I don't like scary movies. Or, at least, that's been my line for at least twenty years. I don't like to be scared and if scary movies aren't scary, they are dumb, and I don't like to watch dumb things either. But my husband has been waging a quiet campaign to get me interested in horror. When we first got together, he offered to watch all seven seasons of the Gilmore Girls if I would agree to watch Alien and The Conjuring. Then we watched Get Out and Midsommar, which are incredible pieces of cinema that just happen to be scary. Lately, we've been watching our way through the Mike Flanagan shows on Netflix, like Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, which are basically eight-hour-long explorations of Flanagan's feelings about addiction and religion with some scary stuff thrown in. And...like...maybe I'm starting to like scary things? Scary-ish things?

Not that Lisa Frankenstein is scary, per se. There's a lot of ickiness: bugs, decay, grave dirt, blood, and multiple electrocutions. But while Lisa may appear to be a plucky rom-com heroine at the beginning of the movie, by the end she's something else entirely. She's the villain, and it's fabulous.

For this month's movie review, I wanted to review a college romance since the whole Game Day Series is now available. I googled around, trying to find something suitable, but I wasn't super excited about any of my choices. Then I mentioned it to my husband and he immediately said, "So you're gonna do Beautiful Disaster, right?"

Bridgerton has been one of my favorite series in the past few years. I read the Julia Quinn novels when I was first getting into romance. When the first season came out I was thrilled with the color-blind casting, the lush costumes and settings, and the soundtrack made up of classical versions of pop songs. Season two took a little longer to get me, but by the time Anthony tries to slap a bee off Kate's shoulder I was hooked. Netflix, clearly knowing what they had, decided to split season three into two parts. What a tease! I was intending to put off watching part one until part two was streaming, but I recently found myself with a free night and a hankering for regency romance, so I went for it. There are spoilers below for the first two seasons, so proceed with caution!

Like many Americans of European-mutt descent, I'm enamored with Ireland. While I'm peripherally aware that it is a high functioning nation with a robust tech sector, there is a part of me that continues to believe that Ireland is ruled by a fairy king and everyone who lives there is a poet-farmer descended from leprechauns who subsists on Guinness, potatoes, and British tears. My husband and I visited in 2021, and the week we spent there did nothing to dispel this fantasy. Everyone we met was incredibly friendly, every stone was infused with history, and it was exactly as green as expected. Take a look at this terrible picture I took out of a bus window because I was so thrilled by the reality of cows and hedgerows: