“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”

This past week, whilst avoiding homework and impending AP exams, I decided that it was high time I watched Anne of Green Gables. I actually haven't ever read the book (I am doing that now) but I decided the movie was worth the watch. 

And it was.

But oh. My. Goodness.

Let me first say, I'm not a crier. I don't like crying, I don't cry if I can help it. 

But this movie. Man. I CRIED. Almost the whole time. 

It was just really sad. All the time. 

Anne was such a sweet girl. I wanted the best for her. You saw her almost obtain happiness, and then something would tear that away from her. 

STOP.

JUST LET HER BE HAPPY.

But alas, the poor orphan girl could not easily obtain happiness.

I mean, she did. Eventually. I think. I sure hope the book concludes better than the movie did. Dang cliffhangers. 

But yeah. 

The movie is about a poor orphan girl, Anne, and she is just a chatty little Cathy. She's a brilliant girl, but just as Don Quixote, she was an idealist. And people thought that was weird. But then a mix-up happened and Anne was adopted by an elderly brother and sister. They almost didn't keep her, but in the end decided to. The movie is essentially about her growing up with them. 

It's incredibly sweet and there are a lot of good morals in it as well. 

Also, so far, it goes along almost exactly with the book. However, that does make the movie a little over three hours I believe. 

Nonetheless. I thought it was a wonderful watch, and I would recommend it. I mean, who doesn't love hearing an eleven year old say things like "a perfect graveyard of buried hopes."  

Ten things I *insert clever pun here*

Yep, you guessed it. Or you didn't. I don't know, I'm not a mind reader.

10 Things I Hate About You.

I was forced to see this by a certain movie freak friend of mine. She insisted it was a must see, something everyone should have seen besidesneverhavingseenasingleTerminatormoviecoughcough. But nevertheless.

So this afternoon, after baking a cake for our AP US History class, we decided to watch it. 

And it's not too bad.

Basically JGL wants this girl and he can't get her because her dad says she can't date. Then her family has an argument and her father says that she can't date until her older sister dates. So JGL decides he's going to make that happen. He and his dorky buddy team up with this douchebag, who also wants the girl, to try and get that to happen. They use the douchebag to pay this rebel dude who everyone is scared of to go out with the girl's older sister. Obviously there are the usual problems like with the douchebag and JGL both wanting the same girl, and other cliched stuff. And I'm just gonna ruin it for you, everyone dies. Just kidding.  

So it was released in 1999, and it's essentially a typical chick flick. Not that it's bad. 

It has the typical "be yourself" message in there and "don't date douchebags, but feel free to date the shady rebellious and/or dorky guys" message. 

But seriously. A movie with a young Heath Ledger and Joseph Gordon Levitt in it? I can't complain. 

Along with that though, they did a fantastic job of appealing to my more feminine, girly side of wanting some guy to come and sweep me off my feet, and love me no matter. Sure, it was cliched. But sometimes, we just have to indulge ourselves and let ourselves hope and believe that there really is going to be that perfect guy out there who we will just fall head over heels for. 

Overall, I couldn't complain. The acting was good, believable for the time period ("Where did you come from? Planet 'Loser'?") and I generally enjoyed it. And I wouldn't mind watching it again. 

But honestly Macy, you can't consider 10 Things I Hate About You to be a "must see" and have never seen any of the Terminator movies. And if you consider Arnold Schwarzenegger to be attractive, it's practically a more action-y 10TIHAY.  

(W)REC(k)

I know, I am just so clever.

But yep. I recently saw [REC]³ Génesis. It's the third in the series, as you can tell by the itsy bitsy three. It is also completely in Spanish.

First, I'll give you a bit of background. It started out in [REC] as a zombie-seeming movie. Some people in an apartment building, someone goes crazy, the government quarantines the building. Stuff goes badly for most of the people. There was actually an English version of this movie, called Quarantine. None of the others in the series got English versions though.
  
[Rec] ² continues in the same building, but adds in some religious theme stuff. It was weird.

But seeing as how they made a third, it obviously had some appeal, right?

Well.

For the third, there's a completely different setting. It starts out at a wedding, and then they move to the reception. That's where things go bad.

Going with the traditional filming style of the REC movies, they start out with the camera angle being from actual characters carrying cameras. But then they break from that theme when someone breaks the last camera. From then on, it's all professional filming. It was a little disappointing. Having the movies shot from the point of view of the characters really set it apart in the other movies. But when they switched to regular filming, it wasn't as good. Just one of my complaints.

It really wasn't bad. But it wasn't good. The characters were harder to relate to. One of the main characters, the bride, was incredibly bipolar and I couldn't figure out if she was a huge wimp or a chainsaw wielding psycho. I didn't really like her. Her husband wasn't much better. 

There were also just points in the movie where I was dumbfounded. Like at one point, hubby and one of his buddies come out wearing full knight armor they stole from a nearby church. Yeah. I don't know. Then they almost immediately ditch it all. Smart movie, homie. 

Then the religious aspect comes back in to play when a preist starts reciting bible verses and the zombie type things stop moving and just kind of have seizures. So he goes on the loudspeaker and just kinda starts reading. The thing is, I thought someone tried that in the second movie and it didn't work. I don't know, maybe this priest was just more holy. 

I also didn't like the ending. Again, the characters were stupid and all. I won't ruin it for you, in case some night you're just really bored and on Netflix and you decide to watch it. It wasn't a complete waste of time, but I certainly could have been doing better things with my life. 

But then again, when couldn't I be?
 

I like the way you die, boy.

This weekend, I finally got to see the movie Django Unchained. You see, I went to the theater to see it a while ago, with my good friend. However, she happened to be a little sixteenyearold, so she couldn't see it, and being the good friend I am, I didn't abandon her and see it alone. 

But I got to see it this weekend, so all's good. 

And it was pretty good! I liked it well enough anyway. 

This movie centers around Django (the "D" is silent), a slave. Well, he was a slave in the first five or ten minutes of the movie. Then he's set free, and he joins a bounty hunter (white dude) as a term of his freedom. They do cool stuff for a while, killing people and all, and then Django goes to rescue his wife, from whom he was separated years ago. His bounty hunter friend tags along to help out. They have a fantastic adventure, involving Leonardo DiCaprio (omghe'ssohotandtotallynotold -Macy) as a slave owner. There're trials and tribulations and nothing goes quite right. But it was a good story and all. 

But of course, I have some complaints. Not really though. They're mostly observations that made me remark that the movie was "interesting" instead of just "good."

The first is the amount of fake blood they used. Oh. My. Goodness. It was like the Great Flood came again. I was looking for Noah and his ark the whole time. As there were a lot of deaths, you would expect a lot of blood. But the amount of blood per capita was ridiculous. Like a simple pistol shot would create a fountain. And don't even get me started on the shotgun shots. One of the scenes was in a house, and many people died. The amount of blood left on the walls was just absurd. I'm not sure if they meant to make it so outlandish, or what, but it was crazy. 

Then was the soundtrack. Each song on it's own, out of context, was good. Really cool sounding, you know. But it was weird selections. One song would be western-y, seeming to fit the situation. Then the next minute, you would hear rap selections. Quite interesting choices. 

It was overall a kind of silly movie. It had it's serious parts, but it also had a good amount of humor and lightheartedness put in in, which is always good in a movie, especially when it's about a subject such as this one. So in conclusion, I would encourage you to see Django Unchained. That is, if you're old enough. Good kids do not sneak into R rated movies.

It's a bird! It's a plane!

Continuing on the move-watching theme, I spent more of my time wasted watching some superhero movies. It's more the type of movies I like to watch, the action-y stuff. I had also just watched Snow White and the Huntsman, so I decided to go to another Chris Hemsworth movie, Thor. No, it totally wasn't because of his looks.

Anyway. The movie. It was fairly decent. I wasn't overly impressed by it, but I wasn't disappointed, I suppose. 

It starts out giving background information on the galaxy and our hero Thor and his friends and family. Then Thor gets sent to earth, and all hell breaks loose. And of course only our dear Thor can fix everything. That's essentially it. Oh and there's a girl. There's always a girl. 

Not bad, anyway. It kinda just seemed like they were trying to get a Thor movie out, so that they could include him in The Avengers and not have the general population confused about who he was and where he came from. That's not a bad thing, but the plot was incredibly generic and monotonous. 

So then from there, I moved on to the one of the other hero movies I should've seen a while ago. Iron Man 2. I had seen the first pretty near to when it came out. And it was good! So why not see the other one, right?

Iron Man 2 started out with Tony Stark, (AKA Iron Man for all those who don't remember characters' names or something,) essentially regressing back to how he was at the beginning of the first movie. And obviously there's a bad guy and Iron Man has to win and stuff. The usual. However, since Iron Man itself differs from the generic hero movie, it's different at the same time as being completely carbon copy. 

It bugged me though how the main character seemed to completely forget the personality change that happened in the previous movie. Stark returned to his hugely egoistic self, not caring for anyone but himself. And while at the end of the first movie he was still an extreme elitist, he still had "learned compassion for other people" or some crap like that. But it all seemed to disappear at the start of Iron Man 2. But it was an alright movie.

So, I guess superhero movies aren't really more than I expected. That might not bring the quality down, especially if they have an attractive star, but it's always nice to have a plot that I can't guess ten minutes into the movie. But we can't be too demanding, now can we?  

And they lived happily ever after...

This week, I've been watching a lot of movies. I don't know why. I really don't have time for it. But I've somehow made the time, (by not doing a lot of my homework coughcough.) I was watching some of the movies I'd wanted to see for a long time, but never got around to. 

The first one I watched that I'll talk about is Disney's Tangled. It's a different twist on the classic fairy tale of Rapunzel. And by different twist, I mean they changed essentially everything except for her long hair and the tower. But that is certainly not a bad thing.

We find out that this Rapunzel was a princess. But then, because of some magic flower that Rapunzel's mother ate when she was pregnant, Rapunzel's hair is magical. That flower was used by a witch, and when the King took it for the Queen, the witch was angered. So she stole Rapunzel to keep herself young and raised Rapunzel as her own. But of course Rapunzel wants out. So when a random man climbs through her window and can take her away, she grabs that chance. All she wants to do is see these lights that are flown into the sky each year on her birthday. 

Of course from there it turns into a fantastic adventure, with a battle between good and evil. And it was really good. I enjoyed going back to my childhood days of watching Disney princess movies. 

With this though, they started moving toward the more modern mindset. Rapunzel's goal was not to find love, but to discover herself. She just happened to find love at the same time. Rapunzel herself was very independent as well. While at times she did need her trusty "knight in shining armor," she could stand on her own, and often times was the one who saved the duo's day. 

Then, continuing on the Disney princess theme, I went and watched Brave. 

And I loved it just as much.

Brave follows the life of a Scottish princess who just wants to be herself. However, her mother wants to make her into the perfect lady, and this causes a rift between them. Because of this rift and differing opinions, a series of events take place that *possiblespoileralert?* turn our heroine Merida's mother into a bear. It sounds weird, but it makes sense in the movie. The rest of the movie is then about Merida trying to keep her mother from being hunted while also trying to turn her back into a human. 

It was really a heartwarming tale, again about a young woman trying to find herself essentially. This one did not end in a "happily-ever-after-with-a-guy," which was of course different from what I was used to with Disney princess movies. But it was still good.

Overall, this just made me excited for what's to come. If Disney is making these kinds of movies now, it sends a good message to girls, telling them to be themselves. It mixes the classic girly love of princesses with the idea that one should be themselves and that essentially girls don't need to have a guy in their life to live "happily ever after." These are the kinds of movies I would one day want my own daughters to watch.