wherein Liz prepares for a busy weekend

My weekend schedule is as follows:

1. Walk to bus station and catch 9:40am bus on Friday, heading down to NJ. Remain awake at least through 11am, so as to call Dad and report whether or not we stop in Binghamton, as this will drastically affect NJ arrival time and the bus stop in Ridgewood is something like 45 minutes from my parents' house. (I could bus all the way into the city, walk from Port Authority to Penn Station, catch a train to Madison, and then drag my suitcase ~1 mile up the hill to my parents' house, but that is a pain in the neck so we go for the Ridgewood stop and a car pickup instead.)

2. Help Mom set up for dinner party.

3. Dinner party with family friends, aka Cat's parents, Susan's parents, and Susan briefly before she has to run off to a dress rehearsal for a Saturday choral concert. Plan Saturday with Susan somewhere in here.

4. Lunch with Susan on Saturday. Hang out and do something as yet unspecified.

5. Early dinner with parents, possibly eating out at a restaurant. Mom keeps trying to make me express an opinion. My opinion is that food is good and I don't know why she expects me to know anything about restaurants in a town I haven't lived in for fifteen years. *headdesk*

6. Attend Susan's concert at 7pm in Basking Ridge. Presumably she will have worked out the ticket situation by then. Pay her back for the ticket if relevant.

7. Go to church with Dad on Sunday, because why not.

8. Pack Dottie and ridiculous amount of dog supplies into minivan. Say farewell to parents and drive back to Ithaca, leaving NJ no later than 2pm.

9. Give Dottie her dinner and evening walk, probably encountering great resistance as she mopes and wonders where her real people are and why she's back in my apartment again. Hopefully that phase will pass sooner than last time.

10. Crash.

...

I am mostly packed, aside from stuff like my computer and phone. I have a list of minor chores to deal with in the morning, and a few more to plow through tonight. And you know, it's not that I am in any way not looking forward to this trip -- my one regret is that Cat has May Day obligations in Massachusetts and therefore won't also be around -- but that is a lot of heavy social-interaction activities in a very short period of time, and I am going to be drained by the time I get home. Also happy! But absolutely drained dry.

wherein Liz rambles about movies, and remixes versus adaptations

Tonight I finally got around to watching Ella Enchanted, which Netflix sent me a while back as a sort of "whoops, the actual next movie in your queue is rare and we can't get it to you within the normal shipping time, so have two movies out at once!" apology... and then, of course, I couldn't get another movie until I send both the real movie and the bonus movie back.

I freely admit I only had the movie in my queue because of watching two seasons of Hannibal and wondering what else Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen had been in. For similar reasons, a couple months ago I watched the 2004 King Arthur, which is a deeply stupid and inadvertently hilarious movie, not to mention baffling in the way it tries to play on the whole Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle without actually doing any setup for it, so Lancelot comes off as a creepy stalker who sacrifices himself for a woman who may not even know his name. But anyway, moving on!

Ella Enchanted is a pretty cute movie. Ridiculous and shallow, sure. But a lot of fun.

It is also a terrible adaptation of the YA novel it's nominally based on, and I think if I'd been watching it with the expectation of a proper adaptation, I would have been extremely annoyed and disappointed. The gist of the story remains -- a girl cursed to obey every order anyone gives her falls into a loose Cinderella plot, complete with horrible stepfamily, prince, ball, and eventual happy ending after the curse breaks -- but almost all the actual plot elements are wildly different, starting with the movie's invention of an evil uncle who's been ruining the kingdom with fantastic racism policies and now wants to kill his nephew the prince.

So, you know, it's about as faithful to Gail Carson Levine's book as Disney's The Little Mermaid is to Andersen's fairy tale. In other words, it's a remix. And if watched with that set of expectations rather than a checklist of every deviation from the book, it is, as I said, a pretty fun hour and a half.

...

I should get a copy of the book from the library and reread it, though. I remember enjoying it a lot. :-)