Upcoming Movies!

Twelve
August 2010

Chace Crawford stars in a new crime drama that could show his expanded acting skills outside of a teen soap show. Based on a novel, the story follows White Mike in NYC's Upper East Side, he sells drugs to his yuppie classmates and hides it from his best friend Molly, played by Emma Roberts. As Mike's cousin is murdered and Mike's supplier Lionel, played by Curtis Jackson, continues to pull Mike further into the drug trade, a new drug called twelve emerges.  


The American
 September 2010

George Clooney is 'the American' in this suspense thriller. After a botched job, Jack decides to step back from the assassin trade and hides in Italy. He makes friends with a priest (Paolo Bonacelli) and develops feelings for a local woman (Violante Placido). But, by revealing himself to the people around him, Jack may be bringing the assassins back.

Conviction
October 2010

Hilary Swank plays Betty Anne who's brother Kenny is convicted of murder in 1983 and sentenced to life in prison. Betty Anne knows her brother is innocent, she graduates from high school and works to obtain a law degree so that she can set her brother free eighteen years later. The evidence that put her brother behind bars is sketchy, the policewoman who convicted Kenny, played by Melissa Leo, is circumspect. Betty Anne retraces the murder case and hopes to set her brother free. 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
November 2010

The final chapter of the Harry Potter saga (so complex, it's divided into two parts)! Harry, Ron, and Hermione leave Hogwarts to search for Voldemort's Horcruxes. Horcruxes are pieces of Voldemort's soul he has split off from his main body so that he cannot be destroyed, there are seven. If all of them can be found and destroyed, Voldemort will finally be defeated. 

     The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader
December 2010

This is what I'm looking forward to the most! Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, along with their cousin Eustace, make another journey back to Narnia. They meet up with their friend King Caspian who is on a voyage to find the seven friends of his father who were sent to sea when Caspian's evil uncle took the throne. The seven lords would have supported the young Caspian in his bid for the throne and in an effort to get ride of them, Miraz persuades them to sail the seas and look for new lands. Now, Edmund, Lucy, and Caspian are looking for the lords to bring them back to Narnia. Along the way, they meet a variety of new creatures and of course the famed lion, Aslan.  

What are you looking forward to?

http://www.themovieinsider.com/movie-releases/-/2010/

A Chilling Read

Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer

I have to admit that when this movie was released three years I didn't pay attention.  But, I picked up this book and instantly recognized the title. I know the movie had received a lot of recognition; it was nominated at the Academy Awards and won several foreign film festival awards. The cover right away tells you how the story ends, Chris McCandless dies in the Alaska wilderness. But his story is captivating. 

I started the book this morning and finished it tonight. It's a relatively small book at 203 pages but it will definitely hold your attention from cover to cover.

The story starts with Chris hitchhiking out of Fairbanks, Alaska. The story commences with continuous flashbacks depicting Chris's journey from his upper middle class home in Virginia to his college in Atlanta to his hitchhiking saga across America. Chris makes many friends throughout his journey, all of them ask him to keep in touch; many ask him to reconsider his final decision. Chris's final decision is his great Alaskan journey, he wants to hike into the Alaskan wilderness and live off the land. Chris abhors civilization's "poison" and as an avid reader of Thoreau and Jack London, Chris feels as though he needs to fight a "...climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution."

There are several chapters devoted to the author's identification with Chris and the author's journey to Alaska to visit the place where Chris McCandless died. You don't have to be a climbing aficionado to appreciate the struggles of the climbers, I don't like wilderness movies or books but I highly enjoyed this story.

An Impressionable Novel

Luncheon of the Boating Party
by Susan Vreeland

You have to like Impressionist art, or art in general, to enjoy reading this novel. The story follows Auguste Renoir over the course of about eight weeks in 1880. As one of the founding members of the Impressionist movement he feels as though he owes his loyalty to the "revolution". But, the group is changing and shifting, they can't achieve the sort of commendation they're seeking. Renoir doesn't want to spend the rest of his career painting portraits of the wealthy so that he can buy food and pay his rent. He has the idea to paint a scene of fourteen people using a combination of Impressionist and classic style. The problem is he is very low on funds and time, he has to have the money to pay fourteen people to model for him every Sunday for weeks. He also has complicated relationships with some of them. 

 The woman on the left leaning on the railing is Alphonsine, the daughter of the owner of the restaurant. She loves Renoir. The woman on the back right, with her hands over her ears, is a former lover of Renoir's.  The man in the foreground sitting on the backwards chair is Gustave, also an Impressionist painter. The woman on the left in the foreground with the dog is Aline, she also loves Renoir. 
Throughout the novel a continuous problem for Renoir is whether or not he can finish the painting. He wants to make it an example of how brilliant the Impressionist movement is, but loses his motivation sometimes. Renoir is afraid that if the critics disown his work then his career will be over and it would just be safer for him to continue receiving commissions from the wealthy. But Renoir says many times, "I can only paint what I love." He finishes the painting and learns several important lessons along the way. 
It's a charming read, enjoyable and sweet. Paris seems to leap right off the pages with descriptions of every class of life and how they view their city.
 

A Vague Sort of Experience

Howards End
by E.M. Forster

I'd already read A Room With A View when I picked this up, I had high hopes because I had really loved it. This was a bit more muddled but charmingly enjoyable, as I've come to think of Forster as. 
With this book you sometimes feel as though you've missed a key event because there isn't always a connecting passage. The event will just happen and you'll stop thinking, "Wait, what?" Character names are tossed out with no explanation as to who they are or even what gender, the younger Schlegel brother is named Tibby (I thought he was a girl).
If you enjoy reading foggy, thoroughly English books then this is for you. There are many ideas discussed in the story, whether civilization and activity can go together, how a place can be adored more than a person, and the idea of being classy when not a member of upper class society.  

Margaret and Helen Schlegel are idealistic sisters in 1910s England, the first chapter starts off with Helen writing to her sister from Howards End, a country house, where she is staying with the rich Wilcox family. The two families are initially tied together when Helen and the younger son Paul Wilcox profess to be in love. The engagement is quickly broken off because Paul is not able to marry, he has no money and is soon to depart for Nigeria. Mrs. Wilcox is a vague, dreamy creature, she owns Howards End and loves it like it is a member of her family. She and Margaret begin a sort of friendship when the Wilcoxes move to London, right across the street from the Schlegels. I don't want to go into too much detail because I don't want to give it away. But the story deals with: class connections, reaching out to others, and social prejudice. 

    Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.  
                                                                - Margaret Schlegel



 

Just Watched...

21
Starring: Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey

Rating: PG-13

Score: 3.5/4 

Counting cards could just about be one of the trickiest things a person could ever do.  You have to keep track of numerous decks, and most important of all: you can't get caught.
Ben is about to graduate from MIT, he wants to go to Harvard Medical school but doesn't have the money. So he applies for a scholarship that could give him a free ride, all he has to do is "dazzle" them.
Ben's professor, Micky, persuades him to join a team of brilliant students who go to Las Vegas every weekend and make hundreds of thousands of dollars by counting.  Ben sees this as the way he can make money for med school and gets caught up in the whirl of Vegas.
The movie is sleek and brightly lit, the Vegas scenes are exciting and while it's not always easy to keep track of the blackjack games it sure is worth it to try.
Kevin Spacey's professor is acerbic and funny and it's fun to watch Ben become a completely different person in Vegas than he is back in Boston. But the change may cost him his friends and his school. Then there's always the number one risk: avoid getting caught.

Global Warming: True or False?

S

State of Fear
by Michael Crichton

I used to think global warming was a real crisis; that people were harming the environment and something should be done to stop the damage.
Michael Crichton says that global warming is perpetuated by inadequate data; that research is conducted by bureaucrats, lawyers, and scientists funded by bureaucrats. In short, we don't have all the facts.

Peter Evans is a young lawyer; he is set in his ideas, he knows exactly what he believes in and has never really needed to defend his point of view. That is until his client, philanthropist and environmental activist George Morton, dies and it is revealed that everything was not as seemed with the foundation Morton was funding. Said foundation was preparing a massive lawsuit against the United States claiming that "since it was the largest economy and the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and
therefore largest contributor to global warming" it would be held responsible for the rising sea levels that were flooding native people out of their homes on the island nation of Vanutu. George Morton was giving more than eight million dollars to fund the lawsuit.
 However, as events unfold it's found that a group of eco-terrorists are creating "natural" disasters in order to
 make it seem as though global warming is a huge catastrophe and immediate action is necessary. In fact it's
 found that the sea levels around Vanutu have not risen at all.
The conclusion I reached at the end of this book is that, humans are not significant enough to impact our
 planet so much that the entire climate can change. The Earth is going through a phase, a phase it entered
 around 1850 after the Little Ice Age. In fact, the Earth is in a constant state of change and phases and
 this is simply a preclude to another cooling in a few thousand years. In short, global warming is not a crisis, it
 is not even caused or affected by humans in the magnitude that we have been led to believe.

What is your opinion? Is global warming simply a phase the Earth is going through or is it something more serious?