Princess Bride

      This passed week I finished reading the abridged version of "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman. I feel that the movie is a wonderful rendition of the novel, all of the dialogue from the book is word for word in the movie. The film is hilarious and well-directed, with hardly any inconsistencies from the novel, which is also hilarious and throroughly well-written.

      I would recommend this dynamic duo to anybody, the novel is a little more intense and graphic than the film but it is still child appropriate I feel.

     Considering how old this movie is I feel that they did a great job, there is no majorly detectable editing mess ups and there are no graphics for them to have butchered the movie with, such as in "Never Ending Story' in which the graphics are so horrible and they use a very small range of camera angles that they make it hard to watch.

    This is a great novel for anyone who loves a good adventure story, with such well developed characters and an interesting, well thought out plot line it's an easy reader for even the most unwilling of readers.

Shania Twain MUSICAL HOUR! YEAH! WOO!

   While I was at work last weekend, as I work every weekend, my co-workers and I decided to mix it up a little and change the radio station, as we changed it we realised that Chyme FM was playing all Shania Twain for one full hour, and who doesn't love Shania Twain?

   After singing along and having a general fun time at work, we realised - we haven't listened to Shania Twain for at LEAST eight years, how do we still know ALL of the words? I think that's because her songs have so much feeling, and such catchy music to match them with. With lyrics like 'that don't impress me much' and 'man, I feel like a woman' how can you not be inspired to dance and be glad to be who you are? People who listen to Shania Twain to this day are alright in my books, they may be a little outdated and living a couple of decades ago, but whatever, her music is timeless.

  Shania Twain has such successes under her belt for her music such as - a top selling album by any female artist in any genre, and top selling album in the country genre for that decade. So clearly she's wonderful. Let's just say everyone at work was quite sad when that hour was over and we had to go back to listening to the same 15 songs they play on every radio station over and over and over...

Vengeance Valley (1951)

This past week in EMS30 our class watched a Western film from 1951 starring Burt Lancaster, Robert Walker and Joanne Dru. As is typical for most Western's, it had very little plot line and was all about cowboys on horses with guns. Truly a boring movie. To be honest I read a book while we were supposed to be watching it most of the time. I really can't think of anybody who would enjoy watching this type of movie, I've seen quite a few of them in my time; all of which I've been forced to watch at school. I've hated them for as long as I can remember. They don't really have much of a plot line, and what plot line they do have is so garbled by their old fashioned way of speaking it's totally lost on the audience.

Honestly I can't think of any way to make these types of movies more interesting for the audience, not one way. Nobody cares about Westerns anymore. They're boring and kinda lame. The characters in these movies have no life story, they just go about hurting animals and being all 'tough' and 'manly'. The characters are all shallow and mean. And there are no effects because these types of movies have pretty much stopped being made because the directors finally realize how much EVERYBODY hates these movies. I wish teachers would realize nobody wants to watch them and stop forcing ME to watch them in school.

Se7en

In class this week everyone was told to read an article about the 1995 movie Se7en, the author in the article said that the movie was so offensive and gross it should be re-rated from it’s 14a status into an R movie.

I watched that movie on the weekend because Doug was so disgusted by the affects of the movie that it sounded right up my alley; and to be honest, it was a pretty lame movie. This guy must have been raised in a cave or something, it was barely even gory. Sure there was a lot of unnecessary swearing, thanks to Brad Pitt, but all of the supposed gore? I’ve seen worse on prime time CSI episodes. The worst you saw in that movie was a fat guy drowning in his spaghetti and some grotesque pictures in black and white from far away.

The appropriate age level for watching this movie is right where they rated it, 14a. Offensive language and mild violence.

fun fun fun fun...

I've recently stumbled upon a rising youtube star, her name is Rebecca Black. Many people have heard of her by now I'm sure, as her youtube video has over 13 MILLION views. In this song she sings a bad song with a bad singing voice and stars in a terrible music video in which 13 year olds party really hard and skip school. This video was not made in joke though, oh no. She is seriously trying to make a music career for herself. Her mother parted with $2,000 for this video to be made with vanity record label Ark Music Factory where they will write you a song and a video and all you have to do is star in it and record an audio track, which they will heavily auto-tune for you.

I wouldn't recommend this video to anyone who is seriously looking for a new song to listen to, but it is funny to torture your friends with. Some of the best lines from this song are 'fun, fun, fun, fun' and 'yesterday was thursday, today it is friday, we we we so excited, we so excited, tomorrow is saturday and sunday comes afterward." Lyrical Genius.

Several critics claimed that this was 'the worst song ever' and it has a 97% thumbs DOWN rate on youtube.

Some of the values shared in this wonderful video are that we should all skip school, stand up in the backseat of a convertable driving down the highway and party all night long. I fully agree with these values, they must be what everyone else is doing, Rebecca Black is doing it, right?

Pride and Prejudice and ZOMBIES

I've recently started reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies written in 2009 by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame - Smith. This book is a parody novel of the Jane Austen classic "Pride and Prejudice". It follows to the exact plot of the original book but theres zombies just thrown in there as well, keeping with the old style of writing he refers to them mostly as "unmentionables" and "satan's spawn". This book is much more tolerable and easier to read than the original, though I did enjoy that one as well. I would recommend reading this book if you are being forced to read the original for English class like I was. It's really a hilarious book. In the original they mostly talk about finding a girl who comes from money and a nice family. But in this book a man also looks for a woman who has been trained by the best of ninjas in the Japanese Dojos.

The characters relate to eachother exactly as they did in the original book published in 1813. They're all very snobby and they don't really discuss their feelings towards eachother. Murder is also a lot more acceptable in this book than it has ever been in real life, people will kill people on a whim, or if they dishonour their family.

There are many funny quotes so far in the book but the funniest one I have encountered so far is in a part in which Liza and Mr. Bingley are traveling by carriage towards Mr. Darcy's aunt's house, their carriage is swarmed with zombies and Liza, being the most skillful ninja in the cart, dashes out to attack the unmentionables. One of the zombies gets into the carriage where Mr. Bingley is hiding as he is not trained at all, and she slices the zombies throat very close to Mr. Bingley and he has never seen a zombie that close up before, in the book it says, "Liza made quick work of the unmentionable slicing it's throat with her katana, Mr. Bingley politely vomited into his hands.' This quote just made me laugh, I highly recommend this book to anybody willing to read it, it's a little rough to get through at times though as it is written in old english.

Melissa Leo does a No-No

During the 2011 Academy awards this actress accidentally swore at the crowd - she dropped the f-bomb in her acceptance speech, ‘it was just so f****** easy!" Of course the media was immediately in uproar. But who really cares? It’s not like we haven’t heard it before. Sure if it was the 30's and only sailors and criminals swore, but it’s not. Face it - I’ve heard nine year olds say worse things. So she said a little swear word in the heat of the moment - who cares?

The academy awards are a production aimed at congratulating people who already make millions of dollars a year on their movies. They all dress really fancy and we all talk about them for days afterwards. They’re geared towards people who can’t afford to wear such fancy clothes, and those who like movies. But they’re not important, it’s not like entire nations watch it when it’s on, most countries didn’t even have the program run live, so they could easily have edited it out if need be. So why was it pasted all over the headlines? People have written blogs about how offended they are that she would say such a thing. How could people really be so offended about this? I’m more shocked about how the media reacted to her little slip of the tongue than the fact that she actually did it.