So my hubby and I just finished watching the second installment of the incredibly popular, albeit late comer (the books were hot sellers 6 years after the death of the author Stieg Larsson, a Swedish man who wrote the long winded books about the heroine Lisbeth Salander), tonight, and although I enjoyed the second installment, I didn’t think it quite lived up to the uniqueness and excitement of the first book “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”.

The second movie, which is a subtitled version of the second book, again stars the two talented actors Mikhael Nyvquist as Mikael Blomquist, the journalist, and Noomi Rapace as the heroine herself Lisbeth Salander.  Salander is a bisexual, mysterious and mischievous tech wizard who also happens to have a very checkered past, which we learn a lot more about in this second movie.

SPOILER ALERT : We find out that her father is a sicko that she doused with lighter fluid and set on fire when she was but a child for beating her mother in to an unconscious state and forever sending her to an institution to live.  We also find that Lisbeth has a half brother, a giant blonde freak of a man who happens to have a rare disorder where he cannot feel pain.

The plot in the second one gets a little fuzzy and starts to have a little too many characters to care about and to follow who they are and what their story is, especially considering it is in subtitles and you have to concentrate a bit harder to begin with to follow that plot.

In it, we see that Mikhael has a genuine care and trust in Lisbeth’s character, especially when we see him start to view the infamous tape she had of her brutal rape at the hands of her caretaker.  I’m not sure if they are quite a “love” story per se, but it’s almost a fatherly sort of protective factor that he seems to feel toward her character, even though obviously they’ve also had intimacy as well.

The relationship between those two is still compelling, and I think that is part of what makes this series of movies (and books) so entertaining and compelling to people. The two of them literally only had a few minutes of screen time together, and yet you still were anxiously awaiting their reunion for some reason, so obviously their story has connected with the audience on some level.

I liked this movie, but I wouldn’t say that I liked it as much as the first. I’m hoping the third, which I believe comes out on DVD this week, is better. I’m definitely watching it, so that says something!

So I just finished the second season of Son’s of Anarchy, the FX show about an outlaw motorcycle club with some of the most charismatic characters since the Sopranos.

The cast is rounded out by a robust group of talented and largely unknown actors (until now), including the excellent, awe inspiring Charlie Hunnam, who’s actually an Aussie playing a roughneck biker with a tender heart and very complicated emotions (yeah ladies, he’s also hopelessly hot, to boot) who is trying to change the direction of the club to a more nonviolent agenda and is having little luck succeeding with his step father Clay (played by the also awesome Ron Perlman).

This season really focuses on the power struggle between Jacks and Clay, stepson and stepfather, and the rest of the gang’s struggle to pick sides and see how they feel about the whole violence aspect to begin with.

Katy Sagal is one of the best parts of this show.  She plays the tough, but sometimes tender, matriarch of the Sons motorcycle club, at first telling Clay to steer her son Jacks back into the fold of violence and corruption, then seeming to soften after she is brutally gang raped by a rival group of white supremacists who enter into the fold of seeminess and threaten to upset the tranquility and absence of drugs and prostitution in Charming – the Northern California town where the Sons reside, and which they love and will protect at any price.

At times this show can seem like a glorified, more gritty (and much better acted) soap opera because there are so many things and so much drama going on at once. But you know they do it well when you are waiting for the next episode with baited breath and rooting for the sometimes bad, sometimes good guys in the Sons club.

This show has a little bit for everyone.  It’s got eye candy for the ladies and the guys, a lot of action, a lot of violence, drama, heartfelt moments and a great soundtrack that may or may not get you a bit choked up at times, and top notch acting from a cast of great talent.

The writing is great too, it’s never too much and the dialogue is intelligent, instead of being ridiculous drivel like you see on so many other tv shows today. This show doesn’t feel like it’s an insult to your intelligence. Instead, it offers an intelligent, addictive alternative to other network tv shows.

There’s a reason why this show is critically acclaimed – I highly recommend picking this one up and trying it out if you haven’t already.

So, my husband and I now have a new reality show that I would definitely put in the realm of “guilty pleasure”.   It’s one on TruTV – if that doesn’t give away that it should be guilty pleasure/waste of time, then I don’t know what is.  It’s a show called “Hard Core Pawn” – obviously a take off on another hardcore phrase to get your attention.

As if they need to do anything else to get your attention than show clips of people acting fools and the often times sad desperation that hard economic times cause in people who are willing to sell just about anything when they really need money to eat or get gas for their car.

This show actually has a few effects on me. First, it’s wildly entertaining because the owners of the shop, a family headed by the father, Les Gold, and his son and daughter Seth and Ashley (who are always at eachother’s throats, which is very entertaining to watch, who doesn’t love to watch sibs fight?).

The show centers around a long-time jewlry store and pawn shop that is HUGE in Detroit called American Jewlery and Loan. The pawn shop has been a great success over the years, thanks to the masterful bartering skills and magnetic personality of it’s own, Les Gold.

While the show is wildly entertaining and the 25 minutes or so of air time literally flies by, there are some occasions where it’s just plain sad to see some of the hard up people who’ve been laid off from jobs and have fallen on hard times have to give up things they love to get money to pay the rent and other living expenses.

This show makes you really count your lucky stars if you have anything at all of value, or if you’re just comfortable and have a job still.   But it also makes you realize that you should never forget what you have and never lust after what you don’t when you see how so many people are struggling in this world today.

There are a fair share of certifiably insane people that visit the store, which is excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch, and makes it an even guiltier pleasure because you know it’s total exploitation, but it’s like a train wreck, you want to stop, but you just can’t stop looking.

Overall, Hard Core Pawn is one of the most entertaining, quickie reality shows I’ve ever seen – it’s addictive!

So my hubby and I finally sat down and watched the Russell Brand and Jona Hill movie “Get Him to the Greek” this weekend.  While this movie started off with a lot of promise with Brand’s believable screwed up rock start persona.  He plays a sort of washed up rock star who once enjoyed the hard partying ways his lifestyle afforded him.

Brand definitely excels at this type of character. For people who’ve seen “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, he’s the same rock star guy in that movie, Aldous Snow, just carried over into his own standalone movie.  Sadly, he and Jona Hill cannot totally carry this movie and somewhere in the first half this movie lost it’s comedy.

P Diddy certainly didn’t help, with his awkward comedic performance and terrible comic timing in this movie. Every time he was on screen, he actually took us out of the movie a little bit, and we couldn’t understand why the producers left all of his nonfunny scenes in. They were just forced, and clearly comedy acting is just not Diddy’s forte.

The movie definitely has a great opening sequence, a montage of the various exploits of Snow’s once very famous and wild lifestyle, chronicling his rise and fall, along side his shallow, celebutante cohort and father of his only child, Jackie Q.

I actually had no idea who the actress was although she’s in another show I’ve watched two seasons of – her British accent was spot on, even though she’s actually Australian, and her comic timing was also dead on, which means she’s definitely diverse because she usually plays dramatic roles like she has in Damages and 28 Weeks Later.

Jona Hill is funny as the sidekick guy in all the Judd Apatow movies he’s been in as of late, but he unfortunately just can’t carry a whole movie by himself.  This was really on Brand and Hill’s shoulders, and unfortunately in the end, they just couldn’t be funny all the way through.

Sure, there were funny moments, but they dried up about half way through and we actually gave up on the movie about this time, as we traditionally do since we promised ourselves we wouldn’t waste time on movies that we didn’t find really good any more.  I guess one too many a wasted nights on bad TV will do that to you!

I wish I could give this a better review, and if Diddy wasn’t in it, and the last half was as funny as the first, then this movie would have been much funnier.

I usually like Will Ferrell. And I usually like Mark Wahlberg – when he’s doing dramatic roles.  But these two together, in a comedy, is basically poison.  This movie was painful to watch.  The comedic timing was terrible for both actors.

Mark Wahlberg I can understand, he’s primarily a dramatic actor these days, and he excels at it.  But Will Ferrell was just baffling in this movie.

An awful script certainly did not help. There was one scene in particular which stands out as one of the  most painful.  Ferrell’s character gives Wahlberg’s a gift.

Oh, by the way, they hate eachother, just so you know, as is evidenced by their painfully awkward and contrived conversations with one another (if you see this movie after this review, remember a conversation about a lion and a tuna, oy).

The gift he gives him is a coffee mug that says FBI, then below it says Female Body Inspector. Ferrell then launches into a diatribe about why exactly the mug is so ironic and funny. It’s seriously one of the worst scenes I’ve ever seen in a comedy.

My husband and I kept looking at eachother through the first half hour of the monstrosity with questioning looks on our faces, like should we be laughing at this?

We ended up turning off the movie about 30-40 minutes in because it was that bad.

I’m pretty sure this movie got bad reviews in general, but it was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a while.  Not only was the script terrible and ridiculous, but the acting and timing were just awful.  I really don’t have anything good to say about this one….

Hey guys, just wanted to wish you a wonderful and happy new year. It’s a time to start fresh, to think about what goals we want to accomplish, and to reflect on this past year and how we’d like to improve ourselves and/or our situations in the new year.

In short, it’s a time of great promise, and we wanted to wish you a wonderful New Year.

So relax before you have to go back to work, and let’s make it a great
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!