Summer List Review {The Lovely Bones + The Blair Witch Project}

This is the sixth installment of me reviewing a list of books and movies I set out to read, watch, and enjoy throughout the summer. You can check out my other posts in the following links. 
Summer Reading and Movie List
First Installment
Second Installment
Third Installment
Fourth Installment 
Fifth Installment 

First things first, I read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. I had heard a lot about the book beforehand and was definitely very excited to begin this one.

For starters, this book had a very original plot line (at least to my knowledge). Susie Salmon has been murdered and the entire story is being narrated by her in heaven. After a few pages you know how it happened and who did it and the rest of the book is spent following the struggles of Susie's family to find out what you already know. Not to mention the grief of not only her family, but the community and her misfit of friends.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style of the author. It flowed well and she incorporated a lot of intriguing thoughts throughout the book. I must say though, there were some dry parts throughout the book (but very few books seem to skip this stretch of boringness) and one point I had a hard time willingly wanting to pick up the book and read. Luckily such a phase was short lived.

Also, the ending left me disappointed in some ways, but also satisfied in others (just take my word for it, alright). I wish I could go in depth with you all fine people, but I'd hate to ruin the book for anyone.

Even with some slow moving parts, I'd recommend this book. A movie was also made based off the book about five years ago and I'm very curious as to how the book to movie adaption went. Hopefully I'll get the chance to watch it in the near future.

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So The Blair Witch Project was quite interesting and made me dwell a little on mainstream Hollywood.

I had really high hopes for this movie to say the least. It reigns up their with Poltergeist and Nightmare on Elm Street in terms of the most classic horror movies of all time or at least that's what I had heard. Upon starting The Blair Witch Project, I was told that what I was about to watch was a true story of real footage that had been found in the woods of Maryland. I immediately rolled my eyes and started scrolling through Twitter on my phone thinking about how overdone the whole true story-found footage-low budget horror movie storyline is.

The movie follows a trio of student film makers who delve into the woods in search of the Blair Witch (hence the name of the movie). They start out interviewing town folks about the witch and eventually send themselves into the forest never to be seen again. Most of the film is one big argument scene between the three characters if we're being honest here. Two of the group members seem to continually gang up on the only female (she got them lost, she lost the map, now they're even more lost, blah, blah, blah). Then one of guys confesses to throwing the map in the river and there's a huge blow up in the group and he storms off into the woods, leaving the other two entirely. Then they go to sleep and start hearing some strange noises which leads them to venture off and look for their lone group member. To wrap this all up, they end up in some creepy little house where the movie comes to a close.

Essentially I thought the movie was alright. It wasn't all that horrifying as the only truly scary part was a three minute scene at the end and even that didn't have me lying awake trying to sleep that night.

I exited out of Netflix feeling disappointed that I didn't enjoy the movie as much as I thought I should have and spent some time dwelling that maybe I had missed something throughout the movie.

Then it soon dawned on me that it wasn't that I had necessarily missed something, but that in reality mainstream Hollywood kind of ruined it for me.

When The Blair Witch Project was released, it was ground breaking in many ways. It was one of the first movies of its kind. People walked out of the theatre believing that it was indeed a real life event upping the scare factor enormously. 

The problem is that today with movies like Paranormal Activity and the like, we have become somewhat immune to the "these are real life events" plot line. We know that most likely it's not real. We know that the one camera and shaky filming were the result of a low budget and not because it was being filmed by an amateur twenty something who was really being haunted.

Personally I feel like the media and Hollywood have made the whole found footage plot line very overdone and essentially ruining a classic horror movie. I mean there's nothing that can really be done about this, but it's definitely made me stop and think about how horror movies are being made nowadays.

All this aside, I'm glad I could at least say I've seen such a classic movie.

Have a fabulous day.