Tales from the Technoverse

I finished watching Ruby Sparks this morning.

Ruby Sparks is a ‘cute’ rom-com (romantic comedy) about a lonely author with writer’s block who writes about his perfect, albeit imaginary girl friend, Ruby Sparks. After doing so, suddenly she is there in his apartment.

What seems like a perfect situation, perfect only because of the limited male imagination I guess, turns out not to be so much. Buried somewhere in the film are life lessons about opening yourself up and learning to care about people for what they are not what you might imagine them to be, blah-blah-blah.

As usual, Holly wood ensures that the character’s back story is sufficiently like the viewers so we can identify with those lessons. Or at least that would be true if you wrote a novel in your teens that caused everyone to compare you to J.D. Salinger and had Annette Bening as your mother and Antonio Banderas as her current lover who live on a palatial estate in Big Sur. I was going to remark that at least the film illustrated that not-particularly attractive male Hollywood movie characters were able to have relationships with really cute female Hollywood movie characters until I read that the female lead, Zoe Kazan, and the male lead, Paul Dano (great in Little Miss Sunshine), are in fact girlfriend and boyfriend in real life. How great is that for Paul Dano, not only does he have a cute girlfriend, but since she also wrote the script for Ruby Sparks, she writes stuff for him to star in; almost like he made that situation all up …

I would give the film a B-. I thought the film was fun to watch but no great shakes, and the ending was a bit too ‘neat’.

Now for my minor discovery, it turns out that Netflix has a limit to the size of its queue, 500 films, which I reached last week. Based on my current rate of going through movies/TV shows I should get to the end of the queue in about nine years, unless of course at some point during that nine-year period I decide to add to the queue.

There are, at least, two things that my daughters mention that I never did for them. I never took them fishing (of course I have almost never fished) and I never took them horseback riding (I guess I did that a little bit myself but it violated my ‘feet-are-on-the-ground happy place’ approach.

The movie I just finished, Buck, deals with horses.

Buck Brannaman, is the prototypical what-we-think-a-cowboy-should-be cowboy (I guess I am overusing hyphens this morning). He travels around the country teaching people how to ride horses better. In fact he is really teaching them about how to treat horses better. As he says in the movie (paraphrased), “People do not have a horse problem, horses have a people problem.” And what he really is teaching is much about the riders themselves about themselves.

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When one represents that shrinking number of people who actually still rent actual DVD’s to watch (my Netflix queue is up to around 490), some things end up being a mild irritant that others would not even notice.

It is normal that when a DVD starts there are a series of previews of films that had just come out, or at least just came out in let us say 2006 when the DVD was made, plus coming attractions for films that will be coming out in the future, late-2006.

After pressing the menu key on my DVD clicker usually I am allowed to skip to the movie, every now and then it will not. This is only a mild problem EXCEPT when the power surges and the DVD player in the basement locks up until I turn it off and then back on. This forces me to go through the previews and coming attractions again.

This morning I returned to my watching the documentary Buck, more about that later, which is a Sundance Select film. It turns out that Sundance Select DVD’s or at least THIS Sundance Select DVD forces you to wade through all this preliminary stuff.

My immediate reaction was that perhaps here was a political metaphor, those on the Hollywood liberal left (but I repeat myself) forcing viewers to be under their control. However, Ellen tells me I over-generalize about such things so I shall not think that, at least when she is looking. But just between you and me …