It's been a long weekend of movie watching for me. I started out watching American Horror Story: Coven, which is the third season in the series.
I love this series. It's graphic and bloody and filled with twists and turns. What I love most about this series is the writers' and actors' ability to both stay the same and be different at the same time. It's comforting to be able to watch a character's gruesome demise and know that they'll be back, better than ever, in the next season...or even a few episodes later. Come to think of it...that's a property of a lot of my favorite shows. What I specifically liked about Coven was the great stories. There was VooDoo, Salem, stories and lore that spanned a two hundred year time period, and I love that stuff. I like knowing that a story has a history and I like knowing what that history is. Coven gave me all of that AND Stevie Nicks. I'm not ashamed to admit that Stevie's cameos were my favorite part of the whole series. The finale episode is titled "Seven Wonders" and Stevie actually performs "Seven Wonders" which is one of my all time favorite Fleetwood Mac songs. I almost cried it was such a great incorporation. The only downside is that I now have to wait until October for season 4: Freakshow to air and then I'll be down to one episode a week. Le sigh.
I also managed to watch the 2013 horror "Oculus" to support Amelia Pond (Karen Gillan) in her big non-Doctor Who debut. The movie is about a haunted mirror that kills the parents of a couple of kids. The son shoots the father, who is psycho and trying to kill them, and the boy is institutionalized for eleven years. The movie goes back and forth between flashbacks of the children's past and the present. In the present, Karen Gillan has re-acquired the haunted mirror and is determined to gather photographic evidence of it being haunted and murderous. Without giving too much away, I was disappointed with this movie. There were some neat points regarding time and dimension bending, but they were ultimately not fully explained. It was also really weird to hear Karen talk with an American accent...I just kept waiting for her to fall back into her familiar scottish accent. Oh, god...how am I going to feel when I watch the American version of "Broadchurch" with David Tennant?? 
Finally, I wrapped up my weekend with "The Woman in Black" aka "Harry Potter and the Haunted House." I have been wanting to watch this since it was first advertised. Everyone told me not to see it; that it was just too awful. Unfortunately, they were right. It wasn't scary and I couldn't stop seeing Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter. The story was slow...so slow! And the scares were just not there. It was creepy, but there wasn't enough meaningful dialogue to move the story along. I get that it was less horror and more gothic, but it didn't seem to have a good balance of those two genres. Again, I was disappointed.
I have two days of work at the district tomorrow and Tuesday. I think that will be good for me...I feel like my brain is getting a little mushy without a concrete schedule and a lack of accountability. The procrastinator in me is winning out and I don't like that. This is why I hate summer break; there's too much time for me to waste and go unchecked. I want to go back to a year-round school.
