Recently, a Cup of Jo reader emailed us with a question…

“My 40th birthday is this June, and I’m hosting a party in a garden,” wrote Kate. “My anxiety has really ramped up over the past two years, but I’m working through things in therapy and hoping that I’m entering a fresh chapter. I want to feel chic but fun, and I’m ready to paaaaaartyyyyyyy. What’s a special occasion dress that’s not frilly or frumpy? I’m okay with a splurge.”

Happy (almost) birthday, Kate! What a fun question, and I’m excited that you’re throwing yourself a party. (I threw my own birthday party last year, and it was one of my all-time favorite nights.) Here are a few dresses that might work beautifully…

1. Pink is gorgeous for spring, so how about a striped dress or this cotton number? I also love this linen one, and what beautiful magenta silk.

2. Red always makes a statement. I loooove this cheesecloth dress, which would feel cool and breezy all night (and would be great for summer trips, too). This linen midi, at a lower price point, is also cute. Or go for great details: these straps are so romantic, and how gorgeous is this back?

3. Channel a flower yourself with this highly rated maxi (with pockets!) or a very pretty mini. Also, my friend has this Sea floral skirt, which was a big splurge but gets a million compliments every time she leaves the house. “Even my 20-year-old boy neighbor was like, ‘I really like your skirt,’” she laughed.

4. Finally, polka dots are a big trend right now, although I’ve always loved them. This sundress is lovely, this midi has a cool square neck, and this dress isn’t technically polka dot but it’s a VIBE.

Thoughts? Which would you choose? Or would you recommend a different look? I also like these chic shoes. xoxo

P.S. More reader questions, and 12 readers share their favorite birthday celebrations.

By Will LeBlanc
| Published 10 seconds ago

Apollo 18 slipped into theaters in 2011 with a marketing hook built around “lost NASA footage,” leaning hard on viral ambiguity rather than star power. Unfortunately, a movie like Apollo 18 has a huge hurdle to overcome before it even gets started. It must defeat the “it’s just another found footage horror movie” naysayers and become its own unique film. Apollo 18 doesn’t exactly do that, but it does manage to get a few good scares out of the audience and send everyone home feeling like they should probably sleep with the lights on.

After the Apollo 17 mission, Apollos 18, 19, and 20 were canceled due to budgetary concerns at NASA, or so the public was meant to think. Apollo 18 intimates that only 19 and 20 were completely shut down, and that 18 was carried out under heavy classification by the Department of Defense.

In Apollo 18, three astronauts were sent into space to place equipment on the moon that would help the United States spy on the Soviet Union. At least, that’s what they thought. The DoD had other plans, though, as the crew unwittingly investigated an extra-terrestrial presence on the moon, which obviously started stirring up some trouble.

Apollo 18 makes every effort to make sure that you are paying attention to Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 when he explains every aspect of his mission to his son. Terms like “orbiter” and “LEM” are in heavy rotation between the astronauts with a dash of some technical jargon that will at least register in your brain if you’ve seen other space flight films rather than simply pinging off your atmosphere.

Of course, a film that takes place between three astronauts in a six-foot by six-foot space won’t make for the wordiest piece, but the few scientific words they do use make perfect sense even to the layman.

Realistically, this kind of Apollo 18 storytelling wouldn’t work in any other format than “found footage”. There’s virtually no character development; there are no side characters to act as exposition sponges to be talked at, just to get story elements across to the audience, and the astronauts are all pretty interchangeable.

It makes sense that the characters would all be very similar; they all went through the same training program, after all. As for exposition, why would these astronauts stop and explain what’s going on aloud to each other when they both already know what’s going on?

It could have been very distracting if Apollo 18 director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego had decided to stick huge swaths of dialogue into the film, having the characters dig deep into anything other than their current situation on the moon, and omitting it helped keep the story concise. But that doesn’t mean the movie was perfect.

Apollo 18’s first mistake was telling the audience that the entire film was edited from 80 hours of footage that mysteriously appeared on lunartruth.com. If that were true, then this film was edited together by the saddest jerk who ever bought Final Cut Pro.

Apollo 18 is, without a doubt, meant to be a horror film and in no way resembles anything other than a horror film. If this footage actually existed in this public database, the first film assembled would undoubtedly be 100% more educational. Sure, the content would be frightening, but the main goal would be to get this information across to viewers, not make them piss their pants in fear.

The Apollo 18 editing itself a lot of the time was barely editing at all, and a lot of times we actually see the ends of reels of the 16mm film the crew was supposedly filming with, an easy fix for anyone who knows how to operate an editing suite. Which leads to the film’s biggest shortcoming.

Apollo 18 is tiresome just to look at. It’s shot with about three stationary cameras and two handhelds that the astronauts frequently carry, and none of them seem to be shooting in the same format. The clarity is constantly shifting, the colors bend, and watching static roll across the screen like on a poorly tracked VCR gets really old, really fast. I recognize that they wouldn’t be shooting in HD, but a lot of the artificially added aging Apollo 18’s editors did to the footage is more distracting than it needed to be to uphold the authenticity of the story.

Fortunately, the film does enough right that even though you’re so tired of the footage itself, the story has immersed you enough to ignore it and just hang on for the ride. 90% of the film’s “scariness”, for lack of a better term, comes from the relentless atmospheric noise the sound team created.

There’s a constant undulating hum that builds a sense of unease on its own, regardless of the fact that there are also aliens on the moon. That, coupled with the LEM’s irregular beeps and boops, will unsettle even the most veteran horror fans.

Apollo 18’s greatest success is its capitalizing on one of mankind’s greatest fears: the ultimate isolation. This doesn’t take place in a house where, if you need help, you can call a priest, or in the woods, where, if you were to run far enough in one direction, you’d eventually find the end.

Apollo 18 takes place on the moon in one of the most claustrophobic places ever filmed. Even more so than the Apollo 13 living quarters. If there’s anything malevolent inside these astronauts’ living space, and there frequently is, they take minutes to suit up if they want to go outside away from the threat, and if they even get out the door, they’re on the freakin’ moon.

They don’t have neighbors, they don’t have help, they just have nothingness. Literally. Just the vacuum of space. That is terrifying. Having one thing actively trying to kill you is scary enough, but when there are a dozen ways for you to accidentally die on your own, you can’t help but be terrified.

Apollo 18 makes its mistakes, but ultimately, the film is enjoyable if you’re looking for a good scare. It’s a little slow and arduous at times, and it certainly lacks depth in its story and explanations, but the mystery is part of what the director is trying to create, and it helps support the film’s authenticity. Apollo 18 isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely worth your time if you go into it looking for horror.

By Zack Zagranis
| Published 1 hour ago

Everyone knows by now that Liam Neeson has a particular set of skills that he’s acquired over a long career in Hollywood. Skills that make him a dream come true for action movie fans. Those skills are on full display in the 2015 underrated action gem Run All Night.

In Run All Night, Liam Neeson plays a perpetually drunk former hitman, Jimmy “The Gravedigger” Conlon, forced to go against his best friend and former boss Shawn Maguire, played by Ed Harris, in order to save his son, Mike Conlon, played by Joel Kinnaman. Along with Neeson and Harris, the film also stars Daredevil‘s Vincent D’Onofrio as Detective John Harding and Genesis Rodriguez of Tusk fame.

Run All Night was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra from a screenplay written by Brad Ingelsby, creator of the popular HBO Max mini-series Mare of Easttown. The film marked the 3rd collaboration between Liam Neeson and Collet-Serra. The duo previously worked together on the movies Unknown and Non-Stop.

In 2012, Warner Bros. purchased Ingelsby’s script, then titled The All-Nighter, for six figures. The following year, Liam Neeson joined the cast right around the time Jaume Collet-Serra came aboard the project. The movie was scored by frequent Zack Snyder collaborator Junkie XL, who thought it would be more interesting to base the score on emotional beats rather than let the action dictate the musical direction.

Run All Night was a minor Box-Office success, grossing $26.5 million domestically and another $45.1 million overseas, for a grand total of $71.56 million, against a production budget of $50 million. Interestingly, the audience for the Liam Neeson action-thriller was 52% female on its opening weekend, a number considered high for an all-male action movie. The figure just helps to further dispel the stereotype that only guys like to see people crashing cars and beating the crap out of each other.

Run All Night is just one of several action movies starring late-career Liam Neeson. Ever since 2008’s Taken, Neeson has focused almost exclusively on action/crime movies. In addition to Taken 2 and 3, Neeson has appeared in at least 20 other movies that IMDb considers either action, crime, or both.

To say the man is being typecast is an understatement. To put it another way, when a trailer for a Liam Neeson movie comes on, most fans assume it’s a Taken sequel until told otherwise.

That’s not to say that the Northern Ireland-born actor hasn’t dabbled in other genres in the last 15 years. In the last decade and a half, Liam Neeson has managed to squeeze in a few romantic dramas, such as Made in Italy and Ordinary Love, along with a handful of cameos here and there. Perhaps Neeson’s oddest collaborations have been with American Dad creator Seth MacFarlane, who cast him as the lead in 2025’s The Naked Gun reboot.

MacFarlane lso put Liam Neeson in his other live-action endeavors like A Million Ways to Die in the West, Ted 2, and The Orville, as well as using the actor for a few bits on Family Guy. Neeson is known primarily for serious roles, making it even weirder that Seth casts him exclusively as comedy relief. For whatever reason, it works.

Neeson’s cameo in Ted 2 as a grocery store customer buying Trix is easily the funniest gag in the movie.

Cameos aside, action movies really have become Liam Neeson’s bread and butter lately. Not just any action movies, either, but the kind where an old, grizzled ex-CIA agent/mob hitman/bank robber comes back and grimaces his way through one last job. His characters are the grimdark versions of the wisecracking, one-liner-spouting action heroes of the ’80s played by actors like Schwarzenegger and Stallone.

Where Arnold’s characters would snap a foe’s neck on an airplane and then tell the flight attendant, “Don’t disturb my friend. He’s dead tired.” Liam Neeson’s character gives the bad guys a speech that basically amounts to “I’m a highly trained killer, and I’m gonna hunt you down and murder you.”

But that’s ok. Liam Neeson, after all, has a particular set of skills that includes playing badasses over 60. Why not stick to what you’re good at? If Neeson’s particular kind of bleak, gritty action movie is your thing, you could do a lot worse than Run All Night.