Previously I randomly had my itunes play songs to see how often a Hunchback song or Hunchback related song came up. By related song I mean the artist was in some way associated with a Hunchback version.
Each test consistent of 20 songs and I did five test. A total of 100 song. Here are the results, I’m only revealing the Hunchback or Hunchback related songs that played.
Test 3
-Dans nos Souvenirs by Helene Segara
– Bohemienne by Helene Segara
– Le Temps de Cathedral Seoul French Cast
– Oh L’adorable Creature from La Esmeralda
– Julie Ose by Julie Zenatti
– Dieu que la Monde Seoul French Cast
6/20 = 30%
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Test 4
– Vivre Notre Dame de Paris Symphonique
– Je Voudrais une Chanson Interlude 2 by Julie Zenatti
– Le Process Notre Dame de Paris Original cast (another ringtone)
– La Monture by Chiara Di Bari Notre Dame de Paris Seoul French Cast
4/20 = 20%
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Test 5
– Trommein der Stodt from Hunchback of Notre dame Berlin (note this the second time this song played)
– I’m a Priest by Daniel Lavoie Notre Dame de Paris London cast
– Overture from La Esmeralda
– Ave Maria Paien Notre Dame de Paris Symphonique
– Recitatifet et Duo: Donc Phoebus est A Monfort from La Esmeralda
– Qu’Est-ce Qu’on va Faire avec Monde by Helene Segara
6/20 = 30%
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The Overall Results
22 out of 100 songs were from a Hunchback version or sung by someone associated with a Hunchback version, or 22%.
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I thought this was an interesting test. Not sure how I feel but I do have a lot of random music from over the years so maybe 22% isn’t so bad.
Last week I randomly listened to 20 songs on my iTunes so see what the probability was of getting either a Hunchback song or a song sung but an artist affiliated with a Hunchback version. The result were one in five or 20%.This is the second test. Nothing have changed I have added no new songs.
So instead of me listing all the songs I got I’m only going to mention which Hunchback songs were played because no care about my music.
Test 2 had disappointing results as only one Hunchback song was played and it should barley count. The song was Visite de Frollo Esmeralda from Notre Dame de Parisbut it was only the “Je t’aime” part. A while ago I wanted it for a ringtone*. Turns out I used the opening of La Sociere more.
So the result was 1 in 20. or 5%. Not as good as last time. Went down 15% from test one.
*2025 update -Remember when Ringtones were like a huge thing?
Esmeralda and Quasimodo Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame
You know who in the Disney line-up would make the perfect Disney Princess? Who embodies the ideal of what it means to be a lovely human being? Quasimodo.
In all seriousiness, Quasimodo meets all the qualifications for Disney Princess-dom, whatever that means and to be fair to this idea“the official rules*” don’t actually make a stipulation that the “Princess” has to be a female. It’s implied but not stated.But given that Quasimodo is presented as a man lets consider him and the only female human character isn the movie, Esmeralda and lets’ look at the the official rules and the meta guidelines.
Here’s a dumb post, what is the chance of me getting a hunchback or hunchback related song (as in a singer who associated with a Hunchback version) to randomy play on itunes when it is on shuffle? I know, super important scientific enquiry!
Now I don’t really listen to my music on iTunes anymore. I tend to use Pandora, spotify or youtube so the music I have on iTunes represents my taste circa mid 2000s up to 2014 roughly. So I have a lot anime/ video game music and Bollywood and random stuff as well as Norte Dame de Paris and other Hunchback stuff.
I took a sample of 20 songs because 20 is a good sample size. So what is the likelihood of me listening to a Hunchback song or a singer from a Hunchback version on itunes in shuffle mode?
Click for the list of songs
1. Rien n’est comme avant by Helene Segara (1)
2. Beau comme Soleil by Nadia Bel (2) DAMN first two out of the gate
3. Higurashi no naku koro ni opening
4. Tromme in der stadt from Berlin Hunchback Musical (3) We’re getting so many
5. Now I’m your Mom by David Byrne
6. Tere Liye from Veer-Zaara
7. Wind City [ City of Wind Windia] by Cyril the Wolf (This is the 2nd time I have listen to this)
8. Kokoro no Kasa wa from Sakura Wars
9. Kogaku Motet from Final Fantasy 9 Plus OST
10. A Walk in the Dark by David Byrne (I love this song)
11. Fossil Roo from Final Fantasy 9 OST
12. Pandemonium from Final Fantasy 9 OST
13. Broken Things by David Byrne
14. Surreal by Ayumi Hamasaki
15. Sumida from Sakura Wars
16. Hungarian Dance no.5 by Brahms
17. Amnesie by Julie Zenatti (4)
18. La Sorciere from Notre Dame de Paris (5)
19. Kalluri Vaanil from Pennin Manathai Thottu (The Benny Lava song)
20. Phony King of England from Disney Robin Hood
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The result is one in five or 20%
But everyone knows that good science requires testing so MAYBE I will do this again sometime for science. Another good experiment would be the frequency of language. Like how many English language songs I get, or French, or Japanese or Hindi, but this a Hunchback blog so let’s keep to hunchback. But in this case of this sample because I’m curious;
Click for song language frequency
Engish – 5 out of 20
French – 4 out of 20
Hindi – 1 out of 20
Instrumental – 4 out of 20
Japanese – 4 out of 20
miscellaneous – 2 out of 20
I’m kinda surprised that more English songs came up.
I have become fascinated by the culture of youtube videos where people buy low quality products off of sites like Wish and Romwe just for the curiosity of what the low cost products are like in real life. It does seem that youtube is a sea of these types vicarious purchasing videos as evident by all the haul and product base review videos.
Now I have gotten at least two items from Romwe in the past and I hated them and I have no desire to get anything off of Wish but I want to play in this content sandbox too so I decided to see what Wish had to offer for Hunchback products.
Wish Disney Esmeralda Costume
Turns out it seems like to search through Wish you need tohave an account, screw that. A cursory google search brought me to a $93 Esmeralda costume, which looks like a really good costume. Wish however is notorious for using other people’s images to sell the products so is this actuallly the costume someone would get in that mail? No, not very likely.
Aliexpress Disney Esmeralda Costume
The same picture is used on Esmeralda costume on Aliexpress along with some other pictures of clearly different Esmeralda costumes. Also there are two different sellers on Aliexpress “selling” this particular costume.
myshow26 Disney Esmeralda costume
After a bit more research I found this costume on eBay where I finally could read the watermark which reads “myshow26.” This is not a person but a cosplay company. They sell a lot on amazon.jp. The only myshow26 costume I could find on amazon.com was Ariel’s Blue dress. So while this product may not be the best quality at least the sellers did not steal someone’s cosplay picture to sell the product. It is in fact the product they are selling (in theory.)
Now for the record I don’t want to waste any money for curiosities of what this costume is actually like in personso I failed there but the culture of buying products for the sake of entertainment is very interesting to me.* The people on youtube buying these cheap products are making their money back on ad revenues, at least for the bigger channels, but it still stands that people are being entertained by someone else’s consumerism.And if I were to get a advance degree in sociology or even anthropology, I would love to study it more or just read reviewed articles on the subject for fun.
2024 edit – Entertainment based on consumerism is much less entertaining as it was since this post went up in 2018.
Reem Kherici as Juliette and Nicolas Duvauchelle as Mathias
Basically this is a French Wedding Planner. You know how it goes, the wedding planner falls in love with the groom but instead of a meet-cute where they have some sexual tension here they have a one-night stand at a costume party. Sure, whatever. Also to add more conflict in the mix the wedding planner/mistress (movie’s word), Juliette and the bride-to-be, Alexia were childhood class mates and by thatI mean Alexia was a pretty rich blond mean child and Juliette was fat and poor.
So there is the dynamic of the characters, unfortunately it’s all presented as very shallow and artificial, like this movie needed another round of rewrites and editing to the screenplay. Aside from Juliette’s connection to her childhood/inner child and her alcoholic mother nothing about that seems to impact her life or personality, she seems pretty together and confident.
There is nothing to really suggest that Mathias, the groom, is at all unhappy being with Alexia except that he has been with her for five years but didn’t think of marriage until Alexia found Juliette’s professional card in his pocket and assumed they were getting married. Alexia is a sort of bitchy and shallow but not deserving of Mathias’ wishy-washy/lukewarm attitude. Really it’s just bad character development.
For instance the movie tells us that Mathias doesn’t have a family, ok fine but what happened to them? Are the dead or was there a falling out? I he going to reveal the truth to Juliette there by strengthening their connection? Nope, it’s a taboo subject never brought up again. He might has well have a family if it’s not important to the plot otherwise why bring it up? The movie isn’t at all that interested in flushing out the characters and their interactions beyond smiling,drinking and the wacky antics they get into.
Which bring us to the humor. Now French humor is a little different, they like misfortune to happen to other people, other people’s pain is funny and BOY does this movie take that and run with it, with train and throws it over a cliff and then breaks its teeth just for good measure. And here are some that occur in the move; Mathias is forced into kissing a man to keep his trite with Juliette a secret, a Bride’s gets her mouth smashed during her wedding after a cross falls on her, Alexia is hit in the face with a tennis ball and breaks for front teeth, Alexia’s father’s prized wine collection isbroken by Juliette as she tries to hide after her Mathias are nearly caught having sex again in Alexia’s father’s house, and many more with one being so awful I nearly stopped the movie. This is a style humor that I don’t find very funny but maybe if the characters were better it could have worked. Like I didn’t care that Alexia got her teeth smashed in. There was no feeling it, it was supposed to be funny but that joke land on it’s face much like that random bride whose face was literally smashed which was also not funny.
While I did finish this movie it wasn’t goodor enjoyable. Perhaps if you want just amindless movie to fill the void for a little over and hour then if’s a fine but you could want anything else and get the result with your time.
Site Note–While I’m happy I at least did the four reviews I set out to do this month but it came down to the wire. While like the idea of reviewing random movie streaming on Netflix I don’t think I will continue. I had mentioned reviewing French Musical in during the month of August, as I have wanted to do that for a while, the truth is my August is looking busy so I’m going to hold off on that for now. In the meantime I want toat least try to do more Hunchback content even if it’s stupid, like 100 layers of Esmeralda. So no more random movie reviews for a while. Not sure how frequently I will post but I will try and post something once a week at the very least and something related to Hunchback.
Karla Souza as Maru and Ricardo Abarca as Renato ¿Qué culpa tiene el niño?
I’m going to blame the fanfic I read right before I picked a movie to watch for my choice on this one. That’s right, I read something about a one night turning into something more meaningful and then I watch a 2016 Mexican movie about a one night stand turning into something meaning. Also I wanted something that was a different and not Asian/Indian Media. So we have ¿Qué culpa tiene el niño?
And like a one night stand turning into something meaningful this movie starts as some nothing and the gets a little more complex at end when there a twist that actually makes it rather sweet.
As you might have guessed this movie is about a young professional upper class woman, Maru,who has a drunken one night stand and gets pregnant. The guy is a very young unemployed loser named Renato and he is all in on being a dad and marriage and love. Maru doesn’t want to get married to him but does due to family and societalpressures but in they end up in love and havetheir baby.
I haven’t seen many examples of Mexican movies so I can’t really rate the style of acting but it seemed fine. Maybe coming off a Bollywood where sometimes in the more mainstream movies, they tend to over-act without much subtlety, so in they were over-the-top in this movie it didn’t come across, aside from the weird musical moments but even then it didn’t seem like too much. Here the characters seemed like slight over-exaggerations of real people. They were fairly shades of gray, as in the characters had their ups and down. Were they amazing characters? No. Were they serviceable for the tone and story being told? Yes.
Was this a great movie? No. Was this a serviceable movie? Yes, I mean I finished it, that seems to be an accomplishment for me right now.
Shah Rukh Khan as Raj and Kajol as Meera, Dilwale (2015)
Sorry, this posting series has gotten away from me, much like reviewing Hunchback versions. Anyway let’s see if I can somehow watch/review two more movies before then end of July. On a better note I did at least decide on the next Hunchback version.
Anyway I hadn’t planned on reviewing another Bollywood movie since I just did one but I watched this with a friend of mine so I figured why not?
Before we get to this movie, a brief history. As a semi-casual Bollywood fan I enjoy the pairing of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. Prior to Dilwale I had seen every movie they have been toegther, which is not major accomplishment. But as a person who enjoys this pairing I was very excited to hear that in 2015 they were going to be a new movie and I had wanted to see it in theaters but then another movie came out around the same time and distracted me. That movie was Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Then I heard Dilwale sucked and I forgot all about it. That is until I saw it streaming on Netflix and I knew I should watch it. So was everyone right? Was this the worst movie with this actor pairing?
The answer is yes. I didn’t finish the movie, I’m such a pro at the whole reviewing movie thing. (I know am not.)
I was so confused by this movie. Most of the characters are terrible. Shah Rukh Khan plays Raj, I think he repairs cars or something but he used to be a gangster. He has an idiot brother who likes a boring yet conventionally attractive girl. Raj is okay with the pairing until he meets the girl’ssister, Meera. Meera and Raj had an affair 15 years ago in Bulgaria but she was in a rival gang and both their fathers killed each other or something. And then she shot him.
Was there anything good about the movie? I mean maybe we should just focus on the positives.
Oddly I liked that the film said they were in Bulgaria, as random as that sounds. But there is a movie called Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam, which a way better movie, but in that movie they tried, and failed, to convince the viewers that Hungry was Italy. It was clearly Budapest and not Rome. So I guess kudos Dilwale for saying you filmed in a place and putting that in the story?
What else? The Shah Rukh/Kajol part of the story was better than anything with the younger couple. That should have been the movie. Their chemistry wasn’t as good as any of their other movies.
Some of the lighting was okay. It was OVERDONE in cluttering the frame but it was a nice distraction in parts.
Everything was bad. This movie was bad. If you like the pairing of these actors and want to be a completionist sure you could watch itbut I would recommend the other movies they have been in. Sometimes it’s not worth being a completionist.
Instead of doing the roulette thing, I decided to take destiny in my own hands and pick for myself. I decided to go fora Bollywood movie since it had been a while since I last watch one. So I picked Kyun! Ho Gaya Na because it was a period of Bollywood I used to watch when I first started watchingBollywood movies (mid 2000s) and I do tend to go for the romantic saccharine movies.
So how was this movie? Very boring. I turned it off after and hour because I just couldn’t muster any attention for this movie. I even paused it to try my hand at water-marbling my nails. Which didn’t go well either but I had more fun failing at nail art than watching this movie.
The center conflict of the film isn’t bad, basically the two leads have opposing attitudes on love. The guy, Arjun, wants his parents to choice for him because love is complicated and Diya rather fall in love. It’s a take on tradition vs modernity theme that you see in a lot of Bollywood movies but the stakes are not high so it’s not compelling.
Honestly that isn’t even the issue. A small love-story that is either chill or silly is fine but this is neither. It doesn’t really know what it’s doing with a tone. The acting is also weird combo of hammy and wooden. Aishwariya Rai is only as good as her director. There isn’t much in the way of chemistry between the leads either which is detrimental in a romance movie.
The look of this movie is off. Some Bollywood movie have a weird super contrast look which makes color pop but darker tones are really dark. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai has that look however that movie knows to use a lot of color, Kyun! Ho Gaya Na doesn’t so it look weirdly washed out.
Then there is the editing and dancing, both of which are very jarring. To be fair I did stop watching so maybe the songs in the second act were better and the editing was tone down. But not the first three songs.
I would pass on this movie. It’s just all around dull.
I failed this quest line. Shame on me. Or did I beat it because I refuse to have it waste my time?Those are the questions! That is the true debate! I did really fail at water-marbling though but I suck at nail art in general much like reviewing movies on the internet.
