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:

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.

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.

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?

2) We also can’t get enough Bon Iver. Here’s a surprisingly candid interview with Justin Vernon, crazy hair and all. The Grammy nominee played a show at the Long Center back in September with his new lady love, Kathleen Edwards, that really blew us away. The National, who played a great show at Austin Music Hall earlier this month, even used Justin on vocals for their latest album, High Violet.

3) Speaking of powerful music, if you haven’t heard this gut-wrenching breakup anthem by Gotye and Kimbra yet, it’s definitely worth a listen. The video starts off creepy but it’s SFW. You might even find yourself hooked by the end.

4) Now just to balance things out, here’s a disgustingly cute video that’s much more upbeat and appropriate for this Saturday’s New Year’s celebration. The stars of 500 Days of Summer reunite to sing a charming little ditty that is sure to melt even the coldest heart this NYE.

5) Wondering what to do for New Year’s? Here’s a party we’re definitely not planning on attending.

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.

2) New York Magazine’s Vulture also gave us this delightful clip of the “Community” cast playing the Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture Edition. We wish we could be on their teams.

3) Alison Brie, “Community”‘s Annie Edison, will soon be on the silver screen in “Five-Year Engagement.” In addition to two of our other beloved TV actors (Jason Segel and Chris Pratt) and Emily Blunt, this trailer offers romantic comedy fans like us hope for the future. And in our book, co-writers Segel and Nick Stoller are two-for-two after “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “The Muppets.”

4) Another dearly departed TV favorite, “My So-Called Life,” received the where-are-they-now? treatment, courtesy of an imaginative writer over at HelloGiggles. They sooooo pegged Brian Krakow.

5) Wondering what to get us for Christmas? We’ll take anything from Brookish, a lovely Etsy shop full of handmade goods inspired by the great Jane Austen herself.

2) And on the other end of the November movie releases, this reviewer sums up exactly how we felt about “Breaking Dawn, Part 1″:

3) So many great movies will be coming out in the next four weeks, but one of the ones we are most excited about is Chickster favorite Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought a Zoo,” which comes out Dec. 23. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Crowe in a great cover story that also includes the mix tape (what else?) he made to convince Matt Damon to sign on for the project. We were happy to see our all-time favorite Ryan Adams song (and Crowe knows from Ryan Adams songs), “If I Am a Stranger,” on the playlist. Here’s a video a fan recorded of Adams playing the song solo at a show in Ireland this summer. As usual, his vocals are heartbreakingly gorgeous:

4) The Hairpin has added another great installment to our beloved Scandals of Classic Hollywood series, this time focusing on the fascinating and tragic story of the beautiful Rita Hayworth. Long, but well worth the read.

5) It is officially December, which means it’s time for one of our favorite music genres — Christmas music! Over on HelloGiggles, they’ve assembled a pitch-perfect mix of retro holiday jams, including one of our absolute musts, Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)”:

Once I found that image, I searched until I found the tutorial for creating it, which ultimately came from Apartment Therapy. And then, it was off to Hobby Lobby. For less than $15, I picked up a 16×20 blank canvas and a package of 100 white Christmas lights (with white light casing and wire too for maximum camouflage). For an extra $10, I picked up a plug-in dimmer to have more control over the brightness of the lights.

Following the Apartment Therapy tutorial, I started by sketching out some dots with a pencil on the reverse side of the canvas. I loved the three-cluster design of the original image, so I tried to copy that. Once I got in there with the lights though, I realized that sketching out the design ends up being pretty fruitless, since you have to yield placement to however much distance there is between each light. The tutorial suggested poking through the canvas (which is surprisingly tough) with an awl. Since I didn’t have one of those, I used a small screwdriver instead to make the beginnings of the hole. Then it came down to simply jamming the individual light through that hole you started. And then doing it over and over again to create 100 holes filled with 100 lights. The tutorial also recommended securing each light with craft glue, but I didn’t have that and am impatient so I just left it. By criss-crossing the light strand and placing each light at maximum distance from the next one, I was able to make it pretty secure from behind.

So when all 100 lights were done, this is what it looked like:

Kind of boring/ugly, but when I plugged in the lights, it began to get pretty:

And prettier:

And really pretty:

I love the way each light throws such pretty shadows against the canvas. I suggest setting the canvas on a dresser or table that will camouflage the electrical cord trailing down from the bottom that needs to be plugged in and also provide enough space for the wiring behind the canvas. Here is a side view of what mine looks like on the reverse side (not too messy, but not pretty either):

Apartment Therapy also suggested painting the canvas first, which could be a nice way to avoid the boring white daytime look. Maybe try a pretty blush color or a nice deep blue to look like stars on a night sky.