Recommendations Round-up!

After exactly a month of August/September Recommendations month, I’ve managed to go through 15 movie recommendations and 2 book reviews from fellow bloggers and given them some credit.

In case you missed some of them, here is the entire list.

1) Dirty Dancing

2) Tai Chi Zero

3) The Descent

4) Forgetting Sarah Marshall

5) The Killer Inside Me

6) Romancing the Stone

7) Best Laid Plans

8) Say Anything

9) Kai Po Che!

10) Upside Down

11) Raising Arizona

12) Shaun of the Dead

13) The Jewel of the Nile

14) Sixteen Candles

15) Jab We Met

Along with the two e-books

16) A Woman Lost by T.B. Markinson

17) The First Pillar (Everville #1) by Roy  Huff

I had lots of fun with this! Did you?

It was an eye-opening experience and I actually was exposed to a lot of movies that I probably wouldn’t have watched otherwise.  Learned about the existence of Jake Ryan and Lloyd Dobler, Casey Affleck and his act of being a crazy guy, a world with opposite gravity, plans gone wrong, a claustrophic cave experience, adventures with jungle man and famous author, both inspiring and/or romantic Bollywood flicks, even had some zombies thrown in the mix.  I’d say it was a very colorful month 🙂

I certainly am thinking of doing this again but with a lot more advanced preparation to get recommended movies together instead of winging it day by day.  Plus, I only managed to mention to a small fraction of bloggers and I want to let everyone know about all of YOU 🙂

Remember to drop me more recommendations after reviews and if you have published a book, I’d love to include it in to share your work.  If you also want to recommend books, I’m totally down for that also!

Would you want me to do another recommendations month? Tell me what you thought about it: suggestions, comments, maybe a different way to set it up?

The Jewel of the Nile (1985)

After some debate, I decided that this is the first sequel recommendation to appear here mostly because a week or two ago, I reviewed Romancing the Stone (review HERE) and Smash from Smashing from Life told me that The Jewel of the Nile was a great sequel to check out 🙂 Smash is an awesome girl who lives in Toronto.  Honestly, I’m new to her blog but I love everything she posts up and she definitely should get some support to bring her smiles so head on over and show her some love.  I know she did an amazing job when she blogged about a potential location for my upcoming visit to Toronto  HERE 🙂

Director: Lewis Teague

Cast: Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, Spiros Focas, Avner Eisenberg, Paul David Magid

Picking up six months after the first one ends, Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) has sailed around the world with her boyfriend and adventurer Jack Colton (Michael Douglas).  All the romance starts being a bit too much and she wants to go back to New York and try to get her career back as she still can’t find the reality in her books now.  Because of that, she is also struggling to finish up her latest book.  Its at this time, Omar (Spiros Focas), a soon- to-be emperor of the Nile hopes to have her write his biography about how he unites the tribes in the Nile.  She agrees however Jack doesn’t and decides to sail the Mediterranean instead.  At this time, Tarak (Paul David Magid), a man from a tribe in Nile comes to him and asks him and coincidentally Ralph (Danny DeVito)  to get back the Jewel of the Nile.  He agrees and as Joan also sees through the plans of Omar, she finds a way to escape and eventually joins up and together they try to make everything right again in a whole new adventure.

The Jewel of the Nile was definitely a fun sequel.  For the most part, I actually enjoyed it more than the first one.  The only deal was that Michael Douglas was not as wild and adventurous in his jungle suit.  He was actually in a suit through most of it, but still I still found his performance quite awesome and with Kathleen Turner, they are quite a great on-screen couple.  This one was entertaining even though I found some scenes showing their age a lot more than the previous one.

I mentioned it a bit on the previous paragraph but the characters in this one actually had more room to shine. For one, Kathleen Turner’s Joan Wilder proved that even though she fell into the over thinking relationships in the beginning, she was still able to bring out that daring and taking chances abilities that she learned from Jack in the previous movie and take care of herself when in danger.  Michael Douglas’s  Jack also had the character development to getting into the whole commitment and facing the expressing his feelings that it seems he was scared of before (or is it settling down that he’s scared of). Still, the romance between them and little quarrels always makes it entertaining.In this one, we still have Danny DeVito with a bigger role this time around and he is definitely the additional comic relief.

The Jewel of the Nile was a fun adventure through the desert with lots of laughs.  There was a lot of action also with out of control planes, fist fights, chases through the desert and fires, shooting and explosions.  What else can I say? Its just crazy entertaining.  I really enjoyed it and its like I said, I might actually have liked it better than the first 🙂 Maybe you disagree but lets just agree to disagree.  I definitely recommend it, especially if you enjoyed the first one and happened to not have caught this one yet.