She won! She won! She won!

Oh ye of little faith!
Everyone thought Julie Chrisitie was going to walk away with the Oscar, but it went to the actress who deserved it. Congratulations Marion Cotillard!

So, I managed to get 12/24 awards right to come 3rd in the Rialto Oscars comp. Top score was 18, followed by 14.
I'm moving up anyway. I think every other year I've done quite poorly. But really, who can honestly tell which films will get the awards for sound, editing etc?!

Am pleased Once won Best Song also. It's one I crank up in the projection room if I happen to be there at the right time.

Am pretty bummed that it's not going to be shown on free to air tv. Not everyone can afford Sky ya know! Grump, grump.
But I had www.stuff.co.nz up all day yesterday with my finger on 'refresh' so I could see what everyone was wearing. So much black. Blah! Well done to those who actually wore some colour!
Another congrats to Marion for her gorgeous white mermaid dress too. Loved it!

Have updated the winners in my previous post; they are now green.

And the dimwit of the day award goes to......

Me.

So, usually I shut the dining room door to keep LB contained at night, but since it has been a bit rattley and annoying with the windows open, I left that one open last night, and just shut the laundry, bathroom and bedroom door instead.
However, I forgot one vital thing. Once my bedroom door is shut, you can't open it from inside.
Yup.
Woke up this morning to the sound of my bunny wreaking havoc in the bathroom. (Apparently I didn't shut that door too well). Went to tell her off and low and behold, I was trapped. Clever fairy.
Now, Mum has a spare set of keys, but she was at work and I couldn't contact her; I really didn't fancy ringing my landlady to come and rescue me; and I couldn't even crawl out the window because the security covers are locked and the keys are in the living room, and anyway, I still couldn't get back inside anyway, so after a little panicking, I grabbed a bobby pin and went to work. I could hardly believe it, but five minutes later I was free! Turns out the movies are right! You CAN use a hairpin to unlock doors! Although, it wasn't actually a lock, just a stuck latch thingee.
Anyway, I won't be doing that again!

One thing I do plan to keep doing is going up to Dorkland (no offense, Jaffas)! for ice skating practise. My darling Mummy came with me the other week, and after getting horrendously lost (thanks for the directions, Rob)! I found out that skating is not at all like riding a bike. I was truly awful. Tiny Asian children spinning around on one foot were sniggering at me. I used to be a great skater 11 years ago......
But, I am determined not to give up trying. It's too much fun. So, anyone else who is keen, let me know and we can go together.

Meanwhile I am so excited!
Last night after work, I went to see The Bucket List and squealed in my seat when the trailer for Mamma Mia! came on. (I was the only one in the cinema at that point, so I felt no shame)!
I haven't had a chance to see the stage show, and as most of you will know, I am the world's biggest ABBA fan, and the trailer looks absolutely fabulous! So much fun. Am thinking it may instantly knock Hairspray out of it's current #1 placing - the dvd of which I have nearly worn out after seeing it at the flicks 3 times!
It's an amazing cast too - Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Meryl Streep....
I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, The Bucket List was a great film. I reccommend you go see it. Very sad, quite funny and most inspirational.
I can't stand Jack Nicholson, so wasn't too thrilled about spending two hours watching him, but Morgan Freeman is just wonderful. I could listen just to him talking for hours. Amazing voice.
Got me thinking about my own Bucket List (that's a list of things you want to do before you kick the proverbial bucket, for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about).
However, right now, in the completely messed up, unhappy, depressed, emotional state I am in, all I can think of is, be loved in the way I have given love in the past, without it all turning into a lie.
Will give the list some proper thought though, and revisit it in a later entry.

So, tomorrow is the big day for the film industry. Happy Oscars everyone!
With Nat gone from Rialto (sniff, we still miss you)! I have taken over organising this year's Oscars competition. And I intend to win!!!!!! (Mainly coz, Nat sent me her picks for this year's winners - tehe)!

Anyway, here are my choices:

Best Picture:
Atonement
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Juno

Best Actress:
Cate Blanchett - Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie - Away From Her
Marion Cotillard - La Vie en Rose (will be so annoyed if she doesn't win)!
Laura Linney - The Savages
Ellen Page - Juno

Best Actor:
George Clooney - Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis - There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp - Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones - In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen - Eastern Promises

Best Supporting Actress:
Cate Blanchett - I'm Not There
Ruby Dee - American Gangster
Saoirse Ronan - Atonement
Amy Ryan - Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton - Michael Clayton

Best Supporting Actor:
Casey Affleck - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Javier Bardem - No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman - Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook - Into The Wild
Tom Wilkinson - Michael Clayton

Best Director:
Julian Schnabel - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jason Reitman - Juno
Tony Gilroy - Michael Clayton
Joel and Ethan Coen - No Country for Old Men
Paul Thomas Anderson - There Will Be Blood

Best Animated Feature Film:
Persepolis
Ratatouille
Surf's Up

Best Foreign Language Film:
Beaufort (Israel)
The Counterfeiters (Austria)
Katyn (Poland)
Mongol (Kazakhstan)
12 (Russia)

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Christopher Hampton - Atonement
Sarah Polley - Away From Her
Ronald Harwood - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Joel and Ethan Coen - No Country For Old Men
Paul Thomas Anderson - There Will Be Blood

Best Original Screenplay:
Diablo Cody - Juno
Nancy Oliver - Lars and the Real Girl
Tony Gilroy - Michael Clayton
Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco - Ratatouille
Tamara Jenkins - The Savages

I'm working tomorrow, and will probably be doing Oscars stuff all day to help promote our films, so will update with the winners, and see how I did.....oh, and the rest of the staff of course. I hope Tu's come up with some decent prizes and not just crap from the cupboard!

Oh my goodness! I completely just had the most amazing idea, way too late.
I so should have persuaded all the Rialto-ites to glam up tomorrow! We even have some red carpet lying around...DAMN!

Ah well, next year.

Be warned!

I'm in love!

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=139499110

This is my dream car! Does anyone have $50K I could borrow and pay you back in um........50 years?

My bunny's an emo

So Saturday night after I got home from work, I snuggled up on the couch with Little Miss for some cuddles and discovered, to my horror, a huge red wound running from about the middle of her back, down and around her stomach.
It looked extremely nasty and painful, so first thing Sunday we hopped along to the vet, where I found out that it was self inflicted. Basically she had scratched herself a little too hard, and because her sking is so soft it had pulled apart, making things look a lot worse than they really were. Fortunately, the wound had already started to scab over during the night, so the worst was over, and I just have to watch for redness or irritation.
While we were there, the vet gave her some flea treatment and also a very nasty, stinging shot to ward off mites. LilyBelle has only just started talking to me again after that one!
Had a very proud mummy moment though, because the vet said she was the most beautiful bunny she had ever seen. Aww!
And she is.....even if she is still wreaking havoc in the house! She pulled my fairy wings down from the table and ate the elastic the day before a party recently. Was not impressed! Nor was I impressed when I discovered she had eaten my second pair of MP4 headphones. Not cutie cutie!
She has stopped biting, so I think she may be ready to accompany me to parties very soon.
I am thinking though, that this Easter I should ring the hospital and see if they'll let the fairy accompany bunny around the childrens' ward. She would make a very good Easter Bunny methinks. If it's all kosher, would anyone like to join us? I have a spare fairy dress.

Saw Target the other night as they were seeing which cinemas would let underage kids in to see restricted movies. Skycity passed with flying colours (they didn't test any Rialtos), but Berkeley failed in a big way.
I forgot to mention in my previous blog post that a friend and I went to Berkeley to see National Treasure a few weeks ago and I was shocked at the service....or lack of. We were 20 minutes late to start with. Of the six people standing behind the counter when we got there, not one person acknowledged us or made a move to serve us until we said something. Their straw dispensers were empty - on a Friday night! And the floor person did not show us into the very dark cinema. OSH anyone? My fingers also were extremely numb by the end of the film, as there were no cupholders or anything to hold your drinks.
National Treasure itself was pretty lame until they got past the superfluous (I love that word) car chase. Did they really need two? And letting technology do all the work. Now I have wanted to be an archaeologist since I was little. Like Evelyn Carnahan in The Mummy movies, I "dreamed about dead guys", and the fun part of diggin up the past, is using your own noodle to it! Not typing into a computer and letting a machine do it for you! Once they got into the real treasure hunting bit though, I was sitting up straighter in my seat paying attention. And Helen Mirren was in it! Was not expecting that!

Also saw 27 Dresses the other day. OK girly froth, but I have never seen a movie so full of cliches. It got to the stage where my friend and I were actually saying some lines with the actors! The best line though is one I plan to use, (if I can remember to) "I feel like I just found out my favourite love song was written about a sandwich". Fabulous!

Right now I am waiting for The Other Boleyn Girl to open. Philippa Gregory is one of my favourite authors and this is my favourite of all her novels. Got me through 7th form history too!
The trailer looks great, although I can already make a complaint. Why on earth was Eric Bana cast as Henry VIII???!!!!! He was a fugly, short, most unattractive man who walked with a limp, and yet in the trailer, when Eric Bana takes off his shirt before he gets it on with Mary Boleyn, you're like PWHHHOOOOAAAR!!!!!! Way too hot. Delicious to look at. But not Henry.

In other news, I managed to redelegate the dreaded V Day display. But I still had to work that night. Burst into tears once on the way to work, seeing tarty school girls and office ladies walking around town with bunches of flowers, and twice upstairs in the projection room. Managed to avoid serving customers all night though, and I banned the subject from being brought up in my presence. My staff were pretty good about it actually. My foul mood was clearly a little too obvious. I had seriously thought about asking another manager to cover, because I knew I wouldn't be able to handle it, but I am trying so damned hard to get over my constant emotional outbursts and thought it would be good for me to put myself in a position where I had to hold it together. I forgot however, that I was doing management and projection, and the black box is a perfect place to hide and weep. I also know where the cameras don't reach, so no one can see me. Sigh.
You know, I really thought I may actually get a present for that day. If not from the person I really would have liked one from, then from my stalker. I mean what use is a stalker if you don't get presents?! Colin has still been txting me constantly. If it wasn't my business phone as well as personal, I would get my number changed. Gosh, he's thick. It's been five months of him txting and me not responding, and he still doesn't get it!

In happier news, I started dance classes last Wednesday - yay! Tap is going to be a little dull since I am stuck repeating last year's grade, but Rock 'n' Roll is great fun. It is very, very slow, because no one in my class has done dancing of any sort. Ever. But while everyone is busy looking at their feet, and stumbling over possibly the easiest steps in the history of dance, I can have a chat with some of the people I dance with, and hopefully make some new friends.
Oh yeah, and I am now top of the class in both tap and R'n'R, which pleases my inner exhibitionist greatly.

I also made an impromptu decision, while waiting for R'n'R to start (in the same hall where I learnt ballet for 11 years) that next year - once my diet has had time to work, and I am closer to being ballerina sized - I want to go back to ballet classes. I miss it so much. My teacher was still there packing up her stuff so the Rock'n'Rollers could take over, so I asked her if this would be ok, and she was chuffed. She was quite happy for me to start right away, but I refuse to be the fat girl in a leotard in a class of sticks ever again. too many painful memories to be brought up. So, next year. It's a good thing I refused when Mum tried to make me sell all my ballet stuff. I knew it would come in handy one day!

The Hamilton Gardens Summer Festival is in full swing at the moment, and so far I have been to two events. The Snow White Panto and Pericles, The Prince of Tyre.

Snow White was great, as I knew it would be. I love pantos! They are, I think my favourite form of theatre. However, one complaint. Snow White was blonde. And also a real bitch in real life, which left me rooting for the wicked witch to kill her! But blonde?! What the hell?! "Skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony and lips as red as blood". Did they never read this story?! Apologies to those who have heard this before, but the greatest day of my childhood was at kindy when the teacher was reading us Snow White and she looked at me and said that I looked like Snow White! (I had the dark, fringed bob thing happening, you see). I had never been so happy in my whole four years of being. So how they thought they could pull off having a blonde, snobby tart playing my favourite Disney princess I do not know.

Ok, I'm over it. Kinda.

Saw the Shakespeare last night, riverside. Took a little getting lost and asking directions to get there. Trust Pip to choose some obscure location I didn't even know existed to stage her play!
Not the most enthralling of the Bard's works - mainly I guess because he didn't write it alone - but the setting was beautiful, the costumes elabrate and it was very cool how they used the river. Must have been freezing in there though for the two pushing the wooden boat along!

Had hoped to make it to the dance performance What Love Can Do, but couldn't. Am going to try to see the childrens' storyteller next weekend though. She is doing a tale called, Faeries, Mermaids, Princes and Peas. May give me some ideas for my parties!

Well, that's about it for this installment, except for:

Is anyone keen for a roadtrip up to Dorkland for some ice skating?

The supermarket is giving out free people! "Honest to blog"!

Well, just Pak n Save's seafood department, as I found the other day:

Usually every week when Mum and I go shopping, I play a very amusing game called "Spot All The Spelling and Grammatical Errors in the Pac n Save Signage". Which never fails to see me walking around the supermarket in fits of giggles. (I loathe supermarket shopping, so this makes it much more tolerable).

Anyway, the above, is currently tops for the funniest sign yet. If I had more courage I would have actually gone up to the deli counter and asked exactly what sort of people they are giving away with their seafood meals, and can I please have mine tall, dark and handsome! But alas, I lack the courage and I was nearly hysterical anyway!

Oh, and the quote "Honest to blog" is from the tres cool Acadamy Award nominated flick Juno, which I reccommend all to see. Very sweet, very quirky, and a lot of fun.

I have been doing very well with my movie watching resolution....much as it seems to the detriment of my poor wee blog! Sorry Jenni! I will add a new resolution of trying to blog once a week too, methinks.
However, probably better that I haven't written any entries lately. Have been feeling pretty low and depressed, so it probably would have just been a lot of embarassing ranting which I would no doubt come to regret later.
In short, I thought things were finally going somewhere with the guy I've been seeing on and off for the last year....but now his ex is pregnant and out to get all the money she can from him while doing her best to keep him out of his child's life, and I find myself in the very awkward position of confidante and shoulder to cry on.

Why can't things just be simple for once in my miserable love life? Oh, and if anyone so much as dares to mention the approaching "V Day" in my presence, be prrepared to face the consequences! I have been volunteered to do a display for this evil, torturous event at work, because I like pink. Well, yes, I do, but I am very bitter and sore when it comes to 'that' day.

Now, I know this sounds strange coming from me, the die hard romantic, but well, I've never actually had a Val.... that day. And right now, I am feeling rather sensitive about the whole singleton thing. I am hating work and hating being alone every night, and am just one very grumpy cow at the moment, so if you feel my wrath, I do apologise. Don't take it personally!

Colin (months and months and months on) is still txting me as well. That boy really wouldn't recognise a hint if it jumped up and bit him on the nose. I guess it's kinda flattering...in a somewhat creepy way.....

So, anyway, movies.

I have seen since my last post:

Alvin and the Chipmunks - yay, they did not destroy a beloved childhood favourite! Wasn't fabulous, but very sweet and had some funny bits.

Water Horse - a bit slow, but the kiddies were cute and it was filmed here in NZ - yay for us!

The Golden Compass - so not a PG film! I was terrified! At one point, during the battle scene I actually screamed! There is no way I would take my kiddies too see that! Pretty ok otherwise, and will definately put the books on my 'To Read' list.

Death At A Funeral - By far the most hilarious film I have seen in a very long time. I was laughing so hard the entire time, as was Mum, which is something! A couple of gross bits that they really could have left out, but for the most part, an absolute delight.

Once - very sweet, very lovely, great music and the girl in it was just lovely. And the two characters are actually dating in real life - aww!

Priceless - was a wee bit upset when I saw this (had just found out news mentioned above), but from what I could concentrate on, it was good. Will have to watch it again when it comes out on dvd.

Clubland - quite disappointing really. Brenda Blethlyn is fabulous and I always love a movie...or book about crazy old theatrical ladies. However, this wasn't all I had imagined it to be. Watchable, but too much awkward teen first time sex.

Jane Austen Book Club - Have now seen this twice. I had heard that the book was pretty bad, so hadn't bothered with it, and that maybe so, but it definately works as a chick flick. Funny, sweet and I have been inspired to finally read the two of J. A's novels I hadn't read - Mansfield Park and Emma. Did not approve of their dissing Northanger Abbey though, as this is my favourite of all her works! Leave it alone!

And, the one I have been waiting for for sometime.....Sweeney Todd! Totally, totally gross but fabulous! After the first few murders, I even got up the courage not to look away for the rest!

I was a bit dubious about Helena Bonham Carter playing Mrs Lovett, as I am an Angela Lansbury fan from waaaaaaaayyyyyyy back (Murder, She Wrote days) and I had first been introduced to Sweeney Todd, seeing the Broadway version of the show on tv with Angela playing Mrs L, absolutely brilliantly.

However, I am pleased to say that Helena did a marvellous job and I was most impressed. I have always found her a little scary and intimidating, but I could quite possibly call myself a fan, after seeing that performance. I think possibly because the Broadway version had a much older Sweeney and Mrs L, and this version had the younger Johnny and Helena which changed things a little. Anyway, am looking forward to seeing it again and buying the dvd as soon as it comes out. (I need something to replace the still current Hairspray obsession)!

In other news, I am planning to make this year a year of learning new things. As well as my tap class, I am also taking up Rock n Roll dancing and am going to teach myself to belly dance as I don't think I can take another night off work for an actual class, so dvds it is.

I am extremely disappointed with the ladies in my ta class, as I was all geared up to attempt level five this year, but only three of us signed up, which was not enough for a class, so I am stuck repeating level four again, as I don't fancy taking a year off. Grrrrr!

I am currently also on the hunt for a sewing teacher as I am finally going to do the whole Rockabilly chick thing! However, the gorgeous dresses that I pretty much have to order online from the USA are about $200 each, and I am trying to save for my trip overseas! So, I need to learn to sew my own lovely dresses.
But maybe, I will splurge on a few of these:

http://www.daddyos.com/retro/retroldy.html

I am however, desperate to actually fit these dresses, which come in rather small sizes. Sigh. So have signed up to the gym again, and have been living on cottage cheese sandwiches, health shakes and apples. Sigh.

The plan is for the weight to just fall off me when all my dance classes start! Well, fingers crossed anyway!

Speaking of my trip overseas, we are going to try and get tickets to the Oprah show! Yay! Apparently Oprah is quite a Cary fan herself, so we may even get a mention!!!!!

I also have recieved five offers of accomodation from fellow Warbrides in: DC, San Fran, Arizona and Houston! What a lovely group of people Cary Grant fans are!

Once things start building up momentum to the big adventure, my travel blog will be updated more regularly:

http://carysgirlfriday.livejournal.com

Um...what else?

Fairy parties are going well. Am actually starting to get calls from people who have heard about me from friends, which is awesome! I also have a couple of face painting gigs coming up, which will be fantastic, as I may then finally have the confidence to get out and about in the Tron on weekends and get some extra pocket money....and publicity.

So, there we have it. All up to date, and I will do my darndest to keep it that way! Honest to blog! (So, my new favourite saying)! Hehe!