"Life will knock us down.
But we can choose to get back up."
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Twilight
When seventeen year-old Bella Swan leaves sunny Arizona to live with her father in the small and gloomy Pacific North-West town of Forks she doesn’t expect to like it. After all she has made excuses not to go there enough times over the past few years. If living in Forks, with its constant mist and rain, wasn’t bad enough she will have to make a whole new set of friends and settle into a new school.
Bella soon makes some new friends at school but when she sees a boy called Edward Cullen sitting with his brothers and sisters in the cafeteria she is instantly intrigued. Edward is stunningly attractive, almost inhumanly beautiful, and yet he is an outsider too. Although Edward and his family have lived in Forks for two years they have never really been accepted by the townsfolk.
At first Edward is aloof, sometimes it almost seems like he can’t stand to be in the same room as her, but eventually they strike up an unlikely friendship. Even as Bella falls hopelessly and irrevocably in love with Edward, she still can’t work out exactly what makes him so different to everyone else.
On a trip to the beach, Bella is told of the local legend about the “cold ones”, a group of blood drinkers who have sworn off hunting humans but are still not welcome on Indian land because vampires are not to be trusted. Realising Edward is vampire changes nothing for Bella, she knows that she still loves him even if he’s not human.
Edward and his whole family are vampires. Edward himself was made a vampire when he was seventeen years-old, although that was at the end of World War I. For Edward his love for Bella is both a delight and a torment. A delight because she is the first person he has loved since he was made a vampire. A torment because although he has sworn off human blood and only hunts animals the craving for human blood never truly leaves him and the very scent of her also stirs his hunger for blood….
The Review
Twilight is the story of Edward and Bella’s romance. Forget any vampire romance you have read before, Twilight is so unique it is almost like it’s in its own genre. The book is marketed at Young Adult readers but it has the ability to cross age barriers and will satisfy both teenagers and adults alike.
The story is told in first person from the perspective of Bella, so the reader only ever know what she knows, making Edward and his family a mystery that is slowly unravelled through out the book. Even by the end of the book I was still thirsting for more of the Cullen family back story - hopefully their characters might be developed further in future books. Bella herself is a well written and realistic character, shy and lacking in confidence, her sarcastic inner voice narrates the story for the reader.
Twilight is simply and yet beautifully written. The descriptions of Forks leave you feeling like you can almost smell the damp air and hear the rain falling on the roof.
The romance between Edward and Bella is both touching and compelling. There is a melancholic feel to their impossible love, yet at the same time they both are unwilling to give up hope that their relationship is not doomed. The book reaches a fever pitch of excitement as the romance between Bella and Edward turns into a frantic race to stay alive.
I have heard Twilight described as “a vampire story for people who don’t like vampire stories” and I think I would agree with that. This book really has something for everyone. Young adult readers, vampire fans or romance readers will all find Twilight to be an appealing story.
For a Young Adult novel the book is quite long but don’t let that put you off reading it because each page is to be savoured. Believe me, this is one book that you won’t want to end.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Toy Story 3
Toy Story is back! Read it here
John Ratzenberger, voice of Hamm the Piggy Bank says: “Hammy is a villain in the beginning of the movie, [but then] Hammy becomes a superhero. You’ll see.”
Another character who will play a larger role in Toy Story 3 is Mrs. Potato Head. “[It’s] wonderful!” said Estelle Harris, who voices the character. “I have a much bigger part. ‘Toy Story 2’ was my entrance, and I was a newlywed. But now, I’m still very much in love with Mr. Potato Head.”
Estelle Harris continued: “You know the wonderful thing about Disney/Pixar movies I think is they believe in this above all, to thine own self be true. And they are.”
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Angelina Jolie: The world's most 'Wanted'
There's sexy, and then there's scary-sexy.
Angelina Jolie certainly earns the extra adjective.
Those lips simultaneously pout and snarl, those eyes smolder, and her body seems specifically designed for seduction or attack.
That added sense of danger is what separates Jolie from all the other leading ladies of Hollywood. She frightens even as she tempts.
In Wanted, Jolie is going bad again.
She plays the aptly named Fox, a world-class assassin whose job is to recruit and protect McAvoy's character, a wimpy office clerk who has the supernatural power to bend the trajectory of bullets, into her fraternity of vengeance seekers.
The movie, a loose adaptation of a cult comic book, mixes gruesome violence with tongue-in-cheek touches of humor. Exhibit A: the ridiculousness of the chase scene.
At first, Jolie denies the scene's sexual overtones, then acknowledges: "Well, I am in a dress with my legs spread. Honestly, I think it comes across that way because I wasn't thinking about that at all. I loved it because she was somebody who has no time for boyfriends or relationships or sexuality or flirtation. She's not like that at all. It's like being with a solider."
What makes femmes fatales so appealing, she says, is they "tend to not be throwing themselves at somebody, and are not thinking about that."
She says playing someone who resists attention makes them, paradoxically, irresistible.
Fox "is not easy to get along with," Jolie says. "Because of that, and how casual she is with her body — she doesn't think twice about jumping across the hood of a car with a dress on — maybe that's what comes across."
She pauses and adds, "I just had to try to keep a straight face."
But all that detachment takes work. Jolie did an unusual thing to make Fox seem more distant and unattainable: cut many of her own lines.
"There are a lot of scenes where James is talking, talking, talking, and I say nothing," she says. "Or something's happening, and I'm eating a cheeseburger while he's being attacked. She has a fun sense of distance."
She has a theory about her subconscious motivation. "Maybe it was my attempt at being Clint Eastwood (who directs her in Changeling). Maybe I was secretly trying to channel the coolest person who says nothing."
Though the film is fantasy, Jolie says Fox's back story — her father was murdered by a criminal who had been marked for death but was allowed to go free — reflects an exaggerated version of her own beliefs.
"I have strong opinions, which I don't want to get into now, about international justice, about the death penalty, about people who get away with murder. There's a little bit of that in this story, it's kind of an underlying point, but the story doesn't get too heavy into it," she says. "I don't like action movies that take themselves too seriously. Those action movies where everybody is acting very cool and it's all very serious and the world is going to end? I tend to just giggle."
There was another part of herself that she was able to include in Fox — her many tattoos. "Instead of taking mine away, which we have to do in every film, we ended up leaving mine and adding more." Those temporary additions are on full display in one scene, where Fox emerges from a steaming bath and walks by stunned onlookers — again, not caring what they see.
"We tried to focus (the fake tattoos) on themes that would be related to this sense of justice. I have 'Strength of Will' in one language, and we added it in four other languages on my arm." "Know Your Rights" is printed in English on the back of her neck, and again in Latin as well. "From Churchill's speech 'We have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,' I had 'Toil' and 'Tears' here and here," she says, pointing to the undersides of her upper arms.
Wanted, Jolie says, is her break from more earnest performances as the wife of slain journalist Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart, an isolated housewife in the CIA drama The Good Shepherd and the mother of a missing boy in Changeling, which comes out Oct. 24 and could fuel Oscar talk.
She was happy to get back to an over-the-top action flick. As her manager, Geyer Kosinski, put it: "It's what people want to see her doing. She said, 'At some point, I have to get back to (sex) and killing.' "
Jolie says: "I've been so lucky in my career that I've been able to do a kind of Mr. & Mrs. Smith thing that's really cool, and I'm made up to be as pretty as I can be. But I can also do a film like Changeling or A Mighty Heart, where it's removed from that.
"There are those certain roles, like this role, where you joke with hair and makeup: 'All right, make me foxy,' " she says. "I think it's in every woman. It's the little girl in us. There's a side of us that likes to play dress-up and every once in a while get glammed up."
For now, Jolie says she's focusing on her role as doting mom.
She declined to confirm her due date, but she has very clear ideas about what the days and months leading up to the birth will be like.
"We've made a point to, both of us, not be working," she says. "So we'll be home together with the kids," Maddox, 6; Pax, 4; Zahara, 3; and Shiloh, who just turned 2.
"At the same time we're expecting two, we have four, so my focus now is on the four we have. And these are some big times for them, big moments in their lives. So every day is just about making sure that their schooling is going right and their manners are intact and we're disciplining properly and we're spending enough time with them individually, so they seem special. That's a lot of balance when you have a lot of children."
As for how Pitt is handling it all, she says, "I'm very lucky — I'm with a man who makes me feel very sexy pregnant and loves children. In the last few months it's hard for me to pick up the other kids, so he's there to help lift them up to me and things like that. He's an extremely hands-on dad with all the kids and really, really supportive. Any woman knows that when you're pregnant, if you have a partner who is embracing it with you and excited with you, it makes all the difference. I'm very lucky to have him."
Since Cannes, Jolie and Pitt have lately stayed out of sight on their new estate in the South of France, the vineyard castle Chateau Miraval.
But people haven't stopped talking about her. Reports, denied by her manager, earlier this month that she had given birth set off a media frenzy.
As she resists the attention, she becomes, paradoxically, irresistible.
Source:
Anthony Breznican,
USA Today
Angelina Jolie certainly earns the extra adjective.
Those lips simultaneously pout and snarl, those eyes smolder, and her body seems specifically designed for seduction or attack.
That added sense of danger is what separates Jolie from all the other leading ladies of Hollywood. She frightens even as she tempts.
In Wanted, Jolie is going bad again.
She plays the aptly named Fox, a world-class assassin whose job is to recruit and protect McAvoy's character, a wimpy office clerk who has the supernatural power to bend the trajectory of bullets, into her fraternity of vengeance seekers.
The movie, a loose adaptation of a cult comic book, mixes gruesome violence with tongue-in-cheek touches of humor. Exhibit A: the ridiculousness of the chase scene.
At first, Jolie denies the scene's sexual overtones, then acknowledges: "Well, I am in a dress with my legs spread. Honestly, I think it comes across that way because I wasn't thinking about that at all. I loved it because she was somebody who has no time for boyfriends or relationships or sexuality or flirtation. She's not like that at all. It's like being with a solider."
What makes femmes fatales so appealing, she says, is they "tend to not be throwing themselves at somebody, and are not thinking about that."
She says playing someone who resists attention makes them, paradoxically, irresistible.
Fox "is not easy to get along with," Jolie says. "Because of that, and how casual she is with her body — she doesn't think twice about jumping across the hood of a car with a dress on — maybe that's what comes across."
She pauses and adds, "I just had to try to keep a straight face."
But all that detachment takes work. Jolie did an unusual thing to make Fox seem more distant and unattainable: cut many of her own lines.
"There are a lot of scenes where James is talking, talking, talking, and I say nothing," she says. "Or something's happening, and I'm eating a cheeseburger while he's being attacked. She has a fun sense of distance."
She has a theory about her subconscious motivation. "Maybe it was my attempt at being Clint Eastwood (who directs her in Changeling). Maybe I was secretly trying to channel the coolest person who says nothing."
Though the film is fantasy, Jolie says Fox's back story — her father was murdered by a criminal who had been marked for death but was allowed to go free — reflects an exaggerated version of her own beliefs.
"I have strong opinions, which I don't want to get into now, about international justice, about the death penalty, about people who get away with murder. There's a little bit of that in this story, it's kind of an underlying point, but the story doesn't get too heavy into it," she says. "I don't like action movies that take themselves too seriously. Those action movies where everybody is acting very cool and it's all very serious and the world is going to end? I tend to just giggle."
There was another part of herself that she was able to include in Fox — her many tattoos. "Instead of taking mine away, which we have to do in every film, we ended up leaving mine and adding more." Those temporary additions are on full display in one scene, where Fox emerges from a steaming bath and walks by stunned onlookers — again, not caring what they see.
"We tried to focus (the fake tattoos) on themes that would be related to this sense of justice. I have 'Strength of Will' in one language, and we added it in four other languages on my arm." "Know Your Rights" is printed in English on the back of her neck, and again in Latin as well. "From Churchill's speech 'We have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,' I had 'Toil' and 'Tears' here and here," she says, pointing to the undersides of her upper arms.
Wanted, Jolie says, is her break from more earnest performances as the wife of slain journalist Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart, an isolated housewife in the CIA drama The Good Shepherd and the mother of a missing boy in Changeling, which comes out Oct. 24 and could fuel Oscar talk.
She was happy to get back to an over-the-top action flick. As her manager, Geyer Kosinski, put it: "It's what people want to see her doing. She said, 'At some point, I have to get back to (sex) and killing.' "
Jolie says: "I've been so lucky in my career that I've been able to do a kind of Mr. & Mrs. Smith thing that's really cool, and I'm made up to be as pretty as I can be. But I can also do a film like Changeling or A Mighty Heart, where it's removed from that.
"There are those certain roles, like this role, where you joke with hair and makeup: 'All right, make me foxy,' " she says. "I think it's in every woman. It's the little girl in us. There's a side of us that likes to play dress-up and every once in a while get glammed up."
For now, Jolie says she's focusing on her role as doting mom.
She declined to confirm her due date, but she has very clear ideas about what the days and months leading up to the birth will be like.
"We've made a point to, both of us, not be working," she says. "So we'll be home together with the kids," Maddox, 6; Pax, 4; Zahara, 3; and Shiloh, who just turned 2.
"At the same time we're expecting two, we have four, so my focus now is on the four we have. And these are some big times for them, big moments in their lives. So every day is just about making sure that their schooling is going right and their manners are intact and we're disciplining properly and we're spending enough time with them individually, so they seem special. That's a lot of balance when you have a lot of children."
As for how Pitt is handling it all, she says, "I'm very lucky — I'm with a man who makes me feel very sexy pregnant and loves children. In the last few months it's hard for me to pick up the other kids, so he's there to help lift them up to me and things like that. He's an extremely hands-on dad with all the kids and really, really supportive. Any woman knows that when you're pregnant, if you have a partner who is embracing it with you and excited with you, it makes all the difference. I'm very lucky to have him."
Since Cannes, Jolie and Pitt have lately stayed out of sight on their new estate in the South of France, the vineyard castle Chateau Miraval.
But people haven't stopped talking about her. Reports, denied by her manager, earlier this month that she had given birth set off a media frenzy.
As she resists the attention, she becomes, paradoxically, irresistible.
Source:
Anthony Breznican,
USA Today
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