Something I wasn't looking forward to and something I was...
Funny how they turned out the opposite of what I was anticipating.
Went and saw Sydney White today with my mother. I thought maybe it might be cute but the only reason I picked it was because there was nothing else out that I thought my mother might enjoy. Everything else was either too violent or too sexy or too stylized. So we went to see SW and we enjoyed it a lot, even laughing out loud a few times. Sure it's not in the running for an oscar, but it definitely improved our moods.
Danny Strong was great, Jack Carpenter (a new face for me) looks like he could be the go-to guy for the teen geek market in the future, and Amanda Bynes proved she can do something besides widening her eyes and moueing -- she can actually act. Well, in a few scenes, mostly when she's playing sad. Recommended but only if you're not expecting Legally Blonde. It is definitely better than that Summer Glau movie about sororities and witches. They should have kept the working title -- Sydney White and the 7 Dorks. They had Grumpy (Danny) and Dopey (Arnie Pantoja) and Doc (I think Jeremy Howard who was on Buffy once as a Dead Nerd) and Sleepy (Donte Bonner) and Sneezy (Jack Carpenter) and I can't remember which the other two were. Oh, and Matt Long was the love interest. Nice dimples.
The something I was definitely looking forward to is the latest book by Robin McKinley, who wrote The Blue Sword and Beauty and a half-dozen other great books. This one was called Dragonhaven, about an earth just like ours except they discovered true dragons in Australia when the English first went exploring the outback. It's told from the POV of a teen-aged boy who's the son of the Director of a dragon-studying institute and the national park that's been established to preserve and study dragons in the northern U.S.
I have to say the teenager viewpoint is done really well, but that's not necessarily a good thing since I'm not that interested in reading teenager-speak. It's not diary style, more memoir style, and it gets really repetitious, just like it would if a real teenager wrote it. The story is interesting but the POV is distracting enough that I found myself skipping whole paragraphs in an effort to find the story again. That might be why I was able to read it in one sitting, but don't infer from that that I was engrossed -- I mostly just wanted to finish it off ASAP because I knew if I didn't that it would sit gathering dust on a shelf. Big disappointment.
Went and saw Sydney White today with my mother. I thought maybe it might be cute but the only reason I picked it was because there was nothing else out that I thought my mother might enjoy. Everything else was either too violent or too sexy or too stylized. So we went to see SW and we enjoyed it a lot, even laughing out loud a few times. Sure it's not in the running for an oscar, but it definitely improved our moods.
Danny Strong was great, Jack Carpenter (a new face for me) looks like he could be the go-to guy for the teen geek market in the future, and Amanda Bynes proved she can do something besides widening her eyes and moueing -- she can actually act. Well, in a few scenes, mostly when she's playing sad. Recommended but only if you're not expecting Legally Blonde. It is definitely better than that Summer Glau movie about sororities and witches. They should have kept the working title -- Sydney White and the 7 Dorks. They had Grumpy (Danny) and Dopey (Arnie Pantoja) and Doc (I think Jeremy Howard who was on Buffy once as a Dead Nerd) and Sleepy (Donte Bonner) and Sneezy (Jack Carpenter) and I can't remember which the other two were. Oh, and Matt Long was the love interest. Nice dimples.
The something I was definitely looking forward to is the latest book by Robin McKinley, who wrote The Blue Sword and Beauty and a half-dozen other great books. This one was called Dragonhaven, about an earth just like ours except they discovered true dragons in Australia when the English first went exploring the outback. It's told from the POV of a teen-aged boy who's the son of the Director of a dragon-studying institute and the national park that's been established to preserve and study dragons in the northern U.S.
I have to say the teenager viewpoint is done really well, but that's not necessarily a good thing since I'm not that interested in reading teenager-speak. It's not diary style, more memoir style, and it gets really repetitious, just like it would if a real teenager wrote it. The story is interesting but the POV is distracting enough that I found myself skipping whole paragraphs in an effort to find the story again. That might be why I was able to read it in one sitting, but don't infer from that that I was engrossed -- I mostly just wanted to finish it off ASAP because I knew if I didn't that it would sit gathering dust on a shelf. Big disappointment.