This just in: Bridesmaids

Short and sweet version:

I liked it but I’m not about to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. 3.5/5

tl; dr version:

Musicals, musicals, musicals.

By the time this post is done, I will have listened to the Original Cast Recordings of two musicals over the span of a ten hours. I am well aware that it is the auditory equivalent of eating nothing but comfort food; it’s just been a really long and ghastly week. Long story short, NPR is to blame.

Twilight ‘medieval’: Red Riding Hood

E4 offers free monthly previews of upcoming films they, as a corporation, deem student-y fare under the ‘Slackers Club’ banner. It’s a pretty fantastic idea as it gets butts into seats on otherwise quite nights. I have but one problem with this rather cunning enterprise: so far it’s been a completely mixed bag. From what I can remember these are some of the offerings: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Submarine, The Wolfman (2011), Get Him to the Greek, a marathon of the first season of The Misfits, Burke and Hare and most recently, Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood.^{1 1} The films with links to IMDB are the ones I ended up seeing. This is not at all indicative of my preference seeing how I cannot seem to pass on the opportunity to see a free film, more on that later. 

Return of Modern Family!

This episode of Modern Family was full of one-liners. Also, T-Rex arms! Little kids saying inappropriate things? Yet another thing that makes me laugh.

I’m generally not a huge fan of all the story-lines coming together in a cutesy and (usually) contrived way but this episode swayed me. It’s really impressive that all three plots came together in such a way that it didn’t necessitate a talking head at the end of the episode. I guess the show does have a huge advantage in that they have a slew of characters who teether on the edge of trope-dom without ever fully committing to it.

“What are my friends gonna think?”
“They’re gonna think you’re helping your father put food on the table.”

The timing of this exchange is just about perfect as it syncs up just as the sliding door clicks into place. I love innuendos so much.¹ *happy sigh* That entire phone conversation between Phil and the (potential) pervert is FANTASTIC. I wonder if this was a joke that was something that had been tossed around in the writers’ room or if it was something they wrote specifically for this episode. Like I said earlier, the story-lines come together in such a way that I wonder if the shrink-wrapped car was at the centre of it all before they fleshed it out.
¹ My friends and I have been playing Innuendo Bingo and it shows no signs of stopping. I predict that by May we’ll never be able to say two words to each other again.

I like that the show doesn’t really shy away from having a teenager who is just average without having her be mopey and insecure. Haley isn’t the brightest tool in the shed but she is actually like people I know. I’m assuming that they plan on exploring Haley’s senior year next season so that’s gonna be fun. I want to see Phil being exceptionally inappropriate about college tours and the rest of it. Oh college.

Frisbee golf and sledding on cafeteria trays. It’s really entertaining that these are some of the things Claire singles out as college’s greatest hits. Over here on the other side of the pond it’s really not like that at all. We’ve got afternoons spent lolling in pubs and skiving off tutorials to go on weekend trips.

Oh snap, David Izkoff. This article in the New York Times cheekily points out that the “purely theoretical sitcom subplot” was clearly something that could only happen on television and nowhere else… I’m not surprised that I didn’t catch the maybe-reference, but I did wonder why a middle school board/whoever is in charge would okay the use of wire work in a performance by middle-schoolers 😉

Spring cleaning and random thoughts

I can finally see out my window; this should not make me feel as accomplished as I do right now. Here’s the thing, it’s been a miserable winter, and to some extent, a dreadful year. Therefore I feel as though I’m reasonable in feeling the way I do. As the ultimate act of pushing the awful winter behind me, I ceremoniously ripped the insulating film off of my windows and cleaned them. I’m talking newspaper-and-vinegar, inside-AND-out cleaning. So far this is the only thing from a rather long list that’s been completed.

Random thoughts:

Hello world!

This is just going to have to be one of those placeholder posts, at least until I decide what to do over here.

Over and out.