Tinkerbell > Twilight

Since starting my new job at the video store, an interesting perk has come my way: free videos. Yeah, baby--as in I can rent for free up to three videos of anything I want to watch. Too bad movies don't interest me much anymore. Ho-hum. Oh, well, you can't argue with free. So, I started off my video watching consumption with an unexpected pick--The Tinkerbell movie.

That's right--Tinkerbell, because for all my grrl gamer, football loving, Half-Life shirt wearing, Master Chief worshiping bravado a part of me--a very closeted part of me--likes girlish things like flowers and fairies. And there's nothing wrong with that, dammit. If boys can be respected for liking cars and Three Stooges comedies, girls should be allowed to indulge their ultra feminine hobbies in peace without their boyfriends tooting 'fairies are gay' every five minutes while the damn Tinkerbell movie is on!

Okay, even I have to admit that a grown woman watching the Tinkerbell movie sans small children in the room is a little bizarre. It may be permissible for adult women to still like fairies, but Tinkerbell? I should have grown out of the Disney branding by now. But try to give me a break. Enjoying a Tinkerbell cartoon can't be anywhere as bad as reading all the Twilight books, being a thirty-five plus year old woman and thinking Edward Cullen is the most ah-mazing guy on the planet.

Just to prove my point, you never thought there were that many old crows crotch throbbing for the Twilight movie to come out, but there they were that Saturday in the video store, averaging about one in four customers--that's including the wrinkled farts bugging you to help them find Vicky, Christina, Barcelona--in their daughters' jeans, asking for the Twilight movie--and to buy, not rent. And if you think these birds are buying the movie for their daughters, you would be wrong, Joe. This retarded movie has major fans in the forty and over club. I overheard one woman suggesting it for another customer's ten year old daughter. You should have heard this dumb cow going on about the romance and the falling in love and some other bullshit. "The book is so much better," she said. As if this bitch ever read a book in her life, if she thought that mash up sloppy sentences constituted anything close to literature. The mom of the ten year old didn't know what to think. She's stuck having to pacify for the whole weekend this board kid who's probably seen everything in the store except Madagascar 2, the movie she really, really, really wants to see. The mom looks over at the daughter and asks if she wants to rent Twilight. I'm close by, dusting off about a hundred copies of Role Models and looking right at the kid's dejected face. She's a little kid, for fuck's sake. She doesn't want to see fuckin' Twilight; she wants to see a dumb talking animal movie.

As for me, at the end of my work day, while trying to erase from my head the echoes of withered voices asking me for 'that one Dustin Hoffman' movie, I decide to enjoy my time off the following day with some nice relaxing fluff, and pick up the Tinkerbell movie. I like the color palette; the story isn't very demanding either. It's about Tinkerbell learning to be proud of her tinkering talent. So her job may not be the prettiest girl at the ball. It's still an important one and it's her own special gift. Normally I give these storylines a hearty 'pfffft,' and Tinkerbell would be no less deserving the same cynical reaction if not for the cool fact that her talent was in engineering.

How neat is that? Wrapping a conventionally unglamorous job like engineering in the fairy motif. Ten years from now I wholly expect female engineers to keep Tinkerbell models on their drafting boards. See, girls! You can be pretty while designing a propulsion engine.

Of course, J, had to impose his male-centric witticisms on this delightful little story, at one point demanding to know when Peter Pan was going to show up and say, "Hey bitch, get in my pocket. I need a pocket fairy." But even after I told him to get lost, I couldn't help but join him in inflating the Peter Pan scenario, and offered a scene in which Peter and Lost Boys are all sitting around doing lines of pixie dust.

So that's how they learned how to fly.