Disney's Frozen

So I went to see Frozen the other day.  The Snow Queen (which Frozen is very loosely based on/inspired by, and I am linking it because surprisingly most people I've tried to talk to about the movie have never actually read or even heard of Hans Christian Anderson's longest and one of his most famous stories) has always been my favourite fairy tale, ever since I was a kid.  When I found out a few years ago that Disney was making a film based on it I totally geeked out and I've been waiting for it in eager anticipation ever since.  At least until I saw the first trailer and lost all hope in a just and fair world.  I mean, look at this crap:

Oh joy, obnoxious non-human sidekicks, how original.  I can't wait to watch a movie full of that snowman's horrible voice squawk out gag-worthy one-liners while the big dumb caribou tries to eat his nose and they have horrible unfunny slapstick scenes all over the place.  The other trailers did equally terrible jobs of selling the film, because I just looked some up and they made it look like utter crap.  I'm really glad now that I only saw the one above and not any of the others, because aside from looking awful, they spoil some great jokes and some neat scenes in the film.  If this had movie bombed, I'd blame the trailers completely fucking over a good thing, not the movie itself.

Anyway, I went to see it anyway (because there was no way I was passing up any version of The Snow Queen, especially a Disney version, no matter how they butchered it), and was very pleasantly surprised.  It was actually pretty fantastic!  Not like the trailers at all!  There's still some stuff that I think could have been done better, but a lot of it really exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations.  I'm probably going to start going into spoilers while I write this, by the way, just in case anybody is worried about that stuff.  I forgot to mention it earlier -- sorry!  At least I remembered before I actually said any spoilers.  Anyway, movie talk.  Pleasant surprises!  Go!

There's the music, for one.  I didn't realize this would be a musical.  Well, I figured that as a Disney princess movie there would be a few songs thrown in, but Frozen was a real straight-up musical.  How do I know it was a real straight-up musical?  Well, it's because musicals are the only movies I can watch once then immediately have to watch again.  I downloaded the soundtrack when I got home, but it wasn't really the same because while the songs are still good, it's also a really, fantastically visual movie.  For example, when I went looking for that godawful slapstick trailer to post above, I found they'd also posted Idina Menzel's show-stopping number that I felt was really the centrepiece of the film's soundtrack.  Listening to it alone on the soundtrack has a very Wicked feel (because duh, Idina Menzel), but I didn't notice it quite so much in theatres because of how fantastic I thought all the snow and ice stuff was, plus I was thinking of her more as the character of Elsa and not as the actress Idina.  Watch:

How great is that?  It's a good song, I really liked it on its own, but the song paired with the visuals of Elsa blossoming into the Snow Queen, finding the beauty in her powers by sending gorgeous works of snowflake art spinning around, creating a swirling staircase of frost, and raising a massive palace of aurora-gleaming ice from the mountain and the air itself.  It's one of my favourite scenes in the movie, because it's just such a spectacle.  Mind you, not all the music was great.  I found some songs to be a little grating; for example, Anna's first song, where she is asking Elsa if she wants to build a snowman like she did before.  It's very cutesy, a bit too much so, and some of the lyrics are rather uninspired and don't make the characters all that impressive; for example, "Do you wanna build a snowman?" "Anna, go away!" "Ooookay byyyyyye."  The way the two words were dragged out sounded pretty bland, and it made Anna seem like the least determined person ever.  She desperately wants her sister back!  But as soon as her sister is all, no go away, she's like gosh ok what else can I do.  And growing up with siblings, let me just say I wish it was that easy to get an obnoxious kid to scram.  

Another good surprise was the characters.  The obnoxious sidekicks from the first trailer aren't obnoxious at all in the film!  In fact, they're pretty endearing.  The reindeer doesn't do any slapstick bullshit, as far as I remember, and while the snowman -- I think his name is Olaf?  Or Oglaf, but I hope it's not, for any google-happy kid's sake -- is goofy, sure, but it's not the grating in-your-face goofy that it was in the trailers, it's more...I dunno, I want to say understated but it's really not.  And instead of just being dumb one-liners he's actually got some really funny bits!  And a lot of the time he's not supposed to be funny himself, really, but more setting up for someone else's funny.  For example, when he's singing his I Want song, the song's a joke, sure, but the real joke in the scene belongs to Kristoff, at the end.  I won't spoil it here because I liked it, even though I think one of the trailers might have done already.  Neither of them get as much screen time as the trailer I saw seemed to imply, and what time they do spend onscreen they usually act as actual comic relief, bringing a bit of lightness and humour to an otherwise heavy part of the movie.  Compare Jar Jar Binks, one of the most famously annoying Adorable Non Human Sidekicks In A Kid's Film characters, who had long scenes of him being unbearably annoying and dragging the film down.  No, Frozen did it absolutely right.

Of course, the characters were also one of the things I didn't always agree with.  For one thing, the original fairy tale had such good side characters!  I was so looking forward to meeting the clever Princess, who has read every book in the world and when she decided it was time to get married, she turned down every suitor until she found someone who was only interested in her mind and knowledge and not her face or her riches or anything.  Or the robber girl!  She was just so rad, she's basically just the hero of another story; she shows up as a kid with her mother and the rest of their band of thieves to kidnap Greta (the girl in the original story, I'd say she's Anna in this but she kind of isn't, the Disney version is hugely changed), and steals her horse and her clothes and everything, and she's kind of like an anti-hero; she sleeps with a knife and threatens her pet reindeer with it for a laugh, and threatens to kill Greta, but then when she hears Greta's story she's all "Well that sounds like a pretty awesome adventure! You know what, you go and get on with your bad self, go save your boy if you really think he's worth it" and gives her back her fancy warm clothes (but keeps her fancy muff and instead gives Greta her mom's bulky old mittens, because she's amazing and takes what she wants) and lets her reindeer free on the condition that he will help Greta get to the Snow Queen's palace, and off they go.  And then at the end of the story she shows up again, riding Greta's stolen horse all grown up with a pair of pistols strapped to her hips because she'd decided to wander the world and find her own way, and she's just like "You did it!  You go girl, if I'm ever in your town I'll stop by for a visit" and rides off into the sunset.  But I guess the story was so changed in Disney's version that they couldn't fit them in, or didn't think they suited the tone of the movie or whatever, I don't know -- the point is, they weren't there and that makes me sad because I loved them so much when I was younger.  The Snow Queen was really just full of awesome ladies, and it bums me out that Disney's version didn't have them.  There was a lady for everyone!  There was the good but sad magic woman who wanted to keep Greta, so she tricked her into staying in her garden out of loneliness.  There was the aforementioned genius Princess and the badass robber girl.  There was the Snow Queen herself, who I always loved; she wasn't really a villain, not really.  At least I never got a sense of evil from her in the versions I read.  She was impossible and otherworldly and had a completely different set of morals; she invited Kay to come with her out of loneliness, I thought, and I don't believe it ever would have occurred to her that it was wrong.  After all, she's an ancient and powerful fairy queen who sees mortals live and die in misery all the time, who would miss the little boy who caught her eye?  But whatever.  The story I remember wasn't the story Disney was telling, and that's okay even if I'm sad I never really saw it, because the original story really was just too religious to go over well now.  Let's talk about the character problems that are in the story Disney was actually telling.

For the record, spoilers are going to start here, for reelzies.  I really did like all of the characters in the movie, at least for the first half.  I didn't have any real problems with the characters themselves.  My problem was really where they paired them up or dealt with them at the end.  For example, Anna and Hans, her prince.  They meet in the beginning of the movie and over the course of an evening fall in love and decide to get engaged.  Everybody gives them crap over it, though; Elsa refuses to give her blessing because they'd only just met (which upsets Anna, who grabs her glove off and accidentally reveals her hidden powers to everyone, setting the main drama of the film in motion), and later on Kristoff gives her a hard time over it too and is all, I don't trust your judgment!  Who gets engaged to someone they only just met?  Well...Disney princesses do.  That's why it worked for me.  In the context of a Disney film, especially one of this style, meeting cute and falling in love and knowing you are truly Meant To Be is the norm.  And Anna and Hans were really adorable; he was a super-cute dude, they had a chemistry-filled song about falling in love with each other, he was responsible and helped her kingdom and tried to save her sister after the whole snow thing went down.  So I was really surprised when Hans turned out to be a bad guy in the end.  It really felt like more of a cop-out than a twist, not least because it made a lot of his earlier actions not make much sense.  For example, his plan all along was to marry Anna and have Elsa die in an accident so he could inherit the throne through Anna.  But if that's the case, why try to save Elsa from the Weaseltown dudes when they invaded her palace in the mountains?  If he never loved her, where was all that chemistry coming from in their song together?  And if he's so brilliant he can just come in and take over the kingdom as easily as he did, why was he so dumb as to leave Anna alive in a locked room in her own castle, just assuming she'll drop dead, then wander out and be all "Oh yes, she died (just don't go to look at her ok) and we totallly got married without any witnesses and I have no proof but that's so totally how it went down you guys, and again she is just so very dead in that locked room over there, no need to check and please ignore all knocking or cries for help."  The apparent moral of "you probably aren't really in love with that dude you just met at a royal ball who sang a love duet with you" doesn't really work out very well in a Disney film.  It feels like a last minute change they made in order to set up Anna and Kristoff as the main couple, since they spend most of the film together.

And I realize I'm getting into very shippy territory here, but I don't think they really work out all that well together, either.  Well, they're cute, I guess, and the romance is very light.  But they seemed more like friends for most of the film, with a few ham-handed "he totes has feelings yo" scenes here and there, and I really thought Kristoff would meet and fall for Elsa, the Snow Queen.  It makes sense; his immediate reaction to seeing her beautiful ice stairway and palace is to shed a tear, because as he says, ice is his life (he sells it for a living).  Of course his reaction would be one of admiration before one of fear; he is very well aware of the beauty of ice and snow, and is struck speechless by it the first time he sees anything she's made.  I was really looking forward to them meeting properly for the whole film, and it...it just never really happened.  I don't think they had a single conversation.  Bummer.

But there was another thing I liked!  They kept the shards of ice in the heart/eye from the original story.  Well, the original story actually had shards of glass made by the devil to make things ugly, but I've seen the ice version before too so it works out ok.  And they didn't keep it completely true, but they had the "ice in heart freezes it" thing, and part of the drama at the end is Anna trying to find an act of true love to thaw her freezing heart.  The characters went looking for true love's kiss, and I was sitting in my chair going, "Man, wouldn't it be great if the act of love wasn't romantic?  Elsa loves her sister, she could give herself up and risk being locked away and losing her newfound freedom in exchange for a chance at saving Anna."  And the movie subverted both itself and my expectations; the act of love came from Anna herself, sacrificing herself at the last minute by running away from kissy Kristoff in order to save Elsa from Hans' blade and turning to solid ice right then, so his sword shatters on her frozen hand.  I really liked the idea of the act of love coming from within rather than without, because it shows how powerful love can be.  I kind of liked how Anna saved herself, but then I was like, can it really be "she saved herself" if she did it by sacrificing herself?  There are a lot of narratives out there about how women need to be loving and self-sacrificing, I'm not sure if this one needs fanfare.

Another problem I had with the films were the character designs.  Don't get me wrong, everything was very pretty!  But seriously, everyone looks identical.  Elsa, Anna and their mom have completely interchangeable faces (which, it has been pointed out to me, look basically like Rapunzel's face in Tangled, because Hollywood is only interested in having pretty white girls around and can't figure out how to make them both pretty and look like individual people at the same time.) and it's kind of dull to look at.  If you saw them without the hairstyles or colouring to distinguish them, would you be able to tell them apart?

Courtesy of this tumblr...I think.  I really don't understand how tumblr works, tbh

Another thing I regret about the film is how little I feel like I know the characters.  Compare other movies; in Beauty and the Beast we know Belle spends all her time reading and being a weirdo with her inventor dad.  In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is obsessed with the human world and spends all her time collecting human artifacts and being a weirdo about boys with legs.  Tiana in The Princess And The Frog has a hell of a work ethic and spends as much time as she can working and reading cookbooks and being a frog, which is pretty weird.  In The Aristocats, the kittens spend their time studying high-class stuff like painting and music, but are still kids and would rather play.  The kitten Marie likes to be very feminine and thinks of herself as a lady, while her older brother Toulouse wants to be big and tough like an alley cat.  In Lilo and Stitch, Lilo's main character trait is what a weirdo she is, doing strange things like making weird dolls and practicing voodoo, and she loves to hula dance and take photos of random tourists.  My point here is that I don't get anything like that from Elsa and Anna.  Elsa spent years alone in her room -- what did she do in there all that time, aside from "have magic ice powers"?  Anna ran around the castle....talking to paintings, pretty much.  She rode her bike down the stairs once.  I have no idea what their lives are like or what they do.  What are their personalities like, how do they change once they aren't all alone any more?

One thing I really took away from this movie was, I want more.  Like I was saying earlier, I'd love to see what Elsa did when she was locked alone in her room most of her life, afraid of herself and of what she could do.  Did she become the well-read princess of the original story?  I can imagine her room full of shelves upon shelves of books as she tried desperately to lose herself in fact and fiction in order to distract herself from her hellish, lonely life.  Or what about Anna?  Did she read too, or did she run around bothering the servants all the time?  Did she go outside?  She must have, because she had a horse when the movie started.  Why would she have a horse and know how to ride if she wasn't allowed to leave the castle?  Or how about what happened after the film; did Elsa ever tell Anna that the reason she hid her powers was because she hurt her?  Did Anna ever remember?  How did they deal with suddenly having so many people around; after all, they aren't used to social interaction after being kept shut in for most of their lives.  Does Elsa retreat to her ice palace when she's feeling overwhelmed?  Did Kristoff ever mention that he saw them that night when they brought Anna to the trolls for help?  Basically, I just want all of the fanfic ever, pretty much, because I just didn't get enough character interaction in the movie, and the stuff that I did get was good enough to show me that it would be worth seeing more of.  It might be a little early to say this (and I might be jinxing it, considering Disney's past track record with the subject), but I'd like to see a sequel where we get to know everyone more.  And maybe Elsa and Kristoff will get together in the next film....ah, I kid, I know that a Disney princess is paired for life.  Still though.  It'd be neat.

Monster High: Ghoul Spirit Is Kind Of Shitty

While we were clearing out my grandmother's apartment after she moved into my aunt's house, I found a DS game called Monster High: Ghoul Spirit.

I know Monster High is some Bratz-style brand of sexy monster dolls for I guess the vast hordes of tween proto-goths who want sexy monster dolls?  Presumably the game belongs to one of my younger cousins, and I hung onto it so it wouldn't get lost and I could return it to her.  I got bored though, so I tried playing it.  It's...kind of shitty.  Not super-shitty, it's no E.T. The Extra Terrestrial or anything, but it has little to no value as a game.

I guess I should start with the most immediately obvious quality, the graphics: they kind of suck, even for a DS game.  I tried to find a decent screencap to show them properly, but the game is so boring and worthless nobody seems to have posted much about it.  I did nab this, which actually looks better than the game usually does:

Now, I can't really say the graphics are completely awful.  I mean, I've seen worse graphics.  Monster High: Ghoul Spirit is probably roughly on par with Nostalgia in that respect, or maybe even a little better than Nostalgia (Nostalgia was pretty bad).  But when this screencap example is the very highlight of the game's graphics, it's...not good.  There was one character who was supposed to look like a total mess, with bad frizzy hair and an ugly outfit and one of the quests was to get her looking nice again.  But I didn't realize that she was supposed to look like a mess until I finished that quest and her sprite transformed into the "pretty" version.  I don't know if it's because I never actually looked at her or if it's because all of the characters are so jagged and awkward I can't tell the difference between the ones that are supposed to be pretty and the ones that aren't.  I also don't know if it's something to blame on the graphics or something to blame on the character designs.  Maybe both.  Speaking of character designs, I just have to say something about the general look of the series.  I know it's not original and everyone has said it before me, but dang, these monster girls are freaking gangly.  And long.  You could probably have a literal skeleton as a character and she'd be able to share clothes with the rest of the characters because you physically cannot make them skinnier than this.  And I'm pretty sure they've all got horribly broken and deformed legs.  How does this poor thing walk on those twisty stilts?  Each girl is technically a different type of monster, but really they're all variations on the horrifying Lankyleg Ganglebeast

It's sad that those boots are the second most horrifying thing about her legs.

But I should at least try to stick to game-specific criticisms. One thing that's definitely bad in this is the map.  The school you're in is so bland-looking that it's hard to figure out where you are just by the surroundings, so I mostly used the map to get around.  Unfortunately, the map is not actually an accurate floor-plan of the school.  The game designers thought it was more important to make the school coffin-shaped on the map rather than make a map that could accurately tell you where you are.  Or, you know, make the school actually coffin-shaped, for some reason.  If that was so important to them, I don't know why they didn't just draw the map first and then design the school to its specifications, but whatever, it's a stupid game and it's obvious that nobody actually cared.  I can't tell you how many times I went into the wrong room because the map told me I was on other side of the corridor.  The school is pretty small and bland-looking, which is kind of weird.  Not really the small part, I guess, since there's only like ten students, but you'd think a trying-to-be-coffin-shaped school of monster people would look more interesting.

So it's mediocre graphics and a shitty map.  Not a great start, but it can redeem itself with the actual gameplay, right?  Maybe it's an okay game after all!  But...no.  Sorry.  Not a chance.  The gameplay is crap.  The entire game is random fetch-quests and pointless busywork.  One particularly egregious example was the "storyline" (I guess? I wouldn't call it a story arc, but it's as close as this game managed to get) about how the zombie girl was kicked out of class for "mumbling" but the real problem was that the teacher doesn't understand zombie language.  Well, okay, I guess in that case you go to the headmistress and explain what happened and make sure that the problem gets documented and dealt with?  Nope!  You talk to the zombie girl instead and she tells you that she wants to make sure the teacher learns zombie language by reading a zombie language book.  So she sends you to her locker to get the zombie language book, then you bring the book to her so she can highlight the important parts, then you go find a custodian's outfit, then you bring it to her so she can change into her disguise, then you go to the "creepateria" to get a soda, then you bring it to her so she can explain the next step where you bring it to the classroom and pour it on the floor so she can clean it up as...a distraction, I think?  For some reason it is vitally important that you find a custodian's outfit for the zombie girl and then pour a soda on the ground.  Then you go into the empty classroom and leave the book on the desk.  That's it, right?  The end of the quest?  Nope!  Next you get a text message from somebody else, so you go find them and they tell you to go find the audiobook of the book you just left on the teacher's desk.  So you bring them the audiobook, and they tell you to go put it in the teacher's headphones.  Or mp3 player.  Apparently the two are interchangeable.  So you go do that, and wonder why you're wasting your time like this.  Then you go leave that on the teacher's desk.  But you're not done yet!  You get another text, and suddenly someone else has an idea!  You should make a potion that magically makes people understand languages!  So you go all over school collecting the potion ingredients (I think -- I vaguely remember doing something like this, but I'm not entirely sure. I tried to double-check by looking up a walkthrough, but none seem to exist, and I'm certainly not going to play the game again just to check, so let's just assume I'm remembering correctly), then you have to go to the Mad Science Lab to make some sort of potion with them, then you have to find whoever sent you on this quest so you can give them the potion so they can drug the teacher with it and the teacher will suddenly know the zombie language and everything will be solved!  For the third time!  That was very long and complicated, wasn't it?  Basically, you do a fetch-quest to fix the problem, but you're immediately sent on a second, completely unnecessary part to the fetch-quest to solve the same problem you just solved, then the final part of the fetch quest is to render the first two needlessly long fetch-quests unnecessary by using a potion to make the teacher understand zombie without needing either the book or the audiobook.  What the hell.  That was a waste of a waste of my time.

I feel like I've wasted your time just making you read that, so here is a hopefully useful "life hack" to try and make up for it.

There's a relationships element to the game, too.  I don't see the point of it, though.  You seem to max out every character's affection for you by completing the quests, and since the quests are the only things to do in the game, you don't have any other options.  You can't progress and do another quest until you've finished the one you're on (or at least I think so, this is another thing I only half-remember) and there aren't extra things to do like give gifts or anything.  So basically, play the game in the only way you can and you'll automatically max everything out and win the popularity contest at the end of the game.  Yaaaaay.  If that's how it works, why bother keeping track of affection at all?

Overall it was a tremendously dull game.  In fact, it was so boring that I forgot I was writing this post three-quarters of the way through and left it in my drafts for like, a year, until I found and finished it today.  I've since given the game back so I can't replay it to familiarize myself with it again to have anything fun to say at the end of the post.  Instead, I'll just point out how the series has desecrated The Phantom Of The Opera by having a character named Operetta, who is somehow the Phantom's teenage daughter from the Deep South, complete with a Southern American accent and obsession with .... ugh ... country music.  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with country music, until you try to mix it up with the fucking Phantom.  She is the single worst interpretation of anything related to Phantom of the Opera.  Just look at it, it's horrifying.

"AN MAH MYOOZIC CAN WHUP Y'ALL'S MYOOZIC!"

 (PLEASE PLEASE KILL ME NOW)

Lay's Creamy Garlic Caesar Chips

Hey, check out what I bought the other day!  Not this specific bag, I stole this photo off the net because I threw out the empty bag I had before I realized I should snap a photo of it for my blog post. But I bought a bag pretty much identical to this, I swear!

So, I assume you all remember that I sort of reviewed the Maple Moose chips a while ago.  Oh, you don't? Nobody reads my blog or cares about the chips I eat and that post was stupid anyway?  Well, I guess that's fair.  I accept that.

Anyway, in my Maple Moose post I mentioned that the chips were really sweet, and not really in a good way.  I also may have mentioned that Maple Moose is a ridiculous idea for a flavour, but the salad flavoured chips seem like a really interesting idea and I wanted to try them!  So I did!  And....well.

First off, the image on the bag is much less hilarious than the Maple Moose one.  I'm ashamed of you, Lay's.  What, you couldn't think of a way to make salad look creepy-sexy?  All you can come up with is a boring old bowl of salad?  That's not fun blogging about at all.

Next, the taste!  Like I said, I was excited to try these because dang, I haven't heard of salad flavoured chips before!  That must be a really unusual, interesting flavour!  Imagine my disappointment when I ate one and found it was....sour cream and onion.  Really?  You call that a limited flavour?  I guess that's a good thing for anybody who ended up a fan of these chips, because it sucks to find something yummy only to have it vanish (bring back The Works chips!  I only had one bag as a kid, and it haunts me!).  But who hasn't already tried the sour cream and onion chips yet?  You had a chance to make something really different with this flavour, and you just wasted it on an old boring recipe instead.  Again, Lay's: shame.  Don't advertise something as new when it so blatantly isn't, it's rude to lie to your customers.

Lay's Maple Moose Potato Chips

These are the most disturbingly Canadian chips I have ever seen.

The flavour is Maple Moose, and the picture is of a moose curling seductively around a giant bottle of maple syrup* while giving you bedroom eyes and a come-hither smile.  No, I don't know why the moose wants to have a threesome with you and that bottle of maple syrup.  I am not entirely sure I want to know.  I am entirely sure that I don't want to meet whoever made that image.
*Or perhaps a tiny moose curling seductively around a normal sized bottle of syrup, I am not sure which would be creepier

I only ate one, so I can't really give a good description of the flavour.  Also I am not a professional food taster so I probably wouldn't do a good job of it anyway.  But they are very...sweet.  Probably because of the maple.  Kind of too sweet, they are sort of gross. They do not have any moose in them, unfortunately.  At least, not that I could taste.  My mother ate more than I did and she said they tasted sort of like ketchup chips, only sweeter.  Apparently a Newfie guy came up with this flavour for a contest, and there are four other flavours to try?  One of the other flavours is grilled cheese, and one is Caesar salad.  I kind of want to try the Caesar salad chips.

The Help

I watched The Help tonight.  It's a decent movie, I suppose.  I want to like it.  But for some reason, I can't really bring myself to.  I want to, because I can't quite verbalize what it is that's prickling me so much.  There's a lot of awkward "white person saves black people because they just can't do it on their own" stuff that everyone before me has mentioned; honestly I found the whole "Skeeter writing black women's stories for them" somewhat less creepy than the "Celia gives Minny the strength to leave her drunk, physically abusive husband by making her dinner one day" because hey, at least Skeeter gets called out on it once or twice, and the maids had a reason not to tell their stories.  It might not have stuck or sounded sincere, but the subject was brought up and the situation was at least believable.  Celia's deal was just.....weird.  But I've watched the movie a couple of times now to try and figure it out, and all I can say is there's something about it that leaves me feeling not-quite-satisfied.  Like it's doing something wrong, but I can't really put my finger on it.

But even the first time I watched the movie, there was one scene in particular that stuck at me.  I'd heard about the white-saviour stuff beforehand and so I came in expecting that, but this scene near the end kind of blindsided me.  The racist woman who was the main antagonist through the film, Hilly Holbrook, goes to main character Skeeter's house to rat her out to her mother about who wrote the book with all the maids' stories in it.  And she's drunk, despite never being seen drinking much at all in the rest of the film.  And she's got a cold sore on her lip, for the first time in the entire film.  And it's just a really cheap, tacky scene.  She's only drunk because it makes her look more pathetic and easily mocked.  She's only got the cold sore so Skeeter's mother can trash her appearance, telling her "no husband wants to come home and see that!" and "Get out of here, before we all get one of those disgusting things on our lips!"  And since cold sores are a type of herpes, I'm pretty sure it's meant in a slut-shaming way too.  It just felt like a really gross scene.  I mean, we've seen Hilly's behaviour throughout the rest of the film, we know how terrible she is.  And in like one of the very next scenes she gets called out again by Aibileen, only Aibileen uses her behaviour and shit to call her out.  Because that's what the problem is, Hilly is a racist turd who's mean and manipulative and generally terrible.  That's what she should be called out for, and it's so satisfying when she is called out for it.  The scene at Skeeter's just feels unnecessary and contrived, because instead of using her established character flaws they just make cheap cracks at her appearance.  This scene also happened in the book; I had to check, because it seemed so far out of left field.  The book's kind of worse, because it also points out how she's gotten fatter and that her shirt buttons are gaping open over her belly.  Seriously?  She's racist and mean and awful, and the best way the book/movie can think of to get at her and make her look bad is.....attack her appearance.  It is so vitally important to make her look ugly that it comes before the scene where she's rightfully told off for being a little shit and ends up in tears. Congratulations on making me defend the nasty racist asshole, The Help. I hope that's what you were going for there.

Star Trek Next Gen: Up The Long Ladder

So I'm slowly working my way through Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I'm almost done the second season.  I just finished the eighteenth episode, "Up The Long Ladder," and...wow.  Just wow.

STAR TREK, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT.  THAT SHIT IS MESSED UP.

So the episode starts off with some dinky little subplot where Worf gets Klingon measles and has tea with the doctor.  If that counts as a subplot, because that's pretty much all that happens.  It's also the most tolerable part of the episode, so...yeah.

The rest of the episode is about the forgotten human colony they find and rescue from a bad case of splody planet or soemthing, a colony of the most cliche stereotypes of Irish people you can imagine.  Complete with Irish accents, despite being isolated from Earth and other humans for three hundred years.  They're a bunch of redheaded farmers who don't know anything about computers or science and the men are all portrayed as lazy drunks and the women are sharp-tongued and complain about how they have to do all the work and they've got sheep and pigs and goats and assorted barnyard animals and use equipment like looms and wear homemade peasant-type clothing, and it's basically just a really offensive Irish stereotype and what the hell Star Trek, I thought you were supposed to be progressive.  The sharp-tongued redhead daughter who's dad keeps trying to marry her off to random dudes wears a petticoat.  A petticoat, for crying out loud.

Then it turns out there's ANOTHER forgotten colony!  So they go check that out and it's from the same group who went up, but they're not Irish because they're scientifically advanced!  So they speak with normal American accents and have basically the same lifestyle as the crew on the Enterprise.  Except they reproduce by cloning!  You see, all but five of the original settlers died in a crash or something and the survivors were scientific peoples, so they just started cloning and at first they stopped people from inbreeding through drugs and punitive laws, and "now, after three hundred years the entire concept of sexual reproduction is a little repugnant."  Because that's how people work, right? Just put up a bunch of laws and stuff and eventually nobody ever wants sex ever.  But blah blah reproductive fading copy of a copy blah blah, and they need new blood!  So they're all "Hey you, want to give some dna?" and Riker is all "Oh fuck no, I'm too special!" and Picard is all "Yeah probably everyone's gonna feel like that so I won't ask around or anything."  So they steal some DNA from Dr. Crusher and Riker in a really ridiculous, needlessly dramatic scene.  And when Crusher and Riker find out they go kill their clones and the clone dude is all "What choice did we have, you wouldn't help!  We have a right to survive!" and the show is all "huh maybe they have a weird point here" and I'm like THE FUCK THEY DO.  They have a right to exist, they have a right to reproduce themselves, but they do not in any way have a right to impose on other people.  Some random dude who wants to make sure his bloodline survives doesn't have the right to force a woman to carry his baby against her will, that's just a more extreme version of what the clone people are trying to pull here.

So the crew goes back to the ship or something and have a meeting and go "What these dudes need is breeding stock....oh!  We've got those homeless Irish assholes in the hold!  Let's shotgun wedding this shit."  Not "Let's present the option to both cultures while informing the rest of the Federation that there's a Class M planet that could use some settlers."  Just straight up "bully these homeless people who've just had everything torn away from them into living with these assholes who have no sense of respect for other people and who clearly look down on them, but need them because their society is collapsing due to a lack of a genetically diverse population."  Then they go into a private meeting, just the two male leaders and Picard's group, and after a bit of disagreeing they finally settle on WHAT THE FUCK STAR TREK THIS BULLSHIT IS CREEPY AS HELL.

Ahem.  Sorry.  They settle on a plan where the Irish group settle the clone planet and monogamy is illegal now because we need lots of babies, so every woman, both the poor Irish women who have just had their entire lives ripped up and are thrown into chaos and the clone women who have a culture of finding sexual reproduction absolutely repugnant, have to have at least three kids by three different men.  None of these women, who's reproductive future is being decided on by a group of men and one doctor, are present for this meeting or have any say about what's going on.  We don't see the reaction of the clone women (who are probably gonna end up rape victims, because none of them actually want sex but they will be pressured into becoming broodmares by the (male) leader of their society), but we see one Irish woman's reaction.  She's the one who's had her father try to marry her off to every man he sees.  She's understandably furious that her father and Picard went around making all these grand plans without ever asking if the women would be willing to play along, and Picard is all "wtf you said you wanted a new home, here it is!"  She goes "Yeah, but I never said I wanted to be Eve!"  Because seriously who would willingly sign up for that bullshit.  Picard is all "Fine, I'll just take you to the nearest star base so you'll have lost not only your home, but your family and friends and entire culture as well."  Because that's not coercive at all.  Suddenly she has a complete 180 on her opinion and goes "Wait, that dude looks important.  He's rich, isn't he?  And I can have three husbands?  Ok, that makes up for everything," and wanders off to hit on people.

What the ever-loving fuck is going on here?!  Granted, a lot of Star Trek episodes are pretty doofy, but this is the first time I've been literally repulsed by the events of an episode.  It's like they tried to think of every possible way to make this episode as creepy as they could, or something.  And they put a cheerful comic-relief/happy-ending gloss over it just so you could tell that they gave zero shits about what a bullshit society they just created.  I thought Star Trek was supposed to represent some futuristic utopia, but here they throw this super-dark, seriously fucked up situation in our face and pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.  Fuck, show.  Don't do that.

If You Love Musicals....

Give Jekyll and Hyde a miss.  Specifically the David Hasselhoff version, which is the only one I've seen, but I assume they're all varying degrees of terrible.  I literally just finished watching it in the past five minutes, and already I can't remember a single tune from it.  I watched it thinking, "Okay, so this isn't great, but so far I've been able to find something to enjoy in every musical I've seen.  Surely sooner or later I'll hit that one guilty-pleasure song that makes the whole thing worth it, right?"  Nope, never happened.  Once or twice a song would start with one or two notes that would make me pay attention because hey, that's sort of good! Except then it would immediately go terrible again.  The lyrics were really lazy (at one point they rhymed "doorstep" with "your step," how the hell did they get away with that), and the performance was....well.  I did enjoy the first transformation scene, but not because it was good.  I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy watching clips of The Room on Youtube.  Which is not a compliment, to say the least.

I would continue with other vaguely-reviewish-words, but I don't have much else to say.  Like I said, I only just finished watching it, so I haven't had time to dwell on anything or come up with fancy reasons why not to like it.  Just...it's bad.  That's all I got.  The Hoff's acting is ridiculous, everybody else is bland, flat and forgettable, the "romance" sub plots between Jekyll, the orange lady and that stripper chick are completely lacking in...everything, really.  And I had a really hard time suspending my disbelief.  Like, I'm familiar enough with the story, as everyone is, to know that Jekyll's potion thing will work, but while he was petitioning the...medical board, I guess?  To let him begin human trials, it sounded so ridiculous that even I was going, what the hell are you on dude, this is not science. I would have agreed with the medical board that he's off his rocker and shouldn't get to do his experiment, but they were all like "You're going against God's will, you're crazy!" instead of "This is the most ridiculous theory I've ever heard, I thought you were a doctor for goodness sakes, what half-rate hotel of a school would give you a medical degree?"  I didn't care about any of the characters.  Not the stripper lady who got killed at the end, not the bride lady who...didn't?  I don't think she did, I was pretty bored by then so I wasn't watching all that closely.  Overall, it might have been the worst musical I've ever seen.  Even worse than West Side Story.  Even that had one or two songs going for it, this thing was just completely forgettable, all the way through.

Well, that's it, that's pretty much all I can think of right now.  Maybe in a day or two when I've had a chance to let the experience stew in my brain for a bit I'll have something more clever to say, but it's all I've got for now.  Bad musical, did not enjoy, do not recommend.

Wireless Mouse: Logitech vs Microsoft

I don't like trackpads.  No, wait, let me rephrase.  I loathe trackpads.  They are a vile, hideous, oozing pus-filled plague-boil of fuckery infecting laptops everywhere.  Trackpads are the worst.  Trackpads cut NASA's funding.  Trackpads were the masterminds behind 9/11.  Trackpads invented New Coke.  Trackpads are the opposite of Batman.

So I bought a wireless mouse!

Actually, I have two wireless...mice?  Mouses?  Whatever, two of them.  One I've had for about a year, maybe a bit longer, which I bought when the wired mouse to my desktop computer stopped working.  But I didn't want to take that mouse from the desktop computer, so I got another one for my laptop a few months ago..  And now...I'm going to compare them!  WOOOOO!  I've never compared techy-stuff before, so I have no idea what I'm doing!  Wooooo?  Really, this is probably more TK's area of expertise, not mine.  This is going to be a train wreck, I can tell.  So let's get on with it!

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Well, the main thing I was looking for when I went to buy a new mouse was to find a small one, to fit my hand: I have kinda small hands, I guess, and pretty much every mouse I've ever used before buying my own was bigger than my hand.  Which I guess wasn't bad, but when I went to the mouse-store and found out "Holy shit, this one FITS IN MY HAND" it was pretty crazy!  Having a mouse that fits my palm is super-comfortable.  So both of the wireless mice/mouses/whatever I bought were like half the size of every previous mouse I've used.  After the size, I wanted a mouse-wheel.  It is so weird to use a mouse without a wheel after you've gotten used to using the wheel.  The third thing, it had to be adorable.  Or at least not-ugly.  Call me shallow all you want, but if I gotta look at it all the time it should be appealing.  Fourth thing is, I had to be able to afford it, so somewhere in the area of twenty or thirty dollars.  That's pretty much all I thought about when I went mouse-shopping.  I dunno if there's any other way to decide what you want in a mouse.  Again, I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing here.

My new mouse is Microsoft brand.  It takes one battery and has a colorful if somewhat abstract design.  I believe I bought it for around twenty dollars.  It fit my hand perfectly, measuring at three and a half inches long according to my sewing tape.

It's an okay mouse.  It's comfortable to use and has a mouse wheel and two mouse buttons, it was affordable and cute, it's, you know, a mouse.  I don't really know what else to say about it.  It doesn't have extra buttons or do anything fancy or flash or light up or anything, other than the on-light.

Congratulations on meeting the minimum standards of mousehood!

I stopped using that mouse a few months after getting it, though.  I liked it well enough, but it had a few flaws that made it a not-great mouse.  For example, the battery cap on the underside wasn't perfectly smooth, so it had a tendancy to snag on the fabric of the sofa where I was usually using it.  I adapted to that by getting a denim placemat and using it as an armchair mousepad.  The thing I didn't want to adapt to was the battery life -- I only used the mouse for a few months because I got tired of having to replace the battery every three or four weeks, even though I always turned it off when I wasn't using it.  So I plugged the Microsoft mouse into the desktop computer that I haven't used since we had to unplug and move it while we redid the floors, and I took my older Logitech mouse from there and started using that.

The Logitech mouse was I think about twenty-five or thirty dollars, but I might have gotten it on sale, I'm not sure.  But I bought it, so it must have been in my price range.  It's a good mouse.  It doesn't have any sort of design on it or anything, other than the logo, but it's a deep pretty red that doesn't really come through in the photos.  It's not as pale or orange-looking as my pictures make it seem.  It uses two batteries instead of the one that the Microsoft mouse uses, but other than that it's pretty similar.  The two mouse-buttons and the wheel, the on-light, you know, general mousy stuff.  It's slightly larger than the other mouse at four inches long, but it's still comfortable in my hand.  I think I prefer the size of the Microsoft mouse, but I like the Logitech mouse much better overall.

I've had this mouse for about a year, and I leave it on literally all the time.  I even left it on for the four months or so that the desktop computer was disconnected in the corner of my room, and it was only the other day that I had to change the batteries for the first time.  I could tell it was starting to die, because it was shutting off every now and then, but I am gonna think of that as a perk - it was letting me know that the batteries were getting low, but I could keep using the mouse by just switching it off and back on and it would work fine for another little while.  I put off replacing the batteries for as long as I could, until it was shutting off every ten minutes.  Still, it was doing that for like a month and it wasn't all that annoying, so I gotta say I am really fond of the battery life.  The only drawback to the Logitech mouse is the battery cover --  it's not on the bottom like on the Microsoft mouse, so it doesn't catch on anything, it's under my palm -- the part with the logo on it.  Like I said before, I usually use my laptop on the sofa in the living room, and use the mouse on the armrest.  The mouse gets knocked to the floor constantly, because that's a high-traffic area; I'm always shoving it with my elbow when I move the laptop, or brush it when I get up, or knock it when I reach over for a drink or something.  And every single time it falls down, the battery cover pops off.  Sometimes the cover gets lost under the sofa and I have to spend ten minutes moving furniture to reach it.  Yet despite opening so easily when I don't want it to, I could not for the life of me get it open when I had to change the batteries last week.  I had to put it on the armrest and then push it off to open it.  I'm pretty sure that's not how it was designed to work.

So overall, the Logitech mouse has a flaw or two but is the clear winner when compared to the Microsoft mouse.  I was really disappointed in the Microsoft mouse, actually.  I thought it would be way better than it was -- who puts a rough snaggy bottom on a mouse?  Not Logitech.  If you are in the market for an affordable wireless mouse and have to choose between Microsoft and Logitech, go with Logitech.  

Much less shitty than Microsoft's mouse.