Unapologetic Reviews

Chef  is a fun movie about food, life, and fatherhood. While I'm giving it only 3 stars, I still liked it a lot. However, it wasn't a great masterpiece, or terribly exciting. My reason for watching it twice is that it gives me a warm feeling every time I watch it. The movie is a lot of fun. It has a fast talking chef, Carl Casper, who swears a lot, like most chefs I've seen on TV, and that's always great to watch. There are some good jokes, and the cop played by Russell Peters was a memorable comic character. It's also about food, and being a chef. Today the trend in food is good, local ingredients, and an ever changing menu that adapts to the environment. The changing menu allows the chef a creative freedom, and also gives a chance to people to try out new things. In the movie, the opposite of this style is a menu that is always the same, which is portrayed as being stuck in the past. As someone who loves to discover new food, I like the progressive approa...

At the acknowledgements Richelle Mead wrote that it was hard starting a new series, even in a familiar setting. Actually, it was kind of hard for me to start reading it. I enjoyed the Vampire Academy series a lot, and wasn't sure if I would like this one. It did help that I already liked Sydney, the star of this series, and I read that Adrian would be in it too. I did end up liking it. The story starts out slowly. There are new characters, and some familiar faces from the sidelines of the previous books that take centre stage here. We also see Rose briefly, and get a small update on Lissa. It was weird seeing Rose from the outside. There are a couple of mysteries that slowly unfold. Most of them I could guess easily, there were enough clues, but one big one didn't have a lot of hints, so I didn't guess it. The slow start accounts for the building of the new environment, and also getting to know the characters. It's also Mead's style that she peppers information abou...

Frankly, I didn't know what to expect when I decided to go to this movie. I have seen that some of the people I follow for book reviews have read it, and it got mixed reviews. However, sometimes even bad books can be made into good movies or TV shows. Recently The 100 comes into mind. Not a very good book based on the reviews, but I'm hooked on the show. It probably also occurred to me, because it has similar themes. Teens trying to survive in a world they don't know much of after an apocalypse. This movie is very action packed. Probably the book is a lot slower, but the movie is two hours even like this, so they really didn't need to put more in it. The pacing is good for the most part, however, the ending was a bit abrupt. As if they were shooting, looked at what they had, and realised that they spent too much time on the stuff so far, so they had to finish it already. The story itself isn't typical current YA. Mercifully, no romance! There could be in t...

The Hundred-Foot Journey  is a delightful story about food, love, learning to cope with differences, and accepting other people. It's also about finding what is actually important in life. The movie feels a bit long, even though two hours in not that long by today's standards. However, a lot of things happen in it. I actually didn't watch the trailer, just knew that it had food in it, and I generally love movie about food. However, while food played an important part in the story, it was more of a vehicle to illustrate culture. The story starts out with an Indian family losing their restaurant, and something more in a riot. They decide to come to Europe, but they want to find some place where there are good ingredients, and start a restaurant there. They come upon a village in France, where they decide to settle down, but on the opposite side of a French restaurant. From then on the story describes how the two cultures get along. I was impressed by the turn of events ...

I wasn't very keen on watching this movie, but as is apparent from my previous reviews, I tend to keep an open mind. There were other movies I wasn't very excited about, and I liked them. The reason why I watched this movie? Alex Skarsgard. Yeah, he's beautiful, and I love his voice, so I decided to check this one out. I also saw that a lot of my online book friends loved the book version. Well, let me just say that I hope the book is better. I can use one word to describe this movie. Simplistic. The book came out in 1993, before the hype of The Hunger Games , and other dystopian YA books, so in a way it's a forerunner of its time. However, while watching the movie it did remind me of a few things I saw or read that were made before 1993, so let's start the dystopian cliché list, that is now so familiar to us all. City surrounded by some sort of a barrier that people can't cross. Two things come to mind, and remember, I haven't seen and read all dystop...

This book took me a little over two weeks to read, but it felt longer. I didn't enjoy it much. It wasn't completely terrible, but I found it a bit boring. The story takes place in 2013, actually, so it's a bit strange in that way, since it was written in 2009. You only realise how many things can happen in 4 years when reading something like this. It happens in a super-mall, which actually didn't sound so bad. It's an environment that I know well, since I work above a mall, and spend a lot of time there, sometimes just to get out of the office. However, the story itself just didn't entertain me so much. It was obvious what was going on at about 10% into the story, so that took the mystery out. Then it was all just people dashing about, some minor characters getting killed, and I just wanted to get to the end already. It was just too simplistic. I also missed the Doctor having someone to properly explain things to. This takes place at the point of his life when h...