Twilight Tuesday Farewell Blog Hop TTIC60

Hey everyone!

It’s Rebecca, bringing you something special for our last Twilight Tuesday Inspiration Challenge.  For this event, we’re doing a DT blog hop.  Our challenge theme????  ”Love of books, the printed words on a page”  since that is what brought us all together. 

Creative portion:  Create a project that uses printed text: a page from a magazine, book, dictionary, etc. within your project, as the background or focal point.

Comment Portion: I love to read the newspaper online but nothing beats a printed newspaper on Sunday mornings. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t abandon books (hardcover, softcover, or paperback) to a digital reader. Are you totally digital or do you prefer a good old fashioned printed page in your hands?”
 

The hop trail will be in a backwards alpha order…
 
Starting here …. at the Twilight Tuesday Blog
Tonya

Rebecca

Margie

Julie

Jodi

Jen

Erica

Donna

Dani

Beth

Alison
… and ending HERE at the Twilight Tuesday Blog 

And did I mention blog candy ?????  There are two ways to win:

1. Create something using today’s inspiration  - post your project to an online gallery or your blog, then come back here and leave a link with our new inlinkz program (see below). ***
2. Watch for blog candy offerings on the Design Team (DT) blogs and leave comments on those blogs to be entered.  We’ll be offering the blog candy on randomly selected DT members ….. so make sure you go check them all out and leave us some twilight love!

*** For those of you who create and share, you will have the opportunity to win your very own Otherworldly Loves rubber stamp set from StampInsanity Stamps courtesy of Stamp Happens! This giveaway is open to U.S. mailing addresses only. 

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Please join in and play along with us! If you do, here are a few guidelines to follow:  For posting to a blog: Please indicate that you are playing along with the Twilight Tuesday Inspiration Challenge on Twilighttuesday.com and please provide a link back to our site. 

For posting on another gallery, such as Splitcoast Stampers or Flickr: Please indicate that you are playing along with the Twilight Tuesday Inspiration Challenge on Twilighttuesday.com and please provide a link back to our site. Please use the appropriate keywords for our challenges; an example is TTIC60 for challenge 60. No number signs (#) or spaces are needed in the keyword. You can also add in more general keywords for Splitcoast/Flickr (such as Twilight, Twilight Tuesday Inspiration Challenge, etc.). Thank you for your help with this!

Photo of the Week, 3 February 2010

Photo of the Week, 27 January 2010

Photo of the Week, 20 January 2010

Friday Fandom Movie Post: Hidden Gems!

Hello and happy Friday!

We thought we’d expand our Fandom Friday posts a bit to include movies!  We’ll be periodically highlighting some movies that are sort of “hidden gems” — movies that might have slipped under the radar but are definitely worth a look!

For starters, today is all about the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino.  I hadn’t been paying too much attention to this movie until a dear friend of mine highly recommended it, and I am SO glad that I did see it.  I count Gran Torino as one of my all-time faves now.

If you thought of this movie as a guy thing, about a cranky old man and his beloved car (as I did), think again!  This is a very subtle movie that is just filled with emotional depth.  Watching Clint Eastwood’s character Walt open up in this movie is a beautiful thing, and reminds me that you can find friendship, a sense of community, and maybe even a sense of family, in the most unexpected places. 

I don’t want to say too much about the plot to avoid spoiling anyone — but this movie is SO worth seeing.   And also?  It’s FUNNY.  This movie is SO much  more than it may appear and might really surprise you with its many layers.

And that dear friend of mine who initially recommended the movie to me?  Well that was our very own Tonya, who has this to say about Gran Torino:

I remember first seeing the movie mentioned on Facebook by my sister-in-law. She posted that she’d “seen it.” I remember thinking at that time… “who cares?” About the movie…not her. My point is, I wasn’t immediately impressed with Gran Torino. It wasn’t until the movie came out on pay-per-view that I bothered to give it a chance. And, OMG, was it worth it!!! I was so stunned after watching that movie. I laughed, I got angry, I cried…and mostly I just loved, loved, loved. This was cinematic perfection and knowing that it is Clint Eastwood’s final performance…he could not have chosen more wisely. Eastwood has had a tremendous acting career and he could not have chosen a more fabulous exit. He definitely went out with a bang.
 
About the storyline of the movie, I was incredibly impressed with the racial issues presented. At first, my own politically correct side winced repeatedly when Walt made derogatory comments to the Hmong people. It wasn’t long until I was able to “get over it” and see what really mattered. It’s interesting that despite all of the negative, nasty remarks Walt made, Sue just laughed him off and never took offense. I’ve heard from one of my mentors that one should never be offended. It’s a goal I have definitely not reached in my life yet. But watching Sue made me want to be like her. A Pollyanna in our century. The most amazing part of this show was finding the golden nugget of true friendship that was wrapped in the racial slurs and defenses of Walt. This movie had me laughing and hurting at the truisms of human behavior. That despite ethnical differences and racism we commonly hear about, sometimes we are cruelest to our own.
 
I watched this movie three times in one weekend. The last movie I watched that many times in such a short period of time was Twilight.

 

So have any of you seen Gran Torino?  Leave us a comment and share your thoughts!  We’d love to know what you thought of it. 

 Have a great weekend, everyone!