things that make you go D'oh!

"magnetic poetry kit of video box cliches"

From the fellow at Breakfast in the Ruins here on Blogger, this is part of a critique on a movie he'd bought. Yes I was hitting the next Blog button. But only after I went to see who was in the blogs of note since last I looked. Turns out there is a book cover reviewer. Great site. And I found Breakfast in Ruins through CausticCoverCritic's blog list. I like both of these blogs for the fact that they have a purpose beyond my meager ramblings and that they seem to have a similar sense for word smithing and coining phrases.

What I like about the above quote is that there are two collections being simultaneously compared and contrasted. First the Magnetic poetry kit. I LOVE those things!!! It's similar to a rainy day game my sister and I invented. She'd get great mad lib action and I was still a bit too Type A and want to have y spontaneity refined a bit more. The MPK is a trove of randomness that can in fact inspire some creative imagery. Sometimes I think Lewis Carroll must have employed a similar technique with his Alice stories.

Second is the Video Box Cliche phenomenon. Bad writing doesn't get more use anywhere else than the banal descriptions of bad movies on case covers. There are times when something is so horrible that you struggle to write two sentences about it let alone a whole back cover. In those instances you get pull quotes and a roster of unknown actors in large font styles to make up for the fact that the best you can write about the plot or characters is that you could have wasted those precious 144 minutes in an underwater basket weaving class. But that won't sell the movie. So you, playing the part of copy writer, do what the director did and string some pretty but over done cliches together and hope that it sells.

So our brave new blog author has realized this is in fact often the case and condenses the concept into this description. It is so obvious, so perfectly fitting what I think about those things and so geniusly crafted with references to modern meme phenomenon that I have to smack my forehead and say "D'oh!". Why didn't I think of that? It is so right there in your face.

I strongly recommend both of the blogs that I mentioned today. I am sure that you will find them amusing and informative. But...
you don't have to take my word for it.