A novel about reading? Why yes, that's what Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey really is. Catherine Moreland, a naive seventeen-year-old with a taste for Gothic novels, is invited to Bath (a resort town) with family friends. Befriended by several young people, she is then invited to Northanger Abbey, the sinister-sounding home of Eleanor and Henry Tilney. Her imagination runs wild due to all the novels she reads and her visit ends badly. My Rollicking Readers book club discussed Northanger Abbey yesterday evening. Although not everyone there had actually READ the book, those of us that did enjoyed it. I know I did! I think I'm finally getting the hang of reading Austen! Our discussion ranged from the uses of novel reading in the plot to the difference of the hero from the average Austen hero to our enjoyment of the verbal repartee. We then watched tw o versions of Northanger Abbey on DVD - one from 2007 and one from 1987. Oh my, what a difference! We found the recent ver...
If you have read Mirkwood Reflections much in the past, you may have noticed this writer has a slight fondness for a certain actor whose name means "Cool Breeze Over the Mountains". So, The Lake House has been on my list of highly anticipated movies for quite some time! This movie did not disappoint! I've viewed it twice now, and I will say that the second time was better, even though I knew the plot already. I could simply relax and enjoy the beauty of the movie. *ahem* Yes, I did mention the plot, which involves a magical mailbox. Did I mention it has holes big enough to drive Alex's pick-up truck through? Um, ok. It really does have some problems with continuity and, well, simple reality. But, that's ok. I don't go to the movies for realism - I get plenty of that at home! I don't want to get specific, as not everyone has seen the film. It's enough to say that one needs to suspend disbelief, but that really happens automatically. OK, the ...
Ocean's Twelve was one of the most interminably tiresome movies I have ever watched. I didn't even bother to finish it. (Which is really so unlike me!) I turned it off 10 minutes before the end (Thank God for that feature on DVD - to know how much more is in the movie) because whatever happened at the end held not the slightest bit of significance to me. The only part I thought was interesting was when Julia Roberts as Tess was pretending to be Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis showed up. I also liked some of the camera techniques. Catherine Zeta-Jones was totally unbelievable in her role as some sort of European detective. Brad Pitt and George Clooney were nice to look at, but uninteresting otherwise. The rest of the characters were uninspired and one-dimensional. It probably doesn't help that I didn't like Ocean's Eleven either. I don't generally like books or movies where the protagonists are "bad guys". So, I am not sure why I even brought Oc...
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