Romantic fiction has always found loyal and patient audiences, who are willing to endure all manner of clichéd storylines to get their fill of torrid affairs and longing gazes over a sink full of supper dishes. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, but I strongly suspect that even those lovely people will heave a sigh during The Lucky One, and not the good kind.
Read the rest of my review at Oakville.com:
http://www.oakville.com/articles/the-lucky-one-movie-review/
Palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware published a list of the five most common regrets of dying patients in her care. Blogger, developer, and entrepreneur Paul Graham took the list to heart, adding the following five commands to the top of his to-do list:
Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.
We’ve actually mentioned Ware’s list before; Graham’s commands are simply inverted versions of these regrets:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
The idea, of course, is that Graham’s commands will remind him to avoid these outcomes. As Graham puts it:
The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are all errors of omission. You forget your dreams, ignore your family, suppress your feelings, neglect your friends, and forget to be happy. Errors of omission are a particularly dangerous type of mistake, because you make them by default.
I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them.
Designer and blogger Alice Lee took a slightly different approach, turning Graham’s to-do list of commands into desktop wallpapers, like the one you see above (you can download the wallpapers in several formats at Lee’s post).
Regrets of the Dying | Bronnie Ware
The Top of My ToDo List | Paul Graham
Wallpaper – “Don’t Ignore Your Dreams…” | ByAliceLeePhoto by Alice Lee.
In a lifetime of following popular culture, I have never encountered a neutral opinion on The Three Stooges. People either love the anarchic silliness of Larry, Curly, and Moe, or they find the whole concept completely asinine. (The former group also tend to giggle at the word “asinine”, but I digress.)
The Farrelly Brothers’ new tribute to the classic Stooge shorts of the 1930s will do nothing to change these opinions, but it’s wonderful to have a film that actually revives the argument. The Three Stooges is as good a remake as could be expected.
Read the rest of my review at Oakville.com:
http://www.oakville.com/articles/the-three-stooges-movie-review/
True Confession: I had never seen James Cameron’s Titanic before this week. The reasons are many and mundane, but so many elements of it have entered popular culture that it was easy to believe I knew as much as anyone who had seen it – “King of the World”, doomed love affair, sinking ship, yadda yadda yadda.
Read the rest of my review at Oakville.com:
When a mirror cracks, an interesting thing happens. The fragments, each slightly askew, reflect at different angles, distorting the image. This is an accurate analogy to describe Mirror Mirror, a new retelling of the story of Snow White. It holds together as entertaining, but tries to do too many things at once, detracting from the overall experience.
Read the rest of my review at Oakville.com:
http://www.oakville.com/articles/mirror-mirror-movie-review/
