Absurd thought of the day:

I'd play Monopoly with the addition of an "earthquake damage table". (See playing to lose, roundabout here-ish.)

Review: Frozen

I just watched Frozen the other night, and AAAHH!

Oh--I should get this out of the way early. I make no pretense of avoiding spoilers in my reviews.

Okay, the movie was merely okay. Maybe a six? (This brings to mind that I don't have a baseline for movies reviews. I'll have to fix that.) Not quite as good as I remember Tangled being, but I saw Tangled a while ago. Although it's possible I missed some early context that would have let me appreciate it more. But the music, gah, WEEEEEE!

Is Disney getting better at doing musicals, or am I at a temporal disadvantage of some sort for appreciating their older stuff--don't have context to appreciate it because I'm to young or like that? Or have I simply never heard it? Tangled and Frozen both had really good music.

But this is about Frozen, not Tangled.

Okay, first off, no villians. What? It's a Disney Musical with no villians. How weird is that? I guess there's a guy who's kind of a villian, but he's second-string stuff and more of a self-centered jerk than a real villian. (Although he acts really well, at least in-universe.)

Incidentally, kids: there's a moral about 'true love' and 'love at first sight' here. Pay attention to it.

For once, Disney has made a movie that approaches this 'true love' thing somewhat realistically. And I think they managed to double-subvert their romantic-movie conventions while they were at it.

Oh, Elsa's was the frozen heart healed by the act of true love, not Anna's. Just sayin'.

Final Verdict: A solid 6/10 for the movie itself--that was nothing much special, except maybe for Disney--but brought a 8/10 by the soundtrack. Though honestly, if you get the soundtrack, I recommend getting the movie; you should see them in context. I think the soundtrack is lurking at an above-nine "copy please" currently.

Review: Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk

Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk is a wonderfully preposterous bit of exquisite nonsense. Well. I say nonsense. Once you accept the time-traveling stegosaurus, and the goopy green space aliens, everything else makes perfect sense. (Well, except the piranhas.)

The father, the main character of the story, gets interrupted on the way back home with some milk—all-important for breakfast cereal and tea, you see—and in the course of his adventures ends up saving the world almost, but not quite, entirely by accident. Along the way he meets pirates, dinosaurs, aliens, space police, wumpires, and one Angry Volcano God. (But no piranhas.) He meets them all out of order, of course, and timey shenanigans are used multiple times to save the day. Twice, at the very least. (Hey, that's high for (what's nominally) a children's book.)

The book is illustrated in a Seuss-like manner. Well—. The illustrations don't look at all like Seuss's work, but otherwise they've got the same kind of absurdity look to them. Unfortunately, as I'm writing this review from memory, I don't have the name of the illustrator at hand.

Final Verdict: 8/10. Well worth reading, but may not be worth buying if you don't have kids who'd enjoy it. I liked it, but I don't expect I'll be buying a copy. I've been very spoiled by fanfic. (Mind you, I probably 'should' buy a copy, to support the existence of such books. But....)