As a married lady of childbearing age, I’ve seen kids on the horizon for a while now. But after watching “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” I may be putting those plans on hold for a while longer. By turns fascinating, mysterious, thrilling and haunting, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” may just be the best form of cinematic birth control out there.

The movie, a festival favorite that opens today in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar and the Regal Arbor, is based on the award-winning novel by Lionel Shriver, directed by Lynne Ramsay and stars Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and newcomer Ezra Miller. The story follows Eva (Tilda Swinton) throughout, vascilating between the present and flashbacks to different points in her marriage to Franklin (Reilly) and the rearing of their son, Kevin, who is played by Miller as a teenager and by several younger child actors early on. From the beginning, Eva senses that Kevin is different, and the mother-son bond never forms. Franklin thinks it is all in her head, but as the film unfolds, we see that Eva’s unease was definitely founded, and she finds herself facing situations we could never imagine while also trying to find answers within herself to questions of parental responsibility and love.

Ezra Miller, as well as the younger actors playing Kevin at various points in childhood, gets under your skin and makes you uncomfortable throughout, giving Kevin a chilling air of unpredictability and menace. But this movie absolutely belongs to Tilda Swinton, who gives the best performance by an actress I’ve seen all year, and I am utterly stunned that she did not receive an Oscar nomination. If I had an Oscar ballot, she would be taking home the prize. She has won many awards so far for her haunted, stricken portrayal of Eva, including being voted Best Actress by the Austin Film Critics Society.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” isn’t an easy film to watch, but because it forces you to face the unthinkable, it will stick with you long after its 119 minutes.

The action kicks off on Animal Planet at 2 p.m. this Sunday. As an added bonus, this year’s edition includes a cheering section of piggies!

2) In other animal-related news, this video of our beloved Kristen Bell’s sloth meltdown kept us in stitches all week. Well, you know what they say, Veronica Mars, she’s a marshmallow!

3) Some animals live in zoos, while others lived on your childhood bed. As “The Velveteen Rabbit” knows, that doesn’t make them any less real, which is probably why this essay on childhood stuffed animals from The Gloss got us all choked up.

4) Another week, another trailer for “The Hunger Games.” We wish Cinna would dress us for the premiere.

5) You’ll have to wait until March 23 for “The Hunger Games,” but we heartily recommend that you get your movie fix this weekend from “Chronicle,” which we caught at an Ain’t It Cool News sneak peek last night with filmmaker Josh Trank in attendance. While he may be maddeningly young (27, to be exact) to have a feature bowing in a wide release, Trank did a great job putting a new spin on an old idea — what would happen if we actually had superpowers? The performances from the three leads, which include Michael B. Jordan of “Friday Night Lights” and “The Wire” fame, were great as were the visual effects. The only negative for us was the found-footage format, which we’re growing tired of (IGN has a retrospective on the genre and its flaws), but overall, “Chronicle” is a surprise well-worth the time. Check out the trailer:

On Tuesday night, a packed house gathered at the Moody Theater for the best attended KLRU Spark at the Moody speaker series so far. This event was titled “Can Women Change Politics? The Life and Politics of Ann Richards” and as speakers featured actress Holland Taylor, who wrote and starred in a one-woman show depicting Governor Richards’ life; political writer Wayne Slater, who covered Governor Richards’ campaign, administration and subsequent years; and documentarian Paul Steckler, who moderated the event.

While I understand that each speaker event in the Spark series has a question for a title (the final installment on April 24 is “How Do You Get to Sesame Street? Education in America”), I think this wasn’t quite the right question, not to mention a question we’re a little disappointed is still being asked. Women have been proving for years that they can change politics, and women from as conservative a state as Texas no less, like Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, former Texas comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, current comptroller Susan Combs, landmark Roe V. Wade attorney Sarah Weddington and, of course, the late great Barbara Jordan. And Ann Richards definitely proved it. So perhaps a better question for a title might have been “Wasn’t Ann Richards Awesome?” Because she totally was.

For someone who served only one term as governor, Ann Richards still looms larger than life nearly six years after her death and two decades after her tenure in the governor’s mansion. Compare that to Governor Rick Perry’s 12-year-long gubernatorial monopoly, and it’s pretty impressive that she cast a shadow that long with only a third of the time in office. While Richards wasn’t the first female governor of the Lone Star State (that glass ceiling was shattered by Ma Ferguson back in the 1920s), she was the first of the modern era and the last great Democrat to rouse such magnitudes of statewide support before our state turned unflinchingly red.

Over the course of 90 minutes, beginning with a talk among the speakers and ending with a Q&A, Taylor, Slater and Steckler created a vivid, loving portrait of Richards as both a woman and a leader.

Taylor had only met Richards once during her life, but she was so affected by her death that she wanted to share the former Texas governor with the rest of the country with her one-woman play. “I was heartbroken when she died,” she said. “I was sad for America.”

“She expressed democratic values by acting not for the most of us, but for the least of us,” Slater said, while recounting stories of time spent with her while covering her administration and campaign. One story he told involved the beginning of her campaign for governor, during which reporters asked her how she was going to get fundraising as a woman, and she replied, “We’ll have shoe sales.”

As Steckler boiled it down, “No matter what she did or didn’t do, she left a legacy by appointing 3,000 women, people of different races and people of different sexualities to posts around the state. She changed the face of who governed Texas. That’s the best legacy anyone could have.”

I think this is a pretty good legacy too:

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.

In “I Love You Phillip Morris,” Jim Carrey (in easily his best performance since “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) plays Steven Russell, a cop who ultimately divorces his wife (Leslie Mann) and comes out of the closet. To fund his lavish lifestyle, he soon becomes a con artist, and when those exploits land him in a Texas prison, he falls deeply in love with his cellmate, the titular Phillip Morris, played by Ewan McGregor, who imbues Morris with the perfect mix of sensitivity and sweetness. Their love for each other is so strong that Russell falls into one long strand of cons, scams and frauds after another to ensure that he can always be near the man he loves. “I Love You Phillip Morris” succeeds as both a comedy and a touching love story, but what truly elevates this movie to the next level are the performances of Carrey and McGregor. And to top it all off, as outlandish as the story is, it’s even more amazing that it is actually true and took place right here in Texas, which makes it all the more enjoyable.

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

2) We Chicksters are very excited about this teaser trailer for “The Avengers,” which we’re certain will be another one of writer/director Joss Whedon’s triumphs. This time around, Academy Award-nominee Mark Ruffalo joins the cast as Bruce Banner/Hulk, making him the third actor in the past decade to go green for Marvel. We’ll be looking forward to finding out what he does in the role when the movie opens in May.

3) The best thing to come out of MTV since Kennedy and Matt Pinfield left has got to be interviewer Josh Horowitz, who twice put Chickster Crush Michael Fassbender to the test of identifying celebrity penises in games of the cheekily named “Members Only.” (via Pajiba)

4) In other movie news, The Editing Room has been abridging Hollywood’s best, worst and everything in between for five years now, and they totally cracked us up with their latest, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” in Under Five Minutes.

5) You can now get your ’80s music and Bon Iver fixes all in one place, courtesy of Bon Joviver:

When Cirque Du Soleil came to the Cedar Park Center I had to catch the show and I’m eagerly awaiting their return with Quidam this year, which will run February 29 – March 4. Since my youthful dreams of running away to join the circus have since been cruelly dashed, over the past weekend I took the slightly more adult excursion.

Austin’s Sky Candy offers aerial classes that allow you to test your skills on everything from trapeze to lyra to silks, hammock and rope (or corde lisse, as they say). Their drop-in introductory aerial class is the best way to get started with an experienced instructor and runs $20. Beginners can also choose to try a six-week series that specializes on the apparatus of their choice. Since the summer of 2010, the Sky Candy collective has been run by a group of performers who can usually be found also teaching classes. Their new studio space is located at the east end of 6th Street, where they share a building with the (delicious) Hops & Grains Brewery and Tasting Room.

So what was it like?

There were three other women in my class. It takes an incredible amount of upper body and core strength to do anything, namely to even get up on any of the equipment. My muscles were trembly by the end and I am definitely sore now. I was most thrilled with the trapeze but quite disappointed in the silks. Climbing them was nearly impossible. Not to mention, it looks soft and luxurious but when you’re twisting or hanging in the hammock version from your hips, it’s highly uncomfortable.

Did you know that both the trapeze bar and lyra are made of steel? Yep. There is certainly an art to making those movements look so effortless and beautiful. I think I have a bruise or two to prove it. Still it was worth it to have the chance to take to the sky. Maybe the greatest of ease part will come with more practice.

Here’s a trapeze routine by one of the resident performers.

2) Here’s the newest single, “Mexico,” from The Staves, whose EP, also titled “Mexico,” dropped in December:

3) We are shocked, shocked, I tell you, that Elle King is not a superstar yet. She has pipes and personality to share, as you can tell in this video for her song “Good to Be a Man”:

4) And here is our new favorite musical performance of any song ever:

5) On a non-musical note, has anyone read “The Carrie Diaries,” Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” prequel? Should be excited that it might soon be coming to our TV screens? Sure, the movies may have ruined some of our goodwill toward Carrie and Co., but we would love to see teen Carrie rock those ’80s fashions.

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.)

Fashion Galore was a clothing design and distribution company I owned. I was seven. Despite the boss’s diminutive stature, crying fits and lack of conflict resolution skills, FG persisted for many years. I had it all: pens and pencils, books holding imaginary records, even letterhead, a.k.a. throwaways from my parents’ business. I would shut myself in my mother’s study to scribble plans, count fake money and hold meetings with my investors: Snowflake, Meow and Baby Deer—a bear, cat and (baby) deer, respectively—their hard, beady eyes drilling me for information about the viability of my endeavor.

I enlisted my family in this corporate world I built around me: fashion advice from my mother, investment advice from my father. In a momentary lapse, I even put the fate of my little business in my older sister’s hands, slipping a handwritten document under her door that read, “Will Fashion Galore go out of business? Circle yes or no.” I’ll give you one guess as to what she circled. Fashion Galore was no more.

Twenty years later, I find myself in a disturbingly similar situation. WriteByNight is not, thankfully, on the verge of annihilation—and if it were, I wouldn’t make the same mistake again, lesson learned—but for our first year or so in business, I found myself reminiscing about Fashion Galore regularly. I’d shut myself in my mother’s study—I was working out of her Florida home at the time—to scribble plans, count fake money and hold meetings with potential investors: flesh-and-blood people this time, their hard, beady eyes drilling me for information about the viability of my endeavor. What can I say? Some things never change.

In short, I felt like I was playing office, just like I had when I was seven. The good news is that I had learned a few valuable lessons from my first attempt at starting a business, which I will summarize for you neatly here:

1. Screw the doubters. There will always be mean, big-sister types telling you that what you’re working toward is not worth your time. Often, these discouraging voices come from within. Your only hope is to shut these negative messages out ‘cause they won’t do you any favors. All that matters is that you believe in your ideas. Your strength, confidence and determination, that’s what counts.

2. No doesn’t necessarily mean no (except in dating in which case no always means no). More likely than not, you’ll experience a few roadblocks on your path to professional success, especially when you’re just starting out. These roadblocks can take many forms—a partner who isn’t on board 100%, an opportunity that isn’t panning out as you hoped it would or a client for whom you can’t quite close the deal—but what they’ll have in common is that they’ll feel like losses. The key word to remember here is “yet.” The partner isn’t on board yet. The opportunity isn’t panning out yet. The client won’t commit yet. You have many productive days in front of you in which to turn those nos into yeses. Nos are not forever, and don’t you forget it.

3. Imagination can become reality. At some point, playing office became running an office, a real one. At what point exactly this shift occurred, I can’t say, and I guess in the end it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it happened and that I found inside me the sticktoitiveness that allowed me to ride the pretend train into the real world, despite the bumps. And the motion sickness. You can do the same.

I’ll tell you what, chickadees, when I go to work every day, I still feel like a kid, but it’s not because I’m playing pretend. It’s because my work feels like play. I’m doing what I love, and I can’t imagine a better feeling.

Justine Tal Goldberg is an award-winning writer and editor of both fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have appeared in Anomalous Press, Whiskey Island, Fringe Magazine, and other publications. Her journalistic work has appeared in the Texas Observer, Austin Monthly, and Publishing Perspectives, among others. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. She owns and operates WriteByNight, a writing center and writers’ service headquartered in Austin.

2) For those who were bummed about the uncertain fate of “Community” and its group of delighfully comical Greendale College misfits, it’s absolutely coming back this season, though Season 4 is still, unfortunately, unconfirmed. The darkest possible timeline will not prevail!

3) If you’re running out of things to watch on Netflix Instant, Pajiba’s got you covered with a list of 20 underrated gems just waiting for you to stream them. We heartily endorse the recommendation of Happythankyoumoreplease, which, from its description, seems designed to bludgeon you with its hipster quirk, but actually wins you over with its romantic charm.

4) We’ve obvi been guilty of totes LOLing from time to time, but we wholeheartedly agree that Internet shorthand should be banned in 2012. What specific words would you <3 to never see again on your computer monitor?

5) Before we retire Internet slang forever, can we just say that nothing made us LOL and LMAO as much this week as this story about NASA’s new space shuttle engines?

Of what I’ve seen, Meryl Streep probably has the showiest role playing Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.” She is just as fantastic in the role as you’d expect, but the film is unsatisfying if you’re at all expecting to see a Margaret Thatcher biopic. Even the nickname that spawned the film’s title is only obliquely referenced during exposition in a news report about the former prime minister. We never see her earning it. For a woman who literally shattered one of the biggest glass ceilings in the Western world and had an enduring reputation as a ball-buster, there are remarkably few scenes of any glass being shattered or balls being busted. The tumultuous events (union strikes, the Falklands, the IRA, the Cold War) that Great Britain endured during the 11 1/2 years of Thatcher’s tenure at 10 Downing Street are all handled in only a superficial way. Instead, most of the screen time focuses on the frame story of her later years as she hallucinates conversations with her husband (Jim Broadbent), who has been dead for eight years. At the end, Thatcher minimizes everything she’s accomplished (good or bad) into whether or not she made her children and her husband happy. And while I’m ashamed to say that I’m exactly the sort of sap that gets weepy because of something like that, the sort of romantic who hopes that if I do outlive my husband I’ll at least find comfort in hallucinating his presence, I also couldn’t help but feel like a biopic of a male leader would never boil down to that same conclusion. One of her children has a supporting role, and the other is never seen on screen, but I felt like judgments were being given on her commitment as a mother both by the filmmakers and by the audience throughout the movie. In all the celluloid representations of JFK we’ve seen, I don’t remember anyone ever asking afterward, “But was he a good father?” The fact that the double-standard exists stinks, but at the same time, the movie can’t have it both ways.

In full disclosure, I’m moderately horrified by the way everyone has been saying that the Lisbeth Salander character of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and the rest of the Millennium Trilogy is this awesome powerhouse female character when basically she is a male fantasy who is hypersexualized to the point of fetishization (even to the point of rape/attempted rape) by every single male character she encounters. And for the entire first book and some of the second, the writer at least once every page, if not many more times, refers to her “childlike figure,” “anorexic look” and “doll-like limbs.” It’s gross. She is constantly repulsed by how men just find her so irresistible, so when the Blomkvist character (played by Daniel Craig in the new David Fincher version of the bestselling Swedish trilogy of books and films) doesn’t immediately try to seduce her, she’s all like, “Hmm, why isn’t this guy seducing me or trying to rape me or treating me like an object? I know! I’ll seduce him!” So yeah, it’s cool that she can hack computers and can kick ass when necessary, but basically, with all her unearned irresistibility shoved down our throats in the first book, on the page, she is more or less Bella Swan with a dragon tattoo. In the Swedish films, Noomi Rapace portrayed Salander as more of a woman taking control of her life, while Rooney Mara (with an assist from Fincher) brings a wholly different interpretation to the role, amplifying the little-girl-lost aspects of Salander and turning her affair with Craig’s Blomkvist into more of a teenage infatuation than the straight-up lust-driven tone Rapace’s Salander projected. Mara does completely disappear into the role, which is a feat in its own right, but I can’t wrap my head around why a character solely defined by how men treat her is a feminist icon.

However hilarious Kristen Wiig is as a performer in “Bridesmaids,” her character Annie Walker‘s never-ending “poor-me” syndrome grates and actually detracts from the fun. Let’s be honest, Annie kind of sucks, right? It’s a testament to Wiig’s affability (and the rest of the cast’s performances) that we stick with Annie’s journey throughout the movie.

Could it be possible that one of the most interesting female characters this awards season is actually Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gary from “Young Adult”? Mavis may actually be the least likable protagonist, male or female, to hit the silver screen in some time, but for all her myriad failings, she at least feels like flesh and blood. She’s not perfect, far from it, in fact, but at least we see her making choices and acting on them, however misguided and delusional they may be. She makes decisions entirely on what she thinks is best, paying no mind to societal constraints.

In the supporting category, one of the ladies from “The Help” will probably walk away with the prize, but Shailene Woodley did fine work in Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” as Alex, George Clooney’s character’s teenage daughter. In what could have easily been a wise-beyond-her-years cookie-cutter daughter role, Woodley imbues her character with palpably authentic teen angst and conflicted feelings about her parents, particularly her mother, while spending most of the movie in a bikini, no less.

Despite my disappointment with the female characters Hollywood served up this year, I’ll still be tuning in this Sunday to see who takes home that golden orb, but I’m already more excited about 2012′s Oscar bait, when hopefully we will be treated to some more well-rounded female characters. And if not, at the very least, we always have Pixar, whose geniuses managed to make a wordless futuristic robot really feel like a woman and are sure to get it right again with their first feature led by a female protagonist in this summer’s “Brave”:

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.

Watch Downton Abbey I Wonder Preview on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

2) If after watching “Downton Abbey” you find yourself in a period-piece marathon, make sure and choose wisely, namely from the films and miniseries including the chaps who landed on Pajiba’s list of their favorite cravat-wearing Brits.

3) Could “Twilight” be better or worse? Find out by reading io9′S imaginings on “If Famous Authors Had Written ‘Twilight’…”

4) We couldn’t get enough of the trip back in time afforded to us by “The Artist,” undoubtedly the most unique film we saw in 2011. With two winning leads and a charming love story, this black-and-white silent gem will make you long for quieter times at the cinema and heartily root for its chances come Oscar season.

5) We’re also rooting for Chelsea Gill, who posted a gutsy and adorable song on YouTube to ask her biggest celebrity crush (and ours), Jason Segel, out for a drink. We hope she gets her drink!