definitely, possibly, maybe

i could try and explain my rationale in why i chose to watch this, but then i realized that there is no plausible reasoning that would explain why i rented this movie [for free, i swear] off of comcast's on-demand service. in any case, i did it with the full expectation that this movie would be terrible. and in many ways it was. first off, what on earth happened to renee zellweger? she was so cute in jerry maguire : and since then she's either lived hard, or had tremendously bad plastic surgery. because in new in town she looks more like this: there must have been a bad plastic surgeon involved with the second picture, right? because her mouth looks completely different. it's like they were striving for pouty and accidentally left her at pinched. and i don't bring this up because i like to make fun of bad plastic surgeries or the celebrities that have indulged in bad plastic surgeries, i bring it up because it's kind of shocking to see her face in the movie...

when i completed my master's project, i dedicated it to my two grandmothers, two women who have had an incredible presence and effect on my life. my maternal grandmother, in particular, shaped my likes and dislikes in ways that i am still sometimes surprised by. she passed away just before the new year, and one of the things i inherited was her collection of harlequin romance books. she started collecting them after her mother died. she had cared for her mother as she aged and during one last illness and suddenly found that she had a lot of time on her hands. so she signed up to receive six books a month from the harlequin reader service. the bulk of her collection runs from 1977 to 1988, which coincides with my grandfather's death. she didn't save every single book, only the good ones [of the later years she kept very few, which indicates that the books were getting a little, shall we say, spicier and this more than anything likely contributed to her cancellation of her su...

i believe my love of silly romantic comedies has been well-documented. and because during the [supposedly] long summer months most of my television viewing consists of [torturing myself by] watching "general hospital" and/or on-demand movies, i decided to spice things up around here with a new feature, focusing on the aforementioned on-demand movies. last night i watched step up 2: the streets , a follow-up to the surprisingly entertaining step up . to be honest, i'm not entirely positive step up is actually as entertaining as i think it is, but i simply enjoy it because...well, perhaps i'll just show you: i don't know. i just happen to think this guy [channing tatum] is so hot. [you know, i don't often spend a lot of time thinking about how much my television viewing habits are influenced by the "hot guy quotient" but i think it might actually work out to be a pretty high percentage of my viewing choices are based on who i think is hot.] any...

the latest season of " true blood " will kick off this coming sunday, and in honor of the occasion i thought i'd share my thoughts on the latest installment of the sookie stackhouse-southern vampire mysteries, dead and gone . since i first read the first eight books, i've gone back and re-read several of them...okay fine, i'll admit it, i've read dead to the world and from dead to worse multiple times solely because of the eric and sookie relationship. i have no problem confessing to the fact that i'm obsessed with eric! not only the fictional book character, but also the actor who plays him on tv: alexander skarsgård is freaking hot!! anyway, the latest installment of sookie's story begins on the night that were-creatures and shifters come out of the metaphorical closet, an announcement that seemingly upsets the balance between the supernatural and natural worlds. surprisingly this isn't the chief conflict of the book. instead the supernatural ...

so in the final moments of "lost"'s fifth season finale we are treated to one of the more shocking visual moments ever on "lost". instead of the traditional fade to black with LOST spelled out in its thin white lettering, we get this: which in the context of a possible h-bomb explosion, fits in perfectly. but it is also so disconcerting and ominous. and i can't help but wonder where the series will go from here. but i'm getting ahead of myself, this two-part episode sees the flashbacks focus on the mysterious jacob and his interaction with the future passengers of flight 815, and the opening scene lets us know that jacob has been around for a very long time: throughout the episode we see jacob visit with kate, sawyer, jack, sun, jin, hurley, sayid, and locke. (juliet gets an unrelated flashback to her childhood that is supposed to supply us with some motivation as to why she keeps changing her mind regarding stopping jack from detonating the h-bomb.) i h...

i feel like i've been working on this post for weeks (because i have been). anyway, i've had a lot of time to think about the season finales of my favorite shows, and a lot of thoughts to share. just not a lot of time to write them up. but i haven't abandoned this and since agreeing to edit a friend's ~600 page novel, i've been excited about writing again. sometimes it is so exhausting, and when i'm traveling, as much as i want to write out what i'm thinking...i find myself watching television in my hotel room instead (i have a whole blog post forthcoming on what i inexplicably end up watching when i am traveling for work). but to get to the point, here are my thoughts on the some of the game-changing season finales i watched last month: chuck this show couldn't have gone out with a better bang. and knowing that we'll get at least 13 more episodes to explore what happened makes the whole thing somewhat sweeter. in the final two episodes of the second...

i don't watch very many half-hour comedies, in fact we can limit them to four: "how i met your mother," "the big bang theory," "the office," and "my boys." but i love these shows. they are all quite different, but have one quality that i think encapsulates why they are great: the ensembles have terrific chemistry. how i met your mother this season has been a strange mix of episodes that felt like filler, episodes that contained some pure comedic genius, episodes that felt like "how i hid your pregnancy" should be the show's new title (alyson hannigan and cobie smulders, the show's two female leads were both pregnant for most of the season), and episodes that really moved the show's story along. you know what, even with the filler episodes, i think that this season has been fantastic. i enjoyed sarah chalke's arc as stella. i think it makes perfect sense that he needed to meet her before he actually meets the mother. ...

so i know i'm behind. but before i get to the "lost" season 5 finale, i feel that i should cover "follow the leader"...but what to say about it. i'll admit that on first viewing i didn't love it. and on second viewing my mind didn't really change. it's one of those episodes that is so clearly moving the chess pieces. everything and everyone is being positioned, getting to where they need to go in order to allow "the incident" to play out. as someone who has a degree in writing (bet you didn't know that with my unfortunate run-on sentence habit) i understand the need for this type of plotting. but it's still not what interests me about the show. i'm one of those people who is big into character development. and clearly have my own biases as to whom i find interesting and whom i do not. so the entire subplot taking place in 2007. not of much interest to me. i find it ooky when locke refers to the others or whomever it is who c...

i don't know what happened. if it is the fact that turning 30 means that time slips by that much faster, or if this year my travel schedule for work is really just that insane, or if i continue to overcommit to things that i should just say no to, but regardless, i have a lot of things i want to discuss, a few posts i've started but have yet to complete. hopefully that will happen over the next few days.

i think it's funny that abc's hyping of the six-year-old shooter seemed to render that storyline the least interesting. i don't know if it was the little girl, who was very cute, but i didn't think she was very good actress. wouldn't you think there would be something more fundamentally broken about an abused child who shot her father 17 times? i don't know. and though i often get annoyed when the patients they are treating parallel the doctor's lives or emotions too neatly at least this case brought out some juicy stuff for meredith. that final scene between meredith and the chief had me in tears. and i think the storyline, meredith's plea that the battered mother do something, anything to change her daughter's story, so that she doesn't grow up to be the girl so broken by her father's abuse, really shed light into meredith's childhood. all of the adults in meredith's life abandoned her. and they all pretended that it was okay. it go...