I’ve actually been intrigued with this movie since the first trailer, but held off because I couldn’t get anyone to see it with me (“it looked too depressing”) and because a fellow Chickster warned me that von Trier also directed “Dogville” and “you don’t want to see ‘Dogville.’” Based on what I’ve heard, I think that’s true.

But I wasn’t afraid of “Melancholia” from the get-go. I guess I admired its honesty. From the trailer, you have no doubt that the world will end, but this movie seems to be more about the complex emotions about accepting the end of the world or not being able to. For sisters Justine and Claire, it’s a rather bare and sad end, but isn’t that to be expected? I don’t mind if a movie’s depressing if it’s honest and interesting. And I will say that after just reading a description of “Dogville” I was expecting much worse.

It’s also visually striking, well-acted (Dunst received the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival and Kiefer Sutherland is always good), emotionally absurd—rendering it very honest—and masterful in it’s cinematography.

But it wasn’t without flaws either. The beginning was really slow, literally. There were about 10 minutes of painfully unnecessary slow motion, though almost everything captured was visually pleasing and well-executed special effects. And I did have a hard time being on Dunst’s side when she couldn’t enjoy such a beautiful wedding. Sure, I know that deep depression renders you unable to feel happy when you should and that’s why it’s so demobilizing, but I couldn’t help sighing every now and then and thinking “Geez, chick. Just take a freakin’ Prozac.”

But again, it also makes me wonder if von Trier had a deeper meaning there (likely). Women are physically affected by the moon, so maybe the movement of an entire planet could really screw up the chi of one who’s already depressed, beyond mood stabilizers. If that is what he meant to imply, he did hint at it a little when twice in Justine’s part of the story (when the approach of the dark planet wasn’t yet known), she pointed out the strange behavior of the stars and seemed to see a meaning that no one else did.

Overall, I would not avoid this one if you have an interest. But be prepared for some slowness and some inevitable sadness.

This web series follows a guild of gamers Codex, Zaboo, Clara, Bladezz and Tinkerballa that make up The Knights of Good as they attempt to balance addictive online gaming and harsh reality. Clara (Robin Thorsen) for instance, is the mother of three, not that she considers that a priority next to gaming. She’s not exactly an attentive mother, which is hilarious and disturbing at times, but I choose to find it funny. The morally apathetic Tink (Amy Okuda) wouldn’t make a good mother either, since the one time she babysits Clara’s kids she puts them in a giant dog crate and refuses to change them. Again, some will likely find this offensive, but I just choose to find it funny. Those two are certainly my favorite characters, but all the actors who play guildies do a phenomenal job, from the socially unconcerned Jeff Lewis (Vork) to the charmingly awkward Felicia Day (Codex), who’s won a 2009 Streamy Award for best actress. 

In fact, the show has pulled in a slew of awards including Series Awards from SXSW, YouTube and Yahoo, and more Streamy Awards for best comedy and best web series.

This isn’t bad for a show that was paid for by PayPal donations from loyal fans in its first season. But since season two, it took one giant step up to being distributed by Xbox Live and Microsoft and sponsored by Sprint. Each webisode is about 3 to 8 minutes long, but if you watch them on Instant, you can watch a whole season at once in about an hour and half.

Brown Bag Delivers aims to fix an issue present in most offices these days: easily available, free junk food. Though I never visit donut shops myself, if someone brings a bag of donuts into work and leaves them on the counter for everyone, I will absolutely eat some out of sheer desperation and cheapness. But if my company were to provide a healthier option on a regular basis instead, I’d lose 20 pounds in no time.

Well, that is the mission of this new company—to deliver homemade, healthy food to homes and offices for an amazingly low cost. They even have a two for one coupon going on right now for personal meals. (Contact them at moreplease@brownbagdelivers.com.) 

But if you’re thinking of incorporating healthy eating into your work environment, they also have corporate packages of 10 meals for $90. That’s only $10 per homemade meal! This isn’t much more than what you pay to pick-up a fatty fast food meal chalk full of preservatives. Plus, the food comes to you.

So how did this idea come about? Well, basically a French-trained chef, Joram Tapiero, and Mexican restauranter, Ben Mendoza, teamed-up with former technology exec Aaron Bollinger and chef Justin Trapani to create this revolutionary concept.

“We wanted to bring back the nostalgia of taking your brown bag of homemade, healthy food to school, but on an adult level,” said Ben Mendoza, CEO.

“Every meal we create is made from scratch and is custom-designed,” said Aaron Bollinger, CMO.

The personalized menu for our rendezvous consisted of spinach and feta empanadas, lamb tagine, penne with Bolognese, and small walnut brownie bites for dessert. It was indescribably delicious. I also had a light guiltless feeling after, since I knew what I was eating was healthy. This is much better than the usual heavy feeling you get after stuffing yourself with whatever sustenance you can find during a mere one-hour lunch break.

I gladly recommend this company to any Austin foodie for personal or business meals, catering, etc. (they have vegetarian and vegan options as well), and I have no doubt anyone would like their food. In fact, I’d say it’s “in the bag.”

The “Mega Python vs. Gatoroid” framework is also a metaphor for the competitiveness of the female relationship. If you release giant pythons into the everglades, fine. I’ll inject alligators with chicken hormones to make them even bigger to kill the pythons. How could this not be a good idea?

And they really pull out all the stops on this one. The effects…well. They’re certainly there. And the story is…very interesting. For instance, at one point, after the pythons have killed about seven people already including her fiancé, Tiffany rightly says in response to someone wanting to postpone a celebration in the everglades, “Why? It’s not like anyone has died.” Right.

And there is a character that the directors are so attached to that we get to see him die twice, at very different ends of the movie. (That’s right. They forgot they killed him already or possibly just didn’t care.)

Anyway, very entertaining. But good? Well…

Micky Dolenz also has a cameo….

I’ve never watched “One Tree Hill,” which I think is probably intelligent self-preservation (please, correct me if I’m missing out), but I heard they had a Sims episode so I had to, at least, check that one out, since I’m an avid Sims fan.

And I immediately regretted my decision to sit through this episode five minutes in. Maybe it’s just that I’m not familiar with the characters, but I’ve never met a crop of fake people that I’ve cared so little about. Nothing about it even remotely caught my attention or stirred my heart strings, which are honestly pretty easy to target and pull. (Okay, I admit I felt a little bit of something when the man, whose heart replacement got eaten by a loose dog at the hospital [Can we say gross and unlikely? And no one even tried to stop the dog.], yelled at the waves and dared God to come and get him. But if he suspected what happened was some kind of punishment, it makes me wonder what the heck he did. Apparently he killed someone, but I can’t figure out if it was a person or some kind of pet. Either way, I don’t like him.)

But overall, there really just wasn’t enough Sim stuff in the episode! In the last few seconds the little boy playing the game showed his mom the “Tree Hill” town he designed and all the characters he had made, but that was it. I’d say it was about 30 seconds worth of Sims. So instead of sitting through this episode, unless you’re into this show, I’d say just watch the YouTube clips online.

It’s witty, funny and it has two very strong female characters, Abigail and Parker (Raven-Symoné and Joanna Garcia), whose side I am completely on when they decide to sabotage the wedding of Caitlyn (Virginia Williams), a girl who stole their best friend Rachel’s (Chryssie Whitehead) boyfriend and then had the audacity to ask her to be a bridesmaid in her wedding.

So they somehow place themselves as bridesmaids in this wedding and do everything they can to take Caitlyn down, including replacing the white wedding tent with a bounce house and putting the wedding dress through a wood chipper. They even enlist the help of a policeman/groomsman, who just happens to be into Parker, while they strive to reunite Rachel and her true love.

Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles play two sibling “hunters,” Sam and Dean (That’s right! Padalecki is Sam and Ackles is Dean, which is confusing for anyone who’s a “Gilmore Girls” fan.) who are aware of a supernatural world most people don’t see and have taken it upon themselves to bring down evil. They’re actually a family of demon hunters with an unfortunate childhood introduction to demons, and they spend the first season looking for their missing hunter father.

They also drive a classy 1967 Chevy Impala all over the country (even though the whole thing is shot in Canada) usually with “Carry On Wayward Son” in the background, and they really don’t make very sturdy relationships with people, with a few exceptions. They really are loners in the way that most people in television series pretend they are but really aren’t. They really don’t have a network of support (and when they do, they tend to lose it), and they really are in some horribly cheap hotel in a different city every other day. It kinda solves the whole “Murder She Wrote” problem, which leaves you thinking that Angela Lansbury is the real murder. Murder doesn’t come to them, they go to it.

Now sometimes their traveling isn’t completely convincing. Once they’re supposed to be in Dallas, Texas, (my hometown) and they’re all wearing heavy coats and going to record stores I’ve never seen or heard of (because they’re actually in Canada) and every hotel room they stay in is the same set dressed-up to look different, but I still like that in this show, these two brothers really are pretty much detached from everything, except each other, which leads to some interesting drama and a multitude of very short-lived love stories, often with a gruesome ending.

There’s also everything you’d expect to see in a supernatural show, from vampires to shape-shifters, but it’s always presented in a way that doesn’t pull any punches. Though it’s sometimes a comedy, the monsters in the show are serious, deadly and rarely comical, like you would sometimes see in “Buffy.” There’s also a higher level of violence and eerie in this show that I haven’t seen in any other currently aired on regular TV, that leaves me marathoning it with a girlfriend (which actually doesn’t stop me from getting scared during) and then checking my backseat as I drive home alone in the dark. But there’s certainly comedy as well. They tend to enjoy breaking their show’s usual mold and doing some really whacked-out episodes that other shows might not be able to pull off. For instance, in season 6, there’s an episode where they get thrown into another reality where “Supernatural” is just a television show and they’re really Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles and another one of the regulars on the show, the angel Castiel (Misha Collins), is addicted to Twitter. It’s very funny.

Another thing to celebrate is the fact that “Buffy” cast members tend to guest star on this show quite often. In fact, the list currently includes: Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia), James Marsters (Spike), Amber Benson (Tara), Julie Benz (Dara), Amy Acker (Fred from “Angel”), and Mercedes McNab (Harmony) to name a few. Mercedes actually plays a vampire once again but not in the usual fun way that you’d expect. (Actually, it’s pretty upsetting!) There is also an episode where Paris Hilton gets her head chopped off. Who doesn’t want to see that?

Though I will say in recent seasons they’ve gotten a little crazy-elaborate with their story lines (maybe because they’ve run out of ghosts and demons?), I think at least the first six seasons, which are all available on Netflix Instant, are worth a watch. The verdict is still out on season seven though, which is still unfolding.

Click here for a trailer.

Actor Kevin Williamson did a wonderful portrayal of Dr. Horrible, a.k.a Neil Patrick Harris, and even had the singing chops to boot. It’s not an easy role either. He has to play the wannabe evil but actually sweet and misunderstood “Billy Buddy” who swings from disturbingly misguided to pathetically endearing every other second.

Taylor Overstreet also did an amazing job as Penny, and her voice sounded almost identical to Felicia Day’s. And Justin Lavergne brought his own interpretation to Captain Hammer, since not everyone can be Nathan Fillion, but if I couldn’t be Nathan, I’d want to be this guy. The “These are not the hammer,” line is not easy to deliver with the right comedic timing, but he “nailed” it.

So overall, just go see it. GO SEE IT! I might have to see it twice.

Right when Marty “fashioned a skate board” to escape Biff instead of just running, as one Master Pancaker humorously pointed out, the screen snapped off, and it became clear that only emergency lighting remained.

“Unfortunately, this isn’t planned,” one of the Master Pancakers yelled into the crowd since the microphones were now useless. Then they decided to perform their movie mid-point skit early with the help of anyone in the audience who had a phone, who were asked to shine it at the stage to create a spotlight. “That’s right, for once we actually want you to use your phones,” one said.

In the skit, Marty was portrayed as energetic and jumpy as a 12-year-old boy. The other was dressed as Doc from the future with a very convincing Doc Brown voice. There was also a Libyan who had a cardboard volxwagen bus hung around his waist who made several appearances to stretch out the skit. He often punished audience members who sang along to “American Pie” with vocal machine gun noises and the sticking of his fingers in their beer.

Marty had several good stalling tactics, like Doc continued to die until he wrote a more and more detailed note about how to survive the Libyans. Just when this got tedious, the Doc Master Pancaker pointed out, “If you keep that up, the audience will know you’re stalling until the lights come back on,” which elicited some laughter. Marty also made the humorous joke of, “In my time, we don’t have electricity.”

The lights did not come back on and it seemed likely that they wouldn’t for a while. So the Master Pancakers recruited audience members to play the other characters so they could perform the entire rest of the movie for us. The audience members they picked held their own and even provided decent jokes in this improvised version of “Back to the Future.” For example, the one playing George McFly quipped “We got a divorce” when Lorraine McFly was late to the stage at one point. Once she appeared he saved it with, “She came back…for the alimony,” which the audience found pretty entertaining.

Even though everyone who experienced the blackout was given a free movie pass for the future, I don’t think anyone felt gypped after experiencing a live, improvised “Back to the Future” performed by Master Pancake and others all the way up to the famous last line: “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads,” which was enthusiastically yelled by the audience in unison. I think many would agree that it was actually a once in a lifetime experience. But I will say that going to the ladies with only the light of your iPhone is a little challenging.

When it comes to the blackout, it turns out there were several transformers that failed in a row and overloaded power lines. This created a 12-hour electricity outage boxed in by Congress, Red River, Sixth Street and 12th Street. So it’s a good thing that Master Pancake wasted no time in performing their skit and that the audience did not wait for the lights to come back on to finish the movie.

Until I decided to cherry-pick this season, I had only seen parts of Ally McBeal while flipping channels and found it pretty entertaining (aside from the dancing baby. That’s a little too weird for me.) But it’s a very odd and amazing show with a lot of things going for it, many that will surprise you. It’s also very empowering (I love how Ally constantly shoves men on the street who walk into her and don’t apologize.) and Calista Flockhart is captivating. I’m not surprised that this show won an Emmy, and now that I’ve seen the famous season four, I just might start it from the beginning. But I’d skip season five. Though Jr. in actually in it once, it’s a hallucination and not worth it, and I just don’t like the direction the whole show goes that season or the very underwhelming conclusion of the whole series.

Some great Ally-Larry moments:
(This one’s even better in English.)

But that said, I did get annoyed with the never-ending, unfulfilling will-they-won’t they pattern, as well as the fact that the episodes all got a little repetitive in formula (get a case, solve the case, almost kiss, but don’t) as with many crime shows, usually without the kissing part. But I did enjoy that it wasn’t nearly as gross as CSI. (I can deal with bones; I’m not so good with body parts and gore. But be warned. This show is not free from gore either. It’s just no where near the level of CSI and all its spawn.)

By the time I no longer lived alone, I felt like I had missed the “Bones” boat. I felt way too behind to catch-up. I could stream the whole thing on Netflix, but I also suspected that I’d quickly get annoyed with endless sexual tension and formulaic story-lines and quit, so I decided to cherry-pick. I googled, “Which episodes do they kiss in Bones?” and this is what came up:

• Season 3, Episode 9 “The Santa in the Slush.” (They kiss under the mistletoe.)
• Season 5, Episode 16 “The Parts in the Sum of the Whole.” (Flashes back to their first case which also equals their first kiss and explains why they already knew and seemingly disliked each other in the pilot.)
• Season 6, Episode 22 “The Hole in the Heart” (Bones stays over at Booth’s and there’re hints that something happened.)
• Season 6, Episode 23 “The Change in the Game.” (Bones announces that she’s pregnant.)

That works for me since I watched most of Seasons 1–3 before I wussed out, but if that’s not quite enough show for you, Elizabeth from Yahoo Answers shared this insightful list of episodes that are particularly important for the Bones/Booth relationship.

Happy watching, hopefully free from annoyingly unfulfilling sexual tension. And if you’re interested in catching up on the new season, you can see most Season 7 episodes on the Fox website here.

Another resolution I always list but never seem to accomplish is “eat better.” Nutrition is fairly complicated. In fact, I dropped that class in college because I didn’t understand it—that and it was at 9 a.m. on a Friday morning which conflicted with my hangover recovery time. So I knew to accomplish that goal, I’d really need to dumb it down to what exactly I need to do to eat healthy. So through some googling, I found that the recommended daily amounts of certain food groups break down like this:

Food Group	Recommended minimum servings each day
Grains	At least 6 ounces of grains (half of those should be whole grains)
Vegetables	2 to 3 cups
Fruits	1½ to 2 cups
Milk and milk products	3 cups
Meat and Beans	5 to 6½ ounces

So then I thought about designing some pretty odd meals for breakfast and lunch that could possibly include all these foods in one day. (Dinner “is what it is,” since I live with a boy who cooks some delicious form of meat and cheese every night and I don’t enjoy cooking. So at least my meat group is covered.) But for my other meals, I’m on my own. So I’d better make them count. This is the plan I’ve come up with.

Eating Plan:

Breakfast: oat cereal (I’m allergic to whole-grain wheat but one could certainly substitute this), plain non-fat yogurt (in place of milk), blue berries (a true super fruit), banana or apple slices and cashews all thrown together. I call this Super Cereal, because it includes the grains, fruit, nuts and milk products I need for the day. And though it sounds strange, it’s actually surprisingly tasty.

Lunch: Salad-less salad: You may have seen this in the “Chickster Cookbook,” but I brought it back because I’m just not fond of lettuce. I find it to be a bland filler food that doesn’t even fill me up. But I do, on the other hand, love artichoke hearts, asparagus and avocados, which is exactly what’s in this. So that easily satisfies my vegetable servings for the day. See this link for a more detailed recipe. But if you also have an irrational hatred of merely applying heat to things, you can substitute canned asparagus and just mix, but it isn’t as good.

Dinner: I’ll try to stick to 6 ounces of meat, which I’ve heard resembles the size of a deck of cards. (Small for my taste, but I’ll give it a try.)

So there is my broken-down and easy-to-follow path to eating better in 2012. Surely, I can’t eat those exact meals for more than a couple of weeks before I have to change it up for variety, but it gives me a place to start. And while the ingredients run out, I’ll have time to build a new eating plan.

Now on to the rest of my 2012 Resolutions/Habits:

• Relax More. (I’ve decided I can accomplish this by streaming everything good on Netflix Instant. Any suggestions?)
• Read More. (A good place to start is popular titles. I’m currently reading “Catching Fire,” the sequel to “The Hunger Games.” So far it’s an amazing series.)
• Drink 8 glasses of water a day. (This is a good idea for general health and weight loss. I once used a water bottle but they’re never dishwasher safe, which leads to gross, accidental soap ingestion from clumsy hand washing. I bought a tervis tumbler and dare to put it on the top rack of the dishwasher and that’s working so far, though this has distorted some of my past water bottles. [Why is every form of reusable water receptacle not dishwasher safe? If someone would just design one that was, they’d bank.])
• Revise novel and finish second novel. (Plan to work on both at least 2 hours a day.)
• Survive the solar flare. (Find a bunker and stock-up on food.)
• Survive Zombie apocalypse. (Stock-up on ammo and research tactics by watching the new season of “The Walking Dead.” Make sure bunker has DVR.)

So there you have it. What are your New Year’s habits that will help accomplish your resolutions?

I think my main prejudice against this show, aside from the title, is that the heroine does not maximize her natural beauty. I’ve met America Ferrera and she is gorgeous! It’s strange to me that they go so far—with the adult braces, huge glasses and frizzy hair—to hide this. I know that’s the title, and it’s probably a prominent theme of the Colombian soap opera it’s based on (“Yo soy Betty, la fea”), but it still seems that someone who works at a fashion magazine would at least know enough to pluck her eyebrows. Though I do agree with the overall message of the story (women are beautiful even if they’re not size zero), there are many things outside the weight realm that we can actually control about appearance. Surely she marches to the beat of her own drummer and is charming and beautiful even despite her sometimes comical appearance, but I can’t help watching and just waiting for a make-over episode. (Is this it? Is this where she gets pretty?) I suspect it might be at the very end or never, which makes me feel shallow, but come on, if I had bushy eyebrows and adult braces…I wouldn’t, for the greater good, and to break through other people’s perceptions of me. Appearance does matter, unfortunately. She would do so much better in her career if she accepted that and worked with what she has. (The weight thing though, I totally agree with. Women should look like women and not sticks. Women should be able to, you know, eat something.)

But on to the other charms of the show. It is certainly a dramedy. It’s a nice mix of light and dark humor and over-the-top soap opera story lines, including murder, poisonings and stolen artificial assimilation—most of which is provided by the stomach-turningly evil Wilhelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams). In fact, the first two midseason finales had me gasping at the screen and yelling: “What! What?! WHAT?!” to the point that my husband even pulled himself away from Warcraft long enough to ask, “WHAT are you watching?”

I haven’t found the actual season finales quite as exciting though. For some reason they tend to save their best stuff for the middle of the season, at least so far. So I look forward to continuing with the adventure and I hope that I finally see an America Ferrera I recognize!

Updated 12-22-11 (*Spoiler Alert*): Well there is a makeover episode as I hoped, though it isn’t exactly what you think. But here is a screenshot of ugly Betty, pretty. But don’t worry if you’re one of the purists out there. This isn’t her look for the rest of the show—just this particular episode. She keeps the trendy glasses, but does lose the braces and the frizziness to her hair, thankfully. Though her hair only appears this gorgeously curled in this episode, unfortunately.

Now that I’ve finished the show, I am pretty satisfied with the overall story as well as where the show starts to head suddenly in the last two episodes. (I wonder if they learned late in the season that they weren’t being renewed?) They tied up more loose ends than I expected in the last two episodes, rather quickly, but somehow it worked. The only thing that didn’t work for me was the ending. I thought they did a great job leading up to the ending I had always heard about but never really believed could happen, but they amazed me by actually making it possible for the characters to go there. Just to then turn around and not go there. That part was disappointing. They set-up the perfect ending and didn’t follow-through, like I assumed they would because the show was over. Instead, they just kind of left it hanging and open, which is too bad. But even though it didn’t end the way I wanted it to, it gave the hint that it would end that way eventually. But I had always heard a rumor about how the show ended that didn’t turn out to be true. I wonder if ”Yo soy Betty, la fea” had ended the way that was rumored. I wish this one had as well! But I won’t give any more away. Hopefully, you’ll give “Ugly Betty” a chance and see for yourself. It’s still worth a watch, even for just a strong hint at the ending you want.