Klaus

All I hear is, "Klaus is so good." "Everyone should watch Klaus." So, let's talk about it, friends. Let's talk about Klaus.

It's on Netflix.

It's about a mailman whose punishment is being sent to a small town waaaaaaaay up North. The town sucks. Everyone hates each other. Worst of all, nobody goes to school, and nobody mails letters, because of the hate.

Our friend, mail dude, has to mail 6,000 before he can go home, to his life of mailman luxury. He steals a kid's drawing, a drawing of said kid looking sad, and tells the kid she can have it back if she purchases postage. Her parents show up, and he runs off, with the drawing. He runs into a big scary guy, AKA Santa, (or Klaus,) who finds the drawing, and makes the postman deliver to the sad girl a toy. (Klaus has lots of toys.) So the postman does it, and soon every kid in town thinks if they mail a letter to Klaus he'll mysteriously deliver a toy to them in the middle of the night.

Well the kids start getting along, and guess who hates that? A few old people. So they try to Grinch Santa and the mailman. Then everyone finds out the mailman was really just trying to get the heck out of their sucky town, and they're really upset at him.
Here's where I go, "Oh come on. Is that really so bad?" In this movie's hurry to be formulaic, they missed making the mailman's sins against his friends, really that big of a bummer. His girlfriend, the teacher, was doing the exact same thing! Then she holds it against him when it comes out he was doing the same thing? Come on.

Then there's a touching moment, that made me cry, and that's when I went, "Oh. There it is. I cried. That's why everyone likes this movie."

To sum it up, it's okay. It's kind of heartwarming if you like warm hearts and all that. I give it a meh on the Boonie scale. Well... it's better than meh, but it's meh. It's not The Iron Giant. Maybe I'm angry because I expected more.

I liked the kid with the carrot, (above.)

Pixar Movies Sadness Level

Pixar movies rated by sadness.

Now you can do what I do - decide which movie you want to see based on how sad you want to get. Enjoy! (Or don't. If you like sad movies and want to suffer.)

1. Inside Out: Cried the entire time. Never not crying.

2. The Good Dinosaur: Bawl fest 2015

3. Coco: Day of the Sad

4. Up: Oh hello. Would you like to be sad?

5. Toy Story 4: Sad Story 4

6. Toy Story 3: The Toys Start Getting Sad

7. Monsters Inc.: Just thinking about the ending is making me tear up. Don't think about it!

8. Toy Story 2: Jessie's past life in Sadville.

9. Finding Dory: I haven't even seen it all the way through because it's more boring than anything else... which is sad.

10. Finding Nemo: Every parents' worst nightmare.

11. Wall-E: No tears, but super depressing.

12. Cars 3: Sad Cars

13. Brave: There are moving moments

14. Ratatouille: another nightmare

15. Cars: it's kind of sad that Lightening McQueen doesn't win... right?

16. A Bug's Life: Sad that it doesn't have more Heimlich

17. The Incredibles: Hardly sad at all.

18. The Incredibles 2: Even less sad.

19. Monsters University: Not sad even slightly. Downright freaking delightful.

Spider-man: Far From Home

Yay! Go see it.

Aladdin

I was not expecting to completely love this movie. These live-action Disney remakes have been disappointing crap-fests. (Search your feelings. You know it to be true.) The Jungle Book was dark and stupid. The best parts of the original were the songs! Take that away and you've just got a big, Christopher Walken monkey. Nobody wants that. Hermione and the Beast was absolutely horrible. Emma Watson's voice made me want to burn my ears off, and she turned Belle into a snob. Belle wasn't a brainy snob. She was brainy, but her big brain didn't make her head bigger. Also, I think I'm the only person in the world who doesn't care for that Evermore song. Just give us, "If I Can't Love Her!" from the Broadway version. That song's amazing. Like sit in my room and not do anything but listen to that song amazing. Cinderella was okay, probably because it wasn't trying to be a sad carbon copy of the original. But it was still slow... and still sad. But you know what gave me chills, was exciting, and not a depressing suck-fest?

I'm not saying it's perfect. Beware of spoilers. (Yes. I know you've seen the original. But still.)

Here's what didn't work.

1. The ending didn't have a, "I'm a street rat, remember? I'll improvise." moment. Who cares? Well, I'll tell ya. He had to be who he was in order to win. When it mattered, being who he was was better than being a prince.

2. Adopt a voice trainer. I'm sorry. But flat notes have no place in Agrabah. Jasmine's voice sounded good during her new, modern, songs, but "A Whole New World" needed a whole new singer. But it's tough being compared to the great Lea Salonga! Meanwhile, during the musical numbers, Will Smith's energy would go on vacation. But this is me reeeeeeeeeally nit picking. No performance was as bad as Emma Watson's was. The best singer was the woman with one line, "Still I think he's rather tasty." Hello there, random citizen with a beautiful voice!

3. Let's talk about Jasmine's story line. It was new. It was unrealistic, except in a modern, or magical, setting. (Which it was, so we're good.) But did we lose our "I'm a street rat," moment because Jasmine was having her, "I won't be silent" moment? I think we could have had both. It stayed true to Jasmine's original character. They just took it a step... or 900 steps, further. But it might have been nice to see a change there. If the movie had started with her keeping silent, and being scared, THEN she embraced her voice at the end, that would have been more effective.

So what worked? I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED! I'm not even gonna number them. Let's go!

Okay. I'll number them. We'll keep score.

1. Will Smith's Genie. No. He's not Robin Williams. Of course he's not. No one is. But you know who he is? He's FREAKING WILL SMITH! He's the Fresh Prince of Ababwa! So shut up about it and get off his back. Come on, people. Seriously.

2. Aladdin. He was great! I loved that during One Jump Ahead you could tell he loved being the Robin Hood of Agrabah. It was wonderful to see this side of Aladdin that really enjoyed who he was, and what he was doing. 

3. The differences. The little things. The removal of the dungeon scene. The removal of Jasmine running away. Gone. Gone. Gone. Thank you!

4. Iago. 

5. The beginning. HOW SWEET WAS THAT!?! So cute! Of course, knowing everything, I knew what was going on. The kids behind me didn't. At the end of the film they were like, "Oh!" Silly youths.

6. I'm out of things to say now. But I want to add numbers because I said we'd keep score earlier and I really enjoyed this movie. It kept giving me chills! It was so much fun! 

7. I don't want to leave out Jafar or the Sultan. They were great. Carpet. Great. Abu. Really great. Is great a good word to use when eloquently critiquing a movie? Nobody cares! (Nobody being me.) 

8. Seriously. I'm done now. Just go see the movie. I'm sorry I didn't list anyone's names except Will Smith's. Check out IMDb. Don't make me do all the work.

9. But let's make this an even 10.

10. Go see it.

A Wrinkle in Time or Why I Hated Reading as a Kid

Thank you, A Wrinkle in Time, for reminding me what it was about kid books that made me hate them.
1. Nonsensical Magic.
My sister hates this worse than I do, but I hate it. "I think I'll be a bird now." No. Not allowed!

2. Appealing to Kids.
"Hey Phil, kids like magic. Right?" "Yeah, Mary. Kids love magic." "Cool. Okay. I'm gonna throw in a lot of stuff kids like." Kids like magic. Everyone likes magic. But kids also like stuff that doesn't suck.

3. Are you saying A Wrinkle in Time sucks?
I'm saying it was a big, boring, chunk of time-wasting fluff. It was pretty fluff. Sometimes the fluff made me ugly-cry. I liked all the, "My gift to you is your faults," or whatever stuff that was a big theme throughout the movie. I liked that a lot. Like The Greatest Showman, having confidence in being deserving of love right now, as you are, is a fantastic theme! But the rest of the blah-blah-blah... no.

4. It boils down to CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.
Do you care about the characters?
Some of them.
Were you worried about them?
No. Because the situations they kept getting themselves into were RIDICULOUS!

Suddenly they're in a forest and suddenly some wave of NOTHING is chasing them! OH NO! RUN FROM THE CONVENIENT OBSTACLE!

To be fair, I spent a good chunk of the movie with my 5 year old in the bathroom. He kept saying he had to go, and he had been sick the day before, so I didn't want to chance it. But he also says he has to go to the bathroom when he's bored with a movie, or scared. I could hardly blame him for being either.

TV Show: When Calls the Heart

Let's take a break from movies, and talk about TV, specifically, Hallmark Channel's (I watched it on Netflix and Season 5 on Vudu,) WHEN CALLS THE HEART.

It's based off a book or something. They call it the North West, the frontier, and there are Mounties, so we're thinking, Canada. Right? Well, their Christmas parade had American flags, so....  I know little about Canada's history, but unless their flag was once a whole heck-of-a-lot like ours... someone got confused.

Apart from that, the show is refreshingly conservative. It's not that I'm anti-liberal TV shows, but this one is clean, and easy. It doesn't challenge anything, and I'm sorry, it's kind of nice. I ENJOY A GOOD CHALLENGE, but this show let's absolutely every other show do that, while it just hangs back and chills.

That being said, every single character is either the best person ever, or the worst. There are a few characters who are grey. THANK YOU BILL!

SPOILERS: I spent the first five seasons wanting to Jack and Elizabeth to get together, and when they finally did I wanted to punch them in the face. They're so obnoxious now! Also, when Cody showed up, uh-uh. No. Hated Cody! But once he was there for a while and stopped WHINING ALL THE TIME he became okay. I even worried about him when he got sick.

Second spoiler: Yeah. It's a bit predictable. Doug showed up and I told myself, (because I watch it alone, or with my babies,) he's gonna die. Low and behold.... he did. BUT I can't knock a show for being predictable, because... everything's predictable.

CONSENSUS: Yes. It's cheesy and it only gets cheesier. Yes, it gets formulaic, (everything does.) Someone leaves town. Someone goes to get them. They change their mind about being grumpy and everything is happy. But it's easy. It's light. I don't have to worry about anything. Sex doesn't even exist and the worst someone does is steal and shoot because they want to keep stealing. So here is a list of my favorite characters, in no particular order:

Lee Coulter (far right)
Rosemary (far left)
Bill (dated Becky from Full House/next to Lee)
Abigail (Becky from Full House)
Tom Thornton (not pictured)
Reverent what's his name (the second reverent who dated Becky from Full House/next to Rosemary)
Opal (not pictured)
Philip (above pictured)
Mayor Jerk-Face (I can't believe I'm blanking on these names. Oh well. It's not like I could take the time to look them up or something!/not pictured)
Charles (poor Charles/not pictured)
Faith (nurse/not pictured)
Carson (doctor/not pictured)
AJ (outlaw lady/not pictured)

And here are characters that bother me:
Early Cody
Jesse
Hattie

Usually, I like our leads, but they're getting on my nerves with all their cheese!

So I suggest you watch it!

The Greatest Showman

CONS:

Con The First: All the songs, I AM SORRY, sound exactly the same, and I GOT SICK OF THEM. (That last part was capitalized because I had to yell over all the shouting at me.) Also, all the choreography was jumping, often cheesy, and uninteresting, except for the acrobat song where Zendaya and Effron were floating around, which was awesome... but also absurd and ridiculous... and, again, cheesy.

Con The Next:

Jenny Lind... ahem.

Jenny Lind, like most people in this movie, was a real person. She was, in fact, a Swedish opera star. During the film she is described as "the greatest opera singer in Europe," or something. Then we finally get to hear her sing, and... wait... that's not opera. She's not an opera singer. Let me put this into context for those of you who happen to not be music snobs. Calling something opera that isn't opera... It'd be like if they described a dancer as a ballerina, then when she danced she danced a ho-down. It's all dancing, but there's a WORLD OF DIFFERENCE. 

Now, I get why they didn't have her sing opera. Trust me. I get it. But don't just shovel pop at us and call it opera! Have it be like a dream, where she's obviously singing opera, but what we - through the view of Barnum - hear is the poppy song. OR just describe her as "the greatest singer in Europe," and leave the "opera" part out! As long as we're taking liberties! It's a MUSICAL! We're not going for realism, but do we have to LIE? Oy. In the great words of somebody somewhere, "If you bring a cannon on stage, you have to shoot it." The word "opera" is a cannon. Handle with care.

Third Con:

The subplot was more interesting than the plot. Is that a con? Yep. I just checked.

Most Objectionable Con Even More So Than The Opera Thing:

Barnum refused to admit his circus friends into the "opera" concert after party. They're so cheesed-off they sing my favorite song about it. (I don't remember how it goes, but it sounds like all the others except sung by the Bearded Lady who's quite possibly the most vocally talented of the lot.) But they NEVER RESOLVE THIS! The circus folk just kind of get over it. WHY INCLUDE THIS IF HE NEVER APOLOGIZES FOR IT!?!?!? Are we to take him returning in the end as an apology? Because it's not. Sloppy convenience is what I call it. 

PROS:

First Pro: The theme of "I'm enough as I am," is absolutely beautiful and relevant. I LOVE that it not only applied to the circus peoples, but to Barnum, who kept thinking he wasn't enough even though Michelle Williams kept trying to tell him he was more than enough.

Second Pro: The singing was nice.

My brother once told me he respected movies that accomplished what they set out to accomplish. This movie fulfilled its goal, but it was also dull. HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT. BOONIE?!?!?!?! I HATE YOU!!!! It's because I didn't care about Barnum. He was kind of a creep. He never sacrificed beyond risking all his money. I cared way more about everybody else, than I did about him.

But would I recommend it? Eh. I would tell you, "It's okay. Kinda fun. Kinda dull. Really great theme. Lots of people liked it." It reminded me of Newsies. I'd say it's better than Newsies. There. Sparkling review. 

Okay. I'll leave it here, fully convinced some of my friends now hate me.