Soul Surfer: I give it five stars!

Last night I took my older girls to see "Soul Surfer," which I highly recommend, by the way.

That's the one about the girl surfer who had her arm bitten off by a shark and got back on the surfboard with one arm. It was filmed here in Hawaii.

(I was going to give it "two thumbs up" in my title, but I was afraid that would be tasteless.)

This movie had something for everyone: scenery, suspense, a shark attack...

Don't laugh. That shark attack was a big draw for my kids.

I really enjoyed it and came away inspired to be a better person.

No, seriously! It was a very inspiring movie. Even my 14-year-old was unable to be blase about it. We were able to have a great conversation about perserverance.

And it's definitely okay for kids; for a movie that's pretty much ABOUT a shark attack, they minimized the gore big-time.

But the movie was really more about how she got back on the board AFTER the attack, of course, with the help of her Christian faith. I thought the whole thing was really well-done.

It was apparently based on the book Bethany Hamilton wrote about the incident. She is super-cool, as we can see from this photo.

Of course, my kids asked me how they'd made the actress look like she only had one arm for more than half the film.

I mean, obviously, Annasophia Robb still has both her arms. Nobody's THAT much of a method actor.

I told the kids they must have digitally removed the arm from the scenes, frame by frame. Later we looked on the internet and I saw they'd used a green-screen somehow, judging by her greened-out arm cast here.

The other thing I found interesting were the photos they showed of the real people after the movie. It's cool when a movie is based on a true story and they can do that.

But it was amazing how NORMAL the real people in the photos were, as opposed to their gorgeous Hollywood actor counterparts we'd just seen up-close-and-personal for two hours.

I thought the same thing after I watched "The Blind Side," actually. The movies are just so much prettier, and cleaner, and slicker than real life.

I mean, the real people were pretty good-looking to begin with, honestly. But I guess no one in real life can compare to someone with a make-up and camera crew.

So all I need to do now is get a movie made about my life, and Hollywood can pretty me and my family up too!

Do you think Catherine Zeta-Jones might be available to play me?