Fifty Shades of Grey–Hot or not?

I’m still leaning towards not.  I think someone chickened out when faced with the reality of the explicitness of the Fifty Shades of Grey novel.  Whether it was Universal Studios (my guess in an attempt to hedge its investment) or the actors or the director, or choose your own culprit(s).  If it was Universal, the irony will be that they could possibly have actually hurt themselves more than help themselves.  Ask anybody who has read the book: Cleanliness is not next to Godliness in this case.

Possibly at least one actor could be a fly in the ointment as well which makes you think that because of Charlie Hunnam’s unexpected departure, they were forced into signing Dornan with not much time to consider too many alternatives. 

In a recent interview Jamie Dornan came off as a stodgy really uptight prude to the point where he had it written in the contract not to show his penis on film.  So he’s going to have to be one helluva actor to be convincing as Christian Grey.  In a key role, Dornan may be a huge mistake.

 

Dakota Johnson on the other hand, at least has a hint of being Anastasia Steele and appears to be willing to go the distance. 


At any rate, Universal’s Focus Features will try to convince you with this trailer that Fifty Shades is going to be really hot, even if they did clean it up for the mass consumption of audiences while crapping on those who made the book a phenomenon in the first place.  But I’ll let you decide for yourself.  Trailer 2:  Hot or Not.

A Vegas Musical Based on Dork Dynasty? Hold Your Nose.

Las Vegas is going to become a less pleasant place to visit.  Anybody who would spend money to see a play based on these bigoted disgusting holier than thou bearded shitheads  really really need to take a lesson in lifting up their self esteem.  Why punish yourself?

Better that you do something useful like put that money into a slot or playing the roulette wheel.  The only thing you'll get from watch this over glorified crap is the need to immediately head to your hotel room and take a shower to wash off the stench. 

Forget that.  The putrid stink of this endeavor is liable to blanket the entire West.  Keep it up, Uhmer’ca.  Soon, we can go back to living in the age of Neanderthal Man.

So how much are they going to white wash these bigoted homphobic jerks?  Probably a lot.

Variety:

“We’ve enjoyed the process of making a musical alongside the team who is interested in telling the Robertson family story from an outside perspective,” Willie Robertson, chief executive of the Robertson company Duck Commander, told the Times.

“The Robertsons are so unusual, their story so juicy, and theater shouldn’t be limited to telling stories about people you resemble or revere,” said David.

Jeff Calhoun (“Newsies”) serves as the musical’s director, according to the Times, and Steven Morris is a composer.

The news comes nearly a year after the family drew massive criticism — as well as support — for Phil Robertson’s anti-gay comments, made in an interview with GQ in December 2013. A&E suspended him after the remarks went public, though it ended the suspension later that month.

The only good thing about this is inspired me to come up with a new label for stuff like this. File this project under totally worthless crap.

Redbox Mucks Up Their Web Page Some More. I Think I’m Done.

Sometimes, you have to wonder what goes through some the mind of some corporate web designers or the big shot executives who tell them what to do.  Lately, any time Redbox has decided to tinker with their web site, they manage to really muck it up. 

I’ve always had my little quibbles with Redbox.  Many of their practices are hardly consumer friendly and they seem to be totally unwilling to make the effort to change.  Make a complaint and you’ll get a brush off.  Oh yeah, occasionally they’ll try to give you a free rental when what they should be giving you is a refund for their incompetence.

You may know that drill.  You reserve a movie and you go over to get it from the machine a few hours later and the machine is broken and not working.  And since you have no clue as to when it might be working again you can either accept your losses or call the Redbox number where the poor patsy on the other end of the phone will try to shove that rental credit on your ass, even if you have no idea when you might get to use it.

Refund?  That would be too much trouble.  After all they don’t really want to give you your money back even though its no fault of yours the machine wasn’t working.  Because that would inconvenience them, and one thing corporate big wigs don’t like is to be inconvenienced.  Better the customer put up with their lousy policies and bullshit nonsense instead of issuing a damn credit on your Visa. 

I can hear them now:

”Hey what’s the big deal?  We have a few million customers so why does one poor shlub in some hick town matter?  Let him/her get pissed off.  Beside, where the hell else are they going to go?  Blockbuster is no longer around, and Netflix takes forever.  We’re practically a monopoly so why should we give a damn?”

Yeah, I think that’s the same attitude Blockbuster took for years and look at them now.

One time I had four movies on reserve at a particular store that has two Redbox machines.  They were in Machine B.  Of course when I went to pick up the movies, it was machine B that wasn’t working at all.  It had even been unplugged to keep people from trying to use it.

This time I called the Redbox number on my cell phone right there in the store.  Basically their answer was that I was shit out of luck.  Could you switch my movie rentals to Machine A since all four movies were in that machine ready to be rented.  Nope, couldn’t do anything like that.  That would be too difficult. 

Could I get a refund?  Nope, and you could almost hear the person on the other end chuckling to themselves over that idiotic notion.

What they could do was give me a credit and I could rent the movies.  Well, eventually I could.  The problem was that their computer, which must be a Commodore 64 the way they run things, would continue to show me with four movies reserved until that reservation ran the clock out.  And the limit on movie reservations at one time is 5.

Therefore, I couldn’t even use the credit until after 9:00 the next night when I would have no use for the damn things because we in the real world have to work this thing called a job. 

There have been other instances as well and if you do a few searches on the internet, you’ll read some real horror stories.  But honestly, with their latest act of corporate stupidity and uselessness, I think I’m done.  You finally have to draw the line somewhere just to keep your sanity.  You can’t say, “What were they thinking?” because obviously they weren’t, and they don’t.  Sometimes policies are invented just to annoy you.

It used to be when you went on the Redbox web site, after having saved “your locations” you could click on one of them and see what was in that particular machine at that location at that moment in time.  If a movie wasn’t showing either it wasn’t in the machine or all copies were checked out.  If they were all checked out you could scroll to the bottom of the page and see a somewhat faded entity marked “not available.”  Pretty simple.  Then you would just click on one of your other locations (if there was one) to see if the DVD or Blu-ray was there, or just choose something else.

In my case, there are three Redbox Vending Machines within a half mile or so radius from where I live.  One of these is just two blocks away.  After that, you have to travel eight miles to the next Redbox and unless you have Quaker Oats for brains, you’re not going to make that trip.  You’ll just wait for the movie to arrive or be checked in or whatever.

But now you no longer know if it’s in or not because Redbox Executives in their infinite wisdom decided to no longer make it readily apparent whether a movie was at your chosen location or not.  Now, they simply list all their movies available at all locations, whether it’s checked out or not or whether its in the machine or not.   In my town, which seems to be last on the delivery list, this often happens.  What a machine in the big city may get on Tuesday, we may get by Friday, if we’re lucky.

So now when you click on a title that’s not even at the location you are browsing, it says “Find DVD nearby” instead of just telling you the damn thing wasn’t there in the first place.  And just checking one certain movie right now, I’d have to drive 30 miles to get it.  Some recommendation that is.

 

Why the change?  Why not just tell you up front that a movie is not at the location you’re browsing and let you make your own choice as to whether to check a box that isn’t 30 miles away?  It worked for me just fine.

Because like politicians, Redbox thinks you’re too stupid to do that.  And I guess they think somebody’s willing to spend $10 worth of gas to drive to a Redbox and get $1.20 movie so they might as well make that sales pitch for the stupid people.  It’s just idiotic and unnecessary.  And worse, you still don’t know if all copies of that movie are all just checked out or if it even arrived at that location yet.  IF ITS NOT AT THAT LOCATION JUST SAY SO INSTEAD OF ME JUMPING THROUGH HOOPS TO FIND THAT OUT!

Really, I think I’m done.  I’ll just order them from Netflix.  It may take longer sometimes, but at least I can watch them at my leisure and not deal with the frustrating antics of Redbox and their total disregard for customer convenience.  I can only be annoyed jumping through corporate hoops before I change the game plan.  Having helped do Blockbuster in, I don’t think copying that company’s little regard for their customers is a great idea.  I’m sure with all their customers, Redbox won’t miss me.  But I won’t miss them either.