A Week of Fairy Tales

This poem is inspired by the poem Monday's Child and the lovely bracelet pictured above, which was made for me by the amazingly talented Jenna from her Etsy store Book Geek Boutique. You can visit her store here.

Monday’s child is fair of face

With hair as black as ebony

An apple causes her agony



Tuesday’s child is full of grace

A maiden at night

At dawn she takes flight



Wednesday’s child is full of woe

For a pair of legs she gives up her voice

Alas sad sorrow is sown from her choice



Thursday’s child has far to go

Measured not in miles but in time

Slumber to a century's chime



Friday’s child is loving and giving

True beauty to love an ugly beast

A prince's true bride at a wedding feast



Saturday’s child works hard for a living

Shod with slippers made of glass

Weds out of the working class



But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day

Is bonny and blithe and good and gay

Bounding through the forest in her red hood

Speaking to wolves outside her neighborhood



Outtakes



(Alternate version)

Tuesday’s child is full of grace

Dancing in slippers made of glass

A shoe fit test she does pass



(Alternate version)

Tuesday’s child is full of grace

A dozen so fond of dancing

Daily their shoes do need darning



(Alternate version)

Tuesday’s child is full of grace

Gliding through the lake at dawn

Turning to a swan again come morn



(Alternate version)

Thursday's child has far to go

Climbing up a giant beanstalk

Up in the clouds where giants walk



(Alternate version)

Thursday’s child has far to go

East of the sun and west of the moon

To save her bear prince from his doom



(Alternate version)

Thursday’s child has far to go

Past spring, summer and last of all fall

To free her friend from the Snow Queen's thrall



(Alternate version)

Saturday’s child works hard for a living

To save her very own skin

Straw into gold she must spin

Fury Movie Review: About As Solid As A War Movie Can Get

Equal parts thrilling and equal parts harrowing even if it does occasionally take off in baffling tangents that doesn't jive with the rest of the narrative, the movie evokes an old-school look and feel on the horrors of WWII.

The movie is as much about Logan Lerman's Norman Ellison character than it is about Brad Pitt's Staff Sergeant Don Collier character, as the audience perceives the narrative through Lerman's experiences as he tries to survive in a war he is totally untrained to fight in.

Critics who have been incongruously likening Pitt's role in this movie to his previous role as Lieutenant Aldo Raine in 2009's Inglorious Basterds are I dare say going way off track here; sure both characters share superficial similarities in that they are both army soldiers fighting on the side of the Allied Forces in WWII, but the roles and Pitt's portrayal of these two characters could not have been more different from each other.

While never reaching the heights of Saving Private Ryan, and despite the fact that as the narrative unfolds the movie seems to be unloading war movie tropes about as zealously as the characters go about collecting their grisly war trophies, the movie is solidly acted and solidly directed and basically about as solid as a war movie can get, which is about the best you can expect from a movie like Fury.

3 and a half stars out of 5 stars for me.

The Book of Life Short Review

It's great to be watching a big studio release of an Mexican/Spanish culture-centric animation film after decades of watching Anglo-Saxon culture-centric ones (No, Dreamworks' Puss In Boots definitely does not count).

I'd say 20th Century Fox will have a really big moneymaker on their hands seeing as Hispanics are the biggest spenders when it comes to catching movies at the movie theater.

The visuals are trippy, kaleidoscopic and gorgeous to look at, which more than makes up for the rather obvious and slightly bland storyline. The music is decent but hardly memorable. The voice cast as a whole is rather good but I am kind of baffled by the incongruous casting of Channing Tatum as one of the main voice actors in this movie. 4 out of 5 stars for me.

Short Dolphin Tale 2 Movie Review: Its Parts Is Greater Than Its Sum

Sometime during the summer, I saw the trailer for Dolphin Tale 2 at the movie theater. It looked interesting and not cloying like I thought such a movie would be, so I went back home and watched Dolphin Tale. I was surprised by how much I liked it, which is how I find myself at the movie theater for Dolphin Tale 2.

The main cast is back, but the sequel has neither the magic nor heart of the first movie. The narrative is disjointed and episodic. There were some scenes that were really good, but these scenes were few and far between and were simply not enough the elevate the dull and boring script.

My thoughts about the movie were echoed by my fellow moviegoers. "The first movie was good, but this one is meh," said a lady to her friend. A kid told her mother: "The first part was good, then it got boring until the end when [a character] showed up."

It also doesn't help that the trailer for Dolphin Tale 2 does spoil the entire story, thus dissipating whatever tension the movie was trying to build up. Even if the trailer didn't, you would have known where this movie was going right from the start. Overall, very disappointing. I'd recommend you watch Dolphin Tale if you haven't yet and wait for the home video for this movie if you like what you see in Dolphin Tale.

2 and a half stars out of 5 stars for me.

If I Stay Movie Review: Superior In All Ways To The Fault in Our Stars In The Currently Popular Teenage Tearjerker Genre

From left: Liana Liberato (Kim Schein), Chloe Grace Moretz (Mia Hall), Gayle Forman (author of If I Stay) at the August 7, 2014 screening of If I Stay in San Francisco, at the AMC Metreon 16 movie theater.





An If I Stay inspired bracelet made by the ever talented Jenna from her Etsy store Book Geek Boutique, which I wore to the screening.

During a period when I ran out of books to read, I decided to check out books that were slated for a 2014 movie adaptation release, and that was how I ended up reading the beautifully penned Gayle Foreman novel If I Stay. Both the book and movie moved me like neither The Fault In Our Stars book nor its movie counterpart did. Unlike my movie experience of The Fault In Our Stars, where I felt like a total monster for being totally unmoved to cry when nearly the rest of the movie theater did, I couldn't help shedding a couple of tears during the final poignant moments of If I Stay, as I believe did many in the movie audience.

Surprisingly, who should pop up before the San Francisco screening I was at but Gayle Forman herself, along with stars Chloe Grace Moretz and Liana Liberato, to promote the movie. Chloe kept on exhorting us to go see the movie again when it gets released August 22, but I don't really know if I have it in me to go see it again, not because it's a bad movie, but because it not only moved me but also left me emotionally drained by screening's end.

The movie is mostly faithful to the book, and any changes that the moviemakers have made are understandable, although fans of the book will be disappointed when they realize that a madcap attempt by Adam to break into the ICU ward has almost been completely excised from its original book version. To have included it would have been tonally jarring to the melody of Mia's life that director R.J. Cutter is trying to compose on the big screen.

Chloe Grace Moretz carries this movie admirably by herself, and she is helped along by quite a strong supporting cast playing her family and friends. Jamie Blackley, who plays Mia's love interest Adam Levine is every girl's fantasy version of a near perfect boyfriend. He is therefore unfortunately the most unrealistic character in both the book and movie itself, although his many gestures of love to Mia are sure to set female teenage hearts aflutter.

For a movie that is mostly marketed in the trailer as a teenage romance drama, the most moving scenes in the film actually come from the interactions that Mia has with her family rather than from her scenes with Adam, which is quite a remarkably pleasant change from other teen movies I've watched before where romance is usually located front and center and backwards and sideways to the exclusion of almost anything else. In fact, the most gut-puncher of a scene was one between Mia and her grandfather, played by the ever fabulous Stacy Keach (Nebraska), which caused a few tears to involuntarily leak out of my eyes.

In handling such a difficult and delicate topic such as death, director Cutter is able to adroitly juxtapose scenes of happier times before with scenes that show the present tragic situation, so there are both laughs and tears to be had. Nevertheless, as with many movie adaptations, something is lost in between the translation from book to screen. In If I Stay, some of the more powerful feelings and emotions evoked from reading Forman's sparse simple prose, written in a first person Mia Hall narrative, unfortunately does not fully come through on the big screen.

Still, the movie is rather excellently and tastefully done and I definitely recommend catching this movie in theaters come August 22. If I have a few small complaints, they are minor ones. Personally, I didn't really like the songs that Adam sang throughout the movie; they just didn't resonate with me somehow and rather dispelled the movie's notion that he is supposed to be a rising rock star. I also felt that there were just one too many snogging scenes in the movie, one which I am sure the largely female-centric audience that will turn out for this movie would have no such issue with.

4 out of 5 stars for me.

The Hundred-Foot Journey Short Review: A Poor Man's live-action version of Pixar's Ratatouille

The movie is rather predictable and also slightly cheesy, but the movie's heart is in the right place. The romance between Manish Dayal's Hassan and Charlotte Le Bon's Marguerite is unfortunately rather bland and tepid, while it is fiery exchanges between Helen Mirren's Madame Mallory and Om Puri's Papa that really spice the movie up.

The movie's plot, its food pornography imagery and its script are all not as good as Jon Favreau's indie movie Chef (still showing in movie theaters), but it nevertheless still dishes up diverse and decent fare. The movie is also let down by a rather lackluster and anti-climatic third-act. A highly serviceable movie from Swedish director Lasse Hallström, whose last food-themed movie is the luscious 2000 movie Chocolat, featuring a Johnny Depp-Juliet Binoche pairing.

3 and a half out of 5 stars for me

Godzilla Short Review: An Almost Complete Snoozefest

Most monster movies are able to successfully create enough tension and suspense to tide movie audiences until they get to see the monsters in their fully glory. Movies such as Steven Spielberg's Jaws and J.J. Abrams's Super 8 are able to achieve this feat. Not so Godzilla. For three-quarters of the movie, the movie is such a complete snooze, with such an exceptionally bland and uninspiring human lead in Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Ford Brody, that when the last half hour gives us the payoff of finally being able to watch Godzilla rising to save humankind, it is too little and too late to salvage the movie itself.

My recommendation? Don't waste your money on this; go see X-Men: Days of Future Past or Maleficent for a more compelling movie experience.

2 out of 5 stars for me.

Maleficent Review: Angelina Jolie as Maleficent is Magnificent

Coming on the heels of the recent wildly successful Disney blockbuster Frozen, Maleficent will unfortunately be unfavorably compared with the former. Sure, Maleficent is hardly perfect, and while the movie does show visible scars from its many rewrites and reshoots, it is nevertheless a charming retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty story, one that gives a three-dimensional characterization to the most fascinating character in the 1959 Disney version, the self-proclaimed mistress of evil herself, Maleficent.

The storytelling is uneven, and the first act is so poorly constructed that it has to rely on the crutches of a narrator to prop up the story. However, once the story toddles through its clumsy first act, the movie soars on the magnificent portrayal of Maleficent by the always mesmerizing Angelina Jolie. Sure, the movie gives a rather weak reason for why Maleficent decided to curse Princess Aurora to die on her 16th birthday, and Angelina Jolie is made to do one too many gazing from the shadows in order to watch events unfold, but otherwise she truly shines and is the heart and soul of the movie, without which the whole movie would simply have collapsed on itself.

Sharlto Copley is somewhat miscast as King Stefan, and Elle Fanning, though a very talented actress (just watch her in Super 8 and you'll agree with me), looks and feels slightly demented here as a happy-go-lucky Aurora who cannot stop grinning like a maniac for no particular reason (I blame the fairy that gave her the gift of never feeling blue). Brendan Thwaites's Prince Philip feels more like a glorified cameo and his appearance seems more like an afterthought. The only vaguely interesting supporting character is Sam Riley's Diaval, who serves as Maleficent's raven shapeshifter and confidant.

As directed by first-time director Robert Stromberg, who was the visual designer for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Sam Raimi's Oz The Great and Powerful, the visuals and settings are lovely to look at and serve as a enchanting backdrop for Maleficent to have her story told.

While today we consider Disney's 1959 Sleeping Beauty a classic, it is interesting to remember that when it was first released, the movie was such a critical and commercial disappointment that Disney subsequently abandoned making princess movies for the next few decades. Maleficent has received mixed reviews from critics, but I hope it does well commercially so as to encourage more retellings that would provide a more modern perspective of fairy tales, where the princesses are not just happy to sing and wait for their princes to bring them their happily ever afters, and where villains become full flesh-and-blood characters rather than just plot points to help prod these fairy tales along.

Highly enjoyable and highly recommended.

3 and a half stars out of five stars for me. =D

Incidentally, I feel that the story of Sleeping Beauty is one of the fairy tale most ripe for retelling. If you be so interested, check out my short retelling of Sleeping Beauty here at: The Real Sleeping Beauty where Sleeping Beauty has to contend not with spinning wheels but the economic repercussions of spinning wheels being banned in her country.

X-Men: Days of Future Past Review

As a young girl growing up, one of my favorite superheroes was Storm from the X-Men series, a character I came to love not through the comic books, but via the animated X-Men television series and the video game X-Men vs Street Fighters. I've always loved the X-Men better than almost all the other superheroes out there (with the exception of Spider-Man, who I grew to love from watching -the animated Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends television series, and Iron Man from Marvel video games). So, even though the Storm I love wasn't how I envisioned she would be, as portrayed by Halle Berry in the X-Men movie series (for some reason she has a tendency to use her powers only after she has been badly beaten up, which is utterly baffling) I still enjoyed the first two X-Men movies (as directed by Bryan Singer), X2 especially, and I was excited to see Singer return to helm X-Men: Days of Future Past so he can undo all the damage that Brett Ratner wreaked with his terrible X-Men: The Last Stand, a job which Matthew Vaughn had begun with his competently directed prequel X-Men: First Class.

And Singer delivers. While the movie was not as good as I had hoped it would be, what with the extremely high expectations I had that came from critics raving about the movie and it garnering a 91% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it still does a pretty decent job.

X-Men: Days of Future Past combines the cast of both the prequel and the original series, and the movie does necessitate that you have watched at least most of the previous films in order to be able to understand what is going on. The movie mostly takes place in the past, and the gist of the story has James McAvoy's Professor X and Michael Fassbender's Magneto fighting for the soul of Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique/Raven.

The entire cast and crew does a commendable job here, and while the huge cast of X-Men means that most of the characters apart from the main cast get rather short shrift here, Evan Peters as Quicksilver does steal the movie despite a rather small appearance. Hugh Jackman has never been better as the gruff Wolverine with his usual laconic humor present to alleviate all the tension and seriousness of the movie. Peter Dinklage does a decent job as antagonist Bolivar Trask, but I wished he and Lawrence actually had more to do with their characters, though it is a quite a thrill to actually hear Lawrence actually speaking Vietnamese in the movie at one point.

As the first movie to officially kick off the summer movie season, the movie is far superior to the other superhero movies that have been released this year, the rather bland Captain America: The First Winter Soldier and the amazingly tepid The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Although X-Men: Days of Future Past doesn't top the greatness that is X2, it is rather well worth watching. so I'd recommend going to see it on the big screen this summer.

4 out of 5 stars for me.

Ranking The X-Men Movies

1. X2



2. X-Men: Days of Future Past

3. X-Men: First Class



4. X-Men



5. The Wolverine



6. X-Men: The Last Stand



7. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Chef Review

It is a well-known fact that moviegoers can be a finicky bunch at times, and movie studios are forever in search of that holy grail of movie formula that will guarantee a box office success every time. What is supposed to be a sureproof move to reap in box office gold (Johnny Depp + Disney franchise = Pirates of the Caribbean-like box office plunder) can very easily end up as a bust (See: Disney's The Lone Ranger). What is supposed to look like business as usual can end up hitting the big jackpot in a huge and unexpected way. (See: Frozen and its billion-dollar plus worldwide gross)

I like to think that in the case of movies like Chef, we moviegoers can be easy to please as well. Give us good food, good music and a halfway-decent story, and we will walk out of the movie theater feeling so good that we are hard pressed to nitpick about a movie we know is clearly far from perfect. Instead we would be more than happy to spread positive word-of-mouth about it and encourage fellow movie lovers to go enjoy this cheerful flick, which can be a tremendous box office boost for an independently produced and distributed movie like Chef. (see The Blind Side and how positive word of mouth made it such a commercial success)

Like I said, the movie is hardly perfect. Some of the more clearly unrealistic parts of the movie include: a food critic who actually announces his visit to a restaurant he is planning to review (Most established food critics do not do that because they want to base their review an authentic dining experience instead of an experience especially catered to elicit a good review); Carl, as winningly played by Jon Favreau, actually having a rich ex-wife Inez, beautifully played by Sofia Vergara, who has a rich ex-husband Marvin, who, in a scene-stealing role by Robert Downey Jr, is available to help Carl out when things go south; A work colleague who is all too ready and willing to give up a job he just got promoted to in order to continue working with Carl; A hot sometime girlfriend for Carl in the shape of a sultry Scarlett Johannson who just seems to exist in the movie solely to slightly spice things up sexually and give Carl very life-affirming advice to pursue his dreams. All these hardly help the movie earn any real street food cred.

It is also not difficult to see how the food journey Carl goes through in the movie can very easily stand in for Favreau's real-life movie career in Hollywood. Favreau, having first successfully established himself in Hollywood with commercially and critically successfully movies such as Elf, Iron Man and Iron Man 2, failed with the critically panned and commercially unsuccessful Western-Science Fiction crossover Cowboys and Aliens. Now, having been slightly burned by Hollywood, Favreau is returning to his indie roots with Chef.

Chef does tread a rather well-worn and overly-familiar road in its storyline rather than try to be daring and break out of its well-established mold, which feels somewhat contradictory in a movie about a chef who doesn't want to keep on cooking the same creatively-unchallenging dishes and instead wants to keep things fresh by experimenting on something new and different.

However, there is real heart behind the movie, and the deliciously scrumptious and luscious scenes of food being lovingly cooked and eaten ("Food porn!" I whispered excitedly to my movie companion at one point in the movie, causing the lady beside me who overheard what I said to burst into laughter), all accompanied by catchy jazzy music, will make you happy enough to groove along for this food truck ride, no matter the slightly bumpy ride.

My verdict: Take a break from all those superhero movies you've been going to for the last month, and go see this charming little food comedy instead. It will cleanse your palate for the action-heavy summer movie schedule that is just a few school bell rings away.

4 out of 5 stars for me.