The Four Gospels, Verse by Verse; Morning Glory

After about three months of study, I finally finished reading the Gospel According to Matthew and an accompanying commentary (which does cover all 4 Gospels) called The Four Gospels: Verse by Verse by D. Kelly Ogden and Andrew Skinner, two professors of ancient scripture at BYU. I've read the New Testament several times over the years, but this time, with commentary it came alive. There were so many details about the Holy Land I simply don't know, having never traveled there, and historical facts about Judaism and Jewish tradition that the authors included that made the scriptures a whole new experience. I loved this book because of the ease of finding commentary relating to the section I happened to be reading that day. It has an excellent index; it really is as it says: verse by verse.

I had a mountain of laundry to fold and turned on Netflix to watch Morning Glory. It stars Rachel McAdams as a driven TV news producer who gets a plum job on what turns out to be a horribly dysfunctional and sinking morning news program. Diahann Keaton and Harrison Ford co-star. I forget her love interest's name, but he was pretty good in his role. I guess the plot caught me off-guard because I went in expecting it to be a rom-com, and it turned out that the central arc focused on McAdams and Ford's relationship, with her as all spunk and him as all cantankerousness. To be honest, it was quite a bit better than I expected it to be (but my expectations were pretty low.) Not the worst way to spend a while folding laundry.

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.