Easy A

Today I watched Easy A which boasts a stellar cast including Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Lisa Kudrow, Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. Olive (Stone) is a clean-cut high school student who realises that by pretending to have lost her virginity she can get noticed. When she starts to offer her services to the geeky boys at school - pretending to have done various things with them to help their reputations - things start to get out of hand! Emma Stone is excellent in this part and the supporting cast are also fantastic. Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are particularly funny as her parents. This is a classic teen comedy in the same vein as Clueless and Mean Girls but with nods to 80's films such as The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles - you can't go wrong with a bit of John Hughes as inspiration!

Life as we know it and Despicable Me

Life as we know it stars Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel and is about a man and woman who end up having to raise a baby together after their friends die in a car accident. Their friends had tried unsuccessfully to set them up on a date and they didn't even make it to dinner as couldn't stand each other. It was an enjoyable and easy to watch film with likable lead actors although you could see what was coming a mile off!

Despicable Me 3D is an animated film with the voice of Steve Carrell as Gru, the evil genius. It's very funny in places and has some great 3D bits although I think it was mostly unnoticeable until the very end. Gru adopts three sisters as part of one of his despicable plans but predictably grows to care for them by the end of the film. There are some funny little yellow characters (the minions) which reminded me of Toy Story and the little green aliens although they're much funnier.

Eat, Pray, Love and The Death and Life of Charlie St Cloud

I saw Eat, Pray, Love last weekend and was not over enamoured with it. It stars Julia Roberts as a woman having a mid-life crisis and decides to go to Italy, India and Bali "to find herself". I didn't feel very sympathetic to a character who is married to a good guy and has a nice life. Sure, her husband flitted from one job to the next but her life seemed okay. It was a fairly enjoyable film but was excessively long at over 2 hours (2hrs 10 perhaps?). My favourite bit was when her boyfriend (played by Javier Bardem) says he's taking her to a deserted island where there would only be "you, me and 200 parrots" but in his accent it sounds like "you, me and 200 pirates"! I'd heard about it on the radio and forgot til he said it and it really made me laugh!! Probably not a good sign that the high point of the film was that!!

This weekend I saw The Death and Life of Charlie St Cloud. Another only okay film. It stars Zac Efron as a young man whose brother dies in a car accident and his life effectively comes to a standstill. It did make me cry a couple of times but was a little predictable and I'm never normally one for guessing what's going to happen in films. The major plus point to watching this film is that Zac takes his top off several times and there's also a scene akin to the one in Pride and Prejudice where Mr Darcy comes out of the water in his wet top!