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This may be the best campaign I've seen all year: GE's "Agent of Good."

Thoughts on Snow White and the Huntsman or How Peter Jackson's LOTRs has spoiled me for all other films

I was really excited for this rendition of Snow White. I really was. And boy, was I disappointed. And it might be Peter Jackson's fault.

No, Peter Jackson didn't work on Snow White and the Huntsman. More's the pity. But because of Peter Jackson, I now expect films of high fantasy to be visually gorgeous and knit together with great sense. Yes, LOTR was written by Tolkien, not Jackson and his creative crew. But the script was rewritten by Jackson and his creative crew. They cut and reorganized. They said hey, it makes no sense for the climax of the first story arc to be in second story. So they change it. And so on.

Snow White and the Hunstman did have some cool visual effects. Like when ... whenever Charlize Theron had a scene.

The first problem with this film is casting Charlize Theron as a character whose main crisis is that her rival is more beautiful than she is. Who -- who? -- in Hollywood do you possibly cast to play that part? Kristen Stewart, who was cast to play that part, isn't an ugly girl, but she, like most American women, can't outshine Charlize Theron, even with movie magic. Not by anyone's standard. Remedy? Flash back to the now-dead old Queen telling young Snow White that she's beautiful on the inside. Ooooh. Inner beauty. Got it. Doesn't make much sense given the whole mirror trope, but we'll role with it.

The second problem is how we connect to the main characters. The Queen was creepy. Great. Goosebumps: Check. The huntsman was rugged but troubled. Deadly, with a devastating past. We can totally empathize with him. (It wasn't until I went to write this post that I realized he was played by Chris Hemsworth -- you know, Thor.) Snow White? It was impossible to care about her or root for her success.

I should preface all my following statements with the fact that this was the first movie I'd ever seen Kristen Stewart in. I'd not watched Twilight at the time and I have no personal feelings about her assorted romantic dealings which headline the tabloids. But damn, did her performance ruin this film.

Every time she was on screen she made me remember that I was watching a movie. I couldn't ever get into it because I spent all my time wondering why the hell is she doing that?

Don't Play It Safe

[Image/quote via Advice to Writers]

As a writer, you should fall in love with your characters at some point, even the dastardly ones. Perhaps the dastardly ones most of all because when else in life is it safe to love a psychopath? But what I often see is the more a writer writes about a set of characters, the less she is able to torture them. She cares about them now and wants to give them a happy life / happy ending.

But creating meaningful ways to torture your characters is important to the narrative. Extremely important.

It's easy to set up a character with a conflict when you haven't yet gotten to know them, but as you come to understand their complexities, you -- like a good parent -- want to smooth the road ahead of them instead of throwing giant obstacles in their way.

Think of the movie Twister. A simple enough plot: chase a series of tornadoes trying to get close enough to put a scientific instrument inside a twister, all while grappling with daddy-issues and a marriage that's fallen apart. I'm not saying that Twister is the perfect narrative -- I'm saying that as your characters drive down the country road of the plot, you need to throw stuff at them. Throw a crazed rival scientist at them. Throw a new fiancée at them. Throw a cow at them. Roll a runaway house directly into their path. And if driving through a tumbling house wasn't enough -- throw an oil tanker at them and make it explode.

Keep throwing stuff at your characters -- physical obstacles and emotional ones. Give 'em both barrels. Inflict pain and suffering. Make it hurt so good.

Because we love to read it when it hurts so good.

The year of Snow White

We may have just had the Chinese New Year, and various news articles might still be extolling what to do, buy and eat in the Year of the Dragon. But from where I'm sitting, this is the year of Snow White.

In 2012 not one but two full length, live action Snow White tales will make their way into theaters. Mirror Mirror staring Julia Roberts and Snow White and the Huntsman staring Charlize Theoron -- perhaps that phrase in and of itself is proof that neither of these tales is actually about the girl Snow White, but the evil queen.

Roberts and Theoron play undoubtedly different queens. Roberts fills the role with her signature laugh and the premise tends toward slapstick.  Beauty in Mirror Mirror is portrayed through bold colors, and dazzling ornateness. Theoron's character is much more of a Morgan le Fay. In Snow White and the Huntsman, beauty is a dark, sensual thing -- both erotic and cannibalistic.

In short, Mirror Mirror is the type of child's whimsy we think of today when we think "fairy tale."  And Snow White and the Huntsman is a throwback what "fairy tale" meant a few hundred years ago -- actually, what it's meant for most of its existence.

Book bender

For the past week or so, I've been fully consumed by a book bender. Which is a lot like any other bender. You overdo it. You spend all of your waking hours that aren't at work, working on your bender progress. And some of your non-waking hours become waking hours all in the pursuit of finishing another page, another chapter, another book. More. More. More of a good thing can't be bad? you ask yourself. And the bender replies, Of course not.

Th book bender even has the same hangover feeling as a regular bender. Although with fewer lasting effects on your liver probably. The same woozy head and need for water that you forgot to drink. The same stack of crud in your apartment that didn't get taken care of. Laundry. Dishes. Overflowing trash bin.

You took care of the basics. Mostly. The cats are fed, their litter box is clean. You showered daily. Or at least every other day. Or at least on the days you went to work.

First thing book I hit on my bender was Frozen by Robin Wasserman. I chose this book because I knew if I read Shadow, book four in Allie's War by JC Andrijeski, I would start on a bender. I love this series and knew I would read the entire 220,000 word novel in as close to one stint as I possibly could. (220,000 words, btw, would make this ebook almost 900 pages if it was published as a mass market paperback.)

And I wanted to avoid the bender.

So I resisted diving into the next book in what I knew was an all-consuming series. I picked up a YA dystopia that I thought I could put down after the first volume.

Unfortunately, I got kind of interested. There was some interestingly unresolved interpersonal stuff at the end of Frozen. So I checked Shattered and Torn out of the library's YA section and finished what's called the "Cold Awakening Trilogy" in a weekend.

These books have a scarily possibly future. We've screwed the world over with pollution, nuclear bombs and "accidents," as well as religious wars. Society has stratified itself to the uber-rich, the poor who live in work camps, and the even poorer who are too mutated or unfortunate to live in work camps and are therefore living in the nasty shells of former cities. The uber-rich pretty much live their lives on the network. Oh there's interpersonal interaction, but you don't define yourself in reality as much as you do in your "zone." Of course, all of this is background. The novel opens with the teenage main character's death and her subsequent rival into a mechanical body. True to form for a spoiled, rich, bitchy teenager, she spends the first 50 pages whining about being dead and/or a machine. It took me a couple of months of picking up the book and putting it down to get past those opening pages. But the premise was intriguing enough that I didn't give up on the book.

But I find my problem with YA dystopia -- YA fiction in general -- is that the endings do not make me happy. How do you plan to resolve all the juicy love triangles if  [skip to below the three the icy book covers if you don't want to hear any hint of spoilers] one or all of your love triangle participants is dead, reprogrammed, some sort of zen ball of energy, or an all-seeing eye in the sky, a beneficent Big Brother?

This, people, is why I read books that are clearly labeled romance. At least that way you know that one of the interpersonal relationships will have some feel of finality by the end of the book.
   

These books were previously released as Skinned, Crashed, and Wired with unpretty covers. They were recently renamed, rebranded, and rereleased. They have really pretty covers in this edition, no?

I was so pissed off that I knew I needed to start reading another book immediately to take my mind off how annoyed I was with the ending that was, albeit, the logical inevitable conclusion based on the world/characters/situation.

I needed to cleanse my palate. And in the process I pushed myself into an even larger reading bender than I ever could have done with one 900 page novel.

I'd requested a copy of One for the Money by Janet Evanovich from my local library after seeing a trailer for the forthcoming movie with Katherine Heigl. The book is hilarious! Absolutely amazingly funny and such an easy, engaging read.

I'm not normally a fan of crime fiction or mysteries, but I'm totally sold on the New Jersey bounty hunter named Stephanie Plum. She's not one of the many kickass crime fighting chicks of fiction. Oh no, she's working the gossip tree of Italian mommas and busybodies. Not to say that there aren't fight scenes, explosions, and gun play. Actually, the gun play is very, very dangerous if you're a roast chicken in this novel.



That may make the book sound more lighthearted than it is. But the end effect is that the gritty parts balance out the humor.

My copy of One for the Money said there was a sequel. Great!

I got it. Read it in a day.

Got the next one. Read it in two days.

I'm on Four to Score right now. If I finish it in the next day I'll have read seven books in eight days.

Definitely on a book bender.

Damn.

I keep thinking about stopping, but then Joe Morelli does something interesting and I want to read more. And then I get a hint that someone happens (maybe) with Ranger in book five, so of course I want to get to book five.

I've redefined what "laying in supplies" for what will likely be a long, snowy weekend means: a fridge full of chinese takeout and books four, five and six checked out from the library, on my coffee table and ready to go.

I looked to the series itself for some relief. I mean, even if I didn't have the willpower to stop this madness, the series had to end sometime. Right? There can't be an endless supply of Stephanie Plum novels waiting to suck me into a never-ending book bender. Right? There can only be a few more novels in this series, surely.

Eighteen.

Janet Evanovich has at least eighteen Stephanie Plum novels out.

At this rate I won't resurface til Groundhog Day.

Very uncreative

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory wants you to help them come up with a better name for what they've been calling the "Very Large Array."

The VLA is made up of several of those GIANT dish-like radio antennas -- like the ones featured in Contact or The Dish -- and is out in some part of New Mexico that I've never heard of. Although, to be honest, if it's not near-Santa Fe or near-Albuquerque then all of New Mexico is a giant question mark for me geographically.


Have to say that I totally loved Contact and I might have even loved The Dish more.  The Dish is a fabulous film that is both funny and historical -- a radio dish in small town Australia (the dish is literally located in a sheep paddock) is tapped by NASA to help track Apollo 11 and man's first steps on the moon.  And The Dish has Sam Neil in it -- who doesn't like Sam Neil characters?

Go here if you have an idea for a more interesting name than "Very Large Array" -- a name which has been on the welcome sign for years now.  I went with murmuration, the same term as is applied to a group of starlings taking off.

(All photos of the VLA come from the VLA art gallery.)

Calender Men

If you've seen the film Calendar Girls you know the basics of the plot: older women decide to produce a calendar to make money for some very nice charity project by posing naked behind strategically placed items.  It's a funny and charming film -- and if you liked it I highly recommend Kinky Boots another British comedy with similar themes and wit though less nudity and more shoes.

I bring this up because I've recently come across The Men of the Stacks a 2012 calendar of, you guessed it, male librarians.  There's ... well you should really just see it. The pictures range; obviously they weren't all shot by the same photographer, but the proceeds go to the It Gets Better Project. http://menofthestacks.com/

Also sent to me was this series of photos of men in traditional pin up poses. There's such a brilliant combination of the traditional pin up and the average man that these are absurdly amusing.

"Green Lantern" Trailer

Recently Read: Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin

I admit that I didn't read Something Borrowed back when it came out in the hey day of chick lit because I had confused Emily Giffin with Sophie Kinsella.  And to my credit, the original covers of Something Borrowed  and Confessions of a Shopaholic were both that same sort of uber-pink chick lit design (see below).  Further confusing me was that I'd never read Confessions of a Shopaholic but a different Kinsella novel where a young, brilliant, female lawyer (same as Something Borrowed) hates her job (same as Something Borrowed) and has man/friend problems (same as Something Borrowed).

So let's just say I was throughly confused.

Then I saw the trailer for Something Borrowed at the movie theater.  It looked so cute!  Girl with longtime crush on her best friend's fiancé drunkenly lands in bed with him and everyone realizes in the nick of time who they really love and that they deserve to chase happiness not accept defeat!  Yay! (No spoilers in there, that's just what the film trailer implies.)

So I -- and every other person who'd seen the movie trailer -- went to the library and requested a copy of the actual book.  I finally got a copy a few weeks ago and settled in to read super cute chick lit fluffiness.

It was not super cute.

Chapter one introduces the characters.  Chapter two finds the main character sleeping with her best friend's fiancé and then starting an affair with him.  Um ... not okay.  Certainly not warm and fuzzy and cute.  As the book progresses many of the main relationships shift radically.  Other characters have to help the main character see this -- see who her real friends are and see who is using her.  Because basically the main character has no freaking clue at the beginning of the novel.

Okay, so I'm maybe half-way, two-thirds finished with the book before the main character and I both get the hint that the main character isn't having an affair with her best friend's fiancé, she's having an affair with the fiancé of her former best friend who is actually a shallow and kind of cruel woman.  Oh.  Still not as cute as I'd been hoping for.

Perhaps I would have found the cute factor the chick lit cover promised me if it hadn't been written in first person (I know, I know, chick lit and a first person narrator are peas in a pod but hear me out).

Because we're wrapped up in the narrator's thoughts and prejudices so tightly by the use of the first person, we aren't allowed to see characters for how they really are.  Our view of them as readers is completely shaped by the narrator's (delusional) view of them.  So we don't realize that the best friend is pretty bitchy for a long, long time.  We aren't allowed to come to that realization because the narrator tempers and makes excuses for everything the best friend does.  The bitchiness even seems to give the narrator purpose in life as the person who tempers the bitchiness -- and the character is proud of this ability! -- so as a reader, I was never given enough distance from the events to make my own judgments about the situation and therefore start rooting for the character to make realizations and changes.  Instead the narrator served as a heavy filter between me and the story.  So I got to the end and ... oh.  It's done. That was the ending? Huh.

I hope the movie Something Borrowed was as cute as the trailer promised it would be, because the book was not as cute as the trailer promised.

Aging, Changing and Dialog

NaNo: 3,974 / 50,000 words

This weekend's Ad of the Week sent me scrounging for my copy of  When Harry Met Sally.  Turns out I don't have one.  Bummer.  But, Netflix had it in their "Watch Now!" stream-on-demand selection, so I watched now.  Happiness.

I was a teenager when I first saw that movie.  Probably thirteen or fourteen.  I followed it.  Pretty much.  Mostly I was amused with the very 80s-ness of Meg Ryan's wardrobe.

Watching it again this weekend, I have a brand new appreciation for the writing.  What I think is really amazing about the writing is that Nora Ephron managed to capture the conversations you have when you're in college and the conversations you have a few years after you were in college.  That the dialog stayed true to the characters, and the characters didn't change drastically, they just grew up a little bit.

I don't think I'm properly expressing my awe.  Let me put it this way: I was watching the first 15 minutes and I was like this is such a stupid and narrow minded conversation that they're having and then I shook my head but it's exactly the kind of thing you discuss when you're 22 and you think you know everything there is to know.  And then I was hooked.

And it got me thinking about the difference between a character changing and a character aging.  Because I don't think the characters change as much as they age--aging being a kind of character change that's less drastic, slower ... glacial.  And how comparatively difficult aging is to write well without seeming inconsistent.

Happy Blue Moon

Tonight, New Year's Eve, is a full moon. (Starting at 7:13 PM to be exact.) Not only is it a full moon on New Year's Eve, this is the second full moon of the month; the other was on December 2.

Due to the moon's cycle being 29½ days, there are occasionally - as in July 2004 - two full moons in one month (only happens on average every 2.7 years). Then the second moon of the month is called a "blue moon." (From new-age.co.uk)

The older, Farmer's Almanac definition of a blue moon is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. Don't think too hard about that one, it's kind of roundabout ... then again what do you expect from the Farmer's Almanac on the topic of full moons?

Over the next 20 years there will be about 15 blue moons, with an almost equal number of both types of blue moons occurring. No blue moon of any kind will occur in the years 2011, 2014, and 2017. (From infoplease)

A double blue moon -- that is two blue moons in one year -- occurs every 19 years. In 1999 there was a blue moon in January and March. And, if you didn't want to do the math, the next time we'll have fourteen full moons in one calendar year is 2018.

Given these kind of numbers you'd think that a blue moon falling on New Year's Eve would be extremely rare. I was willing to bet on it occurring once every fifty or hundred years. Nope. According to The Atlantic the last one happened in 1990.

The phrase "blue moon" has been traced as far back as 1528 to a work by William Barlow: Treatyse of the Buryall of the Masse

"Yf they saye the mone is belewe,
We must beleve that it is true."

Or, if you're a little rusty on your pre-standardized spelling English:

"If they say the moon is blue,
We must believe that it is true."

No idea what that means.

In the 19th century until a blue moon meant the equivalent of when pigs fly. It has since morphed into once in a blue moon meaning rarely.

Meanwhile, the mice from Babe sing:

[I had to snag the video off of the movie trailer and then edit it down to just the mice/credits. They sing a little bit longer in the film but not much.]

Julie & Julia

I saw the film Julie & Julia today. It was sweet and funny until almost the very end. Meryl Streep was great -- so was Amy Adams although Streep outshined her. See, I had to go see it because it's about this woman turning thirty, feeling lost, and finding a way to ground herself through cooking her way through all 500+ recipes in Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, oh and then she blogs about it. So I ran out to see it the day it came out, even went by myself because I didn't want to wait to scrounge up someone to go with me.

I was ready to laugh, to smile, to maybe even cry a little. But most of all I was ready to feel inspired. I even had a grocery list in my purse so that I could return home and immediately continue with my cooking experiments. (I'm not doing too badly, btw, though I think my stir fry is becoming consistently worse.) Instead I left feeling rather devastated.

Nora Ephron (director and screenwriter) did a great job of establishing Julia Child as a lovable character. We really came to adore her and we went for the Julie's adoration hook, line and sinker. And then -- Bam! -- "Julia hates my blog ... she thinks it's disrespectful or something."

Oh the pain and the bewilderment. Putting people on pedestals is always dangerous to do, but it turns out that it's much, much easier to deal with them toppling off those pedestals than it is when they take a swipe at you from them. When they topple off you know they're human. When they take a swipe at you there's gravity helping to land a blow even harder.

I went to the store feeling sick and distraught. Sure, the character Julie pulls it together by the end of the film. Even leaves a gift on the shine of the Julia Child. But in the few minutes between the turn in the film and the credits rolling I had not pulled it together yet.

Still I shopped. Buying green peppers, an onion, and chicken broth to make corn chowder with the ears of corn that are quickly rotting in my crisper bin. I've never made corn chowder before but I'm eager to try it because it's new ... and because it'll use up all the corn quickly, before it gets any closer to Everclear. Also into my basket went talapia and a bottle of red wine. The fish is for tomorrow. The wine is to console my soul.

I'll let you know how the chowder goes.

Movie Review: Star Trek

I know I'm behind the curve and that most people who would consider seeing Star Trek in the theater already have. But most of what I have to say is for those who have already seen it.

I was disappointed. My father, who watched the original series when it aired in the sixties, was particularly disappointed. His main beef was that the young Kirk was not very likable. I stumbled over the fact that all the "main" characters jumped from barely graduated students to the senior crew commanding a spaceship. Cadet to captain? I think not.

For all that it was a good summer action flick. I particularly love the notion of "space jumping" -- it's a lot like sky diving except you do it from outside a planet's atmosphere into the planet's atmosphere. That was cool.

Not cool? The alternate reality. This wasn't a prequel, it was an alternate reality created by time travel. And unlike previous sci-fi time travel gigs, this one irrevocably changed the circumstances of the present reality and while the same characters eventually meet their circumstances and therefore their relationships are different.

Now I'm not a Trekkie -- I haven't seen all the movies, I'll watch the show if I'm channel surfing and it's on but I've never followed it religiously, and I just don't do conventions. Period. -- but this new movie feels like a cheat. Everything that has been made before it with the title Star Trek -- and it's such a body of work that it is an institution in the realm of TV and film -- has been wiped clean and discredited. It leaves me feeling very unsettled and unsatisfied.

All the in jokes were there. The lines characters delivered so often or so well that we'd never believe the new actor if he didn't give us "fascinating" or "dammit, I'm a doctor not a physicist" or "I'm givin it all I got!" shouted up from Mr. Scot in engineering. But the novelty clashed with my wondering through the whole film how they were going to "right" the situation and get it back to the "reality" that I knew. They didn't. And I'm bummed. If there's anyone who should be able to fix a time-space anomaly it's Hollywood, and not even they got it right this time.

For What It's Worth ...

For what it's worth, I'm now on twitter. Check it: @speakcoffee. I'm still learning the lingo ... and thus far my impression is that I'm too articulate in a standard manner and that I need to learn even more internet-developed shorthand.

I have no pictures to show the before and after of my messy apartment because there is no *ahem* after.

It's graduation weekend and 79 degrees in Kalamazoo. This means the neighborhood can't decide if it's home visiting Mom, packing up and moving out, or partying. The schizophrenia is kind of amusing.

I want to be writing. Instead I'm longing to write. An activity which precludes both the writing and doing the thing that is keeping me from writing. It's an effective system, what can I say?

Last night I watched The Duchess. I expected a youthful story of romance, because, let's face it, anything set between 1750 and 1900 that isn't about war we expect to be about young love and an intricate courting dance. In The Duchess the marriage happened less than ten minutes into the film, what followed was a much more exquisite representation of live after marriage that was much more interesting than following the old pre-marriage patter. I also love-hate feelings about Keira Knightly. She's one of those actresses that usually comes across as herself in a film. Yes, that's a bad thing; I don't want actresses to seem like actresses, I want them to seem like their characters. In this film she seemed like the character not the actress underneath.

Movies

So I broke down and reactivated my Netflix account. I think it was a good move for me. Much more rewarding than when I spent the same amount of money on a newspaper subscription.

What I saw this weekend was Ghost Town and it was much more delightful than I thought it was going to be. I don't want to say too much about it because the true delight in this film is that it's just different enough to make you stop and take notice. It could easily become cheesy or cliche or wander in to any variety of things that "have been done" but it didn't. It kept my attention throughout. And I even cried at one point. Although I cry at Kodak commercials; you know, the one where the little girl holds up the picture from the 1940s of a woman pitching a baseball to her grandmother and asks "Grandma, can you still through like that?" yeah, I get all sorts of sloppy and it's only a 30 second commercial.

Trip to the Movies

1. What was the first movie you remember watching? Bambi. Why do all children's films prey upon children's one great fear: separation from the parent?

2. Do you cry at the movies? Dude, I cry at Kodak commercials. Remember the one where the little girl restores the picture of her grandmother pitching in the All-American Girl's League during WWII? And then goes and presents her grandmother with the photo asking "Grandma can you still throw like that?" ... I stand little chance against a sad movie with odds like these.

3. What is your favorite movie theater snack or drink? "Da pop corns a pope'in' 'n it's ... three-dee!" [Ten points if you can name that movie.]

4. Should popcorn be eaten buttered or unbuttered? The movie butter makes it soggy. Which equals sadness. But the stuff I make in the big kettle at home is best. Oil, whole white corn and kosher salt.

5. What's your favorite time to watch a movie? Right before bed. That way people don't try and talk about it and I can hang on to the feeling or discard it as I like. That's the whole reason I watch movies: to make me feel something outside myself, to share the emotion the director wanted to make me feel.

6. Have you ever made out in the movie theater? Yes. *shrugs* It's cool when you're a teenager. Not so cool once you get past that point *glares at 30-somethings down the row that have obviously not gotten that memo*

7. Do you ever go to the movies alone? I did once. I've been meaning to repeat but people keep telling me "oh yeah I'll see that with you" and then I wait for them and the film leaves the show.

8. Who's your favorite male actor? It used to be Harrison Ford but then he started aging not so gracefully. Johnny Depp is always amazing at everything he does and so is Ewan McGreggor. And Sean Connery has the world's coolest voice, he's one of the few people I can ID in 6 words or less.

9. Who's your favorite female actor? Julia Stiles.Kate Winslet is pretty cool.

10. Most overrated actor? Trevolta. (when he plays a man that is)

11. Name a film that made you cry? Recently? Finding Neverland ... then again I cry every time I see Ever After (when the father dies) or A League of Their Own which I cry three times; when the woman doesn't know if she's made the team or not because she can't read the names on the list; when the black woman throws in a great ball from way off and you realize that for all the "opportunity" that the league afforded women that there was still a long way to go; and finally, when the one woman gets the telegram in the locker room that her husband's not coming back from the war.

12. Name a film that made you scream? The Princess Bride. *Ahem* So, there I was, sitting on a couch full of teenagers, smushed in next to City Girl, and we're getting right into the part where the screaming eels are screaming, and the Sicilian is telling us that they only scream right before they feed. And the eel charges Princess Buttercup in all its early 80s special effect glory and Princess Buttercup screams! And at this moment -- this moment that City Girl has been waiting for -- she jams her hand into my side to the one spot on my rib cage that I am disastrously ticklish, and I shrieked! In perfect time with the movie. *shakes head* I have never screamed at another movie.

13. Where do you like to sit in a movie theater? Front and center.

14. Best movie soundtrack? Last of the Mohicans. Gorgeous. I need to find that CD it's around here somewhere ...

15. If you could look like any movie star, who would it be? Nicole Kidman.

16. If they made a movie of your life, who would play you? Julia Stiles? Or maybe Scarlett Johanson just to piss City Girl off. *seeks revenge for eel incident*

17. Have you ever walked out of a movie? Charlie's Angels 2

18. What movie do you never tire of seeing? Love Actually, Princess Bride, Sleepless in Seattle, French Kiss, While You Were Sleeping (saw it four times in one weekend)