Eat, Pray, Love, Contagion, The Vow, How to Be a Pirate

I am definitely doing much better with the movie aspect of this goal than the books, but it's all right.  I am still trying :)

I watched Eat, Pray, Love with Julia Roberts.  I really liked it.  It's about a lady (Julia Roberts) who is unhappy in her marriage and gets a divorce.  She has a hard time with the divorce and decides to travel around the world to find out who she is and find balance in her life. (She travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia)  It's based on a true story and there is a book with the same title written by the lady that the movie is based on.  I liked this movie because there are some really good characters in it and I think we all go through times in our life of needing to find out who we are, but we all have different ways of doing it.

I also saw Contagion.  I did not like this movie.  The beginning was scary to me.  And it didn't get much better after that. It's about a deadly disease that starts to show up all over the world.  It moves quickly and kills fast. The Center for Disease Control strives to find a vaccination for it as it continues to spread. After much research they find out where the disease started. 

I saw The Vow. I really liked it. It was a sad movie, but overall it was good. I liked that the husband fought for the wife even though he had to deal with his wife's family trying to keep her away from him and her memory loss.   

I read the second book of the How to Train Your Dragon series, How to Be a Pirate.  It was good.  I really like these books.  They are an easy read, but they are entertaining.

6 movies down, 50 books to go!

This 50/50 idea is a really good one, thanks to Heather for inviting so many of us to participate! I would like to think that I’ll read 50 books this year, but don’t count on it. There are quite a few books that I have in mind that I do want to read, so I am hopeful. However, I can be pretty sure that I will watch 50 new-to-me movies after the tremendous head start I got by watching 6 in the first 2 weeks of the year. That’s why this post is so long, my apologies.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Deals with racism and needing to overcome our prejudices even when we don’t think we have any. I definitely recommend it.

Crazy Stupid Love. It had some really funny parts where I laughed out loud, but ultimately it was about sex. The parts that made me laugh out loud did not revolve around sex, so I wish there was more of that, with Steve Carell’s goofiness.

Taken: I was surprised to be so impressed with this movie, kind of intense and a little improbable, but very exciting.

Slumdog Millionaire: Definitely not my favorite, especially the part where people get set on fire toward the beginning. And the happy ending was just not enough to make up for the overall depressing idea that there are probably lots of kids growing up in similarly awful situations.

Morning Glory: Meh. Well, I did like the frittata thing.

Cowboys and Aliens: Meh. Lots of gratuitous violence, not much of a story. Plus, why were there only 2 women, one of them absent the whole time, and the other (SPOILER!) is actually an alien? Oh, wait there was another woman whose face we see, but she was dead the whole time and we don’t know anything about her except that she was a prostitute. What’s that about? Ahem, getting off my soap box now….

Now I also have some recommendations of movies that I’ve seen very recently, but not this year, so if you need some more ideas to get you moving, expanding your horizons, here are some.

All about Steve: I liked it because (SPOILER!) they don’t get together in the end, kind of like my very favorite romantic drama “Roman Holiday”. But be warned, it is also very silly, with lots of plot devices to make it sillier, but at least the whole story doesn’t revolve around sex.

Another plug for Contagion: Superb movie, but I was watching it on a plane, which was not reassuring. It had so many interesting elements about the spread of the disease and the way individuals tried to deal with it. I have a lot more I want to say about this one, but this post is already too long...

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, as well as the first Sherlock Holmes movie from Guy Ritchie.  We’re big into Sherlock Holmes in our house. We’ve also been watching the BBC TV production Sherlock, which we love. These are all great adaptations of the stories. and I think they both have very fitting music; I’m very impressed. Too bad I’ve already read all the books - I could eat those up for this challenge.