It’s quite possible that there’s an unexpected benefit to the fact that nothing new opens this week. You know that white Christmas that Bing Crosby enthused over from a soundstage in sunny Hollywood 68 years ago? Well, as you might have noticed, we got it with a vengeance hereabouts. I admit it was picturesque, but it played havoc with Christmas moviegoing, causing early closings, power losses and something other than exciting attendance. Since it’s supposed to warm up and theoretically melt all this stuff, this weekend offers a chance to catch up with The King’s Speech, True Grit, I Love You, Phillip Morris and Black Swan. Of course, Little Fockers and Gulliver’sTravels are out there, too, but wasn’t being snowed in bad enough?

Justin Souther’s article that appeared this week on my 10 years at the Xpress caused me to reflect on just what those years had meant to me, what they’d given me and what I’ve learned from them. And how, yes, I sometimes have felt like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (1971). It also made me decide — after I read it on Tuesday — that I’d break my threat or promise (you decide which) not to write a Screening Room this week. Well, after all, it was really a promise to myself not to work over an unprecedented Christmas off — and since I’m at least starting in on Wednesday, I might pull that off yet.

Well, it’s Christmas week, and, as usual, that means all the studios are vying for your holiday attention. Three films of note come to town this week: The Coen Brothers’ True Grit hits all the first-run theaters (except Carmike) on Wednesday, while The King’s Speech comes to The Carolina and the Fine Arts on Christmas Day, and I Love You, Phillip Morris opens Christmas Day at The Carolina. That’s the good news. Two other titles show up as well. I’d rather not talk about them, but I guess I have to.

As the year sinks slowly in the west, I realize that for me the movie year pretty much is over. When I turn in this week’s reviews, the only thing left for me to review this year is Little Fockers. (Assuming Justin Souther isn’t knocked down by a bus, I have no intention of sitting through Gulliver’s Travels.) So far as I know at this point, there’s nothing opening locally on Dec. 31 and the next new movie we’re slated for is Season of the Witch on Jan. 7. (How depressing is that?) What’s mostly left for me this year is shuffling things around for my Ten Best list. I think I may need the time this year, which has been a peculiar one in a number of ways.

So here it is the week before Christmas, and here we are with five new movies coming to town. Two of them—the two really choice ones, Black Swan and The Fighter—I’ve already seen. What that leaves us with is TRON: Legacy, How Do You Know and, for the truly masochistic among us, Yogi Bear (in 3-D no less). If nothing else, it’s hard to complain about a lack of diversity.

So here’s the situation, having just come off a binge of moviewatching owing to the annual SEFCA (Southeastern Film Critics Association) vote being today, I took a look at what the next couple weeks are going to be like and I was struck by what I saw. Perhaps I should have ducked, but I didn’t. And here’s how it works out—it is within my grasp to take off both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The stars—and the studios—have not been in the alignment necessary for this for some considerable time. So considerable a time, in fact, that I can’t remember when it was.