Wed Words: Actors & Actresses

It’s time for a favorites list! This time I only struggled a little. LOL We’re supposed to share our favorite actors and actresses but I specifically tried to choose people this time that I haven’t gushed over before. Because yeah, we’ve already done celebrity crush type posts and I could just list all of the same peeps again. So here are several people that I love like whoa. The ladies are up first, then the boys. 🙂

 

Mae Wittman.  I’ve loved her since she was an adorable child actor and still love her now that she’s all grown up.  She’s adorable and a great actress. Look for her in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Parenthood.

 

Rose Byrne.  Honestly, I can’t name more than a few things off the top of my head that Rose has been in, but I love her. I think she’s gorgeous and I love her voice and she was freaking hilarious in Neighbors.  I’m looking forward to seeing her in the new Annie remake. 🙂

Emma Stone.  She’s perfection.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything that I’ve disliked.  I’m also amazed that she looks good in absolutely any hair color.  Did you know she’s a natural blonde?! 🙂

Diane Lane.  I’ve been in love with her forever.  She’s gorgeous and sexy and amazingly talented.  Adore!

Jennifer Lawrence.  I love her.  That’s all. 🙂

Miles Teller.  The first time I saw this kid he was in the remake of Footloose as Willard.  I laughed so hard during his learning to dance scene that I snorted.  I’ve loved everything he’s been in (although it’s SO hard for me to watch him as a mean guy in Divergent!).  He’s a great actor.

Chris Pratt.  I’m so happy for this guy!  I have loved him since he was on Everwood and have always thought he was just this amazing actor… so for him to finally find so much success this year with Guardians of the Galaxy makes me so damn happy!

Luke Evans.  *swoon* I can’t say how much I love him.  He’s just gorgeous and sexy and British and yeah… looove! I still need to see Dracula Untold. Yum! He’s also the only reason I want to see the Hobbit movies. :p

Adam Driver. I’ve only seen him in one movie that I can remember.  But this guy was so good in This Is Where I Leave You that I want to see everything he’s been in.  Plus he’s going to be in the new Star Wars so yay!  (No, I’m not one of those Star Wars fans who is all bitchy whiny about the new movies… I’m actually excited, so take that!).

Henry Cavill.  Again, I’ve only seen one of his movies, Man of Steel, but I fell in looooove with him, and not just because he’s ridiculously hot.  Despite what my niece and nephew think, I thought that Henry was the best Superman we’ve seen in a really long time.  I think he’s absolutely perfect for the role.

And there you have it! More people I love that I haven’t posted about a few dozen times. 🙂

Let’s see what the other girls have to share…

Bronwyn | Gwendolyn | Jessica | Kris|

Wednesday Words: favorite Flicks

It’s time for another favorites post. This time we’re talking about our favorite movies. Have I mentioned how hard naming my favorites is for me to do? Yeah… Plus my landlord got a little crazy with the weed whacker today and cut our cable cord so I don’t have Wifi tonight. That means I’ll be posting via my phone and data plan… Grr. So this’ll probably be short.

I love movies. Love. Like, possibly more than I love books. I’ve been a movie junkie all my life and when I meet someone who doesn’t go see movies in the theater it really puzzles me. Yeah, I know that you can watch movies at home, but there’s something awesome about watching a movie in the theater on opening weekend with a full audience. I can vividly remember seeing the original Karate Kid and the crowd cheering when Daniel-San did the crane and kicked that bully’s ass in the tournament. That was a classic movie moment that was made even more awesome by the environment of the theater and the crowd.

Then of course there are book to movies and the midnight premieres. The Harry Potter premieres were all a blast and wouldn’t have been the same at home on DVD. Watching a film like HP with a theater full of people who love the series as much as you do is a wonderful thing.

So yep, I love movies. I’m also very weird so I have a very eclectic mix of favorites. Looking at my DVD’s I have a strange bunch of movies. Crossroads (Brittney Spears is one of my girlfriends and it’s a musical and features Anson Mount), Footloose (the remake… Dance movie, duh!), six of the Harry Potters, High School Musical 3 (music, dancing, Zac Efron), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Angelina Jolie… Another girlfriend), Original Sin (Angie again and a really hot sex scene with Antonio Banderes), Phantom of the Opera (Gerry Butler and b’way), Practical Magic, City of Bones, Rent (my favorite b’way show), Step Up (1,2, and 4… Still need 3), 4 of the 5 Twilight’s, Under the Tuscan Sun, Love Actually (Diane Lane… Another girlfriend), The Holiday (Jude Law… Yum) Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas, and You Got Served (LOL, don’t hate!). So as you can see, I like chick flicks, dance movies, musicals, muppets, angels, and vampire/werewolves. LOL

Fave movies that I don’t own include Grease, Grease 2 (I don’t care if it’s lame, I love it!), Empire Records (“It’s Rex Manning Day!”), Finding Nemo, Lilo & Stitch, Real Steel, Man of Steel (oh Henry!!!), Goonies, Ten Things I Hate About You, A Knight’s Tale, Overboard, and Satisfaction to name a few.

Like I said, I’m an odd duck. 🙂

So tell me what your weirdest favorite movies are. 🙂 Then check out my girls to see what they like. I have a feeling their favorites are going to be waaaay different. Like Jane Austen type stuff and period pieces with castles and shit. LOL

Bronwyn • Kris • Jenny • Tess
Leigh • Gwendolyn • Jessica

50 Shades of Domestic Violence

I haven’t been shy about my dislike of the book 50 Shades of Grey and the message it’s sending.  If you follow me on twitter you’ve heard me bitch about it even more over there when I get on one of my rants.  There are many, many reasons why this book just plain pisses me off.  Shitty writing, shitty fact checking, shitty editing, barely making an effort to change it from AU fanfic before publishing it… I could go on for days.  But honestly, the thing that bothers me the most about this book is that it is so incredibly full of universal red flags for Domestic Violence (DV) and women all over the world are eating this book up like it’s cake. 

BDSM is not domestic violence if both partners fully consent to it.  That’s not by any means what I’m getting at.  I think that when the DV term is thrown out there people automatically assume that you mean physical violence.  That’s not at all what I’m talking about here.  So let me give you my social worker rundown real quick.

Domestic Violence is not about anger management or just about physical abuse.  It’s about power and control over another person.  That can be physical control in the form of beating the shit out of someone, or emotional control through threats, isolation, and mind games.  As someone who has lived through emotional abuse I can say that it royally sucks and it’s just as awful dealing with someone emotionally beating you up as it is getting physically beat up.

An alpha can be an alpha without being an abuser.  Someone can assert themselves and be in control without having to control you.   The person who beat me never touched me physically.  But that person crushed my spirit, made everything bad in the world seem like it was my fault, blamed all of their problems on me, and kept me in this fucked up world where I actually believed that I was the problem.  But I wasn’t.  That is what domestic violence is about; having power and control over someone else and making them believe that they’re doing it for your own good.

I enjoyed the Twilight books and movies.  I’m not a Twilight hater by any means.  But the books were very hard for me to get through because of the little things that Meyer put in the books that screamed of DV.  I mean come on, step away from your love of Edward for a moment and think about it.  He would crawl through Bella’s bedroom window at night to watch her sleep and started that before he even was her friend.  He was nice to her one moment and then mean the next.  He got mad at her for tripping on the field trip to the greenhouse.  When he saved her life and she wanted to talk about it he blew her off and said she had hit her head.  He told her that he could kill her and how everything in him wanted him to.  Even Bella’s mom says to her in the second book how Edward is so clingy.  

Check this out and think about Bella and Edward’s relationship: Power & Control Wheel.

I can honestly point out something in nearly every spoke of that wheel that Edward does to Bella in the Twilight books.  I’m not the only one either, there have been plenty of articles about DV organizations pointing out the red flags in Twilight.

Even though Twilight is full of red flags, I was able to separate it as fantasy and just enjoy it.  Unlike when I rewatched Phantom of the Opera as a social worker and could not stop obsessing about how creepy the Phantom suddenly was! 🙂  But then we come to 50 Shades.  A story that is not about vampires even though it was written about Twilight characters.  A story that women all over the world are eating up and saying how bad they want a man like Christian Grey in their lives, how they wish their husbands were more like Grey.  That, my dear readers, is where I have a really big fucking problem with this book’s success.

E is for Excited!

 I love movies.  Looooove them.  I also love books, and love when books are made into movies.

The Harry Potter books were amazing and turned into brilliant movies.  The Twilight books had crappy writing but a great idea that pulled me in.  The first Twilight movie was so campy and ridiculous that although I liked it, I still make fun of regularly… but the following films got better with different directors and actually were pretty great, IMHO.

A book that I struggled reading was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  It took over half of the book for me to get into it because there was SO much information purging done, but once I got to the actual action I loved it, and I subsequently loved the other two books as well.  I’ve yet to see the Swedish versions of the films (they’re in my Netflix queue though!) but the American version of the first book pretty much blew my mind.  Not only because Daniel Craig is freaking hot and Rooney Mara is my latest celebrity crush… but also because it was an awesome film version of the book without all of the back story bullshit that I hated about the book so much.

I absolutely LOVED the book The DaVinci Code and was really excited about the movie when I heard it was being made.  Then of course the movie came out and was SO incredibly ass sucking that I left the theater at the end royally pissed off that the film was so bad in relation to the book.

The Lovely Bones is another book that I adore and when I heard it was going to be a movie I was uber excited.  Then I saw the preview and thought, “Huh… that doesn’t look right.”  When I finally saw the film, it was okay but certainly was a letdown that didn’t live up to the book at all.

My Sister’s Keeper was a fantastic book and when I saw the movie preview I cried because it was so moving.  There were a lot of readers who were royally pissed because the movie version of the book changed the ending… Unlike my anger with the changing of the end of The DaVinci Code, however, the changing of My Sister’s Keeper didn’t piss me off and I loved the movie.

Tomorrow night/Friday morning I with millions of other people will be at the midnight premiere of the film version of Suzanne Collin’s book The Hunger Games.  I am geekishly excited about this film.  I adored the books… well, book three pissed me off, but in general I loved the series.  While I was reading the first book the cast of the film was being chosen and almost daily I’d find out which actor was playing which character, so the people I’ll see in the film were mostly the people I had in my head while reading.  I have an extreme love for Josh Hutcherson too… I’m Team Peeta all the way!

Last September I bought the books for my baby brother’s 16^th birthday and pretty much demanded that he read the first book by this week so that he’d have read it before the movie.  It took him a while, but about a week ago I got a text that he’d finished the book and now is equally geeked about seeing the movie.  His texts about how excited he is totally make my day, by the way.  Sadly he’s not going to the midnight premiere with me, being that it’s a school night and all… but we have a date for the weekend to see the movie together. 🙂

The previews for the film send me into Geek Mode… I simply can’t wait for this movie!  By seeing the previews and seeing sneak peeks of scenes, I have to say it looks pretty awesome.  I truly hope that the movie is as good as we all hope it’s going to be and as awesome as it looks.  I mean, it has to be epic, right?  Nearly every person cast in this film appears to be perfectly cast.  I was a little iffy on Woody Harrelson, because I’d heard rumors of Dennis Quaid getting the role of Haymitch and I really wanted that to happen, but seeing Woody in costume sold me and I think he’s going to be awesome.

So yeah… to say that I’m excited about this movie is a bit of an understatement.  Tomorrow night when I get into line for the midnight premiere, I’ll be in my geekish glory with a bunch of other book nerds and I’m totally going to enjoy it!  If you haven’t read the books… go do it now and thank me later!

“May the odds ever be in your favor!”

C is for Courage

I saw the movie The Help tonight with my mom. It was a great movie that certainly made me think about courage. Courage means something different to everyone, I think. It’s one of those things that is personal and changes according to the person dealing with it. To simply look the word up in the dictionary you’ll see this:

cour•age noun
1. the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear; bravery.
2. Obsolete. the heart as the source of emotion.

I quite like the second definition actually… “The heart as the source of emotion.” That’s truly what courage is, isn’t it? Listening to your heart and knowing that it’s telling you the right thing even if you’re scared out of your mind or the world around you is telling you that you’re wrong.

Kathyn Stockett, the author of The Help submitted the book sixty times before getting it published by Putnam. Sixty rejection letters, countless rewrites, and yet she didn’t give up. Now she has not only a bestselling novel, but an Oscar-worthy movie based on that novel. Oh and did I mention it’s the first book she ever wrote? That’s courage.

The movie and book The Help are set in the 1960’s right in the thick of the Civil Rights Movement. At one point in the movie Medgar Evers is mentioned. He fought in World War II, fought for civil rights, was instrumental in the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, and was a NAACP field secretary. After his assignation by the KKK, he received full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. He was courage.

On December 24, 1969, only six years after Evers was killed and one year after Dr. Martin Luther King ,Jr. was assassinated for his work in civil rights, a black man and a white woman were married. They faced hatred and bigotry from society as well as their own families, but they went on to have two children, a boy and a girl (said girl happens to be the author of this blog), and showed the world that love has nothing to do with race. They were courage.

People show their courage every day. Sometimes it’s huge, and other times it’s just some small thing that most of the world wouldn’t even notice. What matters though is what that act of courage means to you. If it’s important to you, no matter what anyone else says, it’s courage. If you make a choice that you know with all of your heart is the right thing to do, tell anyone else who thinks differently to screw off. It’s your life, not theirs. You know what your heart needs even when the world is telling you you’re crazy. You might even doubt yourself, but your heart knows exactly what you need while your head is busy trying to talk you out of it. Sometimes you just have to trust your heart to do the thinking. Take a leap and as the definition says, let your heart be the source of your emotion. Don’t give up on the book submission you know could be great, don’t accept laws that don’t make sense and fight to change them, don’t let people tell you who you can love, and don’t let someone else tell you that you aren’t courageous if you know that you are.

Cry Me A River

History has proven that if I cry when I see a movie preview that I will cry when I see the actual film.  I’m not talking about a casual tear though, but full out sobbing and gasping for breath crying where afterward you have to sit through the entire ending credits to recover and then you’re still scared to go to the bathroom and see how horrible you look.  Yeah, that kind of crying. 

The first preview I remember this happening with was Free Willy.  Yeah, yeah, pick on me all you want but you know that when that big computer generated orca jumped out of the water over that kid’s head to be with his family out in the open water you cried too.  “Go, Willy, Go!” 

Then there was “Legends of the Fall.”   All I remember about the preview was Brad Pitt and lots of very moving scenes but something about it made me cry.  Of course the movie itself was seventeen hours long with Tristan (aka Pitt) experiencing one death after another every half hour or so and each time he cried I cried my Brat Pitt loving head off too.

Remember “Pay It Forward”?  Yeah… I honestly don’t remember what about the preview got me, but it did and well we don’t have to actually discuss the movie do we?  I mean really, if you saw it you know why it was so overwhelming.

Next, “My Sister’s Keeper.”  Yes, I read the book and knew what the movie was about but in the preview where the chick from Medium is dressed for prom with her wig on and she looks at the dad and says, “Am I pretty, Daddy?” and then you see him with tears in his pretty eyes as he answers her… yeah, cried.  Then the movie itself with its altered from the book yet still devastating ending had me breathing like I was in labor because I was crying so hard and couldn’t catch my breath.

Not crying over a preview does not however mean that I won’t cry when I see a movie.  Although I was called a cold-hearted hard-ass by my dear friends when I didn’t even tear up over “The Hours” while they cried their fool heads off, I do get regularly choked up over movies.  And tonight whilst watching The Pretty that is Zac Effron in “Charlie St. Cloud” I fully expect to cry.  I’m hoping it won’t be a sob-fest but considering the topic of the movie and how freaking gut wrenching Effron can be to watch when he cries on screen (remember the court scene in “17 Again” when he poured his heart out? *sigh*) it probably will be.  I vaguely remember getting a little misty when seeing the preview but it wasn’t enough to say that it made me cry like the others did.  Then again, it could have been the fact that I was too busy drooling over Effron and squeeing over the fact that I was soon to experience the midnight premiere of “Eclipse” that I was unable to fully let myself be moved by the preview.  I suppose I’ll find out tonight, right?

Til then, let us look upon the beauty of The Effron, shall we?