oh how I hated Coraline

I knew I'd had a topic but it flew clean out of my mind. One of my Ravelry friends faved a mitten called Coraline. It's got a cat on.

I watched that movie. Coraline.

What complete and utter dreck.

People who don't want children should not have them. People who do not intend to feed their children should have their children taken away. Children who look in the refrigerator and see the animated version of cobwebs and who then fantasize about chicken are being mistreated. (with some exceptions)

People with odd names get used to it.

Then there was the weirdness of Wybie saying he wasn't allowed in the main house and his grandmother's voice at the end sounding ethnically African. I realize the boy wasn't supposed to go there because it's dangerous, but it sure sounded like a throwback to slavery to me.

Why did people who hate gardening write books on it?

Orange is a stupid color for gloves.

But mostly we're shown how remarkably strange the real world is and then we're shown a similarly strange world and are expected to see the foreshadowing of evil. To me it seemed like Coraline might have wanted to look behind door number 3.

There was more than a little of the incomprehensibility of Dorothy's choice in Coraline's. Her regular life was one of passive evil. The story was about the seductiveness of active evil and her attempts to escape it after realizing. But I don't understand why she didn't just keep going.

I did NOT like Coraline. Except for a tiny segment of it where Coraline realizes the fantasy world is evil because it forces people to appear happy regardless. I would like that for my real world life. If you're happy all the time, then there's something really seriously wrong with you... but the world doesn't work like that. If you're not smiling and happy appearing, then you're not welcome. Maybe this is the button world and it's a full of puppets whose strings are pulled by an evil spider goddess. That would, actually, make a lot of sense. It would be depressing as all get out though.

The Prisoner

I'm trying to catch up on The Prisoner miniseries. My SO loves the original. The new one is bad. It's almost a parody of the original except parodies are supposed to be funny.

The Village and NYC as portrayed in this are both so awful that if he was Dorothy, he'd be saying, "Fuck both Kansas and Oz, let's rejoin that tornado!"

My complaints about the original were that I was unclear on what the problem was. That Village seemed nice. It's the kind of place you'd want to go when you retired. The original 6 had retired. So it seemed like a good match.

This Village seems ghastly. The new 6 asks "Do you have anything [food] that's not a wrap?" The response was, "Why?" I can't imagine living somewhere that didn't have a choice of food. And everything in this new Village seems really sterile. There's no music in the square, there's no square. The architecture is very Americanized instead of Mediterranean.

The new 6 is some dude who is famous for something. I recognized him and his name. Only later did I find out he was in one of those Christ movies, temptation of, passion of, outing of, something. The 2 is Ian McKellen. Ian McKellen is totally wasted on this.

There are gobs and gobs and gobs of untethered flashbacks in the new version. They make this whole thing look like an acid trip. Plus in one of the flashbacks, the dude (who becomes the new 6) lends his phone to a woman and she steals it. How the fuck do you forget to ask for your phone back? I don't think I'd lend my new phone to a stranger regardless. Probably sneeze on it and get H1N1 flu virii all over it. But even if I did lend it, I'd be right there asking for it back. Clearly 6 is a moron when in the presence of an even vaguely attractive female.

Most of the original was about how 6 would outsmart the series of 2s. He would outwit them and cause them to obviously fail. This 6 seems about smart enough to sneeze through kleenex and be surprised that the rest of the world came back after it disappeared forever behind the tissue.

It's not the world's worst movie, but I'm getting a lot of knitting done while I actively ignore this.

ps. While discussing those Christ movies and asking if they were sequels, I was asked to title a hypothetical slash movie. My answer: Christ and Iscariot in the Back of the Chariot.