Before you get inundated with clever snarky tunes, may I remind you: There WILL come a time that you lose your phone somewhere in the house. You WILL ask your wife to call it to help you find it. Good luck explaining that ringtone. – Reddit post
Well, the good news is that the eclipse is now more than a week behind us and we can all go back to staring directly into the sun.
I swear, I like a good solar eclipse as much as the next person, but I think that, as a society, we all went a little overboard this time. I mean, last week people were more excited about the eclipse than people were in the year 1508 when they thought a dragon was eating the sun.
This time around, everyone was simply eclipse crazy. Before the eclipse, the local news stations had covered the event so much that they ran out of story angles and they started doing stories on whether your pets needed eclipse glasses. Seriously.
One station actually had a professor on saying that your animals would be fine and you did not need to get eclipse glasses for them. He said of pets, “They do not have the same understanding, or curiosity, to look into the sun.”
Uh, hello, I knew that already.
Eclipse glasses for your dog?? Uh, do you know what your dog was thinking during the eclipse? Humans were going around crying and hugging each other and saying, “This is a once in a lifetime celestial event that will be spiritually and fundamentally life altering” and your dog was thinking, “Uh, I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here, but it’s way past time to fill my food bowl.”
No, your dog does not need eclipse glasses and no, I don’t need the news to tell me that.
*****
I imagine everyone knows what emojis are by now, but, if you don’t, they are the small digital images or icons used to express ideas or emotions and you usually see them in texts or emails.
Well it turns out that they are also the loveable animated characters in the new movie – The Emoji Movie.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ve seen movies with bad reviews before. For instance, one time years ago I read a review that said, “If I saw this movie on a plane, I’d walk out.”
And I know they have the Razzie Awards – which is short for the Golden Raspberries – that come out about the same time each year as the Golden Globe Awards. The Razzies are the awards for the worst movies of the year. For instance, earlier this year Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which wasn’t really that bad, got a Razzi, as did Dirty Grandpa, which a lot of people didn’t like but some people thought funny, and so did Independence Day: Resurgence, which truly was an awful movie.
But at least all of those were watchable, even though a lot of people didn’t like them. However, in my entire lifetime of reading movie reviews, I’ve never seen anything that comes even remotely close to the current phenomena around The Emoji Movie. It has a 1.9 out of 10 rating on Internet Movie Database – which is by far the lowest IMDb score for any movie I’ve ever looked up. To give you an idea, once a movie gets below, say, a 4.5, you’re getting into the walk-out-of-the-theater range. I really don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie get a viewer rating lower than a 3.
Until The Emoji Movie that is.
I wanted to see why people thought it was so bad and I started reading the reviews for it and my mouth just dropped open. Apparently, that movie was so bad in some cases it made people not only want their money back – it made them want to no longer continue living.
Here’s one review I read on IMDb …
“If I was God, and I heard this product was not only being made, not only being promoted, but actually released, then I would invite Satan over to manage the heavens so I could personally eradicate my failure below.”
Wow, that’s a bad movie review right there.
Another wrote: “There are no words to describe how ungodly this is. It seems like Jesus won’t be visiting us after all.”
That review says essentially that the movie is so bad it means that all of mankind must give up its right to redemption. I have never seen movies reviewed in such a negatively transcendent way.
To be fair, some reviewers didn’t think the movie should mean the end of all mankind, it only meant that they, the viewer, should stop living.
One of my favorites was titled, “I’ve Lost My Will to Live.”
Another review was titled “Cancer incarnate.” That one stated, “Never before have I deemed a movie to be evil, but …” while another reviewer wrote, “I had to apologize to my distraught family after taking them to see this film.”
You can see all the examples you want to on IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes, but let me just give you one more: “The attempts at ‘humor’ caused me to legitimately tug at my hair and curl inward in my seat. My friends and I were completely floored by the sheer absurdity that was this movie, and when we left the theater, we were physically exhausted. I had a splitting headache after it was all said and done, and when someone else asked me how I felt about it, I was just at a loss. I don’t know if I can even go on anymore, having experienced the sheer soul-sucking emotional black hole that is the Emoji Movie.”
The reviews are so, so bad in fact, that I’m actually tempted to go see it; however, on the other hand, I don’t generally, as a practice, actively set out to do things likely to dramatically decrease my will to live.
*****
Speaking of movies, I went to see Annabelle: Creation, which I decided to go see because it, unlike The Emoji Movie, had a 7.1 IMDb viewer rating, which is very good indeed.
Do you know the reason people like that movie?
It is because, in Annabelle: Creation – and I am not making this up – they took a sweet little girl who had polio and had to walk on crutches, and who was outcast by the other orphans – and then put her in the most absolutely terrifying situations you can imagine.
So that’s pretty relentless and unforgiving right there if you think about it. It makes the horror a lot worse than when it’s just some teenage campers who quite frankly had it coming because they were drinking and having sex in the woods.
*****
Hey, speaking of the eclipse and all the excitement around it, I was amazed at how many Guilford County officials were so utterly giddy about the event. County staff, department heads and commissioners – they were all really swept up in it, and, for days, the eclipse was all they could talk about.
One normally very serious department director included this in one of his email responses to a question I had: “I was at the Wyndham yesterday and it was great. I also practiced for the eclipse by being in the shade whenever possible.”
I read online that some county health departments had eclipse glasses and, when I couldn’t find any anywhere, I emailed Guilford County Health Director Merle Green to see if they had any I could buy.
She sent me an email saying they didn’t have any, and later she sent me a follow up email that had all these eclipse jokes. I am sure you wouldn’t be interested in the jokes …
What’s that? You do want to hear some. Well, OK, here are a few. Since you specifically asked for them …
What’s the most famous painting of an eclipse?
The Moona Lisa.
What did the sun bring to the solar eclipse party?
A light snack!
[My personal favorite]
How does the man in the moon cut his hair?
Eclipse it.
OK, that’s quite enough of that I think.
One of the great things about smartphones is that you can set the ringtone to whatever you want for the different people who call you. You can, for instance, have a special ringtone just for your wife. The other day, my brother told me about a friend of his who has, for his wife when she calls, a ringtone that’s the sound of a clucking hen.
Someone else told me about a friend who has the wicked witch theme from The Wizard of Oz. It hit me that this might be a trend, so I started looking around online to see what other songs people had for their wives. I read about other guys who used the Darth Vader entrance music from Star Wars and Elton John’s “The B#%*& is Back.” And Huey Lewis’ “Stuck with You.”
One man pointed out that, while it may be good for a laugh to have a negative ringtone for your better half, you want to be careful because there will be a time you lose the phone in the house and you have to have your wife call it. Then you will have some explaining to do.
One posted that his song for his wife was, “You are so Beautiful” by Joe Cocker.
He wrote, “Lose the phone in the house on purpose. Get [Lucky].”
This is kind of sad but this is how my computer looked all week recently when I was writing about the Wyndham Championship.
Huh, what’s that you say? You still want more eclipse jokes because you love them so much and you only get to hear them once every few decades or so? You simply don’t want to leave this week without hearing more eclipse jokes that the health director sent me? Well, OK. It wouldn’t be my choice as to how to end the column, but why not. As you pointed out, you can really only use them once every 30 years or so – so we’d better get them out there while we can.
Anyway, since you asked, here you go …
What did the sun say when it reappeared after an eclipse?
“Pleased to heat you again.”
What kind of underwear should you wear during an eclipse?
Fruit of the Moon!
How do you organize a solar eclipse party?
You planet.
Why didn’t the sun go to college?
Because it already had a million
degrees!
Why did the teacher bring solar eclipse glasses to school?
She had bright students!
