Yet more movies

I’ve come to realize that I watch a lot of movies.  I admit it.  I love movies.  Movies of just about any genre at all – from foreign films to science fiction/fantasy and from documentaries to animation.

The only ones that give me pause are westerns and mob-style movies.  I’ll watch either, but my response is usually a shrug and a wrinkle of the nose.

Riley recently commented on one of my posts and recommended the movie, “Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day.”  It’s really funny that she mentioned it when she did, because while I’ve owned this movie for months and months, I didn’t watch it until the night before she recommended it to me.  She must be reading my mind or something.  I thought it was fantastic and even better than I thought it would be.

On Saturday, my mom and I watched the animated movie “WALL-E.”  While my mom thought it was cute and “all right,” I loved every minute.  You know, except for the fact that apparently 700 years from now every single one of us is going to be very friendly, but hugely fat and unable to walk.

I did end up dragging my butt out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn on Sunday morning to go see Twilight.  It’s a good thing I did because there were a ton of people there.  Guess there were a lot of bad people like me who skipped church.  The surprising thing was that I only saw a couple of groups of teenagers.  The rest were older (older than teenagers anyway) women and men (yes, even men!).

I have mixed feelings about the movie.  I’ve read all of the books in the series and really enjoyed them.  As I’ve said before, the main character is a teenager, so there were times that I really felt like smacking her – mostly because she was behaving like a typical teenager. 

I’m not sure how I feel about the movie, however.  It stayed fairly true to the book, but of course it had to gloss over quite a bit.  The book is 544 pages, and the movie was only two hours long.  The most disappointing thing to me, I think, was that it seemed more like a made-for-TV movie than a major motion picture.  Even the special effects seemed kind of cheesy at times.

I’ll also be honest that I wasn’t overly excited about their casting for the two main characters.  Kristen Stewart who plays the main character, Bella, is definitely not one of my favorite actresses, and I definitely wasn’t sure of Robert Pattinson as Edward (the vampire).  By the end of the movie, I was more convinced, but their acting seemed kind of stilted at times.  I also didn’t buy Taylor Lautner as Jacob.  He just seemed too pretty-boy.

Casting for some of the other characters couldn’t have been better, though.  Billy Burke as Charlie, Peter Facinelli as Carlisle, and the others that made up the Cullen family were absolutely perfect in their roles.

While it was fun to see the story come to life on the screen, I think they missed a great opportunity to really make something spectacular.  I do hope they make the rest of the books in the series into movies though.  I also think this is definitely a movie for people who are already fans of the series.

Last night, my parents and I watched “Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.”  I posted last March about some of the computer games I’ve been addicted to (yes, I can be quite the geek).  They are murder mysteries that play like those 360 virtual tours you can get of apartments and houses.  You go around finding clues and interviewing suspects and witnesses and I think they’re a lot of fun.  The ones I’ve enjoyed the most have been based on some of Agatha Christie’s novels:  “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Evil Under the Sun,” and “And Then There Were None.”  The one that I’ve played most recently is based on a Sherlock Holmes mystery, but the graphics are so detailed that I actually get motion sick by playing it.  Needless to say, I haven’t finished it yet or worked on it in a while.When I was at the library on Saturday, I saw that they had an episode of Agatha Christie: Poirot on DVD.  I’ve only read one of her books, but I love her stories so I decided to give it a shot.  My parents were only half-paying attention at first, but even they got sucked into it.

I will say that I figured out who did it before the big “reveal” scene, but definitely think it was worth a watch.  It seems that there are something like 56 other episodes based on her books that aired on TV, so I’m going to have to keep my eye out to see if the library gets any of the others in.

So have you seen anything good lately?  Anything to recommend or suggest I steer clear of?