Every once in a while, I feel the need to eat lighter, perhaps detox a bit.
So I will head to Leaf, a raw vegan cafe in my neighborhood.
As much as I try, I usually enjoy the first couple of bites, then find myself struggling to enjoy the rest. Surprisingly, raw cuisine (other than your average salad) is quite filling.
Deftly putting the “mock” in mockumentary in enough ways to make a mad punner happy, “Futile Attraction” peels back Reality TV’s implicit structural flaw and exposes it to withering satire. Director/co-writer Mark Prebble hits on a clever way to simultaneously propel the narrative “story” of the people making the documentary and their subjects while also taking apart, po-mo style, reality dating shows on a meta-level.
Before reading any further, go to itunes and download a podcast called Rome Review.
Two years ago, during my first trip to Rome, we ate at this charming “restaurant” in Trastevere. Prior to that trip, I had read about it in New York magazine, which did not give the address. Believe it or not, it was on our street in Rome (of all the streets in Rome).
It’s the snap of the whip! The tip of the fedora! The leap of death! The hanging off the cliff! The last minute of the escape! The crack of the wise! The poison of the dart! The thrill of the chase! The dust off the artifact! The bones in the grave! The idol in the temple! The x on the map! In other words, it’s Indiana Jones!
But – well, there is a but.
There were a couple of openings in Culver City I eagerly awaited – and they all opened while I was out of town!
Father’s Office, M Café de Chaya and Vinoteque.
I have been to M Café several times, and it is just as good at the original location. We tried to go to Father’s Office, but at 7 o’clock on a Tuesday night the place was full, and no one was budging.
The surprise in “The Forbidden Kingdom” isn’t the lack of a real surprise in terms of plot or characters. Any familiarity with the film’s component genres – Hollywood romances, Hong Kong Kung Fu, and so on – will make plain how this unabashed crowd-pleaser paints strictly by the numbers. Hence, the bullied kid will learn Kung Fu, exasperating teachers bewildered by his ineptness, and eventually turn the tables on the bullies. He will meet a pretty, and tough, girl (Liu). He will become, in short, a noble warrior steeped in the spirit of martial art virtues. No, the surprise doesn’t lie in the parts but in how the whole transcends its constituent clichés to become a fun-loving, thrill-seeking homage. It’s like inviting some good ol’ friends over for one heck of a popcorn-popping party.
David Mamet’s amusing soufflé “Keep Your Pantheon,” about the misfortunes of a desperate acting troupe, would be right at home with “historical” farces put on by Renaissance Faire troupes like Sound & Fury. Granted, this new short play by a playwright who needs no introduction is not quite so blatantly bawdy or low-flying as, say, “Testaclese and Ye Sack of Rome,” but the overall silly spirit of mirth and merriment is comparable, as is the discernible lack of any goal other than to make the audience laugh. Mamet throws enough jokes that most of them stick. Bonnie Grisan and director Neil Pepe stack the deck in the audience’s favour by casting actors of proven comic worth – David Payner and Ed O’Neill – alongside worthy co-performers. It’s ye olde-tyme comedy of errors, indeed; funny if inconsequential, with a deliberately old-fashioned theatricality that includes big, mouthy, quasi-stentorian dialogue.
Is the Hollywood machine’s decision-making process, the formula by which it sorts out the wheat scripts from the chaff, merely a crap shoot? Is there an explanation for why Hollywood puts out such awful movies on a consistent basis? These are, perhaps, serious questions at the cotton-candy heart of “Crap Shoot”, but they're also not especially profound.
Womanizing, gambling, larger-than-life merchant of death Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) finds himself on the service side of his own weapons and, as a result, becomes the proud papa of a moral epiphany. This, in a film in which the heroic journey celebrates the condemnation of war profiteering with an orgy of gunfire, explosions, and general mayhem. Call him “Irony Man.”
Why is it that overweight women in wannabe quasi-nudie-cuties are typically the butt of jokes, strange creatures whose sexuality is treated as something not to be taken seriously – something repulsive, even? Here’s another question: What would happen to films like “Pool Party” if there weren’t a surplus of nubile young women willing to take their tops off for the chance of being in a feature? The answer, of course, has to with Sarah Horvath, the boss’s daughter, appearing in various states of undress in all her scenes. There’s nothing quite like parading a bevy of bikini-clad beauties to keep viewers from noticing the plot’s recycled content and the used-joke smell of the comedy.
