Found Not Lost

I stayed up late last night, or should I say this morning? I got started watching a movie and could not turn away even though I came in midway through and usually, that is enough to turn me away. Anyway, the movie is called Oldboy and it is a subtitled Korean movie.

This movie has a lot of twists and turns, some of them totally unexpected and the cinematography is fantastic. Very artfully done. I guess that is why it was awarded the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. The movie is loosely based on a Japanese manga and is the second installment of the Vengeance trilogy.

If you don’t mind spoilers, click here for the Wikipedia Site for Oldboy which provides a really good synopsis of the movie’s intricate plot.

Here’s a trailer for the movie:

On the way back to Netflix, the Brothers Bloom got lost…

The Brothers Bloom
(2008)

We watched this movie over the weekend and I was pleasantly surprised. I hadn’t heard of this movie before, my daughter was the one who put it on the Netflix queue.

Speaking of which, I totally love Netflix! For $10 a month, we can choose one movie at a time and we can keep it for as long as we want without any late fees. You exchange videos over the mail, but they make it a point to have a center near you so you can get your next movie the following day after they receive your previous DVD. Isn’t that cool? If you work it right, you can end up getting a movie every three days or so!

We’ve had the service a couple of months now and everything has been seamless up until now. I just received notice that Netflix received an empty envelope from me. This DVD has magically disappeared between my mailbox and theirs. It’s always a good thing when companies have excellent POS systems. Because after I told Netflix that I did return the DVD in the envelope, they simply said, “OK, it happens!”

I like their kind of thinking! I was expecting them to charge me for the movie and I was ready for an argument!

So wherever The Brothers Bloom have gotten to, I hope the thief gets what he deserves.

I have been using Photobucket’s free online storage service for the photos that I use for blogging. I think that Photobucket has the best photo storage service available online. Even though there are bells and whistles that used to be attractive to me in other services, I always went back to Photobucket because of their solid basic services.

They provide almost unlimited storage and bandwidth as part of their free service package. For a small blog or one that is just starting out, this is plenty. I never did fill my quota up in the four years that I had the free service. I could have stayed that way longer but for a unique and hard to pass up offer that I found just recently.

They had an offer for free upgrade to the pro service if you sign up for Netflix. Well what a coincidence! It just so happened that I was approaching my storage limit in the free Photobucket owing to the large sized formats I had been uploading lately. And the kids had been bugging me to buy more DVDs and/or rent movies more and more as they got interested in new and old movies. So it just made sense for us to sign up for Netflix! When I signed up for the $9 a month plan on Netflix, I got Photobucket Pro FREE for a year! That was an awesome deal especially as we already got our money’s worth in DVD rentals before our free first month was even over.

So check it out if this deal is still available. It’s definitely worth it.

JULIE AND JULIA
By Julie Powell
Publish Date: 7/1/2009
ISBN: 9780316044271
Pages: 352

Summary
Julie & Julia, the bestselling memoir that’s “irresistible….A kind of Bridget Jones meets The French Chef” (Philadelphia Inquirer), is now a major motion picture. Julie Powell, nearing thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, resolves to reclaim her life by cooking in the span of a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her unexpected reward: not just a newfound respect for calves’ livers and aspic, but a new life-lived with gusto. The film version is written and directed by Nora Ephron and stars Amy Adams as Julie and Meryl Streep as Julia.
Read more…

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opened in theaters a week ago; and while we were not insane enough to go to the midnight opening, we did go see it a few days later to give the crowd a chance to die down. It was still pretty crowded when we went on the following Thursday night but at least it wasn’t insanely crowded and we managed to get good seats front row center.

I have three daughters who grew up with Harry Potter. We read the first book aloud because my youngest daughter could not read yet and they have been hooked ever since then. We’ve read all the books and are re-reading them again. We’ve seen all the movies and just can’t get enough of them. This latest installment though, kind of left us flat. Which is unusual for us because we are such Harry Potter fans that we pretty much eat up anything Harry Potter that is doled out.

Right off the bat, during the introductory scenes of the movie, where the dementors demolish a bridge in London, they started to lose me. I was frantically trying to remember if this was in the book and my old mind just overlooked it. By this time my girls were like, “What the heck is going on? Where is this movie going?”. My 11 year old was furiously tugging on my arm going “That was not in the book!”. LOL! I guess we must all be purists. We don’t want too many additions nor omissions from the original plot.

Another deviation from the book that also had me and the girls going ‘HUH?’ was the attack on the Weasley farm house. You’d think the Norwich and Peterborough building society had invaded the wizarding world. In the movie, the Weasley’s house burns down during an attack from the fire eaters. As the whole family stood in a circle watching the burrow on fire, my only thought besides from ‘WTH???’ is, ‘I wonder if wizards carry home insurance? LOL! They were really losing my interest at this point.

The saving grace for this movie for me (and also my girls) is how the relationships between Harry & Ginny and Ron & Hermione were developed more in this movie. Forget it that they totally forgot to put focus on the title of the movie, ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ which was only mentioned once (I think) in the movie and if you didn’t read the book you still come away wondering what the significance of the half-blood prince was.

Overall, I felt really unsatisfied with The Half-Blood Prince. I kept waiting for the action to pick up which it never did. This is the first time this has ever happened with me and a Harry Potter movie. So now I want to see it again because I desperately want to like it. It has gotten good reviews elsewhere so I’m thinking maybe I had the wrong expectations going into the movie. I know I’ll be getting the DVD to complete our collection when it comes out. I just don’t know if I can wait that long to see the movie again because it really bothers me that I didn’t like it.

Since the likes of California or Orlando vacations were out of the question for us this summer, we have been doing a bit of virtual traveling instead. As I always say, the best way to travel is through books. Our goal was to read a book a week and the first couple of weeks we were on task. However, we’ve kind of slid off the schedule. That’s all right though, we are still close to our goal.

One of the books my daughter read this summer was The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. The following is a short review from the Amazon page:

In Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their South Carolina peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart’s answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words “Tiburon, South Carolina” scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily’s beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of–Tiburon, South Carolina–determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily’s story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd’s debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic. –Regina Marler –

So a few weeks ago my daughter wanted to watch the movie. We rented the DVD and I must say it’s one of the best movies we’ve seen this summer. The cast consist of Dakota Fanning who plays the 14-year old Lily Owens; The Boatright sisters are played by Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo; Lily’s friend, Rosaleen is played by Jennifer Hudson. The cast is heavily weighted by some awesome actresses if I do say so myself.

If you need a good family movie to watch one weekend, this is a great choice.