Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Our Day Of Being Fourteen


Peanut butter ice is good, real, real good. While taking a stroll through S's neighborhood, we stopped by Scoopz, an ice place. We walked in the very hot sun with our ices. I was in peanut butter heaven. She was in chocolate with a hint of mint hell. She'd ordered their version of Dip N Dots thinking it would be more mint, less chocolate but it was mostly chocolate with barely any mint. As it melted, it looked like chocolate only. That was a letdown, but I was still on a high from the peanut butter. This was a much better experience than when we went to Uncle Louie G's and I got a weird lime that Eddie wound up eating half of because they didn't have anything he ordered because their machines were broken and they'd run out of milk. Scoopz wins by a landslide!

After being out for a few hours, walking around, taking in the neighborhood, we headed back to her place and settled in to watch Beastly. I had toyed with the idea of adding it to my queue, but now I didn't have to since she'd gotten it instead. Basically, it's a Beauty and the Beast story in present day high school.

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! Don't read the rest of this if you are planning to be shocked by the predictable and simultaneously nonsensical ending of Beastly.

Everything made predictable sense at the end. The girl falls in love with the ugly guy. The guy turns into a handsome-ish guy again. The spell is broken.

Then the house servant's children are allowed to come live in America, which is what she's been waiting for since she's been working in America and sending money back to her family in another country. Okay, that's a nice thing. It doesn't really have anything to do with anything else, but a feel good ending is what fairy tales are all about.

Now for the insanity. The blind tutor regains his sight. The father had hired a blind tutor so his ugly son did not have to go to school and the tutor didn't have to see how ugly the son was. The tutor rubs his temple while holding the children's documentation, repeats there it is there it is, and boom! He has his sight back. What the?

S and I rewound the friggin thing several times, thinking we'd missed something. Then we looked up the movie online for a summary. Every summary describes exactly what I just did--the tutor can see, the end.

Then I found a summary of the book that the movie is based on. It has a lot of differences. The ugly version of the boy has a different name. The time frame to break the spell is two years instead of the movie's one year. Oh, and there's a deal the ugly guy makes with the witch that includes giving sight to the blind tutor AND the witch is really the servant under a curse, who is now able to be set free.

While that sounds convoluted, it actually makes much more sense than a blind man randomly regaining his sight by rubbing his temples and gently urging his eyes to see again. While it's a feel-good moment, I don't think the movie should have kept that part in, especially when there's no talk of the deal that makes him see again and the servant and the witch are not the same person.

To rid ourselves of the absurdity of the film, we watched Pretty Little Liars.

I know. Ices. Beastly. Pretty Little Liars. You'd think we were teenagers. However, yesterday, we both did laundry, and S went to the dry cleaners, so we earned our Tiger Beat perfect day.

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