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Muppets Haunted Mansion – JenEric Movie Review

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Hello Cinephiles,

Today we’re talking about the 2021 special Muppets Haunted Mansion.

Story

This was a love story to the beloved ride. The story is a bare bones outline of the ride with some touching moments in between.

Score: 0.5

Characters

The main characters are Gonzo and Pepe. I find Pepe extremely annoying, I’ve never been a fan of the womanizing characters. I understand why they used him for this story, though.

Gonzo goes through a good story arc and speaks to older fans and younger ones as well.

The rest of the muppets have nice cameos.

Score: 0.5

Dialogue

It was everything a good muppets movie should be. It had music, puns, and lots of jokes. I especially liked the shameless use of quotes from the ride.

Score: 1

Visuals and Music

It was a very well shot and designed film. The background details are designed for that cross-section of Haunted Mansion fans and Muppet fans. Down to muppet-a-fying the wallpaper.

The music is a lot of fun and I wish there had been more. I liked the spooky muppet show opening song version at the end.

Score: 1

Fun

Be warned that although this isn’t scary, it does have a lot of jump scares. The kids liked it, although the five year old found it too scary due to the jump scares.

It was nice and nostalgic for those of us that grew up with the muppets show and movies.

Score: 1

Overall

This is a wonderful mix of classic Muppet humour and nostalgia for the Haunted Mansion ride. The littles might dislike the jump scares, but overall it’s a lot of fun.

Final Score: 4 Stars out of 5.

Decluttering and the Art of Optimization

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Hello My Imaginary Friends,

I’ve been cleaning and decluttering. We finally decided to clean out our “nests”. Nests are places you put things you don’t want to deal with. They have a nasty habit of getting bigger and bigger. They also become ridiculously intimidating to clean.

We identified 3 major nests and started work in early August. Boy, did we have a lot of crap. I mean I found empty boxes for cellphones and other electronics that would be going to high school this year if they were human. I found PS/2 port extension cables… No, those aren’t for PlayStation 2.

In a stroke of madness genius, I set a date for a yard sale and gave us 3 weeks to get everything done… We managed to clean out 2 of the 3 major nests and I’m still terrified of the garage…

We’re really close to maybe having a functional guest room instead of a third bedroom garbage pile, so that’s really good.

If this mad cleaning has taught me anything, it’s that minimalism is overrated. The sense of cleanliness and peace doesn’t come from getting rid of everything, it comes from optimizing your living space. If you’re not comfortable in the way your living area is organized, you need to do something about it and the best thing is to get rid of stuff you’re unhappy with and keep the good stuff.

That doesn’t mean that you have to live like a divorced man on TV or some new age guru in a magazine. It just means you need to be happy with the flow and movement in your living space. Everyone has different tastes.

I personally love having lots of oversized cushy furniture and books in every room.

The important thing is to periodically do cleaning and organizing of your nests. The organizing part is extra important to avoid the same nest developing again.

 

Later Days,

Éric