Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2014

Taylor Swift goes Pop

Taylor Swift's new song Shake it Off , is something new and different for her. It's a pop song, and though most of her previous songs were pop country, this is all pop. Some people I know said that they didn't like it, but I love it! It's very catchy and it has a good message - basically that she is who she is, and you can say what you want but she doesn't care, it's just going to roll right off her shoulder. You go Glen Coco! "I stay out too late. Got nothing in my brain. That's what people say ... I just keep on cruising. Can't stop, won't stop moving. It's like I got this music in my mind singing it's gonna be alright."  Oh, I just love it! It's a great, positive message. Don't care what people say. Just do your thing. Keep doing what you love. "I never miss a beat. I'm lightning on my feet. And that's what they don't see ... I'm dancing on my own. I make the moves up as I go. And that's...

Girl Meets World vs Boy Meets World

. As a die-hard Boy Meets World fan from way back in the day, I was absolutely ecstatic when I heard that they were making a new series with the original cast entitled Girl Meets World .  Boy Meets World premiered in 1993 when I was 8 years old. It showcased the life of Cory Matthews (Ben Savage), Topanga Lawrence (Danielle Fishel), Shawn Hunter (Rider Strong) and Eric Matthews (Will Friedle). Though at first, the story was more about Cory and Shawn, best friends and total opposites, later it grew to be about Cory and Topanga' s love story and their friends. The show brought so many adolescent issues to light in such a way that, even now, it still stays true and hits close to home. I can watch reruns of the show and never get sick of it - Reruns can be seen on ABC Family . I watched the premiere of Girl Meets World with the anticipation of it being exactly as its predecessor. I was not disappointed, though I felt it could have been better and still has potential. Girl Meets W...

The Grand Budapest Hotel

  An indie film by Wes Anderson. Definitely something to see. A story surrounding a concierge and a bellhop at the Grand Budapest Hotel . The concierge befriends rich, older women, beds them and keeps the hotel running, until one of his lovers is found dead. He is put to jail and the bellhop helps clear his name. It has a great cast of characters. The characters themselves have their own story to tell, though the main one is of the bellhop and the concierge. Its nonsensical at times. Reminds me a little bit of Rocky and Bullwinkle for some reason - or at least the villain reminds me of Boris and Natasha from the show/movie. Its a romanticized story. A story that keeps you on your toes because you never know what is actually going to happen. A story of love. A story of courage. A story of valor. Work hard and you will, in the end, be rewarded, but it may not be in the way that you think.

Captain America : The Winter Soldier

If you like Marvel comics, superheroes, The Avengers , Thor , Iron Man and watched Captain America: The First Avenger , then you probably have already watched this movie. But if you haven't yet, and you are only watching it because you think Chris Evans is hot - well you'll like it too. In Winter Soldier , Steve Rogers/Captain America, finds himself looking into the eyes of his past, literally. He is also questioning whether he should still be a soldier, and then the fate of the world is in his hands, again. S.H.I.E.L.D. is compromised and Captain America teams up with Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to stop Hydra - an organization that is basically a new Nazi Germany (they create a weapon that uses a computer and DNA to target and kill people everywhere in the world). Key members of S.H.I.E.L.D. are part of Hydra and it gets a little confusing as to whose good and whose bad. But in this movie, all the good people are targeted to be killed off one by one...

Divergent - Veronica Roth

Divergent , based on the first book in the trilogy by Veronica Roth . Main characters are Tris ( Shailene Woodley ) and Four ( Theo James ).  It's set in a future Chicago, where the people are grouped into five different factions: 1. Candor - the honest 2. Abnegation - the selfless 3. Dauntless - the brave 4. Amity - the peaceful 5. Erudite - the intelligent. Each year, all sixteen year olds must take a test that will decide their fate. Will they stay in the faction they were born and raised into, or will they choose another, forever leaving their family and friends behind to make a new life for themselves. Tris was born Beatrice into Abnegation. She changed her name to Tris when she chose Dauntless. When starting in a new faction, everyone gets their slate wiped clean and has to prove themselves. But there is something different about Tris, something she learns to hide from everyone, even those she trusts. One of those people, is Four. Woodley and James have a great chemist...

Recently watched...

Over the course of the last couple of weeks I have watched three movies in the theaters ... I am just slacking on the reviews of them. I've seen Divergent , Captain America: The Winter Soldier , and last night I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel. I am sorry that I have been lagging behind, but I will post all reviews over the course of the weekend. Scout's honor!

Listening to...

I just purchased the debut album  Louder by Lea Michele , singer/actress, on iTunes. I've been listening to it nonstop ever since. She has an absolutely amazing and powerful voice. I knew that from her work on Glee as Rachel Berry, but listening to her cd seals the deal that her voice contends with the best - Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Christina Aguilera and Adele. Each song that she recorded for her album fits her perfectly. It's about love and loss and she said it's very personal, that "every song I sing I'm letting people into my life."  Two of the songs ( Cannonball and If You Say So ) are about Cory Monteith , her fiancĂ© who unexpectedly passed away of an overdose last summer. She said in an Ellen Degeneres interview that Cory had listened to all but two of the songs on her album before he passed and those were the songs. She wrote If You Say So about Cory after his death and Cannonball was already written by Sia Furler and she...

Reading Now

I just started reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown . It was published in 2009 and is the follow-up to The Davinci Code  and Angels and Demons - both of which revolve around Robert Langdon, a symbologist who is at the wrong place at the right time and finds himself in the midst of a battle between two evils and the only way out is to solve the puzzle and hopefully keep it out of the wrong hands. I'm looking forward to reading this book and hoping for the same sort of thrill, mystery and historical data as in the other two. After, hopefully I'll be able to read the latest installment Inferno . Crossing my fingers that it doesn't take me forever to finish.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

First let me tell you that I know nothing about Wall Street. Probably less than nothing. I know nothing about stocks and when I was asked to do my 401k I stared blankly at the page because I had no clue what to do with it - and still don't if I'm being honest. But The Wolf of Wall Street , a memoir by Jordan Belfort , is not just about stocks and bonds and all that rubbish. It's mostly about his drug, alcohol and sex addiction, his rise to the top and his epic fall to the very bottom. There's a lot of partying, sex, drugs, but alas, no rock and roll. Jordan Belfort's quick rise to fame was his charm, wit and brains. Yes, he was very smart. He knew how to get people to do things, to move, to believe in him and what he could achieve. He did achieve a lot, millions and millions of dollars through stocks and bonds. Though, he did a lot of it through lying and embezzlement, which the latter he went to jail for. But before all of that, B...

THE MONUMENTS MEN

The Monument's Men opened in theaters everywhere February 7th. I only watched it recently, with my father - as usual. Going into the theater, I only knew that it was a movie about the end of World War II and that men were sent over who were never really trained for combat. I didn't know it was based on a true story or exactly what those men were sent over to do. The monuments men were actually called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section of the allies. They were "a small corps of mostly middle-aged men and a few women who interrupted careers as historians, architects, museum curators and professors to mitigate combat damage." The group were from all Allied regions, not just the United States, were sent all over Europe to find, recover and return infamous art pieces like the Mona Lisa, the Madonna and Child sculpture and the Ghent altarpiece that were stolen by the Nazis. Hitler had the artwork stored in monasteries, castles and salt mines to lat...