movie review: the new Footloose

1. Okay, the good news is that yes, Julianne Hough is in this movie, and she’s been on Dancing With the Stars, and so there was some show-to-movie loyalty going on there for me. The bad news is that this movie really didn’t translate well to 2011. I kept wondering why they were at the *library,* looking at books — computers, anyone?

2. Actually seeing the whole party-followed-by-tragic-car-accident made the “we passed a law to ban dancing” make even less sense than it did back in the old version. Numerous things would have made much more sense in terms of banning. My suggestions:
-a ban on alcohol
-a ban on driving under the age of 18
-a ban on driving with passengers
-a ban on dating/kissing

3. Lots of this movie didn’t make any contextual sense, which I’m generally fine with in a movie. My biggest disconnect was that the two characters we saw actually interacting the most were Ren and Willard. It’s like the movie-makers just assumed the romance between Ren and Ariel would be obvious, so there was no need to build it up. It ended up coming across sort of like this: [Ren & Ariel: 'hey, you're hot, I'm hot, and we're both planning on leaving in a year or two and never seeing each other again -- wanna hook up?'] On the flip side, Ren and Willard actually had conversations, and relationship development, and even a climactic dance together at the end!

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

adventures in epub

I posted before about what I’m calling “classics project” on my to-do list — basically, trying to get some of my favorite fics onto my nook, for easier access to their awesomeness. It’s a lot slower going than I’d hoped it would be.

I’ve been using a combination of Instapaper, GrabMyBooks, and Calibre, with somewhat hit or miss results.

-AO3 is my favorite — handy “download as epub” button is handy!

-Instapaper is great for stuff you want to bundle together (for instance, The Fourth Wall series, by entanglednow. It even gives you a table of contents kind of thing at the start, which actually works for jumping to specific stories.

-GrabMyBooks is fast (despite my unreasonable dislike of Firefox) and does well with lj single files, though I’m having trouble with *both* Instapaper and GrabMyBooks when it comes to getting the nook to acknowledge the file name once it’s somewhere other than the “my downloads” folder.

-I’ve mostly been using Calibre for stuff that’s saved on my external hard drive — ancient stuff, by internet standards. It does relatively well with them, though it’s clearly designed for taking more time and care with files than my haphazard ‘can you convert all of these, um, 500 or so files into epubs? that’d be great, thanks’

-I have to shake my fist at googledocs. Seriously, that program does not play well with others. I haven’t tried downloading stuff as a PDF and dumping that onto the nook, but that’s probably next.

-In conclusion: AO3 rocks. If you are an author, please consider my humble request that you upload older work there. I’ve felt really weird about uploading old stuff, because, well, it’s old, and I’ve written better stuff (hopefully!) since, and it’s going to pop up at the top of the search in a painfully obvious way… But no matter! It would still be awesome to be able to get these fantastic classic fics SO EASILY. And everyone has different stuff that they consider classic, right?

-PS: I would love it if AO3 came out with a posting option that let you pre-date things. Or a “this is old; please don’t bother putting it up on the ‘most recent’ search page, just storing it here so it won’t get dusty, thanks!”

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.