Author Archives: ghcrawford

Wreck-It Ralph

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Films

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By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Studios (and Pixar Studios, because that’s what you’ll always be to me).

I’ve liked video games since I first played Duck Hunt on my grandparents’ Nintendo, but I don’t consider myself a gamer. Once in a very long while, I might play the odd Halo match with my sister and get pelted with grenades. When I can find batteries for the controller, I might jam out a few riffs in Guitar Hero. Sometimes I play a little Mario Kart on Sunday nights when my brother and sister-in-law come over for dinner, and I get absolutely schooled. I played Sims 2 pretty frequently until I lost the disc and never bothered to replace it. And yeah, I was basically addicted to World of Warcraft my entire first year of university, and my grades may have tanked as a result of traipsing around Azeroth with my level 85 human warrior, but I was a dirty, filthy keyboard turner, so it doesn’t count.

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Sherlock (Series 1 & 2)

01 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Television

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By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of BBC

I’ve loved Sherlock Holmes since I was a kid. I read all the books, watched that CSI episode about the guy who killed himself and created a murder mystery around it, and I even own a t-shirt with Sherlock and the two Watsons on it. I don’t profess to be an expert, especially as it’s been a long time and I’ve forgotten quite a few of the details, but I love reading murder mysteries, and that’s because of Holmes.

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A Series of Unfortunate Events

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Books, Classic Books

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By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of HarperCollins, Nickelodeon Movies, Scott Rudin Productions, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Pictures

I would say I have a problem, but it’s only a problem if it’s negatively impacting my life. And since my life is currently awesome, there must not be a problem. Ergo, spending my free time re-reading A Series of Unfortunate Events instead of doing my homework isn’t a problem.

It all started when my teachers for my prose-publishing class assigned us an essay on an author who influenced our own writing. I hemmed and hawed—a phrase which here means “deliberated for about five minutes before forgetting, allowed several days go by, and finally came back to it because I was bored in class and wanted to do literally anything else”—and swung back and forth between Rowling, Lewis, and Carroll. None of them felt quite right, though, and it was then that I hit upon the obvious answer: Lemony Snicket, idiot.

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Merlin (Season 1)

01 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Television

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By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Shine Television and FremantleMedia

If you were following my Twitter or Facebook or peeking in through my bedroom window, you know that I had a pretty nasty case of the flu for a solid week. I have recovered (thanks for not asking, jerk), though I’ve now got laryngitis, so my life is just fabulous at the moment. At any rate, that was a seven-day stretch spent in bed, and because it wasn’t the fun kind of seven-days-in-bed, that meant I had to find some way to entertain myself. My sister suggested I watch Sherlock, so I did, and once that was over—too soon, I might add—I carried on with the BBC’s marvelous programming and started watching the first season of Merlin. Now stop whining about how Sherlock is such a better show and why am I reviewing Merlin instead when it’s not nearly as good, because shut up, that’s why. I’ll get to it when I get to it, so stop nagging me, woman.

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Les Misérables (2012)

18 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Films

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By Grace Crawford

Image courtesy of Working Title Films and Universal Pictures.

Spoiler alert: everyone is miserable.

When I was in the tenth grade, my high school put on a performance of Les Misérables. It was a crazy time in my life. I was a teenager, trying to learn what the hell to do about boys, trying to succeed in school, trying to make new friends, trying to figure out who I was, and basically kind of just failing at everything. The few friends I did have, however, were remarkable women for whom I have nothing but love and respect, and most of us are still friends to this day. And together we entered that colossal time-sucking adventure that is trying to put on a musical.

“Why am I telling you this?” you may ask. I am telling you this, you darling, somewhat rude reader, so that you will understand my full meaning—well, most of it, anyway, as you can’t exactly go jamming your head into a Pensieve full of my memories and I wouldn’t let you anyway—when I tell you that I have had a soft spot in my heart for Les Mis for a long time.

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

04 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Films

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By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of New Line Cinema, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, WingNut Films, Warner Bros. Pictures

The big problem with reviewing epic movies is that you can never cram in all the things you want to talk about. And by the end, when it’s all formed into one cohesive, coherent piece, you find that there are a lot of little things you forgot about or had no place for, which is quite sad. So I will do my best with this, because it was a lot of the little things that made this movie so enjoyable.

Since I saw this in the theatre, as opposed to what I do normally—which is watch things on my laptop while I’m wearing my pajamas and eating chocolate chips by the handful because reasons—I wasn’t able to pause the movie at various points to take notes and think about things and also get more chocolate chips because I ate the whole bag. So this is gonna be a little scattered, and you’re gonna deal with it, and you’re gonna like it, because your only alternative is Thom, and he doesn’t like fantasy or sword fights or anything awesome ever.

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Pitch Perfect

22 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Films

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By Grace Crawford

Pitch Perfect images courtesy of Universal Pictures

We’ve known each other for a little while now.  I’ve gotten to know things about you, dear reader, shameful things that previously only your browser history knew about (I know you read my Fifty Shades review.  We have no secrets, you and I).  So I’ve decided to come clean about something big, something game-changing, something that will forever change the way you think about me and may even cause you to doubt your love for me, fathomless though you thought it was: I used to be a fan of Glee.

Are you still reading?  Oh, thank God! I was so afraid my love for a cappella covers of popular songs would keep us apart.  What’s that?  Yes, I said a cappella.  Wait, where are you going?  Come back!  This isn’t a Glee review!

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The Hunger Games

22 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Books, Recent Books

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By Grace Crawford

The Hunger Games image courtesy of Scholastic Publishing

The problem with writing more than one review in a single day lies in the number of jokes one is capable of making in a single sitting.  More often than not, I bring out the big guns for the first article, leaving very little for the second.  However, the last one I wrote was a little light on the funny.  It actually wasn’t funny at all.  It was drier than a piece of month-old bread.  It was drier than all the jokes about bread I’m going to make in this article, because I can never resist puns about baked goods when I’m talking about The Hunger Games.

I’m writing about the book, not the film, and just the first book, not the whole series.  So I don’t want any grousing about how “you didn’t talk about the other two books, and everyone knows the last one is the best,” or “the movie was a ball of flaming crap and I fell asleep and so did my narcoleptic great-aunt who went and saw it with me.”  It’s your own fault for bringing an old woman with a sleep disorder to a movie that cost you $10.25 for the seniors’ ticket and $12.75 for the medium tub of popcorn that she can’t even chew anyway because she left her false teeth in the dishwasher again, and anyway I liked that movie.  But that’s beside the point.

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