I’ve been doing this movie project, which began January 1, 2010 but up until very recently, not a single one of the movies I’ve watched has been viewed in a theater.  Weird, huh?  So which movie has the dubious honor of being my first movie theater flick of 2010?

Eclipse.  Yes, one of those Twilight Saga movies.

Weird, huh?

There’s a story behind this, of course.  Even if there weren’t, I’d find a way to make one because I’d try to squeeze a story out of a stone.  A few years back, I somehow heard about this series of books that the kids were reading these days.  It was called “The Twilight Saga” and right there it had me.  I mean, SAGA?  Is there any word that better encapsulates what I love in a guilty-pleasure read?  I love the overwrought.  I love the Victorian yearning.  I love the unrequited or impossible love story.  In short: I am ridiculous.  Welcome to my blog!

The last time I’d heard about a series of books the kids were going gaga for and took a chance reading said books I was rewarded with the incomparable gift of the Harry Potter series.  Man, I love those books.  So.  Much.  So I guess when I heard that all the young people adored these offbeat vampire books I thought: another treasure to discover.

What I found instead can be best described by sharing an analogy provided by a dear and similarly-positioned (age-and-kid-wise) friend of mine from church: “Reading The Twilight Saga is like eating an entire box of Twinkies in one sitting.  You can’t stop yourself, and yet you don’t feel good when it’s done.”  Let that be a warning to those of you who are uninitiated.

But if you, like me, could not get enough of Edith Wharton as a teenager; if Jane Eyre is your idea of the most romantic novel of all-time; if you thoroughly enjoy forays into poorly-constructed chick-lit “beach reads”…then maybe give The Twilight Saga a gander (if you’re one of the half-dozen who hasn’t already done so.)  It’s got the gloomy Gothic feeling of Jane Eyre, mixed with the buttoned-up yearning of Wharton, all wrapped up in a trying-so-hard-but-still-poorly-written package ala Chick Lit.  Get all four of the tomes and prepare yourself for a week in bed.  Maybe bring a box or two of Twinkies.

There.  Now that my secret is out I feel so much better.  But surely you’re asking yourself: if you already felt badly after gorging on the novels, why would you belly up to the movie buffet?

Here’s your answer:

Okay, maybe this is a slight exaggeration, since I had no idea about the hotness of Taylor Lautner before I went to see the first movie.  I guess I wound up in the theater that first time because my main problem with the books was in how they told the story.  The story itself I liked.  So I thought maybe in a different medium it could be fantastic.  Which might have been the case were the acting not so utterly atrocious.  But the second time I went, it was for Taylor.  That felt dirty, since he was still a minor at the time, and I a world-weary mother of three.  Happily married.  But still not blind, damn it!  To reiterate:

Maybe you don’t quite understand:

So hopefully this isn’t an embarrassment, but I have to give a shout-out to my friend Brad here.  Somehow I convinced him to go see that awful first movie with me, the one with all the yearning and the staring at one another and the spinning of cameras.  He was horrified.  I fell all over myself apologizing.  When the second movie came out I immediately called him and begged him to accompany me, citing “hot naked werewolves” as an incentive for attendance, but he wisely would not bite (ha!)  “No.  I’m not seeing that movie,” he said.  But THEN!  Then I found out he got dragged to that very movie a few weeks later by this club of movie-going gays who all wanted to see New Moon.  When I found out he’d gone with other people I was incensed!  How COULD he?!?  He swore he’d go along with me when Eclipse, this third movie, was released.  You might think it was because of friendship and love that he made me this promise.  I say he was thoroughly converted by the hot naked werewolves.  And this time ’round, we could feel a little less dirty about the Taylor Lautner lovin’, as he is now totally legal!  Woohoo!

Brad and I both agreed that the latest installment of the movies was light-years ahead of the earlier counterparts.  For one, some of the actors appear to have been to some kind of lessons or training to teach them to, you know, act.  It has the benefit of the best story from the saga as well: Eclipse was by far my favorite of the novels.  Lastly, there was a lot of action.  Whenever you have actors of questionable talent, throw in a lot of action!  Cuts down the stinkiness by a factor of 10.

So, would I recommend this movie?  Only if you like attractive barely-legal guys and overwrought, chaste, Mormon-penned romance.  Which, as it so happens, appears to be my lot in life.

Well, dear readers…things around our casa are still rather nutso, but after spending too much time (a whole hour!)  feeling sorry for myself about it yesterday, I’ve decided to do what Annie did and stick up my chin and grin and saaaaayyyyy…..ohhh….tomorrow!  tomorrow!  I’ll clean up, tomorrow!

So now it’s tomorrow, and I’ve got a bunch of cleaning-up to do.  But I’m starting with a fun cleaning-up task: movie project catch-up blog!  The dishes can wait…

Going all the way back to early June, I first watched a pretty lame movie called Paper Heart.  It had Michael Cera of Arrested Development, Juno, and Superbad fame in it and I really wanted to love it for his sake, but his costar was so…I don’t know.  I don’t like to call people I don’t even know annoying, but I was annoyed.  By her.  So I guess she was annoying.  To me.  It also was like a mock documentary or something and I didn’t really get it.  Would not recommend, unless you enjoy annoyance.

Then I couldn’t resist a movie entitled Schultze Gets the Blues, because a tragic re-spelling of that popular German last name was my maiden name.  I say the re-spelling was tragic because no one ever got it right, which was the #1 reason I ditched it when I got married.  I was like, “I’m all for progressiveness in marriage and honoring women as they come into that relationship, and I don’t plan to change as an individual because I’m getting hitched, but heck if I’m not ditching this last name!”  Sorry, Dad.  Oh, right.  I watched a movie.  This was a German movie and the story goes like this: retired guy Schultze has nothing to do now that he’s retired.  He and his other pals forced into early retirement from the mine sit around at a local pub and they are all supremely bored. 

Schultze is an accordian player and comes from a long line of such musicians.  But one day he hears zydeco on the radio and suddenly he can’t abide playing polkas any longer.  When he’s sent by his local accordian players club to their sister city in America to play for a polka festival, he skips out, buys a boat, and trucks on down the bayou instead, chasing his new musical obsession.  The movie was good; a lot of slow scenes, many long shots of rooms or landscapes.  I don’t know that I can wholeheartedly recommend it but neither was it a waste of my time.

The Rage in Placid Lake was a funny little movie.  This young man raised by total hippies is bullied his whole life.  He’s got a Girl Friday in nerdy scientist Gemma, but his parents are too pacifist to help him stand up to the kids and teachers who mistreat him.  He gets mad and goes into revenge mode, taking on everyone in turn (save Gemma, whom he of course loves.)  It was funny to see him punishing his parents by becoming a white-collar, fairly successful insurance company-man.  Again, a fun little movie but nothing earth-shattering.

Finally, we get to a movie I can whole-heartedly endorse with every cell of my being: The Men Who Stare At Goats.  As previously noted, George Clooney is my boyfriend.  Well, guess what?  So is Ewan McGreggor, and they are the main co-stars of this comedy based on some true events.  So I was in heaven.  Sure, McGreggor’s accent was uneven and distracting at times, but the two actors were charming together. 

So the basic premise is that in the past, the U.S. Army explored paranormal powers as a possible weapon for their arsenal (this is true!  Hilarious!)  Men were trained in mind control, telepathy-type stuff.  I don’t even want to say much more except that Clooney and McGreggor play off one another perfectly and Jeff Bridges plays his part as the head of the psychic soldiers group perfectly with delightful results.  I loved it, and if you love me, just go watch it (and when they get to the part about the “sparkle eyes technique”, think of me.)

Sunshine Cleaning was a movie chosen because I have a twisted little secret (okay, more than one but here’s just one of them): I am fascinated by forensics.  Like, after someone dies in a mysterious way and they send in the forensic scientists to figure out what happened?  I love that stuff.  The entire time I was gestating Max, Joe and I sat home on the weekend evenings cuddled on the couch and watched every single show on “Forensic Fridays” or “Saturday Night Solution” on Court TV.  At one time I had seen every episode of Forensic Files and could tell you within the first minute of an episode how the victim had been determined to have died in that particular show.  Yikes.  So I thought this movie about a pair of offbeat sisters starting a post-mortem cleaning service would be more like that.  Good for everyone besides me, it wasn’t.  Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play the sisters, and they’re charming.  It’s really about the two of them figuring out who they actually are as people and as sisters who grew up without a mother.  So I do recommend it, even though it lacked any mention of succinylcholine (they didn’t even once use luminol!)

I already wrote about TiMER, so next I watched James and the Giant Peach with the kids during Fish Camp Week.  So, here’s what I’ll say about that: my kids were terrified.  I remember reading the book as a child and I knew it turned out all right in the end, but I remembered no specifics of the story.  For the first 20 minutes my kids begged me to turn it off.  Please think no less of me as a human being for what I am about to admit: I talked them into sticking it out.  They often gets anxious about movies or shows with some kind of interpersonal conflict (rather than violence or monsters or anything typically scary) so I always have to tell them that the ending will be happy and let’s just keep watching a little bit more.  By the end they said they’d enjoyed the movie, though when Joe asked them later if they’d watch it again sometime (he wanted to watch it) the answer was a resounding “NO!”  So take that as your film review. 

Next was a movie I cannot gush about enough: I Capture the Castle.  Let me say first that I read the book by Dodie Smith several years ago and loved it.  Like, one of my top ten, if not top five.  Please, please do yourself a favor if you’re a book lover like me and read this book…before you watch this movie, which unlike most movies based on beloved books did not disappoint.  Maybe because they didn’t muck around with the story, as it’s compelling and lovely just as it is, and I thought it translated to film very well.  In this story, set in the 1930′s, a father of three children has written a very highly-regarded first book and then disappeared into obscurity with his family to a rented, dilapitated English countryside castle.  He cannot recreate anything as good as his first work and has been crippled by the pressure and mental instability for more than a decade.  His wife has died and he has remarried an eccentric artist with a penchant for nudity named Topaz.  His two eldest children, daughters Rose and Cassandra, have come of age but have no prospects of marriage.  Rose is dramatic and loves beautiful things, perhaps as a direct result of having no fine things herself, and she resolves to marry a rich man if ever she can find one.  Cassandra is the narrator of the story and our protagonist is dreamy but practical, aspires to write herself while attempting to cure her father’s writer’s block; she loves her sister but it wildly different from her.  Their younger brother is a peripheral but funny kid.  Not too far into our story enter a pair of brothers, whom they meet during a chance encounter during a storm, only to discover they own all the lands on which the castle stands (and therefore the castle itself.)  You can see the wheels turning in Rose’s pretty little head. 

And that’s all I’m going to reveal of the plot because as I said, you must first read this beautiful novel, and then you must watch this incredible film adaptation.

And finally, because I’m giving Eclipse it’s own post, I get to Penelope.  I don’t know how I ended up watching it but it’s a little fairy-tale movie about a girl with a pig-nose.  Seriously.  It was some family curse or something.  It was fine, I guess, but seeing as the target audience for this film was teenage girls I didn’t really love it.  Oh, wait…Eclipse is for teenage girls.  Hmmm.  Well, that’s for another post! (Likely later today, even.  I want to be caught up!  But after getting caught up with dishes!)  So here we are at the end of July and I am just under halfway through my goal of 100 movies this year.  I’m only about 8 behind!  I can still do it, right?!?