Weekend Recap

This past weekend was one of those weekends that started off slow and then went full force leaving me wishing that it wasn't over. And that I had time to recover from it.

On Friday as soon as I got home from work, I took a nap. I hadn't slept that well the night before. All the announcing that I had done for the two days of the Central District Track and Field Championships had turned my cold into a mild case of tonsillitis. When I left the meet on Thursday night, my tonsils were so swollen and I had a fever.

So believe me when I say I did a lot of sleeping and laying around on Friday night and Saturday morning through afternoon. At least on Saturday when I went to my mom's boyfriend's house, I had Parenthood to keep me occupied. I am addicted to that show, by the way.

Source

On Saturday, the rest of my family headed up to Fredericksburg because my sisters were participating in the Historic Half Marathon there on Sunday. They left me at home with the dog, the cat, and Lynn.

Lynn had been craving sushi for awhile so we made that our plan for dinner on Saturday night. I had never been to Wabi Sabi, which is vaguely surprising since I have friends that used to go all the time. I guess when I was in high school I wasn't an adventurous eater. One time we went to a sushi restaurant in Richmond, I ordered a cheeseburger.

However, this time I ordered sushi. I had the Philadelphia roll and a tempura shrimp roll. Sushi is so filling and so expensive. I ordered one roll of each and had about half to take home in a box. It made for good lunch at work on Monday!

Sushi: really bad cellphone photo

After Wabi Sabi, we weren't quite ready to call it a night. So we headed where all pretty girls head on to on a Saturday night: Martin's. There we bought the craziest assortment of items. The cashier was totally judging us, between our assorted drinks, breakfast foods, two gallons of ice cream (I'm lactose intolerant and require lactose-free ice cream), chips and dip, and ice cream toppings. Lynn remarked that she probably thought we had just broke up with our boyfriends.

To add fuel to the fire (or well, that argument), we stopped by Redbox and picked out the two sappiest love story movies. Our first choice was Breaking Dawn Pt. 1; the second was Like Crazy, a movie I'd seen previews for but had forgotten about.

While eating massive amounts of junk food, we opted to watch Breaking Dawn first and it didn't make me groan nearly as much as I thought it would. Like Crazy, on the other hand, was not good. At all. I didn't realize it was one of those low budget, creative type movies. And the plot line was flat. I went to bed before it was over. Lynn said it didn't get any better.

Sunday, we got up and we were so tired. But we had plans to get things accomplished! First we had a breakfast of bacon, eggs, cinnamon rolls, and cubed potatoes. Then my family returned from Fredericksburg and then half of them left again to head to Blacksburg because my littlest sister is taking a six-week summer class.

Lynn and I headed to Glen Allen to go to my very first wine tasting, which was super cool. We're still upset that we didn't get to keep the glasses. How lame. Then we headed out to do some shopping at Virginia Center Commons. To finish up our day out, we went and got our nails done.

My new nail polish

When we returned back to Colonial Heights, I got back to my watching of Parenthood and then Lynn somehow convinced me to rewrite my resume. The next thing I knew it was 9:15 and I still had to drive 30 minutes home!

What did you do this past weekend? What are you going to do this weekend?

My Semiannual Trip to the Movies

According to The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 2005, the average American between the ages of 18 and 29 sees 7.9 movies in the theater every year. Overall, the average American sees 4.7 movies at the theater in a year.

Granted those statistics are about seven years old but that is beside the point. It's relevant because I am positive I go to the movie theater less frequently than most Americans. I think I only went to see 3 movies last year.


I'm not a huge fan of going to the movie theater. Here are my reasons:

1. I think tickets are entirely overpriced! It costs $10.50 for a ticket. Trust me, there are few movies that I need to pay $10.50 to see rather than wait to buy them on DVD for $20 and watch it as many times as I want. 
2. I hate sitting still that long, not being able to talk, and not being able to pause the movie when I want. 
3. Also, I'm that girl who's never seen most movies you will name (don't believe me? read here). Basically I watch the same types of films all the time.

On Saturday, I had the opportunity to spend time a couple of my Dinwiddie friends! I hadn't seen Amanda, Chris, and Eric since May. Well that night, Chris, Eric, and Karleigh talked me into going to the movies, a rarity for me. 

Anyway, we went and saw Red Tails, which I knew nothing about going into the theater. It turned out to be a really good movie. First of all, it's about World War II and I love history. It follows the lives of a couple of African American Tuskegee airmen fighting in Europe.

Here's the trailer so you can see for yourself:

The only thing that sucked was we had to sit in the very first row since the theater was so very crowded. 

So, the first month of 2012 has passed and I've already been to the movies once! Let's see how many more times I'll go this year!


What and when was the last movie you saw in theaters? Do you enjoy going to the movie theater?

The Help: Fiction vs. Film

Synopsis


Welcome to Jackson, Mississippi; it's the1960s, during one of the most tumultuous time periods in American history. Meet Miss Skeeter, a white Southern woman, who decides to collaborate with black maids to change the way things are in Jackson between the maids and the white families for which they work.


Fiction


So much for individuality; I like every woman in the United States, just finished reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. If you know me, you know I hate to be left out. 


First off, for those of you who haven't gotten around to reading it, it's a very looooong novel. It was very entertaining; it kept my attention and I was always wondering what was going to happen next. I really liked the character of Miss Skeeter because she reminded me of myself with her aspirations of being a novelist/journalist and her having to move back into her mother's house at the age of 23 because she hadn't found a husband at college or a post-college job. 


When I got to the end of the novel, there were certain characters about whom I wondered  what would happen to them after the novel ended. I don't know if it's enough suspense to warrant a sequel but I was left feeling a little unsatisfied since I wouldn't know what happened next to them.


Also, when I finished the novel, I was a little disappointed. To me, the novel did not read as a social criticism like I thought it was supposed to. I think Uncle Tom's Cabin said a lot more about social and racial inequality. The Help reads more like entertainment. 


I also wasn't really a fan of the part the author included about her childhood maid. It seemed as  if she took that one experience and based an entire novel that included stories from more than a dozen fictional maids off of it, which isn't enough information. It was as if she was trying to use her one experience as "research" for the novel. 


Film


Remember how I said that the novel was very long; imagine trying to put all that into a film. Even though The Help was 146 minutes long, this was not sufficient time to include everything in the novel. There were a couple of parts of the plot that I thought were important, entertaining, and very telling of the characters, and they were left out of the film. 


They also changed some of the situations in the movie, particularly the one dealing with why Skeeter's childhood maid, Constantine was not there when Skeeter returned from Ole Miss. I like the reason from the novel way more than the one in the film. 


The actresses chosen for this film were above par. The woman playing Miss Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) did a wonderful job; you seriously wanted to slap for her for all the racist and mean things she said and did to the maids. I like Bryce Dallas Howard and I didn't even recognize her because she was so into this role. 


I also did not recognize Emma Stone, who played Miss Skeeter. Stone was so spunky and full of energy in this film. Jessica Chastain pulled off the crazy Miss Celia well. 


Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, who played Aibileen and Minny, were perhaps the stars of the films. Davis knew how to play Aibileen in a way to evoke emotion and Spencer was quite humerous in her role as Minny. 


Also there were several scenes in the film that brought tears to my eyes toward the end. 


Conclusion

Overall, both the book and the movie were great. If I had to choose though, I'd probably pick the book over the movie, because I think you miss a lot of the depth of the characters and some important and interesting plot lines in the movie due to the lack of time and the changes they made.


Have you read or seen The Help? What did you think? What did you like? What did you not like? Please share your thoughts!  

Fiction into Film

Second semester of my senior year in college I had the opportunity to take a class that was about a topic that it turned out I was very interested in. The class was Film and Literature. And though the class was in Spanish, I found that comparing movies with the literature from which they were derived is something that I enjoy doing. I loved discussing the methods the director used to compensate for the narrator or other things that were hard to translate from book to film.

Every book's made into a movie. You should go see the movie; you don't have to read a book. But book people are getting smart, they're called authors, they'll re-release the book when a movie comes out. Put a picture of the actor on the cover: trick people who like movies into buying the books. Like, 'Fight Club' is a movie made out of a book; they re-released it, people are like, 'Oh, Brad Pitt's in this book. So far just words. 'Fight Club' the first rule of you should have been: don't be a book. I will fight you, book.' Then that guy fights that book and it turns out in the end that guy is that book.--Myq Kaplan

Now, while I spent 18 weeks analyzing film and literature, it only just recently occurred to me that maybe I should blog about my opinions on the book vs. the movie. I've always been one of those people who hates when people don't read the book before they watch the movies on stuff like Harry Potter. But what really started my interest in blogging about this topic was when I went to visit Harrisonburg in April and I was sitting at Beau's baseball game and his sister, Chelsea and I got to talk about books and movies. Needless to say, we missed a couple innings of the game, discussing some of Nicholas Sparks' books vs the movies they were made into.

So here goes the start on this journey. I don't know how long this will last but if you have any suggestions, I'm willing to hear them. Also feel free to leave your opinions in the comment section. And if you haven't read the book or seen the movie, by all means, please go read and watch so we can discuss and analyze!