Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren, Stacy Ferguson

Summary: Famous film director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) struggles to find inspiration for his latest movie project while juggling dramatic relationships with his wife (Marion Cotillard), mistress (Penelope Cruz), muse (Nicole Kidman), agent (Judi Dench), and mother (Sophia Loren)

5 Words/Phrases: Visually stunning; beautiful song and dance numbers; stunning, scene-stealing performance by Marion Cotillard as Luisa Contini; somewhat disjointed between scenes; some of the female roles were underused/did not mesh well with the rest of the story

Most Impressed By: Marion Cotillard was by far and away the greatest thing in the movie – her performance was powerful yet understated

Least Impressed By: How ill-fitting Guido’s muse Claudia (Nicole Kidman) and the American reporter Stephanie (Kate Hudson) were with the overall dynamics of the cast

Comments: I really loved the soundtrack of this film

Overall Rating: 7.5/10

In terms of family, I have an extended family member who has a habit of inviting himself to outings my immediate family plans, such as going out to the movies or dinner. It doesn’t even have to be a formally planned outing; he’s often come over just to hang out and watch TV or eat a home-cooked meal (my mother is a great cook). I know he’s family, but I still find it a little weird that he’ll just invite himself to come over, particularly if there’s nothing planned. It’s not like my family is an exciting host as more often than not each of us are preoccupied with our own agendas and can’t afford to divert attention to guests!

I’ve always been particularly cautious of inviting myself to events/places because I know I’m not always happy to see others who have invited themselves. It places everyone in an awkward situation: the people who didn’t invite the person, and the person who might not be welcome but still showed up anyway. And even though I’ve had somewhat uncomfortable encounters with people who just show up and assume I will be flattered with their presence, I still have yet to find a strategy to handle that type of situation. I’ve no issue on calling out people on misjudgments, but I know the people I am with do have problems with doing that so a much subtler, more low-key way of handling it is needed.

Question of the Week: How do you handle people that have invited themselves to an event? Do you think that it is appropriate for one to do so, or does it make you feel uncomfortable?

If my professors offer an extra credit option, I do it. If my professors allow students to edit/revise work and hand in an updated version of the original assignment for an improved grade, I do it. If my professors provide an option that involves anything with boosting a grade, I do it. (This might sound like there are a lot of extra credit options in my classes, but there actually are very few extra credit opportunities. When they do happen, they come in all different shapes and sizes!)

It’s not that my grades are worse in college than they were in high school. On the contrary, my college GPA is higher than my high school GPA. It’s just the fact that there aren’t as many overall points that make up a course grade in college, particularly as classes are run on a semester-based system rather than a year-long one. If, over the course of 15 weeks, a class only has three 60-point tests that comprise your overall grade (so, 180 points total for a college class compared to the hundreds of points for a high school class), extra credit does wonders if one of those three tests has a poor result.

Take what happened in one of my classes today, for example. We received our midterm exams back, and the overall class results were all over the grading scale. There were several 100’s but there were also a handful of failing grades (the lowest score was 25%!). However, my professor had offered an extra-credit option of writing a short essay over break, which I completed. Thank goodness that I did, as the extra credit points saved my current overall class grade from getting walloped by the midterm exam!¹

For the tl;dr crowd: always do the extra credit. It never hurts and it just might save your grade!

1. I did not do poorly on the exam, but my exam grade was lower than my current grade in the class, so the extra credit saved my class grade from dropping any further.

Blagojevich was impeached from his position as Governor of Illinois after it was revealed that he was allegedly trying to sell Barack Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. Prior to this scandal, there had already been talks of corruption by Blagojevich, but this particular incident was the last straw and the impeachment process began. Let’s face it, Illinois governors are not known for resisting becoming corrupted. Essentially, the man made a mockery of the U.S. government system. After news of the impending impeachment broke, Blagojevich still insisted that he had the power to appoint Obama’s Senate replacement. Blagojevich ushered in the current Illinois junior senator, Roland Burris, in the last few days he still retained gubernatorial power. Both Burris and Blagojevich were heavily criticized for this, but that’s another story.

Blagojevich’s wife, Patti, was a contestant in last summer’s I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. The show took place in Costa Rica, and Blagojevich was not allowed to accompany his wife to Costa Rica because he was in the process of being indicted. I have equal issue with Blagojevich’s wife on a reality TV show¹, but every time I see Blagojevich smirk in the commercials for Celebrity Apprentice and say, “You’re fired? Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” I want to slap him.

He wasn’t fired! He was impeached from office and indicted on corruption charges!

Why is the man allowed to be a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice? Why on earth is he still in the public spotlight, garnering celebrity, and retaining his fortune, when the man should be suffering reparations for his corruption as governor? Why are there not measures in place to prevent people who should be ashamed for their actions from smugly parading themselves around on TV?!

1. Blagojevich’s wife stated she did the show for financial reasons. The Blagojevich’s financial problems are most likely tied to the legal fees for Blagojevich’s trial. Patti Blagojevich is famous because she is the wife of a disgraced former governor, which is why she got invited to be on a reality show, but that’s also where the financial troubles stem from. Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

I know he will do fine; in fact, I’m pretty sure he’ll get a higher score than I did on my SATs (his ACT scores are already higher than mine were!). Still, I wanted to do a little extra something for him as my way of wishing him luck. It was either bake him his favorite cookies or get up at the crack of dawn to wish him luck when he left to take the test. I might be an awesome big sister, but I’m not willing to forgo sleep in my pursuit of sisterly awesomeness!

Anyway. I put on one of my CD mixes to listen to when driving as I never listen to the crap that’s on the radio. One of the songs on the CD was The Bird and the Bee’s “Fucking Boyfriend.” It’s not a foul-mouthed song despite the title, but the words “fucking boyfriend” are repeated throughout the chorus. I didn’t bank on my mother noticing what the lyrics to the song were as she usually doesn’t pay enough attention to whatever music plays in the car. Unfortunately, that seems to be no longer the case.

My mom: Is the girl swearing in this song?
Me: Uh… yes. Yes, she is.
My mom: Why do you listen to songs with swear words in them?
Me: Um. Uh. Well. It’s a good song?
My mom: But why does the singer feel the need to swear in the song?
Me: To express herself, I guess.
My mom: Do you feel the need to swear to express yourself?!
Me: …I’d really rather not have this conversation.

I’m pretty sure that my brother plays Blink-182 in the car whenever he drives it. I’m not really familiar with Blink-182’s stuff, but something tells me that their songs have more foul language than songs by The Bird and the Bee…

Are you working up to something? / But you give me almost nothing
Keep me helpless / Up to something on my knees
Would you ever be my / Would you be my fucking boyfriend?
Would you ever be my / Would you be my fucking boyfriend? ♪♫

1. My knee is far from perfect, but most of the time I can get it to cooperate so I can move around. Minus the times where I wake up in the night because I jerked my knee and the pain was so great that I woke up screaming, that is. Basically, it’s still pretty touch-and-go right now.

Damn, that boy is… *sa-woon*!¹

For all my talk of fictional boyfriends, I don’t really get all that hyped up about actors. Cory, who plays Finn on Glee, seems to be the exception. He can do no wrong in my book and this photoshoot in this month’s issue of Cosmo just cements this belief of mine. He’s just utter and dreamy perfection! The best part is that he’s down to earth and has a great sense of humor, too.

I’ve said this from the very moment I saw the first episode of Glee, and I’ll say it until the day I die: I heart you, Cory Monteith!

1. Brownie points for you if you get this reference!

For the first year or two after the injury, I’d get odd flares of pain in my knee area. Sometimes my knee would lock and I couldn’t unlock it because of the pain. Other times I couldn’t bend it because it felt like the tendons behind my kneecap would snap clean in half if I did. No matter what happened, I’d end up having to massage my knee with my fingertips in the hopes of easing whatever was tensing in the area so that I could use my knee properly and go about my daily life without hobbling around.

Just yesterday morning, I was thinking to myself that I hadn’t had any problems with my knee for roughly the last two years. That was nothing more than a passing thought until after dinner last night, when I hopped off my dinner chair and almost keeled over from the pain in my knee. I guess I had been sitting oddly in my chair or something, because my knee just wasn’t having it. I made it over to my couch and felt like all the muscles around my knee had become incredibly tense and stiff, which was unusual because I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. Still, I managed somehow loosen the feeling of tightness in my knee so that I could get around the house for the remainder of my day.

When I woke up this morning and tried to move my knee, I ended up screaming in pain. The last time I screamed in pain over my knee was when I injured the damn thing! I couldn’t sit up because that hurt my knee. I couldn’t bend my legs because that hurt my knee. I couldn’t reach down to touch my knee in an attempt to massage it because that hurt my knee. Basically, I couldn’t do anything because it would hurt my freakin’ knee. I ended up laying in bed for an hour, staring at my ceiling, contemplating what on earth I could do since I basically couldn’t move at all without screaming in pain.

Somehow I managed to maneuver my body around so that I could do what I could for my knee, as I was not going to put up with being immobile all day. Now, my knee is unlocked, but there’s something still not quite right with it because it still feels very tender and sore. Guess I’m bedridden for the rest of the day until I can figure out what, exactly, is causing all of this…

I had a sudden craving for fruit when I was grocery shopping last weekend, but I never really did anything with my purchased strawberries. However, while rummaging around in my fridge, I came across the following things:

• Dark chocolate squares used in fondue cooking
• Heavy whipping cream
• The aforementioned strawberries

Of course, being the dessert-a-holic that I am, I decided to combine all these ingredients to make a yummy desert. I set about making chocolate covered strawberries using my double boiler to melt the chocolate and boy, are they delicious! They’re low-maintenance too, as I covered my plates in saran wrap before I set each chocolate dipped strawberry on it before cooling so I don’t even need to scrape the chocolate off the plates when cleaning them.

The best part, though, is that I can justify eating loads of these at once because underneath the chocolate is strawberry… and everyone knows strawberries are healthy!

Below is my take on the 2010 Academy Awards. This covers both the red carpet (an abbreviated version compared to the one I did for the Golden Globes as my list was starting to get too lengthy with my elaboration) and the results of the awards portion of the evening.

The Red Carpet
Hits: Amanda Seyfried, Anna Kendrick, Cameron Diaz, Carey Mulligan, Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet, Kristen Stewart, Meryl Streep, Penelope Cruz, Queen Latifah, Rachel McAdams, Sandra Bullock
Misses: Charlize Theron, Diane Kruger, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sigourney Weaver, Tina Fey, Zoe Saldana

The Awards
Highs

• Christoph Waltz winning Best Supporting Actor (Inglourious Basterds)
• Up winning Best Animated Feature Film
• The Young Victoria winning Best Costume Design
• Sandra Bullock winning Best Actress (The Blind Side)
• Kathryn Bigelow winning Best Director
• Avatar not winning Best Picture

Lows

• The Princess and the Frog not winning Best Original Song
• Up in the Air walking away empty-handed

I haven’t seen An Education so I can’t make a case of Carey Mulligan deserving the Oscar over Sandra Bullock, nor have I seen The Hurt Locker so I can’t argue that it fully deserved to win Best Picture, even though I’m told it’s a phenomenal movie. Still, I am very happy that Bullock won Best Actress because she truly was amazing in The Blind Side and the Oscar could not have gone to a more deserving person. As for Best Picture, I’m just really glad Avatar didn’t win. A Best Picture winner needs the full package – directing, editing, script, acting, etc. Just special effects alone isn’t enough to get a movie to win the Best Picture.

Overall, it was a pretty good Academy Awards. I felt that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin weren’t as funny as I expected them to be, but they were decent enough. Neil Patrick Harris’ entrance, though, was by far and away the best part of the evening in terms of the presentations/presenters. I also thought it was a little unnecessary to have the dancers perform to the nominated songs in the middle of the awards, particularly as the awards organizers were so insistent on trying to minimize the length of the ceremony. And while I still think that having 10 Best Picture nominees is a little excessive in an age where there really aren’t that many amazing movies made each year, I’m pretty pleased with most of the awards results.