Sarah Gone Wild

Archive for November, 2008

So, I saw Twilight again on Saturday. It didn’t help that I was in the process of getting sick again, but I have to say…I liked the movie far less the second time around. The initial thrill of waiting in line at the midnight showing was gone and I knew what would be different, so I had more time to examine the details.

The one thing I absolutely adore about the movie is the soundtrack - it’s phenomenal. The lullaby is amazing, and I loved how they tied it in throughout the movie. And how hot is Rob playing the piano? Definitely still swooned over that.

The things that bothered me more – the poor direction given at key points in the story. Edward had a definite reaction to Bella’s smell, but the movie did it all wrong – it should NOT have been funny. It should have been more intense, less overacted. I would blame Rob, but as you watch the movie, you can see how strong his acting can be, so I blame the director. She should have known it was going to come off as cheesy. Jasper should not have looked so stunned throughout the movie. Basically, I think the actors were too reliant on their eyes to convey emotions. It should have been more subtle – it would have eliminated the multiple scenes where facial expressions inspired laughter in the audience.

I didn’t like the early introduction of Jacob and the fact that he didn’t break the treaty. How hard would it have been to follow that part of the story? I guess harder than I thought or it would have been done.

Prom also bugged the hell out of me – WTF? Where was the part with Alice getting her ready? They cut way too much Alice out – that’s my favorite person! And what was that horrific ensemble they put her in? Leggings and a tennis shoe????? The cardigan? Who does that? Ick. All wrong.

I didn’t like how the restaurant was crowded, and the waitress was NOT pretty. What was with her hair? So weird. And why wasn’t Angela nicer? And where was Ben? Again, probably cut for length, but still. And where did that whole newspaper thing come from? No need to add superfluous storylines if you’re going to cut other things!!! And the spider monkey line had me laughing like crazy, but it was totally out of character. I will come at you like a spider monkey! I’m all hopped up on Mountain Dew!

I think, if you hadn’t read the book, you wouldn’t grasp the depth of the love story. It seemed very rushed. I think they could have easily added 20 minutes to the movie (leaving it at a full 2.5 hours long) and gotten a lot more impact. The casting is great (when Jasper isn’t channeling Johnny Depp, he’s totally hot), with a few exceptions, but you can’t please everyone. It’s extremely hard to make a movie out of a beloved book series (don’t even get me started on the Harry Potter reviews), and I think this was an adequate attempt, but if there could be a change in screenwriter, better direction and more budget, it would have been much better. Let’s hope the next three improve drastically!

But at the end of the day, who am I kidding? The hotness alone justifies seeing it 2 or 3 more times and then buying it on DVD. Sorry, Mr. T!

And the new HP is out in July! Woohoo!

…when you are looking at this???? My pal Claire sent me this and I can’t stop watching. 22,662 other viewers agree. It’s mind numbing adorableness at its finest.

Enjoy. Bring on the baby talk, I’ve been doing it all day.

I got about 3.5 hours of sleep last night because I went to the midnight showing of Twilight with my sister. The Harry Potter trailer at the beginning was enough to justify it alone, but I can’t get over how amazing Rob Pattinson looked in this movie. He’s generally hotness anyway, but the makeup and styling in the movie just made him that much more dreamy.

The movie itself, however, was disappointing. Sure, I’ll see it again Saturday and probably a few times after that, and I’ll buy it on DVD, but that’s more a testament to the story than the actual movie. I know lots of people will be seeing the movie so I won’t say anything too specific, but if you’ve read the MSN review of the movie, suffice it say that I agree with the entire article. And it pissed me off that the kitchen cabinets were light blue, not yellow at all. I mean, that was a detail that was carefully written in the book – how hard would it have been to keep that consistent? Little things like that aggravated me to no end.

I will also say this – pay attention to Jasper (what little footage of him there is, anyway). I watched the entire movie wondering what character he reminded me of so strongly. At the end of the movie, it hit me - Edward Scissorhands. Seriously, he was channeling Johnny Depp like nobody’s business.

It annoyed me how inadvertantly funny a lot of scenes were, but conversely, I enjoyed the humor that was intentionally added. I do admit that Stewart really was a good pick for Bella. Some of her scenes were definitely overacted, but in a teen movie, what more should you expect? Overall, for a 2 hour adaptation of a 600+ page book, the storyline didn’t change too terribly much. Sure, a lot of it felt rushed, but that’s to be expected. I didn’t like the way Angela was depicted, and I’m guessing Ben has been cut out entirely, so that was disappointing. I think more of the original dialogue from the book could have been maintained, but those who see the movie without reading the book obssessively won’t even notice.

Bottom line, for all intents and purposes, it was an entertaining movie (I’m still swooning over Rob playing the piano and hearing his songs in the background). Movie versions of books never fully do justice to the books themselves, so take it as what it is. The book (as always) was a million times better, but having two hours filled with Edward, Emmett, Jasper and James (evil can be so delicious) is definitely worthwhile.

Let’s take a journey, my friends, into the land of WhothoughtthatwasagoodideabecauseboydoIhavenewsforyou.

I work in advertising. Our agency does a lot of interactive work. We have a partner agency in another state with whom we interact on a daily basis, through email, phone calls and file transfers. We are in a new office. We recently had phones installed. Not regular phones. Oh, no. VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) phones. Yes, phones that use the power of the interwebs…meaning that, when something is being downloaded or uploaded, the phones drop calls due to bandwidth limitations that apparently cannot be fixed.

I reiterate – our day-to-day tasks rely on being able to TALK ON THE PHONE AND TRANSFER FILES…AT THE SAME TIME…but we can’t because those two key functions disrupt each other. Not to mention, no streaming music or video…nice.

Oh, how I envy those who live in a magical place where phone and Internet work simultaneously. I just don’t know what some people are thinking when they make recommendations.

In case that wasn’t obvious enough…I’m feeling extremely stabby today.

I don’t know how many more days I can handle spending 8+ hours with people who belittle my intelligence and underestimate my capabilities. And who talk so loudly that I feel the need to wear headphones all day.

For future reference, I am not an idiot. I didn’t buy my MBA, I earned it. I wrote business plans. I aced finance classes. I understand how a business is supposed to work…and this is not it. Not even close. Thank god it’s Wednesday. Ultimate Fighter 8.

Yes, the holidays are coming. I get it. Enough already. It was bad enough that a local station converted to all Christmas, all the time – before Halloween. Sure, it was because they needed a hook to get listeners while they worked on reformatting the station to a full sports format, but still.

Then, each year, stores put Christmas crap out earlier and earlier. I don’t want to dress up like Santa for Halloween, okay? I don’t want to see festive ribbon before I see skulls and blood. I don’t want Hannukah back-to-school items. I don’t even want to think about the impending doom that is holiday shopping until my belly is full of turkey and pie.

Even worse, I do NOT need ABC Family to countdown until the 25 days of Chrismas. First of all, now it’s 25 days??? What happened to 12??? That was good enough. Second, A COUNTDOWN TO A COUNTDOWN???? Who decided that was even NECESSARY? Talk about redundancy.

As you can tell, I am not a fan of Christmas. I’m a scrooge. I do enjoy buying gifts for people, but I’m not rich and can never afford anything really great, so that bothers the hell out of me. Sure, I like getting gifts, but I hate people feeling obligated to do anything, I hate opening gifts in front of others and I hate thinking that people spent money that they needed for bills on something for me. Unnecessary, in my opinion. I do like holiday baking and spending time with my immediate family, but nothing else about the holidays really appeals to me. I come from a divorced family, and once you add in my married family, holidays become way more stress than I care to handle. I can’t be 5 places at once. If you didn’t raise me or my husband, don’t bank on seeing me.

Not to mention the added gloom of this being my first holiday without either of my grandmothers…I don’t even want to think about how sad it’s going to be.

So a note to all you die-hard Christmas fans – give me another week and a half and THEN I’ll begrudgingly accept your annoyingly joyful celebration. Until then, back off. Bah humbug.

I posted last night about the work situation, and about an hour after I got home, my phone rang. It was LL from the office, calling to tell me to wear crappy clothes because today is supposedly MOVING DAY!!! If all goes as planned, in a few short hours, I will be hauling all my crap (I literally have a toy box…it’s bigger than the box of work related crap) to a new office space on Delmar. Sweet! I’ll be even closer to my house and only blocks off the main stretch of the Loop. Maybe things will finally regain some sense of normalcy.

Yay for wearing sweats to work and yay for finally moving! This is the perfect excuse to bake a cake tonight. Sweet. Now, off to a meeting.

I just want to do my job. I want to write. I want to produce good work. And I want to maintain my sanity in the process. But no, that’s asking for way too much.

First, the layoff. I was lucky enough to be fired one day and hired the next, and the transition didn’t really affect my actual work very much. At the time. Then, after we were promised that our health insurance wouldn’t lapse, the policy was cancelled. Right when I got sick. And needed a refill. Suck. Then everything just went to hell. I can hardly focus, I question my work, I have no idea what my role is any more or if I’ll have a job the next day and it depresses the hell out of me. The economy sucks, the job market sucks worse and I actually like what I do, so I really want the company I’m with now to be successful. But I need to be 100% away from the old job, which is not my reality as I type.

Mr. T wants me to come play pool with him and a buddy tonight, but I think he needs a guy night. And I need to spend some time with Edward and Bella. *sigh*

Just as long as you want me to be.

 Call me lame, I totally don’t care. Last night was amazing. Totally cheesy, but amazing. First of all, Natasha Bedingfield was awesome. She’s really talented (guess it runs in the family) and completely adorable. She was a great opener, although I would have LOVED to see me some Vanilla Ice. Too much in one night, I suspect.

It took FOREVER for the main show to begin. BUT…since our tickets were in section 301, we got upgraded and ended up sitting in the second row up from the main floor, so we were really excited. Thanks for having an anniversary, Lynn, and selling me your tickets!!! We were wondering what they’d open with. My guess was they’d amp up the crowd with the first line of Step by Step and then immediately transition into one of their new songs (which I don’t like at all…the new stuff just doesn’t have the same memories tied to it and it just doesn’t do anything for me). But alas, they didn’t even start with a good teaser…just busted in with Boyfriend or whatever the crap that song is…I mean, there was a cool video intro with some video from them back in the day, but music wise, I was disappointed.

But overall, the show was just fantastic. They did a great job of mixing the new stuff in with the old (they even let Jordan and Joey do their solo hits, although I could have lived without that). But the BEST part of the whole night was when the guys moved down to a rotating stage with a piano on it…literally 30 yards away from us. I could see all their sad little wrinkles.

I had a revelation as well. I always said Danny was my favorite, and mostly because I felt bad that everyone loved all the other guys so much and called him a monkey. So I figured he needed to have at least one fan, so I stepped up and took on that role. I wish I had my giant I Heart Danny pin…although, now that I’m older, I Heart Wood would be much funnier. But here’s the revelation…by choosing Danny as my favorite (and it was a big deal, all the discussions we had about it, sheesh), I was setting the groundwork for my “type.” Not the type I actually dated, but the type I swooned over for the rest of my life. Big biceps, tattoos, sweet smile. Ahhhhhh. A said last night that he’s a butterface (butthis face?), but I disagree. He’s got the right stuff. Baby.

I’m sad it’s over. It was so fun…although we were wondering how many times Jordan had to be kicked in the balls to maintain that falsetto. It was cute 20 years ago, but now it’s just a little creepy. Even Joey can’t sing as high as he used to. Oh well…further proof that Jordan is a giant douche. Even douchier than John Edward.

Bottom line, I recommend not calling me today unless you want to be serenaded with NKOTB songs by a girl who barely has a voice left from screaming like crazy all night. Just get on the floor and do the New Kids dance!

Oh oh oh oh. Oh oh oh oh oh. The right stuff.

Tonight is the NKOTB concert. If you need me, I’ll be busy hangin’ tough.

We’re rough.