Well, I really wasn’t prepared for this movie to rip my heart out and leave me in tears at the end, but that’s exactly what it did. Excellent performances by the whole cast, including one of my favorite new actors after seeing him in “The Social Network”, Andrew Garfield as Tommy(who’s also slated to play the new Spiderman), Carey Mulligan as Cathy, also an exceptional actress, whom I loved in “An Education”, and Keira Knightly who turns in a great performance as Ruth.

This is a story of childhood friends set in Britain, who all are at a boarding school, presumably for orphans since there is never any mention of parents. It’s a tricky movie, because you would think a movie with such a futuristic concept would be set in the future, but it’s actually set in the 50′s or 60′s with the characters being young children at the outset.

The children, all strictly kept on the campus at the boarding school, grow to find out that they are simply going to grow up to be organ donors for people who can afford to buy them who are terminally ill.  While this is of course a huge moral issue, the movie never directly addresses how the abomination of humanity comes to be nor whether people are really protesting it.

At one point, the head school master tells Cathy that she wanted to see if the children “had souls” by looking at their artwork, and that is why they had a gallery for the children.  The children were “modeled” after real people, presumably cloned, for the specific purpose of being organ donors when older, until such a point when they “completed” or died.

It is simply a heart wrenching movie. SPOILER ALERT.  It’s not just a story about morality and the bizarre justification of harvesting organs from people who aren’t really allowed to live real lives on their own, from childhood to adulthood, it’s a love story as well.

The most emotional scene is when Cathy and Tommy go to see the gallery owner, who they think can offer these “pardons” for donors who are in love and can prove it. They find that the pardons are all myths though. That’s when the real drama begins, but it’s a real head scratcher to wonder why these kids didn’t just up and go – run away.

There was never any real reason for the audience to believe they would be in imminent danger if they just skipped the country and fled, nor any explanation as to why they didn’t choose this option. But that’s part of what makes this movie so great – they don’t assume anything.

My husband and I really enjoyed the first movie Paranormal Activity. It was a different take on a horror movie, relying more on imagination and eerie grainy footage of minor paranormal incidents than big special effects and in your face violence to really get the audience scared.

Of course, it isn’t a totally original idea. Earlier concepts that also made lots of money in the theaters on a tiny budget like Blair Witch Project and “Cloverfield” (JJ Abrams ambitious home video camera take on a creature taking over downtown Manhattan) paved the way for movies like Paranormal Activity.

But the scares and bumps in the night are very effective at revving up that most precious of human assets – our overactive imaginations and the thrill we get out of scaring ourselves. It truly is one of the most escapist forms of entertainment. It makes you feel lucky to be safe and in your warm home, even if your life is stressful in that moment.

Paranormal Activity 2 is actually technically a “prequel” to the first movie. It delves a little deeper into how this demon comes to haunt Katie and Micah, her ill fated boyfriend from the first movie, showing them in earlier happier times in footage taken by her sisters step daughter.

The main characters in this one though are a baby, an adorable little boy named Hunter, whom we find the demon is after because of a deal the great grandmother of the family made with the devil years ago (yeah, I told you it delves a little more into the reason behind the “paranormal activity” that terrorizes two families.

The second movie has plenty of jump in your seat moments, but it’s very slow to take off, putting a lot of filler footage in of the family being silly with eachother. I supposed it’s necessary though, to build a relationship with this family so you feel a bit of empathy for them when things really start to hit the fan.

Even though they seem nice enough, it’s hard to feel anything real for the family because they are so dumb about everything.  The mother of Hunter for instance, doesn’t tell anyone about her run ins with this demon and thinks that if she just ignores it, it will go away. The father totally denies that anything is wrong until he sees actual evidence of it on camera – and yet no one has the forethought to call in an expert, even at that point?

Even though parts of this movie are totally ridiculous, it’s very fun – and yes, you will jump in your seat several times, and you will have a few heart pounding moments of suspense!

I’m a huge Stephen King fan. I have been since I started to get interested in reading books when I was about twelve years old actually.  I’ve read almost everything by the prolific author, except for his Gunslinger series, which I’m not sure is quite for me, but I’m sure once I run out of new books to read by him, I’ll go backwards and start  those.

King has put out some good collections of short stories lately, or novellas. His latest collection, Full Dark, No Stars, is definitely one of his better collections. Perhaps it’s that a lot of the significance of these stories is of modern importance, or reminded me of past news stories, or perhaps it’s the very human, normal touch he put on them.

As he says, he find ordinary lives very interesting to write about, and he made these normal people extremely riveting to read about. The first one is about a farmer, set in the pre depression era of the 1920′s.  The farmer’s name is Wilf, and he has been having some bad thoughts about killing his wife.

He doesn’t hate his wife, but he resents her for making him sell their home after a large commercial farmer has offered them a lot of money for their acreage. Sealing his spot in hell, he enlists the help of his young son, only 15 years old, preying on his hesitance to leave their farm and their life – and his young girlfriend, as a good reason to help him do the dirty deed.

This story is definitely hard to read in parts. It tells the story of a murder in gruesome, too-real detail, and it also goes into detail about the hurt, pain and suffering that their evil deed does in the aftermath. An excellent story that will unfortunately leave you with a heavy heart and questioning why you started to feel sorry for this cold blooded murderer.

The first story is the longest.

The second story is about a brutal rape, and how a woman, who is single and an author or old lady murder mysteries, seeks her revenge on her rapist and the ensuing story of redemption and moral ambiguity of an eye for an eye. Also an excellent, absorbing story.

The fourth story, the shortest by far, is engrossing as well, and a very quick read. It’s about something that we all deal with – envy and jealousy – even of the friends we may hold dearest, and the darkest thoughts that accompany such counterproductive emotions of the human sort.

It’s about a man who lives a modest life as a banker who finds out that he has terminal cancer. He questions the fairness of it, and upon chance one day comes across a pudgy man who happens to be a demon or a wish granter of some sort who simply wants money in return for granting him a “Fair Extension” on his life (incidentally this is the title of the story as well).

Not believing it is true, he takes the man up on his offer, and is ok with the fact that in exchange for his good luck, he must stick it to someone he hates, who happens to be his best friend who is rich and has everything he wanted in life.

The fourth story, and my favorite by far, because I couldn’t wait to read the rest of it and got mad when I actually got so tired I couldn’t go on reading, was “A Good Marriage”.  I don’t want to ruin this one at all for anyone. It’s about being married to someone for a long time, and how you can never truly know anyone.

It’s excellent – very engrossing, and probably one of my favorite short story by King.

So, my husband and I became instant HUGE fans of the cult hit show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia when we started watching it just a few months ago. We finished all 5 seasons in a very short time, and I was having really bad withdrawal already when we noticed that there was a special made, a 45 minute long Christmas special titled “A Very Sunny Christmas”.

It did not disappoint, although there were a few lulls and eyebrow raisers, there were two outrageously funny scenes where we were literally holding our side from laughing so hard.  One involved Charlie and a mall Santa Claus, and the other involves Frank, played by Danny DeVito (who I’ve grown to love on the show, although at first I wasn’t too sure) and a couch at a company Christmas party.

The special finds the gang around Christmas time. And they are surprisingly into the season, of course for all the wrong reasons. Charlie and Mac have their own story line, while Sweet Dee and Dennis have their own story line. Charlie and Mac realize that the Christmas traditions they had grown up with were totally unorthodox, and Dennis and Dee try to reform their father (or is he their father), Frank.

Frank has, for years, gotten the gifts that Dennis and Dee have pined after much of their lives – but only he got it for himself, and he would parade it in front of them because he was such a great father.  The show has some pretty hilarious flashbacks to the character’s childhoods, but the best ones are the flashbacks of a mini Charlie (who I think is the funniest character on the show) and Mac.

Of course, through a series of mishaps and erroneous judgment, which is par for the course for the “gang”, they end up doing Charlie and Mac’s usual holiday tradition at the end, which is throwing rocks at trains on Christmas day.

If you’re a fan of the show, you gotta get this one, it’s worth it. If only for the two hilarious drop dead scenes, you won’t be forgetting about this one soon.

So, I finally got to see the movie that I’ve been anxiously awaiting to see since it got all sorts of attention and Golden Globes and Oscar buzz, “The Social Network”.

It’s the movie about Facebook, the mega media giant and social networking wonder, which burst onto the scene after a nerdy Harvard student created the code for sharing of profiles and all sorts of other neato stuff – basically laying the foundation of complex code in one day.

What we didn’t really know much about what that Mark Zuckerberg, the now billionaire (actually the youngest billionaire now), had so many legal troubles and seemingly a few people very p.o.’d at him over his handling of the company’s divying of profits and ownership.

What I also didn’t know was that Sean Parker, the whiz kid who made headlines allover the world when he founded Napster, the music file sharing internet service that had musicians up in arms about their music being freely shared throughout the world, and ultimately ended up being shut down and monetized, had any part whatsoever in the creation of what Facebook is today.

Apparently he doesn’t really feel the movie accurately depicts his stake in the company, nor of his poor treatment of Eduardo Saferin, who used to be Mark Zuckerberg’s best friend but ended up suing him.

The film was brilliantly done, since you don’t really know who’s suing who or what’s going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds, and as we get interjections of the back story and flash forwards to the present day when  Zuckerberg was involved in several lawsuits over rights to the company and creative disputes, it flies by quickly.

That’s when you know a movie is really solid, you look up and think you’ve been watching it for fifteen minutes, and it’s suddenly an hour in.

Even Timberlake as Sean Parker does a great job, he seems totally unaffected in his portrayal of Parker, which is refreshing considering he’s a pop star.  Jesse Eisenberg is good, but other character steal the show in my opinion.  The British actor who plays his best friend, Eduardo, for example is head and shoulders above some of the others, and he’s just great to watch.

You really end up liking his character, and feel terrible about what happened to his and Zuckerberg’s friendship in the end when he was squeezed out of the ownership of the company after unknowingly signing away his rights.

I can see why Mark Z. has a problem with how this movie depicts him. It does seem one sided, and it is, in many ways, a work of fiction.  It’s interesting that he’s noted as not caring about money in the movie, but in the end, the whole thing is all about money.

Definitely a thought provoking movie that will have you googling the real life characters that night when you see it dig in a little more to the real story.