Oh So Geeky

One of my favorite summer reads used to be Nicholas Sparks' books. I say used to because when he was served with a lawsuit in 2014 claiming racist and homophobic  behavior, my hobby was somewhat buzzkilled. It was hard to separate the claims from what he was writing. Not only that, but every adaptation following  The Notebook sizzles out into the Blandlands. A lot of people will say his books are virtually the same and I'd agree: they are all about pretty people who are shot with a love-at-first-sight arrow by a North Carolinian cupid. Two people spend two hours or 300 pages in love with each other and don't face the obstacle challenging their true love until the third act. Despite reading the same thing over and over again, there were adaptations I looked forward to - Safe Haven , Nights in Rodanthe , Dear John . Yet every time, something fell flat - either the direction, the acting, the script, or all three. When I heard last year that  The Choice  was goi...

{ source } Hollywood has been circulating a remake of director Alfred Hitchcock's  The Birds for more than ten years. Every time a director and a writer commit to the overhaul, the project inevitably falls apart. It's seen its fair share of possible leading stars like Nicole Kidman, George Clooney, and Naomi Watts, hinting that it would be a retelling of his specific version rather than a take on the actual novel. Being a big fan of not only the original film but also Daphne DuMaurier's short story, I finally felt it was time to let go of how I've always imagined the original source material translating to the big screen. The original 1963 film was a cinematic introduction to model Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels, a complicated socialite who meets a charismatic lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a pet shop. Traveling to his hometown island Bodega Bay, she aims to surprise his younger sister with a pair of love birds. During her trip, flocks of birds attack t...