PAULA NEAL MOONEY

by Paula Neal Mooney I just watched this amazing "A Girl Like Me" video clip of the award-winning documentary by Kiri Davis , a 17-year-old New York high school student. (Thanks, dreah , for the heads up.) Kiri Davis conducted a modern-day "doll study" wherein she asked black children to choose between the black and white dolls. Most of them selected the white dolls. But skin bleaching tales caught my ear the most. One black woman spoke of friends who actually pour bleach in their baths in sad attempts to lighten their skin. I understand the mentality. Even though some blacks consider me light-skinned, my biracial friends and whites are quicker to call me dark-skinned. All depends on your perspective. Anyhoo, I still use the skin lightening cream sold in grocery stores. I tell myself it's just to even out my skin tone. But I feel a little weird at times as it moves down the conveyor belt toward the register. I snickered at my mom when she used beauty products ...

by Paula Neal Mooney Back during one "winter of my discontent," I went thru an old movie-watching phase. With the sliding glass door of our Richton Park, Illinois, apartment taped closed to alleviate heat-leakage, I alleviated my cabin fever with movies like Butterfield 8 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , starring the exquisite and violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps that was when I fell in love with my absolute favorite old movie of all time, Sunset Boulevard , starring the delectable and dodgy and beautiful William Holden. These thoughts came to mind when I caught The Saturday Early Show's segment yesterday called Movies to Hit the Love Spot . On it they featured a movie called Brief Encounter , which, though I've get to view it, harkened back to those cozy pre-kid days of just me falling in love with slightly sepia images and slowly unfurling storylines. Described as a movie wherein a housewife and married man fall in love but never have a physical affair, Brief Encoun...

by Paula Neal Mooney Ask. Believe. Receive. Those are the three basic tenets of The Secret , a new DVD and hardcover book by Rhonda Byrne that's sweeping the world. I caught Rhonda Byrne and clips of The Secret movie on Oprah yesterday, and couldn't stop watching the panel of New Agey-sounding experts talk about The Secret using hokey terms like "universe" and "energy" and "presence" instead of what this Christian girl calls "Jehovah Jireh" and the "Holy Spirit" and "God Almighty." Only one of the panelists, Lisa Nichols (the black woman pictured here), broke down and said she got on her knees and cried out to God to help her change. But I believe some of the other panelists and The Secret teachers are Christians -- not sure about Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith and James Arthur Ray -- but Jack Canfield created those Chicken Soup books. However, the "universal truths" they discussed from The Secret movie ...

by Paula Neal Mooney I love it when artists put all of themselves into their projects, spilling the truth about their innards -- come what may. Looks like this is what Chris Rock has done in viewing his latest movie trailer for I Think I Love My Wife . Watch it now... Chris Rock is proving he is human and makes mistakes like we all do. Of course, upcoming books will tell just how human he was and how much his wife, Malaak Compton-Rock, must forgive... But I'm glad to see Chris Rock back in the director's chair for I Think I Love my Wife , a movie he also penned. I'm even more overjoyed by reports that Chris Rock may not have filed for divorce after all , and am thrilled that Chris and Malaak Rock -- I still love the way her first name rhymes with Rock -- they were meant to stay together! -- attended the Living Legends Foundation 13th Annual Dinner all hugged up together last month, with reports saying that Rock may not all filed divorce papers after all. Forgiveness is...

by Paula Neal Mooney Just as Super Size Me became the bane of McDonald's existence and Fast Food Nation fictionally treaded upon the e-coli scare at Jack in the Box and Mexican-immigrants-as-underpaid-workers controversy, now comes Black Gold threatening to do the same to the Starbucks leviathan. Black Gold received lots of attention at Sundance in January, and only then would Starbucks Corp. reportedly grant interviews to brothers Nick and Mark Francis , the ones who shot the Black Gold documentary, which shows the abject poverty among Ethiopian coffee growers. Starbucks sent an email saying Black Gold was "inaccurate and complete" to the coffee giant's UK Starbucks employees, but the chief executive of Starbucks will meet soon with an Ethiopian prime minister. I'll lift my grande mocha and hope that Black Gold will force Starbucks to play nice, and dole out more of the 4 bucks a pop -- or, a fabulous Starbucks vanilla latte, I should say -- that us Starb...

According to TechCrunch and DigitalJournal , AOL Video is giving away over 30 free movie downloads for one day only on Saturday. Sounds like mostly Christmas movies like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Jack Frost , but also Spiderman 2 . The free stuff starts at 6:00 a.m. EST and there's a limit of one movie per person, not computer. Let's see...should I wake up for this? Bookmark or blogroll me at http://www.paulamooney.blogspot.com/ and drop back in some day to see what I'm up to next. Blessings and love, Paula Tags: aol , free , movie , movies , download , one , per , computer , person , video , saturday

Yesterday I was in pure bliss as my kids and I either biked, jogged or sat like Queen Elizabeth II in a double jog stroller (guess which one) down the lovely 1.6 miles plus of boardwalk trail that is Fort Island, a protected marsh in Ohio. I was soaking up the unusually bright sun and temps that felt like 70 degrees or warmer and loving it...that is, till I got home and watched the DVD version of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It and learned why it's been so spankin' warm lately. You can save all those jokes about old stiff Al Gore , this film version of An Inconvenient Truth is his slide show display alive with the true passion of what the man was born to do. I'm still glad I didn't vote for Gore in 2000 -- still glad ol' W was in office during 9/11 (not so much during Hurricane Katrina) -- but this movie shows a side of Gore that is both funny, dead serious and so vulnerable as he talks a...

On The View today I saw clips of this new documentary called Deliver Us From Evil , which opened today in New York City. Directed by Amy Berg , the Lionsgate's documentary Deliver Us From Evil follows Oliver O'Grady, formerly Father O'Grady, a California priest who sexually abused dozens of children during the 1970s up until his arrest in 1993. Oliver O'Grady After serving only seven years of a 14-year sentence, "Father Ollie" now lives as a free man in Ireland. What is most striking about O'Grady is his sickeningly honest admission of being excited by young people, whom O'Grady is creepily nearby a lot in parks and such as Berg extracts his honest confessions. What is most heartbreaking are the accounts from the former young people he abused, now adults who weep in Deliver Us From Evil. One woman said that her last memory of O'Grady was intense pain before blacking out. What is most infuriating is that O'Grady was repeatedly protected and s...