A fairly normal week as far as school was concerned, usually term 2 will see the pace slightly intensify as teachers race to complete the curriculum in time for the mid year exams.
GG has been quite busy in school especially with her choir as the dates for the competition is just a few weeks away. Once they finish the competition, they should stand down CCA until after the exams. She has also been asked by her English teacher to emcee an event in school, for which she is super chuffed. The only thing is that rehearsals for the event clash with some of her CCA practice and so she needs to work this out with her Teachers.
As for BB, I’m constantly on his case to start getting serious about school. He needs to do well this year so that he can get the science stream next year, but as usual, it’s all white noise to him! Sigh! I really wonder when he grows up! It’s going to be difficult in his school as most students choose this school because of the importance of their STEM Programme, especially in aeronautics and so it’s very likely that a large portion of the cohort will end up wanting to take science next year. But when will this enter this boy’s head?
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step….
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
Sunrises and sunsets fascinate me and wherever in the world I am, I try to capture nature’s canvas as best as I can. This is a throwback post to some of the awesome sunsets I’ve managed to capture….
The naked body of a young Englishwoman washes up in Istanbul wearing a pendant inscribed with the seal of the deposed sultan. The death resembles the murder by strangulation of another English governess, a crime that was never solved.
Kamil Pasha, a magistrate in the new secular courts, sets out to find the killer, but his dispassionate belief in science and modernity is shaken by betrayal and widening danger.
In a lush, mystical voice, a young Muslim woman, Jaanan, recounts her own relationships with one of the dead women and her suspected killer. Were these political murders involving the palace or crimes of personal passion? An absorbing tale that transports the reader to nineteenth-century Turkey, this novel is also a lyrical meditation on the contradictory desires of the human soul.
On Sunday, GG and I caught the live-action remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. This film is rated PG in Singapore which meant she could not see it with her friends. But honestly, I really didn’t the big deal about it being PG as the theatre was filled with young children and their parents, many much younger than GG!
Emma Watson was aptly cast as the bookish, but brave Belle while the actor who played the Beast, Dan Stevens only showed his true self at the very end, was scary initially as the beast and one who got our sympathy as the movie moved along. Luke Evan’s Gaston was also spot on as the slightly slimy and pretentious character he was.
The film is pretty true to the animated version and those who’ve seen it will follow the movie. I loved the songs and GG hummed along with the soundtrack. The film is longer than the typical Hollywood movie with a running time of 129 minutes. It also gives a bit of the backstory about why the Beast behaved the way he did in the beginning (when he gets cursed) as well as a bit of Belle’s background, especially about her dead mother. These scenes, which are experienced by Belle with the Beast show us and Belle his soft side and are probably instrumental in getting her to fall in love with him.
As to the other cast, my favourite of the household help was Lumiere, Beast’s butler who turned into a candlestick voiced and enacted by Ewan McGregor. The interplay between him and the majordomo turned clock Cogsworth played by Ian McKellen was lovely to watch as was the romance between Lumiere and Plumette, the housemaid played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw who had been turned into a feather duster. I also loved how Mrs Potts (Emma Thompson) and Chip (Nathan Mack) were interpreted, and would have loved to have more scenes between the two. Another interesting character was Gaston’s sidekick LeFou who was played quite flamboyantly by Josh Gad. He was an out and out closet case, corrupt and utterly devoted to Gaston, but who in the finale changes sides and moves to the side of the good.
I also liked that throughout the film, there was a lot of racial diversity, but I’d image that in the 16th century France where the film is set, especially in the small village of Villeneuve where Belle lives and the nearby castle of the Beast, you would not expect to see this kind of racial diversity.
On to the elephant in the room, the overtly gay scene which everyone was talking about. Because of this scene and perhaps one more somewhere in the middle of the film, Malaysia has postponed the release of this film indefinitely. Both the scenes were, according to me, not worth the hype it generated. Agreed that this is a children’s film, but the violence where the Beast fends off the wolves and also when the villagers come to kill the beast and ransack the castle would probably be more frightening to children than these scenes. These were literally blink and miss scenes and I seriously doubt any child in the theatre (and there were plenty the day we saw the film) would have even realised what was happening in that fraction of a second.
So there you have it, a film which is surely worth the ticket price (plus the popcorn you will inevitably buy). Please do go and see it if you haven’t yet. If you have, I’d love to hear what you thought of it.
Here are some trailers from the film for those who haven’t seen it yet.
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step….
The naked body of a young Englishwoman washes up in Istanbul wearing a pendant inscribed with the seal of the deposed sultan. The death resembles the murder by strangulation of another English governess, a crime that was never solved.
