Featuring my dad's review of a very highbrow film

Today's blog post comes courtesy of my dad, who, generally speaking, does not like fantasy films.  I've been trying without success to get him to watch the excellent How To Train Your Dragon for two and a half years, but it's animated and about a dragon, so I think that's two strikes against it for him.  A little over a week ago, I sent him a short children's book I wrote, which, without giving anything away, involves a dragon.  He read it and loved it, and I suppose that opened his mind to stories involving dragons.  So anyway, last week this e-mail exchange occurred (Oh, and this post contains significant spoilers for the movie Dragon Warriors, so, ya know, if you had an intense yearning to Netflix that one, maybe skip this):

From my dad:

(The movie is called "Dragon Warriors" and that description reads "When a princess jilts a powerful wizard, he vows to clear the land of love and orders a fire breathing dragon to take out affection in the kingdom.")

A bit later:

Me: Wait, you actually watched that movie you sent me the description of?

And my dad's e-mail response:
Hell yes, it was fantastic!! The ending was a real hoot. The evil wizard has the “beautiful and voluptuous princess” (no kidding, the priest who was supposed to perform her marriage to the wizard called her that during the ceremony, to which the wizard responded, “Please, this is a wedding ceremony.”) chained to a wall and is facing her. The dragon is behind him, also facing the princess. The evil wizard commands the dragon, who you notice has a lot of teeth and a big roar, “Destroy and eat the vile creature in front of you.” (She had refused to say “I do” and the wizard had already killed the priest for messing things up.) So the dragon leaned over and ate the wizard, which left the eager viewer with the moral of the whole story — Speak precisely and don’t give orders that are easily misinterpreted. The princess is then set free by her beloved, who has just arrived on the scene and prepares to do battle with the dragon, but the princess runs to the dragon to thank him for saving her, and the dragon purrs like a cat and nuzzles her and they all lived happily ever after. A true children’s story. Gives new meaning to the word “campy."

~~~

As I've written about before, when I was in third grade, my homeroom teacher had us do a class exercise where we had to write out the instructions for her to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from scratch, starting with a closed loaf of bread, closed peanut butter and jelly containers, and utensils set out on a table.  She only followed the directions completely literally, so if anything we wrote was unspecific, or if we skipped even the tiniest step, we failed the exercise.  The point was to get us to give clear directions that can't be misinterpreted, and I wrote about five pages and succeeded in getting her to make the sandwich. And now I know the real significance of this exercise -- she was training us how not to be eaten by dragons.