The Ride

Going back to my trip to New York City for a moment, the final thing we did in the city before we left was take a bus tour called The Ride. This is the infamous "sideways bus." Yes, the seats on this particular bus are situated so that all of the passengers have a window view. Instead of facing forward, the seats face the one huge window on the right side of the bus. The seats are set up stadium-style so the top row is higher than the bottom row and everyone has a good view of what is going on outside. The Ride has two tour hosts - Jackie and Scott. It is obvious that both of them have had improv training of some sort. Both of them were absolutely hysterical as they poked fun at the passengers and the people walking past on the street. In this case, the tour operators really do make the attraction much more fun and enjoyable.

It's a little difficult to explain The Ride if you have never been on it. It is a tour so you do get to see some of the touristy things in New York. You get some basic information on Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building and some other notable places. What sets it apart from other city tours is the sidewalk entertainment. There are a couple of stops where entertainers, dressed as regular people on the street, perform for you. For example, a man in a UPS-type uniform sets his package aside to do some breakdancing for us. Since he is right there on the street, there are regular people walking past him. Not only are the performers awesome to watch, it's also funny to watch the reactions of the people trying to get someplace.

The Ride is on the expensive side of things. It costs $59.00 per person for an approximately 75 minute tour. (Note: The box office is located at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. It can be difficult to find but once you get to the museum, it is literally right there.) However, I do think that it is worth the price. All three of us spent the entire ride with smiles on our faces. I would love to do it again the next time I am in New York City.

Marriott Marquis

I went to New York City with my aunt and my daughter this past weekend. Over the next few days, I'll be giving you reviews of the places we visited. I'm going to start out with our hotel. We stayed at the Marriott Marquis right on Times Square. This is the same hotel we stayed at the last time we visited New York City back in August 2010.

Our room was nice. We were on the 12th floor with a corner room. It was a pretty standard hotel room with two double beds. I was a little surprised to find that the room did not have a refrigerator but it wasn't a deal-breaker.

If you follow me over on Instagram, you would have seen a picture of the view from our hotel room. This was the view on Saturday morning. See the Sony screen almost in the middle of the top of the shot? If you follow those billboards straight up, that is where the New Year's Eve ball hangs. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good shot of the ball from our hotel room due to the massive amount of brightly lit billboards under it. Towards the center of the shot, next to the building roof and near all the orange construction cones, is where all of the characters wander around begging for people to pay them for pictures. (No, we didn't take pictures with any of them.) On the left-hand side of the picture, under the Bachelorette's face, is Toys R Us.

One of my favorite things about this hotel is the elevator system. All of the elevators are located in a circle in the center of the hotel. You go to a number pad and enter the floor number you wish to go to. The number pad then tells you which elevator to get on. The elevators are each given a letter. So if you push in floor 12, it might tell you to get on elevator J. It is much easier than having everyone pile into one or two elevators then having to wait for each floor, especially when you are on a higher floor.

The down part of the elevator system is the way the hotel is organized. The lobby/concierge/registration desk is located on the 8th floor. If you want to eat at the hotel's rooftop restaurant, The View, which is on the 48th floor, you have to go to the 3rd floor to get the only two elevators that go to the top. But if you want to leave the hotel, you need to go to the 1st floor. So if you have a question for the concierge before you leave the hotel, you have to take an elevator to the 8th floor to get your answer before going down to the 1st floor to go outside. And if you have dinner reservations at The View, which we did, you have to go down to the 3rd floor to go all the way up to the 48th. It's a lot of work.

With that said, I do highly recommend the hotel. If you are willing to pay for a room with the view of Times Square, the view is pretty amazing. All of the hotel staff that we encountered were extremely nice and eager to assist. And, best of all, it is right in the middle of everything you would want to do in the Times Square area. I am very likely to stay there again if we can manage another trip to New York City.

Movie review: Cloverfield

No, I didn't see Cloverfield in the theater. It was probably a good thing considering the shakiness of the hand-held camera work. I felt nauseous just watching it at home. I can't imagine how people made it through the movie on the big screen. There will be spoilers in this so if you haven't seen it and you don't want to be spoiled, stop reading now.

OK. Let's talk about this thing. I've been looking forward to Cloverfield since the teasers started coming out last year. Unfortunately, my husband and I just didn't get the chance to see it on the big screen. However, friends of ours saw it and said the graphics were really nauseating. I completely agree. I understand why they used a hand-cam for the movie but I really think it detracted more than it added anything to the film as a whole. Sure, you got the "in the midst of the battle" feeling...but you couldn't SEE anything half the time. It was just a jumble of pictures while the main characters were running. The only time the camera was still enough to see anything was when the characters were standing or sitting still, which wasn't very often. I think it might have been a bit better if they had mixed steady-cam shots with the hand-cam shots. Show an outside view while the characters were running but then switch back to the home video when they are sitting around talking. Not only would it have made the movie easier to watch but we would have been able to keep track of the characters better.

My next problem with it was how the monster was handled. In the DVD extras as well as in many interviews, J.J. Abrams kept talking about Godzilla and how he wanted to make an iconic monster for America. I don't think he's ever seen a Godzilla movie. Those movies focused on the monster as well as the humans. Not to mention that, since Godzilla was created thanks to some hydrogen bomb testing, there are quite a very environmental messages in there too. In Cloverfield, we learn nothing about the monster. We don't even know where it came from! According to the interview with Abrams, the monster is a newborn. There isn't anything in the movie to indicate this nor is there any explanation for the parasite-type creatures that the monster drops. So that negates classifying this as a "monster movie." The monster is only there to act as a catalyst to move the human characters into motion.

Ah, the humans. There's Rob (the guy going to Japan), Hud (Rob's best friend and the cameraman for the movie), Beth (Rob's sorta-girlfriend), Jason (Rob's brother), Lily (Rob's girlfriend) and Marlena (Lily's friend). At no point in time are we compelled to feel anything about most of these characters. Rob is a douche and he tries to make up for it by trying to save Beth after treating her like crap. We don't learn a whole lot about Hud, beyond the fact that he hits on women a lot, because he's generally behind the camera. Jason kicks the bucket early on, leaving Lily to hold the group of friends together. Poor Marlena got the short end of the stick since she wasn't even supposed to be at the farewell party for Rob in the first place. Not only did I not care about these characters, I was actually rooting for their death by the middle of the movie. There was no real emotion behind any of their actions. The only reason Rob wanted to save Beth was because after having sex with her then not contacting her for two weeks, she decided to move onto another relationship when *BAM!* Rob realized he loves Beth. Yeah, Rob, you didn't love her until she found a new man. Douche.

And that is the entire plot of the movie. Rob and his friends try to rescue a girl that he realizes, in the middle of a monster attack, that he loves. I don't even believe that he loved her. I believe that he felt badly about the way he treated her. I believe that he cared for her a bit. However, I mostly believe that the only reason he wanted to save her was to save himself from being the big dickwad of the movie. Too late, Rob.

After all of this, I can't say that it was a bad movie. It just wasn't a good movie. It definitely wasn't a good monster movie. If Abrams was aiming to give the American audience an iconic monster to identify with, he failed miserably. Yes, the monster was cool looking but there was nothing about it for us to identify with. There was nothing to make the monster endearing to us. Nothing to make us want to buy a big plushie Cloverfield monster for our bedroom. There are rumors that there will be a sequel. I can only pray that they do a better job than they did with the original.

Game review: Jojo's Fashion Show

There has definitely been a sudden influx of fashion-based casual games. Few of them really had anything to do with fashion though. Well, things are different now. Jojo's Fashion Show is definitely about the fashion and nothing else. You play Jojo Cruz, a retired fashion designer. She's trying to come back to the fashion scene and it's your job to help her. The goal is to make the best outfit you can. You are given three models, a variety of clothes and a couple of themes. It is your job to create the best outfit for the given theme with the clothes you have.

Sounds easy, right? It's a lot more difficult than you would think! Sometimes you don't get the right clothes and you are forced to just throw something together before the model walks onto the runway naked. But sometimes everything comes together and you create the absolute perfect outfit.

This is definitely a game for those interested in fashion. I can't imagine someone who doesn't like clothes enjoying this. Clothes are the game. And this is most definitely the best fashion game I've come across so far.