My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary

I'm feeling kind of confused about my life, so I decided to start reading books about people. I decided to read autobiographical works, journals, memoirs, that type of thing.

I just realized that Beverly Cleary is still alive. She's 104 years old. I didn't realize she was such a successful author. She sold over 90 million copies of her books.

I'm not sure what gave me the idea to read this book. I just remembered That I enjoyed her books as a child. Though the memory of her book was very vague since it was so long ago. I think I read her book titled Socks.

I was hoping that she wrote books for adults too. My other favorite children's authors, Lois Duncan and Madeline L'Engle I also looked up to see if they wrote for adults. Lois wrote a book that was non fiction about her daughter going missing. I'm not sure about Madeline L'Engle. 

The only thing that Beverly Cleary wrote for adults was her memoir, and that actually worked out for my goals of reading autobiography type books.

Something about her book is really well written. I was super impressed with the first paragraph even. I'm not sure why it was so satisfying.

It was a real page turner too. I was wondering what would happen next, and how she would get over obstacles as she attended junior college and college. 

It was interesting to see her life and perspective because she attended college during the great depression and worked during world war two. It was very interesting to see what people's lives like were back then.

The one thing that I thought was odd was that she barely described or talked about her husband. Maybe this was out of respect for his privacy. She only had a shallow portrayal of him and her relationship with him. I kind of wished to know more about how she felt and how they connected.

She didn't talk about her children hardly, but they weren't born yet by the time her book ended.

I'm very inspired by how she always worked and tried to be independent and was so sociable. I'm also inspired by how she worked for her goals and how she started writing. She overcame writers block and that feeling of wanting to do something, but not knowing exactly how.

I felt sad by the time I was done with the book because I felt nostalgic. All the characters and personalities in her memoir existed many years ago. But they were real and once existed. It made me feel so sad and melancholy when I realized they are from the past and are long gone.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

      I didn't like the first movie, "the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants." But, it grew on me. I was forced to watch it three times. Twice, I was invited to a friend's house to watch a movie with a bunch of people, and the movie being shown was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The second time I didn't want to be rude and say I have already seen it. The others seemed to be really looking forward to the movie. I don't know how I got stuck watching it the third time, but I think my family was involved. By the third round, I grew an appreciation for this movie.

     That is how I grew up the courage, patience and perseverance to see the sequel! Without the first movie being hurled at me three times, it would never have happened!!

     I liked this movie right away, and it didn't take three times for me to warm up to it. I like it better than the first one. But, it's not as dramatic and blockbustery as the first one was. Blockbustery isn't a word, but you get the gist. The first movie shows how 4 friends stayed together during a summer apart by mailing lucky jeans to each other. They were all three different sizes and figures, but by some strange magic, the jeans fit all of them. They would mail the jeans with a letter saying if anything lucky happened to them while they had the pants.

     The sequel was the same. They were four friends apart because they all had different plans for the summer. They mailed their jeans to each other in rotations. It was a lot to follow, because there were four completely different plots for one movie. It reminded of me of soap operas. Days of of Lives, for example, have many characters and plots.

      The movie was well acted, written, and really deep. It was a lot to take in all at once because each of the main characters learned a big life lesson and came to a big realization in the movie. It wasn't like a fake or contrived or forced upon lessons they all learned. Through really serious and great acting, and very gifted writing, they perfectly fit all four plots together to perfectly convey some real healing and realizations in this movie. These four girls had a lot of pain and heartaches of different kinds but they were all able to find some wisdom to get them through it and out of it.   

Dinner for Schmucks

    This is the first thing that I have seen with Steve Carell that was hilarious. (I didn't think his other stuff was funny.) I laughed out loud, not "LOL" figuratively, but literally, through much of the movie. But, that was just me. Humor is in the ear of the hearer?

    Though it had some cheap sex humor, or silly stuff in it, I thought this was a sophisticated comedy. I was impressed with tiny little details. I was thinking to myself, that, whoever wrote this movie is more intelligent than the average writer of scripts, especially for comedies. It just had a lot of subtle features, most people would have taken for granted if they weren't paying attention. I can't quite explain it, but it was just precious in some ways. This movie was loosely based on a french film called Le Diner de Cons. I want to watch that movie too.

    This movie is about a guy trying to get his girlfriend to marry him, and so he thinks that moving ahead and getting promoted will help his chances. He works at an equity firm ran by creeps that like to throw a dinner once a month making fun of the biggest idiot he can find. He has to find an idiot to take to a dinner party to impress his creepy boss and co-workers. The comedy just starts from that premise, and it becomes one of the funniest comedies I have ever seen.

A Thousand Words

    On the internet, I saw a lot of bad reviews for this particular movie. They said it was done before. You know, I see a lot of reviews like that. People saying they hate the movie because it was like other movies they have seen. I guess Solomon in Ecclesiastes was right; "There is nothing new under the sun."

  Well, despite what critics have said, I can positively report that the plot of this movie was new to me. I haven't seen anything quite like it before. Eddie Murphy plays a guy who finds out he will die when all the leaves fall off this magical tree in his back yard. Every time he speaks a leave falls off the tree. Eddie is basically trying to not talk in much of this movie for this reason. The comedy part is the silly ways he tries to live his life without talking.

 "It was not realistic!!!" Another common criticism of movies, (And of this one.) a criticism that I make sometimes too. But realism is not what this movie was aiming for. It had a fairy tale like aspect. Disney could have done this movie in cartoon version. They would just have had to change a few of the main characters to a prince and a princess and they would have been set.

   I liked the feel and vibe of the movie. I liked the moral of the movie, and the message it conveyed. It was not only a silly comedy, but it was trying to tell us some moral and message. It was well executed. I liked the main characters and the side characters. They were fun to watch.

   People say this movie is stupid, no good. But, I like the fairy tale, clean, moral atmosphere it created. I enjoyed it. Only thing that I can think of is that I was a little bored in a middle part of the movie. Not too many things can be perfect.

The Accidental Tourist (the movie)

     This movie is from the 80s! I grew up seeing the book, the Accidental Tourist on the bookshelf at my parent's house. My dad read a lot of books by the author Anne Tyler, who of course, wrote The Accidental Tourist. I haven't read the books. But, I watched the movie! I really did like this movie a lot.
     I might read the book that was written in 1985. It won a Pulitzer, and other awards. The movie was made just a few years later in 1988. I love the eighties. I don't know what it is, but even eighties movies, have something special about them. 


     I really ragged on the movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. If you read my recent review of that movie, you would know I don't particularly care for it. I bring up that movie because it was hysterically and painfully, grasping at straws trying to show exactly what this movie, The Accidental Tourist showed, with much more realism, grace, finesse. This movie rung much truer to me. It did exactly what Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tried to do and failed; to show the pain and remorse of the loss of a loved one, and how they found a way to heal from it. 


   Sorry the to the people who made Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: You don't have to show someone crying and screaming and having tantrums and write the most ridiculous inconceivable plot, and have the most obnoxious main character to convey the pain of death and coping with the loss. 


   What this movie did was show pain and coping with it in a much realer, realistic, reasonable, way that really resonated with me and spoke deeply to what is true to me and in my own life. At least to me. It was well written, and acted. I really enjoyed this movie. 

The Vow

    My boss at work said that this movie was good. I decided  to check it out. I don't have any really strong opinions about this movie. I can't say it was good or bad, or if I liked it or not. Sorry, lame review I have got going. Don't have the magic movie reviewing mojo going on.

   This movie is really loosely based on a true story. When I looked up the true story, the plot seemed more interesting than this movie. I wondered why they didn't stay truer to the real life story it was based on. The movie is about a husband and a wife that get into a car accident. The wife looses her short term memory and can't remember ever even being married to her husband. She doesn't remember her husband, or that she is married. She is very apprehensive about going home with this strange man when she wakes up from her coma.

   The movie is about the husband fighting to keep their marriage together, when his wife frankly doesn't even seem interested in him any more.

   In a way, come to think of it, I did like this movie because I found it to be very interesting, and not for what it is at face value. Though this is a romance movie, or a testimony to keeping the faith in marriage in love, I was much more interested in the other facets of this movie, that didn't even have to do with the boy girl relationship.

   This women was a completely different person five years ago. She forgot the last five years of her life, and waking up to the decisions she made in the last five years were a true shock to her. She didn't know or understand the person she had become. She wasn't even sure liked her new self. She wanted to go back to her old life altogether. Seeing her go back to her college friends, and spending time with her family, it really was like a whole different society and standing from the new life she made for herself. 


   Other than her self exploration, I found her relationship with her family and rebuilding that even more interesting than the relationship with her husband as well. She hasn't spoken to her parents and siblings in years. When she wakes up in the hospital, she is shocked when she figures this out. She realizes her husband and her parents never met. She doesn't believe that he is her husband. She questions him, if you were really my husband, why haven't you met my parents? This was a big part of the story line. 

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

I know that I am supposed to feel very touched by a movie about a kid coming to terms with the loss of his father. I know that I am supposed to feel very sympathetic and open minded for the main character, who has Aspergers Syndrome.

I saw a lot of very positive reviews for this movie. They praised how emotional the movie was, and how good the acting was, and how it shows people overcoming death and moving on. I thought the acting was bad, I have seen better on ABC family TV Shows! I'm serious. I don't know why so many people said the acting was good. What?!

 As for the main character, the little boy, I am empathetic, and open minded usually, but I had trouble feeling that way towards him. I just couldn't stand him. He was annoying, bizarre, strange, and very smart, but super dumb. He was also very rude and obnoxious. He was in almost every scene. He was the MAIN, MAIN character, and I just couldn't take it. He drove me up the wall. The kid didn't strike me as having a syndrome, or a "problem." He just was really, really, weird to me. He seemed like a normal kid that decided to be weird, rather than someone that had a real issue. In a number of reviews, people said "I have a kid with aspergers," and his acting really accurately portrayed the syndrome. If you say so.

I couldn't wrap my mind around the plot. It was just too stupid to make me even care about what was happening. I was super bored, and felt no sense of expectation or curiosity as to what would happen. It was so implausible and ridiculous. How could a boy of that age think that there was a sixth borough of New York City? How could he think that by visiting everyone in New York with the last name Black, he would find out what the key in his father's closet opened? Rhetorical questions. What was really dumb and unrealistic is that he did find a person, with the last name Black, which solved the mystery as to what the key was for. In real life, good luck with that. Someone writes the word black on a tiny envelope with a key in it. You visit hundreds of people named Black. Bingo. Make me vomit!

 Then, in the end, to paraphrase he said, "My father is never coming back, and I have to move on, and be okay with it. My father would be proud of me moving on." Huh?! Never coming back? Don't believe in Heaven? No wonder it's a year after the kid's father died, and he is still having a breakdown.

 It's just so odd that a mom would let her young boy, what he looked ten, but could have been older, go around everywhere by himself. In the end of the movie, it shows that she visited all the Blacks, before her son did, to check them out to see if they were okay. Really!! No one has that kind of time. She works full time. Just ehh. Come on now. Not even trying to make a reasonable plot anymore? Why didn't she offer to go with her son as an escort, instead of visiting all the Blacks in advance of her son?

 This movie seemed to try to control your thoughts and feelings, and manipulate you rather than let things just happen organically. I felt like a dumb ass puppet. I just found the whole thing boring and annoying. Oddly, I have found that boring and annoying often go together, like peanut butter and jelly.