I have some thoughts on the following pieces of entertainment. Enjoy:

Batman Begins This movie turned out to be surprisingly good! Once I got over my thinking, “That could never happen!” and started to remember that this is a comic book character, then I was able to enjoy it more. Good storyline. Pretty good acting. Katie Holmes is a cutie but the girl can’t really act, IMO.

The Wedding Date So cute. Characters are just barely one dimensional (most are maybe 3/4-dimensional!) but cute and to the point. Sorta predictable from the get-go but it’s cute how it comes about. Very funny at times too.

The Last Temptation of Christ You’re probably wondering what a witchy pagan such as myself is doing watching religious movies such as this one. Well, I’ll tell ya…in my Western Civ class, we are to review three historically-based movies from a long list of suggestions this semester. On said list is this movie and I wasn’t going to rent and watch it until last week my instructor played a bit of it for us (when Saul is preaching to a crowd and Jesus comes up and challenges him and says, “Hey, I’m just a man. Leave me be!” and Saul says, “Yah but I’m giving these people hope and something to believe in!”). It sparked my interest. So Honey and I watched it last night.
Now, this is a Scorsese film so it’s full of long, drawn-out dramatic bits and pieces. It’s not a historical account of Jesus’ life, rather, it’s a representation of the universal spiritual struggle. Personally, I’d like to see a more historical film about the life of Jesus (since I don’t know my Bible very well and I’m not inclined to sit down and read it). But this was pretty good. Music score is done by Peter Gabriel so that’s pretty sweet. David Bowie plays Pilot (sp?), Harvey Kietel plays Judas and William Dafoe is Jesus. Quite good, though confusing at times.

Until I Find You by John Irving What a horrible book! I had to skim the last 100 pages just to end the torture. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a HUGE fan of John Irving’s novels. One of my favorite books of all time is A Prayer for Owen Meany. But this one is so predictable it’s not even FUN to read! If you’ve read any of Irving’s previous books, you know he has certain images that frequent his pages. We’ve come to expect that. This book is FILLED with all of these images…so much so that I often thought it was a conglomeration of Owen Meany, Cider House Rules, World According to Garp and Hotel New Hampshire. If you’ve read some of Irving’s other novels, skip this one because you’ve read it all before. If you’re not a reader of Irving yet and you want to start, DO NOT START WITH THIS ONE!!! PLEASE! Do yourself a favor and start with Owen Meany or Garp. This is supposedly semi-autobiographical but, personally, I would have preferred it if he had just plain published an autobiography so we could read it and say, “OOOhhh now I get why these images keep showing up in his fictional novels!” Big disappointment.

Okay, I just started YaYas in Bloom. So far it’s cute. The new Tom Robbins book is currently on hold for me at the library. Hopefully I’ll get to start it before we leave for Vegas on Thursday.

We’ve been making mad amounts of beer lately. Go to Honey’s site to see a picture I took of the fermenting stage of our brew house!