Bonus Blog 1 - Every Parent Should Share These Films With Their Kids!

So today an old school friend of mine - Debbie - posted on Facebook that she was watching the movie Short Circuit with her kids.  This inspired me to create a list that every parent should look at and take note of.  This list is going to be the movies that every child should watch at some point throughout their childhood and parents really should encourage them to do so.  Of course there is no particular order in which they should watch them but here's my choices.

Goonies;
Gremlins 1 and 2;
ET;
Indiana Jones 1, 2 and 3 - maybe 4 if you feel it hasn't ruined the franchise;
Back to the Future 1, 2 and 3;
Rain Man;
Who Framed Roger Rabbit;
Empire of the Sun;
Ghostbusters;
The Breakfast Club;
Ferris Bueller's Day Off;
Big;
Adventures in Babysitting;
Stand By Me;
Weird Science;
Uncle Buck;
Home Alone 1, 2, 3 and 4;
My Girl;
Last Action Hero;
Flipper;
The Karate Kid;
Flight of the Navigator;
Explorers;
Little Shop of Horrors;
Short Circuit 1 and 2;
Police Academy 1 - 7;
Neverending Story 1, 2 and 3;
Labyrinth;
Honey I Shrunk the Kids;
Little Monsters;
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure/Bogus Journey;
Willow;
Time Bandits;
Howard The Duck;
Miracle on 34th Street;
Of Mice and Men.

So there you have it, my full list of the films that every parent should encourage their kids to watch at some point in their childhood.  Of course, some of them are probably better suited to older kids so it may be best to wait for them to reach a certain age first, parental discretion is advised.  As you may have noticed, most of them are from the 1980's - truly thr greatest decade for both movies and music in my opinion.  It was the age of the family movie era and boy did they do a great job.  I may even have to go and watch all of them all over again - sounds like a plan eh?

Feel free to leave me some feedback and let me know if you think I should have included any others.

James!

xXx

Day 35 - Patriotism My Arse!

Today I discovered a new show to watch - The Listener.  It's about a paramedic in Toronto who can read my minds and decides to use his ability to help others around the city.  I noticed on Facebook that most of my friends had been spenind their day watching parades and concerts and whatever other jubilee crap happened to be on TV.  I purposely avoided it and chose to watch my new show instead!

Don't get me wrong, I am proud to be British, but today I was not in the slightest bit patriotic.  I'm fed up of all the attention the royal family gets and the fact that everyone loves them so much.  I don't understand why people don't realise that they are the ones who should be bringing us out of this poxy recession instead of larging it up and living life as if they don't notice the deprevation around them!

The unemployment levels in the UK are so ridiculously high and the one person who needs to take control is our wonderful monarch.  She needs to stand up and tell her government to sort it out or heads will roll!  But no, she just sits there with her nice home and pretends it's not happening and that everything is fine.  I mean seriously, why ignore the subject?  All she has to do is tell her government to start creating more jobs for people and eventually we can bring ourselves out of the recession.  How hard is it to do that eh?

I don't have all the answers but I think there must be some way that the government can create more jobs for us to help us out of poverty and back from the brink of starvation.  Me personally, I'm finding it really hard to survive at the moment - I have so little money right now that I can't even afford to eat properly every day.  I spend most days trying to invent a new concoction of dinners - even resorting to making soup from water, a can of tomatoes and a few herbs just so I have something to be able to eat.  Yes, it's that bad that my cupboards are practically empty and my freezer hasn't had anything in it for a good three or four weeks now.

But anyway, enough whinging about how sad and pathetic my life is - back to the blog!  I spent my day watching TV shows and playing on Facebook - with the occasional argument on Facebook about how much I despise the royals but we won't go back there again, time to move on!

I finished my evening off by watching a film - Tower Heist starring Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Tea Leoni and Matthew Broderick.  I then headed for my bed at about 4.30am after finishing the Scavenger Hunt season with a final burst of energy to try and get the number one spot - hopefully it worked, we'll see tomorrow!

James!

xXx

Day 34 - Sunday!

Today was pretty much just like all the usual boring Sundays - absolutely sod all to do other than sleep and play on Facebook!  I did manage to squeeze in a film - after finally finding a link good enough to watch.  I decided to watch the 2010 version of Robin Hood with Russell Crowe playing the title role and Cate Blanchett playing Maid Marian.

It was a pretty decent adaptation to be perfectly honest and I was rather impressed with it.  Mark Addy did a reasonable job as Friar Tuck too, even if he didn't get on screen as often as I'd hoped.  Oh, but the forest scenes were a big change this time - they decided to make all the people who lived there a bunch of orphans, something I've not seen in any adaptation of the story before.  It was kind of like the lost boys from Peter Pan, hahaha.

I did also manage to find a new TV show to start watching - Homeland.  It stars Damien Lewis as a soldier who is found as a prisoner of war in Iraq after being missing in action for 8 years.  When he returns to civilisation however, a CIA analyst believes that he has been turned by the enemy and begins to build a case against him.  I only watched two episode though so haven't got into the show on a huge scale yet - this maybe something to return to at a later date!

Apart from that, not much else happened today to be honest - so I headed for bed at about 1am.

James!

xXx

Day 33 - Same Old, Same Old!

Yep, another day filled with episodes of Breaking Bad and the occasional Facebook game - including another mini war with Heather and Hannah on Angry Birds.  UGH - those two will be the death of me soon, hahaha.  I did finally manage to get to the end of season four on Breaking Bad though so that's finally over with and I can now move onto something new again.

I did pop out to the shop at some point to pick up some milk and bread plus I also managed to sit in front of the TV for a couple of hours instead of my PC - only to watch the football though.  England played against Belgium - the last friendly before the start of Euro 2012.  Hodgson made a few changes from the previous match against Norway - this time he decided to start with Oxlade-Chamberlain on the left wing and Milner on the right wing.  He also started Welbeck up front alongside Young - a risky move but it paid off after Welbeck scored the only goal of the game in the 36th minute of the game.

So apart from that, my day was pretty much the same as it had been for the past two or three days - watching shit loads of Breaking Bad and playing Facebook games - oh what an interesting life, hahaha!

James!

xXx

Day 32 - This Means War!

Today was the third day in a row that I spent watching a shit load of episodes of Breaking Bad with the occasional visit to Facebook in between episodes.  Today however was slightly different because Hannah declared war on me - she beat a couple of my scores on Angry Birds, again!  This time I was out for blood!

It was the weekly tournament that I've mentioned in my posts before but this time Hannah had surpassed me on an epic scale - I actually spent over an hour on one level before I eventually took back the lead.  Unfortunately she had also beaten me on another level so I had to move onto that one next.  Then, whilst I was busy trying to gain the high score back on that one, Heather jumped in and beat my score on a third level, ugh!

And so it seemed they had started to gang up on me to knock me off my pedestal.  It was of course short lived for Heather as I quickly beat her score after about 10 attempts and regained my pole position.  I was not so lucky with the other level though and just could not beat Hannah's new high score.  I eventually admitted defeat and vowed to get revenge at some point in the future.

Thankfully, her high score did not affect the overall scores and I still took the top spot on the weekly leaderboard for the accumulative scores across the four tourney levels.  It was about 4am when I finally submitted to my defeat and went to bed.

James!

xXx

Day 31 - Hooked!

Well after one season of watching Breaking Bad, I had become hooked - well and truly!  It may have started off slow but it certainly did pick up the pace in season two - I've sat and watched another 10 episodes today and did hardly anything else at all to be perfectly honest.  I think I can see a pattern emerging of what the next few days may hold in store for me, hahaha.

So my day went like this - wake up, Facebok, Breaking Bad, Facebook, food, Breaking Bad, Facebook, Breaking Bad, more food, Breaking Bad, finally got past a level I had been trying to pass on Candy Crush Saga on Facebook, more Breaking Bad, etc - you get the point.

I finally turned off the computer and went to sleep at about 2am after spending about an hour or so commenting on Jess's latest Random Thought Thursday post on Facebook - it's a weekly thing where we all gather to post loads of random crap to each other, hahaha.

James!

xXx

Day 30 - Breaking Bad!

Well this morning I posted on Facebook about the Planet of the Apes film I watched last night and it seemed to get quite a reaction from my friends.  I had lots of likes and lots of comments about how much my friends also enjoyed the film, one of them - Craig - even said it was his best film of 2011 before we eventually moved onto discussing TV shows instead.

He told me that I should check out an American show called Breaking Bad.  I read the write up about it and was convinced enough to watch the pilot episode.  It intrigued me enough to warrant watching a second episode and from then on I was hooked.  Although the first season was a little slow, it still had some great positives and the characters are just brilliant.

The show is basically about a high school chemistry teacher called Walt and a former student of his called Jesse and the mishaps that happen in their lives over the course of several months.  Jesse is a meth addict and down on his luck after the DEA raid his meth lab - therefore leaving him with the need to start again.

Walt had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and is told he only has several months left to live so he wants to quickly make enough money to leave behind for his family to live on after he is gone.  He has the brainstorm of becoming a meth cook so decides to join forces with Jesse to make some money.  What follows after that is a series of adventures and troubles that lead to a very entertaining show.

I ended up watching all 7 episodes of season one and then the first 3 episodes of season two before I got too tired to carry on.  I went to bed at around 3am and boy did I need the sleep - I was knackered after that much TV, hahaha.

James!

xXx