MonkeyPants

Egregious: My Review of The Seeker. Warning: ENTIRELY Spoilers.

I’m watching The Seeker and I have to share my pain, so I am live-blogging my critique.

1) Casting Ian McShane as Merriman is like casting Jonathan Taylor Thomas as Indiana Jones. So wrong.

2) Why is everyone American? In this so called British school? Why does Will have to be 14? What was wrong with 11? And who’s the guy on the scaffolding watching the ‘Stantons’?

3) Max is in art school, you blasphemers!

4) WTF? The guy on the scaffolding is George Dawson? They are HIGH Also, apparently, he’s…Scottish? At least Northern somewhere. And John Smith isn’t a smith. In fact, it appears that there will be no discussion of the Old Ways or any background that might accidentally allude to British legend.

5) Where’s Annoying Sister Mary? Instead there’s someone named Gwen. Younger, not older. And a brunette.

6) Oh, Stephen’s on the webcam. Right. Oh, in Hawaii? Not, in fact, Jamaica. And I can’t help but notice he sent a belt instead of a fricking carnival head!

7) Overloading the crow imagery. But then, they took all the mythic resonance out, they had to have something.

8) Shopping Mall: Mysterious box with swirls? Shoplifting accusations? Dungeons? Are those guards…birdmen? This is certainly a radical departure from anything Susan Cooper wrote.

9) Will’s dad is a teacher? What was wrong with him being a jeweler?

10) What’s with the mysterious Celtic swirlies at Huntercombe Manor?

11) Betcha five bucks the Highschool Hottie takes the place of apple-cheeked Maggie, and is a vessel for the Dark.

12) Why is The Rider on a white horse? With black mastiffs?

13) Pretty good info-dump on why Will has to seek the signs. But where’s the Book of Gramarye? For that matter, where’s Hawkin?

14) Wait, he Googles Light and Dark? Oh, come on, people. And then he goes to his dad for advice? Because that’s what 14-year-old boys always do when confronted by supernatural uber-battles.

15) Whhaaa! The Rider is masquerading as a doctor? AND he’s Christopher Eccleston? If there was a drinking game wherein I drank for every time I saw something that appalled me, I would be on the floor by now.

16) Um. Will’s dead twin was…actually kidnapped, according to this tripe. I blame The Dark.

17) How come the Rider can come into church? Isn’t the sanctuary…well, a sanctuary? And how does he have a mother who is actually a crazy-mad snake lady?

18) The Lady is taking all too active a part. Where’s the ethereal? Where’s the Summer Queen? Oh. Right. They weren’t doing that. Now she’s a septuagenarian ninja

19) Bet: Five bucks says Will contains the Sixth Sign.

20) Wahey! Won five bucks: Highschool Hottie is in service to the Dark!

21) What’s with the midnight chat about his issues with Merriman? This Will Stanton is a totally different personality to Will in the book. And the setting the tree on fire? Yeah. Because the pyrotechnic budget wasn’t all used up.

22) Interesting step through time with little sister Gwen. This isn’t even embroidering on the book. It’s total fabrication and the adapters should call their mothers and confess their woeful inadequacies.

23) Wahaha! Rider possesses Max! And then 17th Century English Village cockfighting ensues. With Max still possessed! And Max dropped out of college! OMG! Why even say you’re adapting the book? Because…

24) Mr Stanton was working on some kind of Light and Dark Thesis? What was the point of that?

25) Manor crisis scene: Dramatic, but quite different from the book. Water indicates thaw, whereas the relentless cold imagery in the book is much more effective as ice and snow. Oooh, Highschool Hottie is named Maggie, as an homage to the book character. Way to be faithful scriptwriters!

26) Wait, what’s this? Will’s testing scene (at the beginning of the book) is now at the end of the movie? He hears his family’s voices and wavers? What’s this? He’s let the Rider in! The moron. OMG! And The Rider has Will’s twin brother! But here’s Merriman, going after the Rider with a mace! And The Rider consigns the twin to drowning! But then Old George comes out and he’s back in the fight!

27) Will makes a last stand against the Rider. SURPRISE! Five bucks for me, Will is the sixth sign. And surprise! The kidnapped twin gets to go home with Will!

Addendum notes: No Wild Hunt. No Arthur. No real ties to the book at all.

But not a bad movie. Generally speaking. For Hollywood’s blasphemous interpretation of this story, anyhow.

Friday Confessions.

Hello. We’re Special Guest Bloggers this Friday. We’re Liz’s boobs, and we’ve hijacked Friday Confessions, because she’s too busy with the first season of Veronica Mars and the fallout from our merry havoc to worry overly much about what’s going on with us.

Yes, we know. Boobs can’t type effectively. We’ve commandeered the fingers, because Liz isn’t minding them. Again with the Veronica Mars.

Okay. you know her favourite jacket? The Chinese 1980’s-era standard-issue one that makes her feel like Jet Li, except she’s a girl?

Yeah. We totally wrecked the zipper on that jacket. What with her running for buses and whatnot, we just shook that jacket until the zipper cried ‘uncle’.

What? We had to! It did nothing for us! That jacket had us sequestered like a couple of fifty-year-old Spanish nuns in Andalusia. No one saw us! Ever!

So we broke out. We split the zipper, and not attractively. No cleavage-enhancing here. We were playing hardball. The split went south to gape across her stomach-which she hates!

Now she’s ass-deep in pins and needles and a new zipper. But it’ll take her a while. We’re free for now. Mwahaha!

So who else stepped up or out this week?

Nasty Squad.

I wasn’t there at the time, but apparently Alex came back from someplace. A job, or maybe school, or I seem to recall he had family up in Williams Lake or something. Whatever. The story goes that Daymon phoned Cory and said, “Nasty Squad is back.” Cory phoned Todd and passed it along.

It was an artificial construct at best. Nasty Squad viewed themselves in a mirror of their own construction, but there was too much testosterone competition, and not enough agreement on what ‘manly’ was.

They would go to restaurants and fight over who ate the biggest steak. Go to clubs and bars and fight over who could tip the waitress the most. Argue about pointless stuff.

Daymon had a girlfriend who was trying to make it in Theatre. She was in Hong Kong for a couple of months in a supporting role in Phantom. When she was home, she dragged him on epic shopping trips that he pretended to suffer from, but actually loved.

Cory was always in love with Kat, his high school girlfriend. No other girl was as artificial or manipulative or confused, and therefore not as sexy. It was tiring to be a girl around Cory.

Alex tried hard, but there was nothing really hardcore about him. He just spent a lot of money and told us about it.

Todd had an endless supply of drug dealer and user stories. It was actually quite unsettling, since he believed he’d already experienced the most exciting things in life. He looked at the future with resignation.

I was privy to their relationships. I was there on their steak dates. I was there when they ogled the waitresses. Don’t ask me why.

Their construct fell apart later than you’d expect. Finally, their disinterest overrode their loyalty. What they thought was solid was ephemeral, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Finally, their posing was nothing, and they parted ways. But not before giving me a cynic’s view of posturing male relationships and an impatience for them.

Snacky Snake

G is a lovely student. She is emotive, responsive, and curious. Previously too shy to ask for a pencil, she has become comfortable enough to read out loud with expression and ask questions about vocabulary. I’m very pleased, because a lot of what I do is encouraging confidence in the shy ones so that they’ll speak up in regular school and get more of the help they need in the classroom.

So G’s looking at a fill-in-the-blanks exercise, and she asks, “What is snack?”

“Oh, a snack is a little bit of food. Maybe for recess, or after school. When you’re hungry.

“Snack? Eat?” She looks incredulous.

“Sure. A little bit of food. Not like lunch or dinner. Like a cookie, maybe.”

She looks utterly confused. Looks down. This is a crucial moment. When a kid doesn’t have the nerve to explain her confusion, the confusion stays. But G looks squarely back at me.

“Snack?” She makes a serpentine motion with her hands.

“Oh. I think you’re thinking of ‘snake’. Not snack.” I repeat them so she can hear the long a sound. I write them out for her.

Understanding lights her face.

“Yeah, it’s not the same. A snake is-” I do the snake motion with my hands. “A snack is some food.”

I watch her eyes carefully and I see the humour a little under the surface. See if I can bring it out. “Don’t eat a snake!”

She laughs. Success!

Easter Time.

When I was younger, Easter was a bonanza, but it was sure hard work.

See, the rule in our house was that, at noon, Dad got any chocolate we hadn’t found. Dad loves chocolate. Dad has a sweet tooth the size of a sabre-toothed tiger’s fang. And Dad hid the Easter chocolate.

He didn’t mind so much if we found all the jelly beans, but he did make it a challenge to find the chocolate.

He once hid a bunny at the bottom of the Cheerios box. If I remember right, he put it right underneath the Cheerios, not between the box and the liner. So we had to pour all the Cheerios out to get the chocolate.

These days, getting Easter chocolate is easier. I just go to the store. But the hunting was more fun.

Friday Confessions.

Wow. When you have two jobs, a week goes faster than just with one job. I am also happy to report that my looking-at-kittens-on-the-internet has also decreased. That and more money in my pocket make me feel like less of a waste of space. Oh, I still find time to hang out on Flickr looking at pictures of food, but not nearly as much as before.

One confession is that I keep finding things as I am out and about on my new job: Things nonreturnable to their owners. On Tuesday I found a beautiful green linen scarf with poppies on it, just on the ground. If there had been a fence or something nearby, I would have draped it over, but it was a busy area and all there was was a garbage can. So I took the scarf. On Wednesday I found twenty bucks that had fallen down the side of a car seat. I’m not sure if either of these is theft; I was happy enough to take advantage, but how could I have returned them to their owners? I am a thief. Or an opportunist.

Also, yesterday morning I scored not one but two Nora Roberts books at the library. Yes, the first and second in a series. I’m on page 218 of the first one. Apparently I am a pulp fic junkie.

Incidentally, I thought a lot of uncharitable things about the Transit System this week.

Anyone else got anything to get off their chest?

Ringing Guitar Sounds Go Here.

Today was another car jockey day.

What I learned today: The Honda hybrids have terrible stereos. I felt like I should have been hiding under the covers listening to ‘Send Me An Angel’ by one-hit wonders Real Life sometime in 1983. Really. It sounded like one of those little battery-operated hand-held thingies.

But then, in another car with a stereo that wasn’t nearly as tinny (a Protege, Cheesefairy), just as I was finding a place to park the last car of the day, The Cult came on the radio. So I circled the block a few times until the song ended.

Because driving around on a sunny day listening to rock music? That’s like my religion.

Mwa ha haaa!

Today I had one of those really, really rewarding experiences that a) advanced my cunning plan to have people shop at my favourite stores and b) let me clown around in public for a totally good reason, and c) got me lunch. Result!

I showed Rachel where Dressew is. She needs some harem pants for belly dancing, and shopping for fabric anywhere other than Dressew is a crime. Unless, of course, you go to Little India, where I will take her when I am reasonably certain her head won’t explode.

But the best part was getting to entertain her dynamic progeny, Grand Master B. Here’s a thing: I am a natural clown and a drama queen. I love making people laugh. So when my job for the day is to ride herd on a smallish child, I bring the goof along. I tried on masks and made B laugh, “You’re silly!” High praise, indeed.

And then Rachel bought me lunch! At Topanga! Awesome! Rachel, when I learn the whereabouts of that Mexican restaurant I told you about, I’m totally going to return the favour. But maybe not, if it’s actually called Mexican Bob’s Emporium of Meat.

Photo Geek Across The Ocean.

The seven people who read this blog know that I’m doing a photo-a-day project. It’s affiliated with the one board I post on, which is UK-based.

I know. I am not UK based. I found it by accident and stayed because the grammar in the posts was the best I’d seen and the relationships I saw between members were real.

Well, it looks like I might be having a meet-up with some other members of the board while I am in the UK this spring, to take pictures in London.

I am so excited.

Friday Confessions.

Um. Yeah, I forgot to post a thread. I could say that it was all hectic today, but it really wasn’t.

Melissa and I were supposed to write, but we watched Little Shop of Horrors. That’s the first confession. We didn’t write a lick. But we did make notes on the movie, so we now know that a) I don’t have to write 50 songs, and b) we’re trying to be way too realistic. Musicals? Not vehicles for gritty realism.

I totally lied to my new friend Tony (of the scrotal fistula). He wanted to go for coffee and talk about gardens, but I told him I was visiting my dad. In fact, I plan to go to the St. Patrick’s Day parade and take a lot of photos of men in kilts. It just wasn’t convenient.

Te absolve. Whadja do?