Jennifer Aniston’s Smartwater ad is a fantastic follow up to my previous posting about viral videos. It teasingly pays homage to the things we love to share in a bid to go viral, which the film has over the last few days. 

Everyone knows we are in a down economy.  If you don’t, then you are either richer than rich, or have been living in a cave for the past two years.  Just because you empathize with the state of the economy, does not mean you should forfeit your worth or value when it comes to what someone is willing to pay you.  So many of you think that you may have made a certain salary, earned a certain income level in the past and you can’t or don’t deserve to ask for the same amount of money now. What’s changed? Have you gotten less experience over the years? Have you depreciated in value? Just because you may not have worked in awhile or are trying it on your own for a change, doesn’t mean you are worth any less?

Like Rapunzel in the ivory tower throwing down her long braid in hopes of a rescue, does your career feel like you need more than a prince on a white horse to help you out?  Having a job these days has become more than a blessing given the alternative.  But do you somehow feel that you are sacrificing more than you think?  Feeling trapped in your situation even though you are collecting a paycheck is not any better than not having a job-you’re tangled by your circumstances no matter which side of the braid you are holding.

So maybe you’ve been focusing on your Plan A now for quite sometime without any real momentum. Or maybe you’ve been striking out but somehow you keep thinking it’s going to come together for you any day now.  Still, you stick with it, follow through and do everything you were told would help you get a job or move up in the job you currently have but, nothing.  So you might go to a career coach, figure you might need to tweak your resume or maybe splurge for a career makeover.  Trying to stay focused on your original plan, you continue to go out of your way to make it work even when nothing is coming together for you.  Do you dare ask yourself, “Is it time to initiate a Plan B?”

It’s really not that hard to kick your job search into high gear.  Some of us get so focused on building the resume, the bio and figuring out who to include as a reference that we forget to do a few basics which really happen BEFORE the resume re-write begins. When you think about preparing for your job search you might spend all of your time preparing a killer resume and think that is all you need.  Unfortunately, a resume is only one tool in helping you present yourself to a prospective employer or a recruiter. Your job search begins with your ability to research, goal-set and prepare yourself – three ways to plug and play to you’re your career forward and find your dream job.

Sometimes you walk in cocky and so sure of yourself that you may wonder why you even need to interview for the job in the first place?  Come on already you can’t be that good?  It’s great to possess self-confidence and to be self-assured when you are handling the interview process so well, but how do you really know you are acing the interview or living up to a higher standard?

Here are five ways to know you are hitting it out of the park whether you ultimately get a job offer or not:

It’s always good to be ahead of the curve.  Pushing your way through the crowd of angry job seekers like a mob scene out of “The Walking Dead,” you have the right to want to move past the rest of the herd.  It’s not that you aren’t ambitious.  But even a hungry zombie needs a break every now and again.  When you are just plain TIRED and you’ve been at this for a while, it’s okay to just chillax your search and sit this round out.

 

2012 was an amazing year for animation short films. This year’s Oscar nominees share one thing in common: they are all silent films, each demonstrating the power of pure storytelling with only visuals and music! The nominees are: “Paperman”,  “Fresh Guacamole”, “Maggie Simpson in the Longest Daycare,” “Head over Heels,” and “Adam and Dog.”

Due to its subject matter, this film should be called sci-fi. But its tone is far closer to a somber period piece. Mark Romanek, whose only other feature film was the sad thriller ONE HOUR PHOTO, has kept the same straightforward tone of the book from Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel REMAINS OF THE DAY was adapted into a somber film as well. Romanek never sensationalizes the material into some kind of conspiracy thriller. He asks one philosophical question and spends the film answering that question in an emotionally powerful way.

Kathy (Carey Mulligan, AN EDUCATION), Tommy (Andrew Garfield, RED RIDING TRILOGY) and Ruth (Keira Knightley, PRIDE & PREJUDICE) have grown up together at the highly controlled boarding school Hailsham. The headmistress Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling, SWIMMING POOL) does not stand for anyone breaking the rules. The children were told stories that if they left the grounds even for a second they might be savagely murdered. They wear wristbands to make sure they are all accounted for. The new teacher Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY) begins to question the morality of how the children are being treated, but her views are seen as subversion.

It has been nearly thirty years since the original TRON made waves with its then groundbreaking visual effects. Visual effects have caught up with the visionary ideas of the digital world of the original, making the sequel a visual treat. Unfortunately, the story is less compelling.

Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS) idolized his father Kevin (Jeff Bridges, THE BIG LEBOWSKI), a brilliant computer programming who dreamed of creating a perfect world inside the computer. He called this world The Grid and promised to show it to Sam one day, but then he disappeared. Sam has grown despising what ENCOM, the company his father ran. Each year he plays a prank on the company to get under their skin. Then his father's old partner Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, TV's BABYLON 5) comes to him with news that he's received a page from his father's old office. When Sam goes to investigate, he stumbles across his father's work and inadvertently gets transported into The Grid.