Category: Books

Ella Enchanted and stuff

Sunday, 5 September, 2004 at 9:31 pm

It’s too hot to go to sleep. :( Maybe I should open my window or something. But I’m afraid of someone climbing in my window. >_> Whenever I hear of some guy going in houses and attacking women, I also hear “the victim had her window open because of the heat.” And I think, well, I wouldn’t leave my window open while I’m asleep. But … it’s … so … hot. x.x

Oh well. There’s nothing to do online. I’m bored. I was telling myself I’d go on aim, but then I kept putting it off for when I was “less occupied.” And now I’m not going on because it’s so late. ._.;

Anyway. On Saturday I watched Ella Enchanted ’cause my cousin bought the DVD. Blah, stupid book-to-movie ventures. I mean … some are good. *thinks Harry Potter, even though it’s not perfect* But this one was absolutely warped. Did I complain about the A Wrinkle in Time movie here? That was actually pretty nice. It stuck to the main part of the book. The only part about Ella Enchanted that was carried to the movie was there was a girl named Ella with a stepmother and stepsisters who went looking for Lucinda to take the spell of obedience off her.

To list my complaints, off the top of my head >b (spoilers ahead, if you haven’t read the very good book):

  • Ella liked her dad in the movie. That was stupid. Where was the reason of keeping her obedience a secret?
  • The maid/”house fairy” (which sounds an awful lot like “house elf” to me :b) wasn’t such a prominent character. That stinks. They just made her a rotten fairy. x_x
  • Her book wasn’t her boyfriend. That was weird. It was supposed to be a regular fairy book that showed you whatever you wanted.
  • Lucinda wasn’t the way she really is. She’s supposed to portray herself as the quintessential glittery fairy of the fairy tales, when fairies really look like humans (just with really tiny feet). I dunno. Maybe there wasn’t enough time to show that she was just being an idiot. Nah, she’s just your average black fairy who’s got sass and every other cliche characteristic in the book.
  • Hattie, the older stepsister, was made into your regular Popular cheerleader chick. Actually, I rather liked her. ^^ Not the changes, but the person who played her was funny.
  • Char … blegh. He’s so much nicer and prince-ly in the book. Okay, this is a better complaint. They put politics in the movie. That was really really really funky. The elves and ogres and giants were segregated and some were forced into slavery and junk. And Char didn’t really get gung-ho about becoming king someday.
  • Stupid talking snake. Enough said.
  • They took out the part of the book where Ella meets Char at her mother’s funeral. ;.; That was sweet. And the part where they ran away from the party or whatever and found the glass slippers.
  • One part in the movie Ella had to tell her best friend they couldn’t be friends anymore (even though they became friends when Ella was sent to finishing school), and she’s not allowed to be friends with an Ayorthaian. They didn’t even explain what Ayorthaian was or anything. They just made the character look Middle Eastern, and that solved the whole non-explanation. x_<
  • They added the elf character and the Benny-book-boyfriend character. It made it so much more average. What’s wrong with a girl traveling by herself? Oh, I know:
  • They changed Ella completely. She couldn’t have kept the audience’s attention on her own. She wasn’t smart and witty and coool. No, she was just another feminist protester (of all these politics). And she sang. O_o In the book she can’t sing. And they made her feminist. *cries* “Who asked you to save me? I can save myself. I don’t need any help from you.” I thought that was the worst part.
  • They also changed the climax. Instead of it being her refusing to marry him (which, I think, is a much better ending; but I don’t know how you’d carry an internal struggle over to a visual media) and breaking the spell, she tried to kill him because his uncle told her to and she was locked up and then she saved him from being poisoned by his uncle and having his uncle take over the throne. Stupid. That was just an imagined reason for why she wouldn’t marry him. I don’t know why they picked up such a mundane, done-before ending. It’s not like you can’t make a smart movie for kids that adults can like (i.e. Harry Potter :b).
  • Oh yeah. They took out the part of the book where Char had to go away and he and Ella were writing back and forth and learning about each other. *one of my favorite parts* :b

Just to erase the memory of that movie, I’ve got to read the book again. Aw. Books I have yet to read: finish Raise the Red Lantern; Mary, Called Magdalene; Sabriel; The Haunting of Hill House; Ender (and Bean) series; The Da Vinci Code; and Why Girls are Weird. Oh, poor me. :b

*pokes Poke*

Friday, 20 August, 2004 at 7:48 pm

Wow. *twitchtwitch* Mozilla and IE can take the same exact coding (absolute positioning) and have a difference of ONE PIXEL. *twitch* I can’t tell which one is off, either, because it involves text and I can’t really tell where the top of the line of text is. Grr.

Hidek said to me today, “If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have done it.” Messed up logic. I dunno. That just confused me for a while. ^^;;

Mum and I went to the mall today and we went in this store that sells junky stuff and we saw these, er, things. Like, stuffed animals/figurines/statues/whatever. Well. They were cat/dog/chicken things, and we think they had real fur/feathers covering them. That was really weird. Ooh! That store also had these neat cards. They all had stick figures and speech bubbles, very simple in black and white. This one said, “Congratulations on your marriage, and I hope you have many …” on the front and “anniversaries” inside. Another one said something like, “Sometimes during the day I like to sit and think …” then on the inside “about you.” So cute. ^^

Well anyway. East Wind closed at the mall (albeit a long time ago, but I’m trying to make a point here), but we found this other food place that was there since as long as I can remember that changed its menu (and maybe its management), so now it serves shrimp and sushi! XD No noodle place yet, though. ¬_¬ Westside Pavilion and Thousand Oaks mall and the outlet mall all get noodles, but this mall doesn’t. Boo.

Yeah, I think that’s it. Oh yeah. I spent $220 on books. Er. Schoolbooks. And I bought a new copy of Hot Gimmick vol. 2. Now I have only a bunch of singles in cash. And I need to save up $300 before next semester to put back in my checking account. Ah, back to school and having no money.

(Last night I read a few of the first pages of both Mary, Called Magdalene, and Raise the Red Lantern, and they’re both soso good, and yet I’m still raging against the fact that no money means no books!! Wah!)

logic will break that head

Monday, 9 August, 2004 at 6:53 pm

The Stills’ singer is reminding me of someone, and I can’t figure out who. Grrr. Someone whose album I bought recently … I keep thinking Muse, but that can’t be it.

Yeah. I bought The Stills today, and Snow Patrol. ^_^ The Stills are all right. I dunno. I guess I’m just that into punk/punk pop? ‘Cause I’m really excited about Green Day’s new album. ^^;; The Stills are nice, but somehow … it’s just a bit dry to me. If that makes any sense. Maybe I just don’t like singers with low(ish) voices … >.>

Today I returned the Hot Gimmick vol. 2 I bought on Friday ’cause I found out it’s defective. First there’s this whole big part that gets skipped, then later on it’s inserted randomly and the manga just follows normally from there. Or, as Mum told me to phrase it, there’s a section duplicated, and it’s inserted in the storyline before it’s supposed to happen.

I got confused, greatly. As I was reading it I thought, ‘okay, maybe it’s one of those stories where things get filled in as you go along … o.O’ but then I realized later I’d read that part before! So. Uh. Yeah. I got a refund, and the guy ordered me a new one, ’cause I’d bought the store’s last copy. ^^;;

I also bought this guinea pig figurine! XD At a train store Mickey and Hidek went to for different things. It was only two dollars, and it looks so cuuute! Not rodent-like at all. Or … hampster-like. >_> And Mum bought a second one to give to Noelle. :b Ish sho cute. My guinea pig merchandise collection is growing! XD

dreams lengthening and shortening time

Saturday, 24 July, 2004 at 2:20 am

Wow. I was updating my private dreamlog (rule for myself: every new dream I have, I have to add at least two dreams to my log) and I found this dream with a reference to Harry Potter. o_o Now, for some reason, I was thinking that the dreams I had in 2001 were old. Yet, I keep thinking that it wasn’t that long ago that I read Harry Potter after Christmas. But, I guess, yeah, I read them in high school. About three and a half years ago. Hehe. I don’t know why, but I think that that’s such a long time ago. Number-wise. But when I think about back then, it doesn’t seem like such a long time ago.

Anyway! In the same dream, Magic cards and books about trains were mentioned. o_o That was a while ago! It just makes my brain do a backflip.

there’s got to be another way

Tuesday, 8 June, 2004 at 7:12 pm

Hah, I just realized there’s this option to have people registered before they can comment … and that I had it marked “yes” ^^;; I don’t really know how I’d have people register. How did I register in this thing? I forgot. Uhh … too lazy to go find out.

Yesterday I watched Mean Girls. Mum thinks it was a copy of some executive’s video, and not a pirate, ’cause it was bad quality, but in a good way. Meaning, it wasn’t slanted, and there weren’t shadows of people walking across. ^^;; (unlike Shrek, which we watched Saturday.) It was just fuzzzzy and there was an annoying crackle in the background, which I managed to partially get rid of (Mum: “There was background noise?” ^^;).

I liked Mean Girls, but it wasn’t as good as the commercials make it out to be … :/ I don’t know if I’d watch it again. But I’d tell people to go see it if they’re interested! (And … I’m not a hypocrite; I wouldn’t have paid theater admission to see it, I wouldn’t have rented it from Blockbuster, and if it weren’t on HBO later I’d go through my whole life without having seen it.)

Shrek was good. Not fantabulously amazing, but if anyone had a DVD or paid for my ticket, I’d see it again. >b

Most of my summer so far, my internet access has been subpar. :( Half the time it’s really really really really really slow and the other half it’s all right. One time when it was slow I tried running a speed test, and my browser sat there for about ten minutes (or more) before the site told me the id thingamabobber had timed out and I should check to make sure I met the requirements of the test (cable or DSL access). O_o

Earlier this year I finally managed to get Launch videos to work on my laptop, but now they don’t work because the internet speed is too slow and the video keeps “buffering” or my connection is broken and I have to click OK to restart the video, but that never works and the window just freezes and I can’t do anything with it.

Also, the host servers I use for fs.net (Host Affect) seem to be down quite a bit. I don’t know. They say they have 99.9% uptime (equalling 45 minutes per month of downtime), which means roughly 1.5 minutes downtime every day. A week or two ago I couldn’t get fs.net for an hour or so almost every day. I didn’t think the internet was that slow then, either. x_x I dunno.

I have 21 different nail polish colors. Blues, pinks, purples, reds, and shimmery colors. I also have four clear bottles (one’s this Sally Hansens diamond strength thing, one is a plain clear color, one is Cutex Strong Nail with glitter in it, and the last is a topcoat). Right now I like only two or three of the colors. I want new nail polish. ^^;;; Yeah, I’m horrible all right.

Books I want to reread: Sabriel and Lirael, Crown Duel, and the Ender series. I also want to reread The Sandman series. I also have By the River Piedra I Sat and Wept to read. I just have to finish reading Jo’s Boys. Blah. That one is so unlike Little Women … but I won’t get rid of it, because it’s part of the series. ^^;;; I also have to buy Abhorsen before I read Sabriel or Lirael. That came out … a looong time ago … but it didn’t go to paperback for a while, and by the time it did I’d stopped going to the young adult section. :(

I have ten dollars. I want anime posters, Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, Confidential Confessions 4, Abhorsen, and The Time Traveler’s Wife. ^^;; Good luck to me.