Sunday, May 20, 2007

Strawberry Shortcake

Bunch of good things:
  1. Colleague has rearranged the days he and his daughter are touring her college campus so I can take reasonable vacation days for July 4th holiday and friend's wedding. Yay!!


  2. I went to the Strawberry Festival. Actually ate strawberries there, in the form of a build my own shortcake. I was checking it out to see how it would be to get a booth there. (Not yet. Need to start smaller. But I am pricing my ornaments right.) Bought a table for my patio. I need a better picture, but it's a little steel table that has been heated to get various color effects, and highlighted with cuts and copper. I dig it.

  3. Artsy steel side table with bird tracks
    steel table in profile and bad lightingTable leg spiral detail with copper

  4. Re-read a Suz Brockmann book. It was so engrossing that I resented the time I spent in the shower to de-stink myself before heading out because it took me away from a book whose ending I already knew. A little weird, but hey, at least I enjoyed the book.


Also have a little crank to get out. I went to see Shrek 3 in the theater this weekend. It's my first theater show since Casino Royale (whoot!). I wanted it to have good opening sales because the first couple of flicks were excellent. This Shrek? Not so much. Not as witty. Not as fun. Not as engaging. It was a boring morality tale with stale M/F stereotypes all through it. Why wouldn't Fiona have been Queen? Why does Donkey keep dumping the dronkey babies on mama and going on quests? The whole story was a mishmash wrapped around a bunch of rabble rousing speeches that roused the rabble and made me want to barf a little.

If you want the audience to find a character believable, they can't be a turd. Prince Carming, Artie - both turds. I didn't see much of a difference between the two. So little difference that I kept expecting them to announce that PC was A's daddy. A better ending would have PC and A doing dinner theater to rave reviews. There were a couple of cute scenes that will make it tolerable: Pinocchio talking around the truth without lying; Puss in Boots generally; Shrek's baby nightmare. But there was lots of down time and dreck with too few funny scenes. I thought about leaving but I'd had hopes and already finished my book.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your table is really nice.

I didn't enjoy Shrek 2 nearly as much as the first. We haven't been to the movies in ... forever... so I won't rush out to watch this one.

S.

Amy in CA said...

I LOVE that table!!

We have lots of "artsy" studios/stores/festivals in Laguna Beach . . . you should look into the Sawdust Festival.

Thanks for the Shrek review - I've heard similar.

CrankyOtter said...

Amy: I'm going to have to check out a bunch of festivals. See which ones would be good to grab a booth at next year. Any chance you'd be headed to the Sawdust Festival?

As to Shrek 3, the more I think on it, the more I think they should have put as much effort into the script as they did to the marketing. Even an 1/8 of the effort of marketing would have been a help.