Month: June 2017

Thumbelina (1984)

“It’s just that I’m always the bride and never the bridesmaid…”

Thus quips Carrie Fisher in her 1984 role as Thumbelina, the diminutive heroine of one of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre productions.

After Thumbelina escapes the mother toad who kidnaps her as a bride for her son, she lives alone in the woods until winter, when she is rescued by a field mouse, whose neighbor the mole falls in love with her. Her host believes her marriage to the mole is a foregone conclusion; thus her frustration.

I watched this Faerie Tale Theatre episode after I saw the truly awful Don Bluth movie and re-read the original Andersen tale, both of which include yet another suitor (a beetle whose friends find Thumbelina ugly).

More details about this version below.

Continue reading Thumbelina (1984)

Thumbelina (1994)

“Let’s get out of this stinking weather before we’re statistics. I can’t even feel anything in my feelers anymore.”

That’s a brilliant pun. It’s the best line of dialog in the whole movie, and like all the best lines in Thumbelina, it belongs to the beetle, who sounds like Iago in Disney’s Aladdin. (Both characters were voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.)

Unfortunately, “can’t feel anything” describes the effect the movie had on me. In spite of all the supposedly empowering messages in it that could have been meaningful, it left me numb.

If you saw and enjoyed Thumbelina when you were little, maybe you can see and enjoy it now. Otherwise, I’d say the odds are slim to none.

Watch on Amazon

Keep reading for more (MUCH more) on why I didn’t like the movie, along with a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Continue reading Thumbelina (1994)

General Waste

This is the door that covers the rubbish chute on my floor in my building. It says “general waste”.

Every time I see it, I think of a joke which I somehow can’t find online anywhere, probably because the world moved on ages ago…

There used to be some kind of “blue screen of death” error that said “GENERAL EXCEPTION”.

I once saw a joke response that said:

Who is General Exception and what is he doing in my computer?

So now, EVERY TIME I go to throw stuff away, I invariably think:

Who is General Waste and what is he doing in my lift lobby?

What a difference an ‘s’ makes!

Citibank just sent me a new debit card. The tagline on the enclosed letter says:

For all the things life has in store.

My thought was that it should say:

For all the things life has in stores.

If English were to lose its plural inflections (which are already by no means required in Singlish), this pun would be even more apparent; as it is, “what’s in store” and “what’s in stores” mean totally different things!

Cutleries Station

I took this (lousy) photo of a sign that says “Cutleries Station” at Soup Spoon in Novena.

In modern standard British and American English, “cutleries” is not a word. (Neither is “equipments”.)

What makes this example interesting is that it raises another issue: whether we use singular or plural nouns as “noun adjuncts” or “attributive nouns”.

In other words, which is correct?

Drinks Machine
Drink Machine

Obviously, the machine would contain more than one drink, so using the plural is more “logical”, but it sounds horrible to me. Wikipedia says that the singular (or the possessive) is traditional in most cases, but that plurals are gaining ground.

I’ve seen several (many?) signs in Singapore that say “Children Playground” rather than “Children’s Playground”, which is doubly silly since those signs should probably just say “Playground” anyway.

(This one is in the complex where I live. At least “Residents’ Lounge” is correct.)

If you think “Children Playground” sounds awful, don’t laugh too hard. Whoever named the 2002 romantic comedy Two Weeks Notice neglected to include an apostrophe after “weeks”, unleashing a wave of scornful critique from movie-going fussbudgets. Apparently, educated native speakers working in the media and entertainment industries, even if they don’t misuse singulars and plurals, still struggle to distinguish plurals from possessives when modifying nouns with other nouns.

English is not easy!

Further Reading