Movie Review and Progress Update

I took my three kids to go see The Lorax yesterday.  I was looking forward to seeing this movie because The Lorax has always been my favorite Dr. Seuss book with a great message.  Sadly, the movie did a poor job living up to the spirit of the book.

First of all, The Lorax is a musical.  Or maybe not an outright musical, but is full of musical numbers that are highly cheesy and really pretty bad.  In fact, the movie immediately begins with a musical number, during which I couldn’t help thinking, “Please kill me now.”  It was that bad.  What’s even more ridiculous is that Taylor Swift is cast as one of the vocal talents, but she doesn’t sing a word.  I’m not saying she could have saved the bad songs, but you’d think the movie creators would have taken more advantage of the talent available.

Secondly, Dr. Seuss’s simple message became lost in visual extravagance.  Everything about this movie was just overdone and it was just too much.

On the plus side, the animation was fun, the vocal talent was good, and when they weren’t singing it was actually tolerable to watch.  As expected, the story from the original book had to be expanded in order to make sense as a full length feature film, and the story itself was pretty good.  It flowed, made sense, and stayed true to the vision of the book.  However, the ending reminded me quite forcefully of Wall-E, I don’t think it gives to much away to say that it involves a chase over a small sprouted plant.  It seems to me they could have attempted to be more original, or if they felt the need to repeat ideas used in Wall-E they would have followed Wall-E‘s example and kept it simple.

In the end The Lorax wasn’t terrible, but it’s wasn’t great either.  It does not live up to the hype surrounding it (that shouldn’t come as any surprise to me).  I think it’s impossible not to draw comparisons between this film and Wall-E, the latter coming off as the superior offering.

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In other news, I’ve finished moving all of my Quilting Bee pages over to this website.  I’ve also moved up my book list and added to it.  I will continue to periodically add new books as I read them…or remember I’ve read them (haha).

So, all in all, this website is “finished”, as far as I have nothing else to add for now aside from an occasional blog post.  If I find anything worth adding here in time I will.

Progress

My Quilt page has been added, that took…way too long.  Working on WordPress is harder then just coding the dang site myself.  Oh well.

I’m going to continue working tonight on the remainder of my Quilting Bee pages, but some of those are going to be a lot of work to finish.  I’m not looking forward to it.  In addition I will be relocating my Book List here from my domain.  Pretty much everything else I’m going to leave behind.  I’m keeping it simple here, people!

Header Updated

After repeated struggles I finally updated the header at the top of the site.  It features a photo I took of some of my favorite dolls in my collection and their cute feet.

What I really wanted was a pixel header like I used to have on my domain, but something always got messed up when I uploaded it.  WordPress wants a specific size, so I did that, but it was still resized thus compromising the image and distorting it.  This was extremely frustrating.  In the end I gave up on a pixel image and opted for a photograph, a photograph takes to resizing better then a pixel image and still looks fine.

All I know is I didn’t want to continue using the default image.  I liked the photos included but they weren’t mine nor did they have anything to do with me which made them and the site feel too impersonal.  I’m satisfied now.

New Blog!

Yay, new blog!  I’m in the process of moving my blog (although I’m not much of an actual blogger) and other website related items to this site, soon to be from the domain timidity.org.  I decided my days of owning a personal domain are over, I really don’t use it enough to justify the cost, so I’m off to wordpress…and here I am.

This site is still in a serious state of disorganization.  I’m slowly getting stuff uploaded here and *hopefully* by the end of February I will have it mostly/all done and ready for my domain to shut down.

I own the domain timidity.org until October but the hosting runs out at the end of February.  I don’t want to pay for more hosting so I’m just going to let it all expire.  It’s kind of a relief to be honest.  I mostly use Facebook and Flickr these days so it’s no major loss to me.  WordPress appears to have the capacity to serve my needs just fine.

Mostly I want a place to keep my Quilting Bee Quilt, that will be the the first area I focus on moving over here and getting organized as quickly as possible.  I’ve got some other stuff to put here as well.  As far as the blogging goes…whether or not I actually blog more then I used to remains to be seen, LOL!

More later…