Weekend Fun

Hi there! Hope everyone had as beautiful weather and lovely weekend as we did here!

R and I were both free this past Friday night for the first time in a while, so we decided to go out on a dinner and movie date. R chose the restaurant (one of our favorites-Cheesecake Factory) and we chose to go see "Dark Shadows" with the idea of seeing "The Avengers" later on this month.  I'm not sure anyone else remembers this, but in the early 1990s, there was a made for TV mini-series that was made from the original 1960s-1970s Dark Shadows television series. NBC ended up canceling the series after only twelve episodes due to the onset of the 1st Gulf War and news updates meant program interruptions and understandable fewer ratings due to people wanting to see/watch news about the war. I watched the 1991 series with my dad and remember really enjoying the story line!

Source

When I found out Johnny Depp and Tim Burton were recreating the series in a movie, I was pretty excited! These days, I don't get too excited about many things involving vampires (while I'm at it, I am definitively not a fan of Twilight, True Blood, or much of any of the other recent vampire media onslaughts). This version of Dark Shadows starts in 1700s Colonial America and continues in the 1970s, with an Alice Cooper cameo. Ha! I love when he shows up in the most random of places- I still remember him appearing on stage at a Tim McGraw/Billy Bob concert in Austin that I went to with a roommate during college.

While I found the movie pretty entertaining (worth the $12 tickets), it did seem to be a story-line that a viewer would need to know some of the background of the Collins family. Eva Green (Kingdom of Heaven, a Bond girl in Casino Royale) and Michelle Pfeiffer also did a good job of being entertaining (and funny) in the movie. Without giving anything away, I thought the Burton/Depp take on the storyline did the series justice with just enough modern-day entertainment added. For a Friday night, the mall area wasn't all that crowded, except there was a fairly large number of Academy freshmen in line to get tickets to see Battleship (gee, I wonder why? -tongue in cheek) while we were in line to get our movie tickets.

I'm still not sure about Hollywood making movies out of boardgames and according to a sidebar in this month's InStyle, studios are planning on making movies out of Candyland, Monopoly, and Risk in the coming months . . . your thoughts?