Night at the Museum (4 Stars)

Today is only the second time I've watched this film. The first time was more than 10 years ago (i.e. before 14th September 2010) and I honestly don't know why I've waited so long. All I could remember about it was the comedy, the ridiculousness that museum exhibits should come to life at night, but there's a lot more to the film. There are serious messages packaged between the slices of humour. The messages aren't even hidden, they're so open that I really should have paid attention to them first time round.

Simply put, the film is about a man who takes a job as a night guard at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he discovers that the exhibits come to life every night from sunset to sunrise. The film is based on a children's book, and the film is definitely suitable for young viewers. They will probably miss the serious messages, like I did.

Ben Stiller plays Larry Daley, a man who's divorced and struggling to keep contact with his son. That's a common theme in films. It doesn't get worse with repetition. If a mother gains custody of a child, she might refuse to let the child see his father for his own sake, if she thinks the father has an unstable life style. In this case, Larry is a dreamer who doesn't want to do a normal job. He has ideas about new inventions which he wants to market, but they're too impractical, so every company he founds goes bankrupt. The divorce court allows him to see his son Nick every weekend and every second Wednesday, but his lack of money has forced him to move into a tiny apartment which his ex-wife doesn't consider suitable.

So Larry is forced to get a steady job that will pay the bills and allow him to upgrade his accommodation. He applies for a job as a security guard at a museum. When I was unemployed 15 years ago it was recommended that I become a security guard, because that's a job any man can do. Wow. The nice man at the Job Centre thought I was so desperate that I'd take the job at the bottom of the pile? I've never regretted turning down his offer. It was an insult to a man with four years of university and managerial experience behind him. But I'm getting off the subject.....

The museum is downsizing because of poor visitor numbers, so Larry's job is to replace three elderly guards. They give him a book with hand-written instructions, but he doesn't bother reading them. What can be so difficult about a job that any man can do?

He finds out too late that the instructions are essential. Maybe not too late, because if he'd read them before nightfall he wouldn't have understood them. "Lock up the lions or they'll eat you"? That doesn't make sense. The museum's lions are only made of wax.

In the first night Larry has to play with a dinosaur, run from lions and fend off attacks from miniature cowboys and Roman legions. He decides to quit the job, until he realises that Nick finds his father's job interesting. He can give it a go for a few more days, if he finds out how to deal with the living exhibits. He reads books about them to find out how to deal with them. They might only be artificial creations, but when they come to life they have the personalities, strengths and weaknesses of their real life counterparts.

With the encouragement of Teddy Roosevelt, played by Robin Williams, Larry learns that he can be a success if he tries hard enough. Years of failed ideas are enough to make any intelligent man despair, but perseverance can work miracles. Quoting Shakespeare, President Roosevelt tells Larry that "some men are born great, and others have greatness thrust upon them". He's only a lowly security guard, but he can make a difference. He can win the respect of his son and maybe even find a new romance in his life.

There are other messages in the film, such as the value of brotherly love, but the most important message is the importance of perseverance. Sometimes the odds seem stacked against you, and maybe you're in a situation where it doesn't look like it's worth the effort, but if something is worth having it's always worth fighting for.

Success Rate:  + 3.2

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On another topic, Google has recently introduced a new version of its blogger software. This is the first major update since I started blogging 10 years ago. Unfortunately, the new version was pushed out too quickly without being sufficiently tested. I'm coming across new bugs every day. Some are minor, but others cause me more work. There's a procedure to report bugs to the developer team, but there's no reply to bug reports, not even an automated response, so I don't know for certain if my bug report will ever be read. Google should have left the software the way it was before. It worked. That's all that matters. 

Here's a list of the errors I've discovered so far:

1. The attribute "imageanchor=1" is included when a new image is inserted, but if I switch from the HTML view to the normal compose view, it's removed. Without this attribute posts are displayed incorrectly on mobile phones, so I have to edit the HTML code manually to put the attribute back in.

2. After an image is resized, there's a box left in the edit window until it's clicked away. This is only a cosmetic error, but it's annoying.

3. When multiple images are inserted at the same time they are sometimes inserted in the correct order, sometimes in reverse order, depending on whether I click in the edit box first.

4. When an image is inserted, it's usually inserted at the end of the post, not at the place where I'm currently editing. Sometimes it works correctly, but mostly it doesn't. I haven't been able to work out the logic of this bug.

5. When I'm editing HTML on my mobile phone, it's not possible to enlarge the display.

6. If a post has a large number of labels, only the first few labels are displayed in the post list. Very annoying!

7. Now here's a very curious bug. If I have the stats open and open a second stats tab with Ctrl-Click on the word Stats, the current tab is reloaded with the default settings before opening  the new tab. If, however, I open the new tab by right-clicking on Stats and selecting "Open link in new tab", there's no error.