Movie Night

At my house Sunday's are movie night. Sometimes life gets in the way but not often. We usually make a nice dinner of comfort food while watching sports...football, NASCAR, golf, basketball...whatever happens to be on that day. Yep I watched the final Elite Eight Round. Got totally wrapped up in the action, missed the final round of the Arnold Palmer tournament and Tiger started the day with a one stroke lead, missed the race. And started cooking later than usual.  And I'm not even that big of a basketball fan. However, this year I was drawn in by the excitement. Since I got a late start on the cooking I decided to go with something quick and easy. I cooked some breakfast food for dinner, scrambled eggs, fried taters and ham steaks! Hubby went and rented some movies. Sometimes when he comes home its a crap shoot as to the quality of movies...but last night... I loved two of the movies and now have to add them to my reading list!

Started the night with: Tomorrow, When the War Began, followed by Tooth Fairy 2, and ended with drum roll please, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo!

I'll start with my least favorite of the night. Tooth Fairy 2. In my opinion it was cute, a little funny, but not the typical Larry the Cable Guy movie. On the other hand it is definitely a kids movie, so keep that in mind. And if I was a kid in the targeted age group I would have loved it. And probably would have liked it better if we had watched it before the other two. Because yes I'm guilty of liking to watch kids movies! Come on who doesn't love Nemo or the Chronicles of Narnia!

Now on to the next...the first movie of the night was Tomorrow, When the War Began. When the hubby came home with this movie I had never heard of it. Didn't know what to expect. Well...I loved this movie from the get go! Yes it is a YA movie, and targeted to that age group. But still it was action packed and in my opinion had just the right amount social interaction. It reminded me of Red Dawn with a modern spin and it takes place in Australia rather than the USA.  In my opinion, at the time Red Dawn came out it seemed to be targeted towards the male teenager. I feel that this movie will appeal to both genders of the teenage crowd and to adults that like that sort of thing. I liked this movie enough that when the ending seemed to leave you hanging a bit I looked it up. And what did I find? Of course this movie came from a book, and it is a whole series.  The series consists of seven books authored by John Marsden known as The Tomorrow Series. And there is a sequel series of three more books know as the Ellie Chronicles by the same author. Both series are written in the first person perspective of Ellie Linton, a teenage girl, who is part of a small band of teenagers waging a war on the enemy soldiers in the region around their fictional home town of Wirrawee.
I can't wait to add all of these books to my reading list.

List of books in the series.

.Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993)
.The Dead of Night (1994)
.Third Day, The Frost (1995) (published in America as "A Killing Frost")
.Darkness, be my Friend (1996)
.Burning for Revenge (1997)
.The Night is for Hunting (1998)
.The Other Side of Dawn (1999)

The Ellie Chronicles:
Following on from the Tomorrow series, these three books continue Ellie's story after the war.

• While I Live (2003)
• Incurable (2005)
• Circle of Flight (2006)

Now on to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Absolutely one of my favorite movies ever! I could watch this movie over and over! Now going in I knew this movie was a book before the movie but didn't know a lot about it, and usually I always read the book first but I just had not gotten around to it. And it is probably a good thing that I didn't. I am always disappointed in the movie after I have read the book first. I might want to stop doing that. I loved not knowing what was going to happen or not knowing what was supposed to happen that didn't. I can't even compare this movie with any other, it was just so different. The movie is a drama/thriller that takes many turns and twists and follows two separate characters path while investigating the cold case of a girl that went missing 40 yrs earlier for the girls rich Grandfather. I hate to be a spoiler so I'll stop there and just let you go see the movie and I'll give you some info on the book. One thing I didn't know about this book was the fact that it also belongs to a series. The Millennium Series was written by the late Stieg Larsson (1954–2004). The main characters in the series are Lisbeth Salader a woman in her twenties possibly a genius with a photographic memory and very poor social skills, and Mikael Blonkvist an investigative journalist and editor of a magazine called Millennium.  The series originally was supposed to have ten installments but Larsson died before or during the writing of the fourth novel. I can't wait to add this series to my reading list!

The Three Books in The Millennium Series:
.The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
. The Girl Who Played with Fire
.The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest