Tuesday 23 December 2003

Pic of the day: Un-grate-ful wretch! A really cheesy piece of merchandise on this most shopping of shopping days.

Grating

Today was the third day of the rest of my life. This day of the year is what I call "husband shopping day". I guess that's kinda ambiguous, except that husbands are not traded. So yes, it means the day when the husband is shopping. Men in general: Husbands, boyfriends, sons and brothers and uncles; the Y chromosome makes us all hesitate, procrastinate, delay and just put it off until it is almost too late. The good thing for the merchants is that the desperate males don't look too closely at the price tag. As long as the gift is obviously not shopped at the gas station on Christmas Eve, anything goes. And besides, it can always be swapped after Christmas.

Me, I bought the extended version of the Two Towers movie on DVD. And a cheese grater. A very cheap cheese grater with lots of differently sized holes. The old, simpler one was broken quite some time ago. Well, to make a short story even shorter: After using the new grater once, I repaired the old one. The new one was every bit as shoddy as it was cheap, if not more so. It was a rather grating experience! But at least I bought it for myself, not for my significant other. (Receiving such a gift would be enough to make anyone feel like an insignificant other!)

The movie was definitely better than the dinner tool. 42 minutes of new and extended scenes, boasts the label. But it is done very subtly, so that I did not catch all the new scenes even though it is barely a year since I watched it the first time. I blame this on the book. Having read the book, it is all too easy to edit the movie in your head and put in your favorite scenes. I know when I saw the movie in the grand movie theater with SuperWoman and my other friends, I was disappointed by the way Gimli the dwarf was portrayed. I felt he was made too much into a laughingstock, and I missed the banter between equals which he and Legolas ran through much of the book. But when I watched the DVD, it was much closer to how I remembered it from the book. The friendly competition between the humanoids was one of the favorite parts of the book for me.

The boxed set contains four disks, and only the first two contain the movie. There is a lot of background stuff: The characters, the actors, the landscape, the making of the movie. Even though I paid for it, I am not currently motivated to watch that. As for the actual making of the movie, I doubt I shall ever be interested.

I am not actually interested in the movie making industry, despite having bought The Sims: Superstar. I skip the Hollywood part of newspapers and magazines, and I would not recognize even the most famous actors if I met them on the street. I mean that quite literally. Perhaps I am unfair by seeing actors and performers as just tools. Perhaps they take part in the creative process as well, in some way that I do not understand. But frankly, I put them in the same category as football players and long-distance runners. Talented people, gifted, but in a purely mundane way. Not inspired, like composers, songwriters, playwrights and authors. Not in the same category as sculptors or painters. Not creators, just workers, no different from a really clever bookkeeper or an exceptionally qualified dentist. Not that they don't deserve respect like any other outstanding worker. But the fawning and worship bestowed on people who happen to look good and move gracefully ... well, it grates on my nerves.

But I don't have much trouble with that, really, since I am all alone most of the time.