Searches Ending at The Green Room, Part II

Last year I posted a detailed analysis of Google searches that brought unique visitors to The Green Room. This year, some of the searches are the same, but there are quite a few interesting new ones that make me shake my head at the strangeness of the World.

First of all, why are so many people asking about butterfly poop? Seriously. I get at least five, often more, inquiring visitors every week asking the age-old question, "Do butterflies poop?" There is an astonishing dearth of information about this topic on the otherwise knowledgeable Internet; and so the Internet sends them to me for answers. The answer is Yes, butterflies poop. Read all about it here.

Many stumble into The Green Room seeking book reviews, and sometimes they're looking for a specific kind of review. Some have searched for a bad review of Joker One--which they certainly did not find here. Some arrived looking for a dissertation on the themes or chapter summaries of Danny Gospel.

More than anything, new visitors want to know about a certain company that goes door to door trying to get unwitting customers to sign up for a long-term contract for the delivery of natural gas, promising budget-conscious consumers protection from future natural gas price increases. When I last updated this expose, I reported that my price-per-therm had averaged well-below the price that the company had tried to get me to lock in. Since then, my price-per therm has ranged from $112.84 in September '08 to $39.40 in April '09, with an 11-month average per-therm price of $73.09, still well-below the $1.13 lock-in price.

An alarming number of people want to know about sociopaths: "sociopathic husband laziness," "sociopath control cross," and "sociopath brain science," for example. The search engines direct them here because of my review of The Sociopath Next Door, a scary book that made me start seeing sociopaths every time I turned the corner. When I visit my family.

This blog does not pretend to be a food blog like some of the really great sources of food euphoria out there (Elise's Simply Recipes is one of my favorites, as is Chris' Ordering Disorder). And yet! Virtual visitors have uncovered some delicious recipes in The Green Room kitchens: authentic sopes rusticos; texture-and-flavor-rich corn, wild rice and sausage soup; and fresh summer salsa, for example.

Apparently I performed a service for Chicago families learning to navigate the Chicago Public School selective enrollment high school system when I narrated C. Peevie's journey to high school.

Night at the Museum 2: Battle for the Smithsonian got people to the Green Room with amusing searches for "Bobblehead Einstein that's the way I like it," "Einstein bobblehead conversation," and "watch Albert Einstein bobbleheads singing." I can't blame them--that was my favorite scene in the movie (reviewed here) as well.

Apparently many folks are interested in taking care of an unsavory little league situation--perhaps like the one I described here. They searched for "how to get rid of a bad baseball coach," "how to get rid of a little league coach," and "bad little league coaches."

I'll close with random selections from the site meter reports that offer secret insights into the weary travelers that stop by the Green Room for a brief visit:

• Marriage is hard work
• I believed that prayer would work without fail joker one
• plucky people
• what coral should I get for goldfish
• how to get along at dinner table book
• good boy movie dinner table
• what is reading enrichment
• senator burris vain nightclub
• a boy touch a girl breast
• your own word will turn around and bit
• agent freckles
• onesimus and philemon forgiveness drama skit
  

Thank you, visitors to The Green Room, for making this blog the 889,960th ranked blog on Technorati. I'm so proud.

The Mirror is...Empty

The recently released Kiefer Sutherland vehicle, Mirrors, is not worth your time and money. Don't even bother renting it on DVD.

The good parts can be summarized in terms of Kieferlishousness: Kiefer; Kiefer's whisper; Kiefer in wet jeans; and Kiefer saying, "Dammit!" I suppose some might also like it for the on-display cleavage of the unknown co-star, Paula Patton, in a low-cut and/or wet t-shirt.

Her cleavage has promise. Her acting? Jury's still out. She might have sucked because the lines she had to say were so bad.

Oh, and I'll also give the movie credit for a creeptastic setting, in the fire-damaged department store with mannequins that add atmospheric trepidation.

The bad parts: everything else.

Mirrors starts with suspense, horror, and enough gore to make me cover my eyes. Then we meet Kiefer, a suspended cop sleeping on his sister's couch. He's taking medication, he's got stubble, and he's sad. I immediately wanted to cuddle with him.

Director Alexandre Aja establishes that Amy Smart is Kief's sister by having him call her "sis." Who does that? And then he re-establishes it 20 minutes later by having Amy remind Kiefer, with her hands pressed to the side of his face like a lover, that she's his little sister. "You can talk to me," she pleads with him, "I'm your little sister." Um, yeah. We got it the first time.

Much of the dialogue follows this format--awkward, unlikely interchanges that are supposed to help us know the characters better but in fact only serve to remind us that the characters have not been developed sufficiently to be knowable. Especially the dialogue between Kiefer and his estranged wife, the pulchritudinous Paula Patton, was apparently lifted straight from a romance novel book jacket.

Even the music was cliche: A high piano note plinked deliberately--plink, plink, plink--then gradually faster--plink-plink-plink-plink--when Director Aja wanted us to feel increasing tension.

The mirrors in Mirrors reflect enough gore and horror to more than earn the R-rating. Amy Smart's gruesome self-dismemberment clinched it: what Aja lacked in actual story, he'd make up in shock and cheap "boo!"s. (I doubt if I punctuated that right. Please don't report me to the punctuation police.)

There's a twist at the end that makes me think that the movie contains the germ of a good idea--but I was left going, "Huh?" I'm pretty sure that's not what the story-teller was going for.

Even when a movie is bad, something good can come out of it. Sometimes that good is a clever review. I did not read any reviews before seeing Mirrors (I should have; I learned my lesson), but I read a bunch on Rotten Tomatoes afterward. My favorite line is this one, from Peter Sobczynski of EFilmCritic.com:

"...while watching it won't necessarily lead to seven years of bad luck, it does make for a fairly aggravating 110 minutes."

Consider yourself warned.

Movie Review: Juno

Michael Cera is the Victor Garber of Generation Y. Every facial tic, every blink, every posture is natural and yet perfectly modulated to communicate the subtleties of his character's emotions. Am I coming on too strong? I love this kid, and I think he's great actor. You don't need any other reason to go see Juno besides the fact that Michael Cera is in it.

However, there are plenty of other good reasons to see it. It's well-written and well-acted, for one and two. Ellen Page plays the eponymous Juno, who is not lovable in a sweet and cuddly kind of way, but her character kind of grows on you.

Sixteen-year-old Juno talks (on a hamburger phone) like a Woody Allen character, her conversation salted with sarcasm and snark. She's world weary and naive at the same time. Her pale would-be boyfriend, Paulie, runs track and consumes orange tic-tacs. In a few years he'll be husband material--reliable, gentle, and devoted; he's definitely not boyfriend material, especially to a precocious teenager who typically has a hard time seeing past Paulie's skinny legs and concave chest.

Out of boredom, or curiosity, and possibly a tiny bit of lust (but maybe not--she seems kind of ambivalent) Juno gives Paulie the adolescent wet dream of a gift: they lose their virginity together in an overstuffed chair that later, in a scene I don't really understand, ends up in Paulie's front yard.

Juno gets pregnant and spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out what to do, whom to trust, and whether or not any adults ever get their shit together. Is there a good solution? Juno, predictably, considers abortion, but her classmate's caricature picketing and a nonchalant, gum-popping desk clerk abet the cause of life. When she finds the perfect couple to adopt her baby, she's hopeful; but beautiful Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) turns out to be more than a tiny bit desperate, and her husband Mark (Jason Bateman), immature and disillusioned.

I laughed (a lot), I cried (a little, but then again, I cry at DeBeers commercials and M*A*S*H reruns, so don't give that a lot of weight). I loved the tight, clever banter. My friend MD observed that the characters, especially Juno, didn't talk like real people, and she's right, of course. But we would talk like that if we could. Instead, in real life we snap our fingers and say, "Rats! I wish I'd thought to say that at the time!"

(Photo credit: Twentieth Century Fox.)