CaraOakley.com

My friend and I were due a trip to the cinema before Christmas and we decided on Twilight. Partly because she likes Harry Potter and mentioned that the guy who played Cedric Diggory was playing one of the lead characters and also because another friend told me it was about vampires and I do quite like the fantasy genre. At this point I had no idea just how huge Twilight was in the USA (the film or the books) so went along with no real expectations. For me the first thing that really got my attention was the music, I went home and downloaded the score and the soundtrack, both of which are excellent. The film was really good with the added bonus that the cast are easy on the eye, which is a plus.

As these things happen, once you have heard of something, you seem to hear more about it. Turned out that the books are a cult over in the USA for teen girls. With a trip home to my parents for Christmas (a very quiet village with nothing to do) I thought I would try the books for size. Stephenie Meyer, writer of the Twilight saga has one creative mind!

In the sleeve of the final book Breaking Dawn is her website address and I was curious enough to take a look. Here I discovered that the Twilight saga came from a dream she had. I have to say that I found this to be quite fascinating. Four books were created after she had a dream! If you are curious, she dreamed about the meadow scene and it all grew from there.

The story is about Bella Swan, a very ordinary girl who falls in love with a vampire. Then there is Edward Cullen. The ‘vegetarian’ vampire who falls in love with Bella. He makes for quite the torn hero, the whole I love her but want to eat her thing cannot have been easy to get across on the big screen. I had heard somewhere (I cannot remember where) that Robert Pattinson had received a lot of negative mail from fans of the books saying he would not make a good Edward Cullen.

Now I would just like to finish off with this; in my humble opinion Robert Pattinson brought Edward Cullen to the big screen perfectly. He nailed it actually, I cannot fault him and I do hope that his sucess continues, he is talented, gorgeous and it’s really great that we have a brit doing so well in Hollywood.

Have you seen the news today?? Children as young as 5 were expelled from schools last year for sexual bullying.  A 5 and 6 year old were caught trying to elope to Africa. I ask you… what on earth is going on??? I don’t know about you guys but when I was 5 and at school there was nothing like that going on, I wanted a pony and a sleep over with my best friend. I am truly curious and in truth quite disturbed as to why these very young children are behaving like this? The more scary of the two news stories that caught my attention has to be the sexual bullying at school, ranging from a few sexual comments to out about rape! PARENTS - what the hell are you teaching your children so that they think its acceptable to do this?? This post really could go on and on about how lapse these children’s parents must be for such young children to be acting in this way but I do not want to get into that now. This is all pretty disturbing and I really hope that for the sake of the victims that schools and parents act right away to get this under some sort of control.

Here is the link to the story on the BBC Panorama website.

Panorama: Kids behaving badly is on BBC 1 at 2030GMT on Monday 5 January 2009.