Uptown Girls

Uptown Girls is a comedy from 2003, starring Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning. Molly (Brittany Murphy) is the daughter of a former rock star who was killed, along with his wife in a plane crash, and now lives alone, off her inheritance. Apart from this tragedy, she has everything else a girl could want and lives an extravagant and fun lifestyle in New York City. Though she is initially surrounded by wealth, Molly’s life soon plummets in a downward spiral.

After losing her inheritance, her apartment, Molly’s friend is able to score her a job as a nanny. The job is to look after eight year-old Ray Schleine (Dakota Fanning), whose dad is in a coma, and whose mom is so consumed with work that she is never around. Ray is everything Molly is not: sensible, independent, mature, and grown-up. Compared to Molly, who is spunky, fun-loving, and spontaneous, Ray is more of the adult in the relationship. Ray has gone through nanny after nanny because no one can cope with her, however, Molly is determined to get through to her, and teach Ray how to be a kid, and ditch the adult-like persona that she has. 

The main focus of this film is the juxtaposition of these two drastically different characters’ lifestyles. Molly has pursued an absurd lifestyle in response to the loss of her parents, while Ray has been forced to grow up too fast and be independent, thus assuming a complete adult manner. After annoying one another to no end, these two finally find common ground and each influences the other for the better. Molly is able to bring out Ray’s carefree child side, whereas Ray teaches Molly to become more mature and responsible than she had been previously. These events that unfold cause both characters to arrive at a better, happier life, while developing a touching friendship in the process.

"Survival isn't who you are. It's who you become." -'The 100'

One of my favorite TV Series at the moment is The 100, which is one of the new popular shows that runs on The CW. This show first premiered on March 19, 2014; I didn't even know about it until I was looking through Netflix back in October and saw that a show called The 100, was recently added and nearly had a 5/5 star rating, so naturally I thought I would give the show a try and soon after starting it I was HOOKED!

"The Ark"

This series starts with one of the main characters, Clarke explaining what has happened and where she is. She states:

"It's been 97 years since a nuclear apocalypse killed everyone on Earth, leaving the planet simmering in radiation. Fortunately, there were survivors at the time of the bombs. There is now only The Ark, one station forged from the many. We're told the Earth needs another 100 years to become survivable again and man can go home, back to the ground. The ground, that's the dream."

Clarke, played by
Eliza Taylor

We soon find out that Clarke and many other minors are in "prison"!  Since they have been up in space for nearly a hundred years, all of their food, supplies and oxygen are low at The Ark. They believe they are the only humans left in the universe so to keep the human race alive; no matter what crime they commit they are sentenced to death. They shoot you out in space, they call it "getting floated". The only way you don't get "floated" from committing a crime is if you are under the age of 18. The reason why this show is called The 100, is because the people that are in charge of the Ark decide to send 100 prisoners down to earth to see if it is livable once again. 

I love the character development that happens once they are on earth, from the start of the season to the end. It starts out with the 100, acting like normal teenagers, partying, not thinking/planing how to survive and where to sleep. They mature into warriors, when they need to start fighting for their lives when they realize that some humans have been living on earth all this time and they aren't happy that they are living on their land. I also like how we learn more about how these teenagers used to live on The Ark through flashbacks, and how much their characters had to change to survive. 

I recommend this series to anyone that likes Action, Drama, and their minds being BLOWN multiple times throughout a season.  

I would rate Season 1 of The 100, 9.3/10.  The only reason why I didn't give it a perfect score is because the series starts out a little slow but by the third episode it picks up pace and keeps getting better with every episode. 

Boy Meets World

These past two weeks have been a little crazy for me. I've been in and out of the hospital and had other various sicknesses. However, the one thing that I've been using to entertain myself through sleepy recoveries has been the television show Boy Meets World. The show started airing when I was born, however I remember growing up on the re-runs.

When I was about six-years-old, my best friend at the time was a kid I had gone to pre-school with and who had been in my kindergarten class. Because of this, our mothers were also very close, and one of us rarely got away with something the other wasn't supposed to do. The show was well into its sixth season, and I had just started watching. Boy Meets World is a show that truly grows with its characters, and my by the time I was six, the characters were graduating high school and dabbling in the more adult stages of life. My best friend's mom saw a particular episode in which two of the main characters were debating whether or not to have sex, and because of this, she warned my mom not to let me watch the show. It was inappropriate for our young ears.

In a few years my mom had forgotten the warning and I began watching the re-runs on TV. There's something about this show, where the stand-alone episodes work as its own entity, while also creating an ongoing plot throughout the season that makes you want to watch them all in order (which is why I decided to finally watch them all the way through).

I really like that the show started with the main character, Cory, and his friends, Topanga and Shawn, as sixth graders. The entire tone of the show revolved around their youngness and naivete. Cory and Shawn both thought girls were icky, Cory couldn't understand why his brother wanted to date them instead of hanging out with him, and his problems were relatively simple sixth-grade problems.

However, as Cory became older, going from seventh to eighth, to ninth, his problems because more and more complicated. Girls were slowly added to the picture, the realization that one particular girl (Topanga) was someone he loved more than any fifteen-year-old ever should love someone, and the nerves that come with such a difficult time.

I'm really glad I decided to go back and watch the show. Right now I'm about halfway through their tenth-grade year, and I'm excited to see the characters as they reach the roadblocks I've encountered the past few years.

On the flip side, it's also strange to realize that I'm finally older than the characters I've grown up and embolized throughout my childhood.