Lily Cahill

What Are They Doing to Those Pumpkins?

Long-time readers will know that I want more romance movies for every occasion. Give me your Halloween romance, your Hannukah romance, your Every Holiday romance. But I'm not the only one befuddled by the lack of Thanksgiving romances. The holiday has all the small-town and extended family hijinks that a Hallmark movie could want, plus the opportunity for sexy cooking scenes and second-chance romance. But for whatever reason, Thanksgiving rom-coms are thin on the ground. Last year I reviewed Pumpkin Pie Wars, so this year I decided to stick with the theme and review Growing the Big One, a 2010 movie starring...Shannon Doherty?

A Rom-Com for Spooky Season!

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.

Did Someone Say Pidge?

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 3.2: Regency Romance is so Weird

Don't get me wrong, I love regency romance. It's one of the genres I enjoyed the most when I first started reading romance novels. I love pretty dresses and horseback riding and elegant castles as much as the next girl, but the thing that really makes the genre sing is the threat of immediate expulsion from polite society if one steps even a toe outside the bounds of permissible behavior. But of course, "permissible behavior" doesn't include anything fun, which means all the fun stuff has an illicit air that makes it even more delicious. As a reader, I find myself trapped between envy for the sumptuous lifestyle regency MCs enjoy, and grateful that I don't live in a world where my only purpose is to be pretty enough to capture a mate. In some regency novels, that tension snaps when one of the characters steps way outside of respectability and finds acceptance for who they really are. Those characters have the ability to really touch readers (or in the case of Bridgerton Season 3, watchers) who empathize with the struggle to fit in, even in our more permissive society. Those are the books that are remembered for their powerful character development, instead of their heat level.

All that to say ... I understand why there wasn't more sex in this season, but I really would have liked more sex in this season.

Spoilers below!