Chaos Attraction

Advent and the Bee

2018-12-07, 6:34 a.m.

As per the “Holiday Calendar” theory that any advent calendar is likely to show something super common that you might come across during your day...I’m going to open up this Despicable Me Minion chocolate calendar Jackie got me at the end of the day, and we’ll see if anything that happened that day corresponded with the calendar object!

December 1: a stocking. I can’t even recall if I saw any stockings on that particular day, to be honest. I did on December 2, mind you, but... NOT RELEVANT.
December 2: Santa Claus. I did wear my “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” sweater that day, but that’s about as close as I get to it. Did not see any in-person Santas, but there was probably Santa merch about. Dawn did tell me her Santa Christmas card story though, so I officially deem this on RELEVANT.
December 3: A squirrel. I absolutely love squirrels and I am disappointed to say that I didn’t even see any squirrels today. NOT RELEVANT.
December 4: A house. Again, nothing house-relevant came up today.
December 5: An ice skate. NOPE.
December 6: A 8 pointed star or maybe it’s a sun. PROBABLY NOT.

So so far, I must conclude that that calendar was actually magical and was not coincidental.

On a related note, I was compiling the pictures I took of ugly holiday sweaters this year to send to my Yarn Club mailing list (I co-run a yarn meetup and mailing list at my work and mostly just post silly link roundups, activities going on in the world of yarn, the occasional book review or self-promotion...etc.) and realized that I had enough of them to fill an entire DIY advent calendar. So here it is! I also managed to find my old DIY advent calendar from 2009, which apparently still exists.

Every year I try to do a link roundup of advent calendars on my silly links blog, particularly of the online variety. Sadly, that has gone way downhill in the last bunch of years. The good ones (harpold.com, RIP, Electric December) have died/gone away and I can only find some pretty boring ones most of the time now, or very temporary ones, or whatever. I guess I should do my own on the regular....lord knows I take enough pictures of things that would fit.


In other news, at my volunteer job tonight, our manager decided that we would watch The Bee Movie, because “it’s really bad.” Since we are (intermittently) working during the shift, I figured eh, what the hell, probably not gonna pay much attention and it’s probably like, Emoji Movie level bad.

Noooooooo. It’s so much crazier than that!

So the movie starts out about Emoji-level, with a young bee named Barry not liking how he has to pick one job and stick with it for the rest of his life. But this quickly morphs into him meeting a human woman, Vanessa, and them basically becoming as much boyfriend and girlfriend as they possibly can (beestiality) without even being able to anatomically do anything. They seem to go on dates, is what I’m saying. Vanessa does have a jerky boyfriend, but you can’t help but feel a bit sorry for him when she throws him over for a bee. Also, ladies: note that the dating situation for a hot young lady is so bad that her choices are a jerky human or a TINY INSECT. Those are your prospects, girls!

Anyway, after Barry finds out that *gasp* humans eat honey, he decides to become a lawyer (how?) and sue all of humanity for abusing bees with a bee smoker, and using a bear as a honey mascot (“I think we all know what they do in the woods.”), and Ray Liotta (who has a honey company in this) and Sting, for calling himself Sting. AND HE WINS, so he takes out Winnie the Pooh and Sting and forces all the humans to not eat honey and nobody will now pollinate anything.

Then of course, all of nature dies and this turns out to bee a bad idea, so Barry and Vanessa steal a “Princess and the Pea” float from the Tournament of Roses parade, fly it to NYC, then accidentally take out the pilots and have to fly the plane themselves. They also somehow manage to keep slapping each other even though Barry can’t really tolerate every time Vanessa wants to high-five.

Uh-HUH.

In the end, Vanessa can run her flower shop again and Barry sets up a legal practice with his mosquito friend--”I was already a bloodsucking parasite.”

Quotes from various folks at the CC at the end of this:

“That’s not how pollination works.”
“Is that your only problem with this?”

“I think you just have to take it all with a grain of pollen.”
”First it would be a truckload, of salt because I am very salty!”

Memorable quotes from reviews I found online:

Roger Ebert: “Compared to them, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane would have it easy.”

Christa Bass:

“I can’t decide if it’s sheer brilliance or the worst thing I’ve ever seen. (Leaning towards the latter).”

“Look, we’re all really here to figure out if a bee and a human woman can really sustain a happy and fulfilling relationship, aren’t we? And the answer is, who knows? Maybe they can, maybe that’s the recipe for success, to find yourself a talking insect and go with the flow.”

Josh Tyler:

“I’m not just talking about insane from the point of view of a bee; I’m talking all American, grade “A” crazy.

With almost no effort Barry is suddenly arguing before a human judge and jury, who unlike Vanessa, are surprisingly accepting of the notion that bees are intelligent and can not only talk, but make a pretty mean legal argument. Before long even Vanessa has lost her head, and she dumps her boyfriend in favor of dating Barry. I guess she has a thing for stingers.

The grand, uplifting theme about individuality and grabbing your dreams hinted at in the beginning is a red herring that never goes anywhere, as is any other sensible thing in the film you might grab on to.”

And the TV Tropes page is Quite Something.

“It's rumored that the title began as a joke Jerry Seinfeld made to Steven Spielberg, who pointed him to Jeff Katzenberg to make it into a movie.note The rest of the conversation supposedly went "We're creative people with lots of money. We can do whatever we want!" Yes, really.”

So, that was fucked up and weird!


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