Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging

I read this book a while back and was looking up something about it and found out it was made into a movie! I had no idea, never heard of a movie of it before. I watched the trailer and went to Netflix to put it in my queue. When I put it in my queue, it showed up under saved movies and was unknown when it would be available. Finally, it showed up as available now.

I thought this was such a cute teen movie! I enjoyed it a lot. I just loved their small English town by the sea, would love to live there myself! It's been a while since I read the book but it seemed to follow the book pretty well. Most characters seemed great but Jaz (the main character, Georgia's best friend) didn't really act or look how I pictured her. And I was a little annoyed how relatively easy it was for Georgia to get Robbie to like her after her never having a boyfriend. But it was fun and cute, all wrapped up neatly at the end in a fun way.

Inglourious Basterds

I will start by saying that I don't really enjoy Quentin Tarantino movies. Not my thing. However, my husband wanted to get this from Netflix and I said I'd watch it. It seemed to be an interesting concept and I couldn't pass up Brad Pitt.

Turns out I loved it. There were still too many violent type scenes for me and had to look away for some. It wasn't at all what I expected it to be about, according to the trailers I saw. I liked the other stories better than the Basterds parts. Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa was awesome. I'm glad to see him up for lots of major awards.

I love alternative history so I loved that part of the movie too.

Funny thing. I read that this movie was a "spaghetti western" set during World War II. I've seen the term spaghetti western many times but never really knew what it meant. I assumed it had something to do with what happened in some westerns. I was surprised to find out that they are western movies that were directed by Italians and Spanish directors/producers. I thought they were totally something else, but not sure what.

Movies

I've never really written movie reviews but decided to write a few when the mood strikes me. There's been a few movies I've seen lately that I feel like writing about so I will write a few posts about them.

The Quality of Life Report

Lucinda is a reporter from New York City who decides after doing a report about Prairie City in the midwest, to move there. The story is about her trials and tribulations to what she believes would be a simpler and nicer life.

My first problem with this book is the man Lucinda begins to date and eventually buys a farm with him. I just couldn't see her with that type of man, and he is the type most sensible people would walk away from immediately. It just bothered me and I couldn't get past that. Also, I couldn't believe how naive Lucinda was about some things or all the mistakes she made. It was easy to read, an ok story, but one of those books you keep getting annoyed at the main characters.

Inkspell

This book is the sequel to Inkheart, in which Meggie and her father can read characters of of books and become particularly involved with the characters of a book entitled Inkheart.

Inkspell has characters returning to their book along with Meggie and other major characters, including the author of Inkheart.

I love the concept. It sounds like a great concept that booklovers would love. I read the first book and said, eh, it was ok. I decided to give the second book a try. I really shouldn't have.

The book was longer than I thought, 600 some pages. And most of it dragged with not much of anything happening or nothing interesting happening. I wasn't really entralled with the Inkworld. I should have quit this book but didn't. I read the description for the third book and decided that it sounded boring and that I didn't need to read it. I am disappointed in this series.

Mirror Mirror

I love the genre of the retelling of fairy tales. I haven't read one of Gregory Maguire's books in a while. I read Wicked in the summer of 2002 and listened to Confessions of the Ugly Stepsister in the fall of the same year. Wicked was ok but got too philosophical for me. I really liked Confessions, though.

Mirror Mirror is the retelling of Snow White set in 16th century Italy. The character of the evil queen is Lucrezia Borgia, modeled after the real historical person. The dwarfs are not at all like the Disney version of happy little men but quite different and not very likeable.

I don't really know what say about this book. It was interesting but didn't turn out to what I thought it would be. I did like hearing about the Borgias and that made me do some research on the real Borgias.