• Member Since 11th Nov, 2014
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wingdingaling


Just a guy who only recently got into MLP: FIM. Saw the first few episodes with my niece and nephew and wanted to see more.

More Blog Posts39

  • 1 week
    The Room Analysis: Finale

    1:26:27-1:39:35

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part Nine

    1:17:19-1:26:26

    Continuing the trend of unnecessarily long scenes that don’t belong in this film, the scene cuts to the San Francisco skyline once again. Only this time, it’s at night. And it drags on for a good fifteen seconds, which for some reason feels like a lot longer.

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part Eight

    1:09:00-1:17:18

    We’ll be doing things a bit differently for the rest of the week. Since there are only three more entries to go in this analysis, there will be an additional analysis posted tomorrow, as well as Friday. Right? Good. Let’s dive in.

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part Seven

    1:00:57-1:08:59

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part 6

    00:51:42-1:00:56

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    0 comments · 22 views
May
15th
2023

Empress Theresa: Chapter Twenty-One Analysis · 6:20pm May 15th, 2023

The chapter opens with the scene cutting suddenly back to Theresa and Steve, who just happened to be watching TV when news suddenly breaks about Exxon’s ship, the Exxon Maria, sinking. We then cut to what Theresa refers to as an ‘Anderson video,’ and that tips her off that it was indeed a terrorist attack, and not a freak accident. The wording of the paragraph and the use of the phrase was very strange, so I wasn’t sure if this was some jargon or slang that I wasn’t familiar with, so I just had to look up what ‘Anderson video’ meant. The only results I got were some old episodes of ‘Baywatch.’ Clearly, David Hasselhoff was not on duty, or he would have prevented this nefarious plot.

Okay, the coast guard is there to clear things up, and they discover and analyze a tape from somebody named Michael Anderson. Anyone remember this guy? Me neither. That’s because he’s just appeared out of the blue in a truly anticlimactic debut. He’s supposed to be a character that parallels Jake Busey’s character from the movie ‘Contact,’ where Busey plays a fanatic who sabotages the technology that is meant to help us on Earth speak with aliens. Unlike Busey’s character, who was introduced, established, built up, then had a spectacular payoff where he is remembered long after, Mikey just kind of fizzles out shortly after he blows up.

Just because Boutin thinks that everyone in the Middle-East is a complete douche, he puts his racism on full display here, and writes everyone in the Middle-East as singing and dancing as they gloat about the Exxon disaster. It’s a win for OPEC, and they’ll support all the terrorists they possibly can to make it happen again. Take that, stupid Americans!

Theresa, an eighteen year old college student, runs to her bedroom and cries again. She does this more often than any little kid I’ve known in my adult life. Steve tries to console her as Theresa bemoans how unfair it is that she only tries to do good, but all these horrible people are too mean to let her. Knowing Theresa, she would probably try to come up with a plan to control everyone’s mind to consistently worship her all the time, instead of allowing them to flip-flop between worshipping her unconditionally and hating her groundlessly.

Well, it seems that Steve can’t do anything for his own wife, who requests that he leave her alone. That’s another early sign of impending divorce, for anyone who’s keeping track. Mrs. Parker comes in and basically confirms what we’ve all suspected. Boutin believes that all women think and feel the same way about all things, which somehow makes Theresa feel better, decide to sell the oil she’ll extract from her island for a lower price, and ‘hit the mattresses’ with Steve. (I dated a paranoid schizophrenic once. Her thought processes made more sense than Theresa’s ever will).

Before she does any of that, she gets on her direct line to Blair’s office. Once on the phone with Blair, Theresa requests to be put on a line with President Stinson. She then explains that all of Israel must evacuate immediately, ends the call with Stinson, and requests to be put on the line with Scherzer. Theresa tells him that the entire country must evacuate now, because she just lowered the price of her oil to ten dollars a barrel. In a lapse of leaderly judgement, Scherzer just kind of agrees, and says he’ll need thirty-six hours to help everyone prepare. Theresa says that she’ll raise a mountain in the desert somewhere to remind the Arabs of her promise to make their land more like Europe.

Surprisingly, we don’t get a timeskip. Nor does Theresa decide to just sit back and see what will happen if things unfold as they do. Instead, she and the others turn the living room into a makeshift war room. Then we get a timeskip to the Israelis preparing to evacuate, with no actual payoff to the scene where the living room is converted.

Once they’re all there, Theresa shows off her biggest example of blasphemy yet. Through Boutin’s boundless love of numbers, we are told about how Theresa makes walls of water on either side of the land bridge in a stunning emulation of Moses parting the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘The Ten Commandments.’ (Personally, I’m partial to ‘The Prince of Egypt’).

Scherzer declares Theresa the right hand of God. That’s probably even more blasphemous than emulating His power. Anyway, we’re absolutely choked with numbers again as the landbridge is described in horrifically dull detail. For some reason, the US begins to experience an incredible sense of charity to the jewish population, offering their homes to any jewish person they meet. Imagine that you’re a jew. You’re minding your own business when some random weirdo jumps out at you and says, ‘Shalom, buddy! You look tired! Want to crash on our couch? We have latke!’ My guess is that it’s Boutin’s way of deflecting criticism of being christian-centric or anti-semitic.

Finally, after all this buildup, the entire population of Israel is evacuated. Why they all agreed to this is baffling. Why this plan was even conceived in the first place is even more baffling. It was suggested in an earlier comment that with all of Theresa’s boundless power that she could simply transpose the holy land of Israel with another landmass. What-the-hell-ever. After a week, everyone is on the bridge, and the other side is reached. Lucky them. It took their ancestors forty years of wandering to find their promised land. Of course, they’re still not on that island that Theresa created for them…Hmmm.

Theresa celebrates her nineteenth birthday and begins to think about going home. But not before he rejects the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that Scherzer deserves it instead. Gosh. Isn’t she generous?

Some undisclosed time later, Theresa meets with an unnamed American ambassador, who asks if Theresa would like to return home on the Ronald Reagan. It completely slipped my mind before, but the Ronald Reagan was the ship where Theresa was jettisoned from before she was supposed to be nuked. Apparently, the Ronald Reagan has gotten a bit of a bad reputation and nobody wants to serve on it since Theresa’s botched execution, and the US seems to think that if Theresa visits it people will think nicely of it again. Of course, Theresa is hesitant to return there. She knows that HAL is unpredictable, and doesn’t know what it will do if it returns to the place where it stopped the world’s wind.

Steve has already been established as the one with all the goofy ideas. As the story progresses, he just gets goofier. Case in point, he decides to make a diplomatic move by organizing an ‘army vs. navy’ football game, with Theresa playing quarterback for the navy. Dear Jesus, if Steve gets any more goofy, Disney’s gonna sue him for infringement! Of course, the football players will all be amateurs. We can’t have good players overpowering the super-strong, perfect-aiming, remote-viewing Theresa. But it seems that Boutin has forgotten about all of these powers. Especially Theresa’s ability to radiate fatally high temperatures. That alone would clear the way to the endzone. Despite all these glaring problems, the ambassador thinks that this game will be an even bigger deal than the Superbowl.

Theresa’s ready to go home now. She boards the Ronald Reagan, where some sailors 'unnecessarily grope at her.’ I’m almost certain that the word meant to be used here is ‘glare’ or ‘leer,’ because ‘grope’ implies that unwanted physical contact was made. The narration suggests that the sailors were only looking at her. Those sailors are then replaced with ones who probably wouldn’t take a second look at Theresa when she was flirting with the cameras at her press conference. We’ll never know, because we won’t ask and they won’t tell.

One of the main problems that I’ve had while typing up these analyses is that the narration suggests one thing, so I assume that something has happened, even though it hasn’t. I then have to keep reading so that I get the actual events as they happen (or don’t happen). This goes back to the importance of clarity in writing. I mention this, because I had to rewrite that last paragraph three times before I found out what was actually happening.

Somewhere in the world all of a sudden, a Hollywood stuntman wants to recreate Theresa’s drop from an airplane into the ocean. Theresa recounts a bunch of information that we already know, and particularly emphasizes those empty soda bottles that saved her life. Anyway, the guy jumps and his dead body is recovered. This entire scene could be cut, because it had absolutely no bearing on the plot.

This is another lesson that you should take away from this story. If you’re writing a story, make sure that everything has a point that ties into the actual story. For example, in ‘The Room’ there is a scene where a character (Denny) is held at gunpoint because he owes money for some drugs he bought. Nothing before this scene suggests that he was in financial trouble, or was doing drugs. After this scene, the incident is never mentioned again. The scene is just kind of there. In order for this scene to work, Denny would have had to have been shown to be acting weirdly, such as excusing himself suddenly whenever he notices the drug dealer somewhere in the scene. Later, Denny’s confrontation with the drug dealer would have to tie into some larger plot point. A popular fan theory about the movie is that Mark is an undercover cop, so let’s just pretend that perhaps that Mark was on an assignment to find out who was selling drugs in that neighborhood, and it turned out to be Denny, who was holding out on the money he owed to his boss, and Mark catches him just before he kills Denny. (A popular pastime with me and my friends is to figure out ways to improve ‘The Room’).

The chapter ends with Theresa learning about the definition of ‘prejudice,’ being a preconceived notion or attitude about a new idea. Theresa somehow applies this to the stuntman who died by jumping out of an airplane, and decides that it’s better to be herself than to be someone else’s fantasy. This is already a moot point, because she is clearly the fantasy of Boutin. An amalgam of every classmate, coworker, customer, waitress who ever served him breakfast, etc. who he had ever wanted to ask out on a date, but didn’t have the self-esteem to approach. His dream girl that he wished was his own, but he can never have and will never like him back. Because she’s fictitious.

This chapter wrapped up the entirely pointless ‘Exodus-esque’ plotline. The only reason that such a thing exists in this book is to show us all how great Theresa is. Everything that comes after that is completely irrelevant to the entire story. Especially that bit with the stuntman, which seemed to just exist as a way for the author to dissuade any readers from attempting the same thing. One of the foremost principles of writing is that you must assume that your audience is as intelligent as yourself. Based on that, it’s easy to think that Boutin thinks that his readers are dumber than he is, and would attempt to jump out of an airplane into the ocean with a lifevest made from empty soda bottles just because they read it in his book. That leads us to wonder: what audience is this book intended for?

That’s it for now. Come back again on Wednesday.

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Comments ( 2 )

This is what they make you read when you get caught kicking puppies.

5728360
Warden, stop! I'll never kick another puppy again! Just don't make me read another page!

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