Rosewater is an eye-opening movie about the real life Newsweek journalist who was imprisoned for 118 days in an Iranian prison for his accurate reporting and filming of the riots post-election in 2009. This movie is the reason why Jon Stewart took three months off last year from The Daily Show - Stewart wrote the screen play and directed the movie, which he based off Bahari;s book (linked). I am waiting until after graduation to read the book, but the movie was so powerful, I wanted to recommend it to everyone; hence, I am breaking my own rule about reviewing anything other than books here on BL.

"The Fault in Our Stars" is a work that defies its genre in all the best ways possible. There is great benefit to all who read this. It’s not only about two teens battling cancer; it’s about a lesson to all of us to live our lives every day, every minute. We should be thankful for this time especially if we are lucky enough to find love and be capable of giving. This story is beautiful, funny, heartbreaking and poignant. John Green truly told a great story of love, of life, of death, of humor.
This is the first John Green book I've ever read and I am sure it want be the last one.
Well the only mistake that I did is that I saw the movie in the middle of reading the book. So I took a little brake from the book.
I love Agustus' metaphore with the cigarette. A great read even thought the theame is pretty hard, but it's part of our lives.

(Read 25.08.2014)

I started reading All You Need Is Kill after a few friends recommended it to me. The only thing I knew about it was that a soldier dies and must live the previous two days over and over again.

I was extremely, pleasantly, surprised at the direction this book took. At just around two hundred pages long, I finished it in one sitting.

Summary: Aliens, known as Mimics, invade the world. The story revolves around [Keiji Kiriya] -- a raw, green recruit who is given a suit of battle armor, called a "Jacket", and is ordered out onto the battlefield.

Keiji Kiriya dies on the first day of fighting. The only problem is: he doesn't stay dead. At least, not in the normal sense.

He's reborn prior to the battle, gets sent BACK into the battlefield, and dies yet again. This cycle repeats itself a hundred-something odd times, but as he 'loops', he becomes aware that he CAN, in fact, change what happens each time he loops back in time.

Keiji becomes determined to change his fate of dying. During the cycle, and at different points during that cycle, he meets a legendary soldier, Rita Vrataski, whose nicknamed "Full Metal Bitch": a US Special Forces soldier whose supposedly a hardcore battle junky.

But like a true bad-ass woman, there's more to her than meets the eye. And it's not pink frilly dresses.

Rather than doing a lengthy review, I'll just hit a few high points that I really enjoyed.

Easy peasy, lemon squeazy.

You can't get much better than these 4, IMO.

Water for Elephants stayed true to the book very well. Of course it had to make a few changes to be a smoothly flowing movie, but it held the magic and romance that the novel portrayed.

Memoirs of a Geisha was amazing in both book and movie form. The movie brought the characters and imagery to life in a way that makes me cry every time I see it. I've always loved Asian culture of any kind, and this movie/book was everything I wanted. And I cry every single time I see the Chairman and Sayuri profess their loves for one another. I'm a hopeless romantic.

Jurassic Park was a better movie than book. The book was a little draggy and boring. It had a lot more going on than the movie, but the movie just seemed so much better to me. I know a lot of people will argue with me on this, but oh well. The only part of the book I liked more than the movie was that the Aussie game hunter dude (why can I never remember names!) got to live. I liked him. I like Aussie accents. I like accents, period. Anyway, where was I?

The Lost World was hugely better than the book. Both Jurassic Park and this novel were full of what I coined "Malcolm-isms", pages and pages of chaos theory and boring mathematics. It made me zone and not remember a damn thing I read. And why would Malcolm even set foot on another island of dinosaurs when, according to the book, he almost died and was psychologically tortured by hungry raptors hanging over his bed, trying to eat him. There's not enough money on Earth to make me go through that again. But he does for some inane reason I can hardly grasp. But the movie version made more sense. He went to save his girlfriend! That's plausible! I get it. And the movies left out the Malcolm-isms, so I didn't glaze over.

Plus we got a T-Rex destroying L.A...which is awesome.

I'm dino-phile, though. I loved all the Jurassic park movies and I am super excited about the next one. So don't mind me. I'm a weirdo.

This was kind of hard for me. I tend to not watch a lot of book-turned-movies. Or if I do, I make sure I read the book first. Most of the ones I've seen turned out well, like Water for Elephants and The Hunger Games. These 2 books are the only ones I could really think of that fit the "bad movie" list, and Percy Jackson isn't really bad.

The Lightning Thief wasn't a bad movie at all. And I'm guilty of watching it before I ever read the books. Maybe that's why I don't hate it. I actually really loved it. But if we compare it to the books, then it's really an abomination. They changed so much that it wasn't really the same story by the end. When I read the book, I was shocked at the true bad guy and couldn't understand why they would change so much. But I still love the movie. I just look at them as 2 separate things.

White Shark was terrible. It was turned into a SyFy original movie, Creature, and it was so bad. Soooooo bad. They changed the location of the events and a lot of the back story of the monster. Plus you have to add SyFy quality graphics into the  mix and you get a barf-worthy performance. The only redeeming quality was Craig T. Nelson, but not even he could salvage this. Yuck.