TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Star Wars IX - The Rise of Skywalker. After Star Wars VIII - The Last Jedi my enthusiasm for the new trilogy wasn't in a great place. Director, Rian Johnson, did make a fairly good movie but his efforts to subvert expectations by almost completely trivializing (or ignoring) most of the interesting hooks from The Force Awakens , meant that J. J. Abrams needed to make up for a lot of missing story for Star Wars IX - The Rise of Skywalker . The Rise of Skywalker is the final installment of the Skywalker saga that includes nine films, though technically it really only concludes the stories of Rey and Ben Solo that began with The Force Awakens. If you saw the trailers then there are few surprises to be had here in terms of the story. Rey and Kylo Ren are on a collision course that eventually leads to the return of Emperor Palpatine (thanks to Rian who turned Snoke, a potentially interesting villain, into nothing noteworthy) who for some reason needs Rey in order to make himself...

The Good Liar. When you see that Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen are staring in a movie together for the first time you really don't need to know anything else about the movie before deciding to go see it. That was the case with The Good Liar . I was looking for a film to go see with my partner on her birthday, this was showing. That's really all we needed but it didn't hurt knowing that the premise was a hustler attempting to relieve a rich widow of her fortune. Like any good hustle movie, you know going in things are not going to be as straightforward as the initial outline describes. You'll probably work out pretty early where the story is heading. Despite that the film does a good job of putting in enough doubt along the way, so you're never quite certain the end is going to be exactly what you think. This is quite possibly the first time I've seen Ian McKellen play just a regular person without superpowers or magical abilities. As you'd expect h...

Mostly Plants - 101 Delicious Flexitarian Recipes from the Pollan Family . I've never bought a cookbook in my life until now. Mostly Plants randomly came across my path when I happened upon a Youtube clip of Jimmy Fallon interviewing Michael J. Fox and his partner, Tracy Pollan. One of the topics discussed, obviously, was the cookbook which is a collaboration with Tracy's two sisters, and her mother, with a title that comes from her brother Michael's quote: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. You can watch the aforementioned Youtube clip from April 2019 below. Mostly Plants is a Flexitarian recipe book, not to be confused with a diet book. Its main goal is to give anyone trying to eat healthier, plant based meals, some options if you'd still like to keep a little meat in the mix. At the time I bought the book my partner had been trying to eat less meat, and even tried going vegan altogether but wasn't managing to stick with it for very long. Possi...