently trying to secure funding for an online-only news organization.

He and the organization arguably could benefit from spreading the online-only gospel. That, to me, is a conflict of interest — one that warranted a full disclosure. I told him so, and he agreed.

My other issue had not to do with the possibility that Sugg might profit from what he printed but, rather, that he didn't explicitly state that he'd lost money as a result of what he described as "the erratic and impetuous" managerial style of Creative Loafing Inc.'s CEO Ben Eason. Sugg did disclose in the column that he's a Creative Loafing Inc. shareholder, but he didn't outright state that Eason's supposed missteps were a blow to his own finances — or that he might harbor anger toward Eason because of that financial hit.

Anyway, you might be wondering why I read the column days before it appeared in another publication. Sugg had emailed the column to me on Tuesday night, to be printed in next week's Creative Loafing. But as I had mentioned to him the day before, I and the rest of the staff wanted to print a column about the contributions of former CL Editor Ken Edelstein, who'd just been fired.

I asked Sugg to retool the column. He said he would — but instead wrote an entirely different piece. The original then appeared in the Sunday Paper.

At this point, the conflicts have become so convoluted that, although we'll be running a column about Edelstein in our next edition, it won’t be written by Sugg. When I told him that, he said he understood the decision. Hey, no hard feelings.

P.S. — Note to SP editors: Your headline for Sugg's column (and the column itself) alludes to CL's "strategy" to "rip off articles and blogs from real content producers and paste them onto CL Web sites." You seem to be referring to a sidebar on our website's home page, where we link to stories we find interesting in other publications. The whole thing takes less than 5 percent of the staff's time. It's called "aggregation," and it's practiced by the New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and, to a greater extent, Talking Points Memo and the Daily Beast. Wake up to the Internetz!

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• TROY DAVIS: A man holding a photo of Davis protests his death sentence at the state Capitol on October 24.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will hear arguments December 9 to decide if Georgia death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis will be permitted to challenge his murder conviction in federal court.

Davis was condemned to death for the 1989 murder of Savannah police Officer Mark MacPhail. Since his conviction and death sentence, seven of nine witnesses for the prosecution recanted their testimony, and three additional witnesses came forward claiming another man pulled the trigger.

Davis has come within hours of execution on three occasions since July 2007 as his repeated appeals to have his case reconsidered have thus far been rejected by state and federal courts. The 11th Circuit stayed Davis’s most recent execution order on October 27, days after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)