Unhappy Customers

Not Always Right allows anonymous posting about funny or strange customers.

Here are some funny ones:

Snakes on a Plane

True and Not True

Passion of the Christ

Wizard of Oz movie

Pan’s Labyrinth

Furniture – It was a different business but I’ve had this conversation.

Harry Potter books

Book Title

Console Confusion

Keyboard

Video Game – kind of sweet

ramblings

I am having a busy week and all my thoughts are stale.  I’ll just ramble a bit.

Picked up the book The Lightning Thief and Nim’s Island from the library.  Both appear charming and I doubt that the film versions caught the whimsical tone of either book.

Still watching season 2 of House MD.  Cameron is less annoying since the writers dialed down her smugness a bit.

Watched a Starz special on character actors The Face is Familiar.  The choice to focus on how hard it is to get roles in Hollywood films was a poor one.  I would have preferred seeing any old Hollywood actors and seeing contemporary ones in more depth.

I managed to watch 4 musicals recently (at least I think of them as musicals): Blues Brothers, Drumline, August Rush and The Fighting Temptations.  They were all a lot of fun, although I had seen Drumline and the Blues Brothers years ago.

In the middle of Pharoah’s Daughter by Julius Lester.  I have Escape from Egypt by Sonia Levitin and Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs by Barbara Mertz (Amelia Peabody mysteries) on hand too.  I didn’t realize the common theme until today.

Danny Dunn, Scientific Detective

Image by Phoenix Dark-Knight via Flickr

Recently, I found an old copy of Danny Dunn and decided to reread it.  Most of the series books I read as a kid such as are disappointing now.  I wasn’t expecting much but I thought Danny Dunn, Scientific Detective was surprisingly readable.

Danny’s mentor Professor Bullfinch builds a scent-detecting security system for a large department store.  The managers basically are identified by their unique scent print. When Bullfinch goes off to a conference and one of the managers goes missing, Danny, Irene and Joe use the scent-detector to track him down.

Irene was as much a scientist as Danny, though she wasn’t the leader of the group.  Joe played Watson, helping the authors give facts to clarify what was going on.

My favorite in the series was the “Smallifying Machine.”

The books move quickly and except for their science geekery, the kids and the adults speak and make decisions that are reasonable enough.

A retrospective on Danny Dunn series from Geek Dad.

information on Danny Dunn series and its creators.

Wikipedia entry.

series information on the Internet Book List.

Jay Williams’ information on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

early 2010 movie releases

Just some movies releasing in the beginning of the year that I’d like to see.  Some of these I’ll watch at home.

Daybreakers – SF Horror.  Scientist opposes the dominant species: vampires. I like some mad scientist in my vampire flicks.

When in Rome – Romantic Comedy. Girl in Rome pursued by unlikely suitors. I like Rome on film and have a soft spot for Kristen Bell. seen

Lightning Thief – Fantasy Adventure.  Teen tackles the Olympians.  I’m a sucker for Greco-Roman mythology.

Wolfman – Horror.  Please, let it be anything but embarrassing & lame.

Shutter Island – Thriller.  Man investigates a missing patient at a hospital for the criminally insane on an island in a hurricane.  Intelligent and heartwarming, I’m sure.

Cop Out – Buddy Cop. Kevin Smith directs.  I’ll watch it but I dunno.

The Crazies – Horror.  Something’s in the water.  I like its simplicity.

Hot Tub Time Machine – Comedy. Four men time travel to the 1980s. They admit in the trailer that it’s stupid.

The Runaways – Biopic. Looking forward to this one although I don’t know their music.

Clash of the Titans - Fantasy. Perseus kills CGI monsters. Liked the original for its effects mostly.

How to Train Your Dragon – Fantasy. Viking named Hiccup adopts a baby dragon. I’ll watch it mostly because it’s animated.

Mother – Drama. Mother hunts for murderer to exonerate her son.

link: Princess and the Frog

This is a thoughtful and interesting review of Princess and the Frog.

Inkheart (2008)

Cover of Inkheart

Story:  A girl and her father go on a quest to save her mother who has vanished by magic.

Director:  Ian Softley  (Hackers, Wings of the Dove)

Author:  It’s based on a trilogy of  fantasies by Cornelia Funke.  They are Inkheart, Inkspell, and Inkdeath. I attempted to read the first book this summer but failed.  I might try again now that I’ve seen the movie.

Cast:  Brendan Fraser (Mo); Eliza Bennett (Meggie); Paul Bettany (Dustfingers); Helen Mirren, Jim Broadbent

Comments: I enjoyed seeing Brendan Fraser again.  I seem to have lost track of him but maybe he’ll make a few more movies.  I also was happy to see Paul Bettany again since I liked him so much as Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale.

Helen Mirren is a treat in the movie, and lent it an air of authenticity as it grew more fantastical.

The concept of reading stories aloud can make them real is an entertaining one.  However, it begs the question why unscrupulous people wouldn’t read a sci-fi military book and pull out  a bunch of advanced weapons and take over the world.  Apparently, the books on hand were set in historical periods.

Roger Ebert pointed out that it might scare children that if they read aloud, their mothers will disappear.  That’s a good point, although it can’t be much more disturbing than Labyrinth‘s premise.

It takes the movie an extraordinarily long time to reveal why and how the mother went missing.  Once the action starts up, everything moves along smartly.

Worth it?  Yes.

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• Inkheart (popsyndicate.com)

The Proposal (2009)

Story:  A Canadian woman about to be deported blackmails her secretary into marrying her.  It’s a bit Philadelphia Story and a bit Green Card.

Director: Ann Fletcher (27 Dresses; Step Up)

Writer: Pete Chiarelli

Actors: Sandra Bullock (Margaret Tate), Ryan Reynolds (Andrew Paxton), Betty White (the grandmother)

Pros:

• The two stars are appealing and the movie is easy to watch. They seemed comfortable together and I did believe they liked each other.
• The scenery is lovely to watch too.
• It’s an old-fashioned movie.  By that I mean that ignores all serious implications and focuses on the sweetness of the loving family and the goofiness of the physical comedy.

Cons:

• I didn’t buy Bullock as a mean person.  Everyone kept saying she was mean but that was hard to accept since the meanest she had was sweetly serious.
• The whole Betty White as an Inuit bit was weird.
• I think they had a limited number of jokes, so they stretched what they had in some scenes.

Worth seeing?   Depends on how rough your day was. It isn’t noxious but not special either.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Proposal (popsyndicate.com)
• Zorianna Kit: Movie Review: The Proposal (huffingtonpost.com)
• [Movies] The Proposal (2009) (geeky-guide.com)

and so I venture into fandom

Cover of Bimbos of the Death Sun

I grew interested in media fans and read a book that had a short  history of fan fiction writers.  Then I read another more difficult book about fan communities.  I poked about online and read some slash fiction and was disturbed by the concept of male morning sickness. Then, I stopped looking.

In the past week or so, I’ve had free time on my hands this past week.  I decided to try again.  I’m glad I had time because there’s so much to take in.

I went to Fanfiction.net, which turns out to be a sort of internet warehouse for fan fiction.  The site is easy to find and mostly easy to navigate.  There are massive numbers of stories on it.  I was kind of hoping to find some fabulous stories but didn’t find anything that I liked.

After I finished watched the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I searched for and found a lot of fan sites for the show.  I had noticed that many of them had sections for fan fiction but I hadn’t investigated.  I went back to these sites and found a few good stories, which encouraged me to keep trying.  Then I stumbled upon an obsolete site that recommended stories with links.  Many the links were dead but the stories I did find were very good.

Eventually, I learned that I could find a lot of fan fiction on  Live Journal.com.  Bloggers there had all kinds of helpful guides too.  This was the kind of thing I was looking for.  Through their links, I discovered fan fiction archives (such as Yuletide) which pleased me a lot.

I moved on to wikis Fan History.com and Fan Lore.org, which gave me more recent history of “fandom.”  There I read about all the disputes in the past year or so.

Sharyn McCrumb‘s Bimbos of the Death Sun gave me the notion that fans were cozy and embraced each others follies.  Maybe that was true once upon a time.  But I learned from many, many posts and other accounts in the “community” that I was wrong.

It is not news to me that people are confronting the flaws of our society and that they are trying to survive the tragedies that result from its toxicity.  By my perception, as an outsider, is that there is no room for  “ground for good-faith discussion” † in fandom.  It’s disheartening.

Back to the stories…of course, the most recent and most popular works have the most stories.   There are few unusual works in the mix as well.  I joked about looking for fan fiction based on the Epic of Gilgamesh.  And then I found three fan fictions that had written by request. Talk about your long tail.

†Lehman, D. (2005).  Foreword. In P. Muldoon. The Best American Poetry (4). New York: Scribner Poetry.

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As You Like It (2006)

Image via Wikipedia

Watched Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It (2006), or at least most of it.   It was a set in 19th Century Japan. The movie wasn’t good.  I am most disappointed with him.

Short list of reasons for which I disliked it:

Why was there such a shortage of people of Japanese heritage in the cast?

What was the point of the violent beginning?

Why did Orlando fight a Sumo wrestler?

Why was Duke Frederick psychotic?

Why couldn’t Branagh think of a different finale?

A shorter list of reasons for which I liked it:

The costumes were very pretty.

Getting back to Branagh and my disappointment with him…

Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) with Alicia Silverstone was abysmal too.

He is a good actor, and I particularly liked him in Rabbit Proof Fence (2002).  His directing tends to be uneven though. Although I liked his too-long Hamlet (1996), a lot of his later efforts failed to please me. To be fair, I haven’t seen his take on The Magic Flute (2006) or seen Sleuth (2007).

I loved his Henry V (1989), Dead Again (1991) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993) but he did those when Emma was with him.  I wonder if there’s any correlation.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a bigger fan of hers than his.  I’ve followed Thompson’s career with unabated appreciation.  I really liked her in Stranger Than Fiction (2006).

2 Blogs R.I.P.

Romancing the Blog posted a farewell on December 31, 2009.  They began blogging in 2005.

Sporadic Sequential, which I’ve mentioned before, posted a farewell on January 3, 2010.  John Jakala began blogging in 2005.  He says that he’s lost his intensity for reading and reviewing comics.

It’s a pity to see them go but I understand and wish them well.