A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

The Messengers is a horror movie that stars Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, and John Corbett. The movie tells the story of Jess and her family who have moved from the big city to basically the middle of nowhere so that her father can try to make a go of a sunflower farm (yes, you read that right--a sunflower farm!). It is the new start that the family apparently so desperately needs. Before long Jess and her younger brother discover that the farmhouse is haunted with scary ghosts who may or may not wish the family harm. I'm not really sure where to start with this movie. The film makes it obvious that Jess and her family share a troubled history that has created thick tension among its members. The nature of this history and the subsequent tension is alluded to and eventually explained towards the end of the film. However, the vibe that the family gives off on screen is that it's a blended family. For example, the tension between Jess and her mother seem...

Lady In The Water is the most recent film by director M. Night Shyamalan. It stars Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard. When this movie hit theaters, critics and reviewers were quick to pan it, and it was not a success at the box office. Honestly, I don't understand what all the ill will toward the movie was about. I enjoyed the movie--it pulls the viewer in to the story and doesn't let go until the end. The movie is based on a bedtime story the director told his children and the movie itself feels like a bedtime story with its weird creatures, fantastical journey and archetypal characters. The odd camera angles and scene compositions add to the strangeness and mystery of the story in which the superintendent of an apartment building finds a sea nymph living in his building's pool. He is forced to band together with an unlikely group of tenants to protect this sea nympth from sinisterly scary creatures and help her find her way home. However, he must first find the right ...

There's a "tag game" making the rounds on YouTube in which someone tags you at the end of thier video of Five Facts, and then it is your turn to share five fun facts about yourself and then tag five more people. We were tagged by a subscriber in Britain last week, and we have finally uploaded our video entitled "Tagged--But Now You're "It"!". We are sharing some fun facts about the library that you probably have not heard before and at the end we are tagging some people from our subscription list. It was a fun video to make, and it is probably my favorite video so far. I hope you'll check it out, and maybe even check out some other videos from the tag game. You can view our video here or at http://youtube.com/matthewslibrary . We hope you enjoy "Tagged--But Now You're 'It'!"

I will tell you a story that is all of those things, a story of magic and love, of daring and death, and one to comfort your heart. It will be the truest story I have ever told. Now listen, and tell me if it is not so. I was sixteen years old the day I was lost in the forest, sixteen the day I met my death. --from pages 9 and 10, Keturah and Lord Death Oh, the books I've been reading lately. They are sad, sad, tragic tales that make my heart hurt... but they are written so beautifully, and it is often stories such as these that stay with me long after I've read the last page. I am referring to the previously reviewed Any Bitter Thing and the currenly reviewed Keturah and Lord Death , both of which I read over the past four days. This books tells the (fairy) tale of Keturah, who is herself a skilled tale teller. Keturah repeatedly bargains for her life and the lives of those she loves with Lord Death by charming him with her gift for storytelling. She wins a twenty four hour r...

I land directly on the yellow line--lined up neatly, head to toe--and rattle loose. The road feels forgiving and cool. Something breaks inside me, not only bones. I am thirty years old, with a husband and a good job and a best friend and students who need me and a hole in my life that I fall straight through. Impossibly, I hear it all. The fading trail of the escaping Neon. The silence of my body laid upon the yellow stripe, waiting not to be revived but resurrected. Prone, waiting, in the middle of the road. The panicked engine sound weakens with distance, and I wait. --from page 10, Any Bitter Thing, large print edition Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood is as heart breaking and tragic as it is beautiful. All of these things magnified by the beauty of the author's poetic writing as she tells the story of Lizzy Mitchell and her fractured childhood, past and family. Lizzy's parents die when she is young, leaving her in the care of her uncle, a priest for a small Maine parish. Sh...

John Tucker Must Die stars Jesse Metcalfe, Brittany Snow, Ashanti, Sophia Bush, and Arielle Kebbel. Although this movie can easily be classified and dismissed as a "teen comedy movie," one shouldn't write it off solely for this reason because the movie lives up to being as funny as its previews suggest. John Tucker is the star of the basketball team, and, as a result, he can date any girl in the school. Frequently he does so and often dates more than one girl at the same time. The girls he dates have no idea that he's dating them simultaneously. This continues until three of the girls meet up and put the pieces together. A fourth girl joins their group (who has not previously dated John Tucker) and gives them the idea to take out their rage on John Tucker instead of each other. John Tucker has no idea he has these four girls setting him to take a big fall. Hilarity and hi-jinks ensue throughout the movie as the girls try and fail a number of times to take John Tucker...

The movie is called Pulse . Now that I think about it, I'm not really sure why it was titled this, but there it is. It stars Kristen Bell (of Veronica Mars fame) and Ian Somerhalder (of Lost fame). According to the DVD box, the dead have found a way to communicate with the living through electronics like computers, cell phones, etc. They can use this technology to reach out and touch the living and this is not a good thing. However, the movie itself never fully explains that the scary, gray beings who "come through" are dead people who just want to live again (as proclaimed by a preview); the characters in the movie only refer to these beings as "they" or "them." Ultimately the film runs in a unexpected direction in that by the end of the movie, the scale of the impact of the dead taking over the airwaves is much more global than originally predicted. In some ways Pulse reminds me of zombie movies, which is, again, not what I anticipated. Fi...