FU-GETTABLE
For around 50 bucks, our table was quickly loaded with more than enough to feed a hungry fivesome – and that’s the best thing I can say about a recent visit to Mama Fu’s Noodle House in Lake Mary. The rest of the experience – from the food to the service to the ambience –…
Movie: De-Lovely
De-Lovely Length: 2 hours, 5 minutes Studio: MGM Website: http://www.delovelymovie.com/ Release Date: 2004-07-16 Cast: Kevin Kline, Ashley Judd, Jonathan Pryce, Keith Allen, Angie Hill Director: Irwin Winkler Screenwriter: Jay Cocks Music Score: Cole Porter WorkNameSort: De-Lovely Our Rating: 2.00 It’s de-valued! It’s de-pressing! It’s de-sensitized! (OK, maybe it’s not desensitized, but it fit the meter.)…
GROWING UP AND COMING DOWN
Movie: The Return
PUBLIC ZERO NUMBER ONE
Movie: Napoleon Dynamite
Movie: De-Lovely
Our Rating: 2.00 It’s de-valued! It’s de-pressing! It’s de-sensitized! (OK, maybe it’s not desensitized, but it fit the meter.) In his last hours, Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) is visited by an otherworldly emissary (Jonathan Pryce), who treats the dying composer to a replay of his life in the form of a stage musical. As framing…
PUBLIC ZERO NUMBER ONE
Movie: Napoleon Dynamite
GROWING UP AND COMING DOWN
Movie: The Return
Filling your head with beer
There are a lot of us who don’t share an all-consuming passion for beer and we’re made acutely aware of it when it comes time to socialize and entertain. When called upon to pick up a couple of six-packs, there’s always a quandary. Go for cheap-but-generic for quantity? Or expensive-but-exotic for flavor? There are so…
The Monsters and City Beautiful terrorists
Heads are gonna roll, nod off and roll again, as everybody’s favorite racially insensitive heroes, The Monsters (formerly known as The Monsters of the Mid-day), are forced from their 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. time slot on WTKS-FM (104.1) this week. Seems the waistlines made for radio (the lovely Savannah excluded, of course) made a…
RILKE COMES ALIVE!
Typically, a live album is the product of an artist either flush with massive success or on the desperate end of a career. However, in the case of Rainer Maria, neither of those two descriptions are accurate: This modestly popular indie rock band’s recent efforts have earned the trio acclaim from fans and critics. Their…
SEA, SWALLOW ME
While many bands resort to playing dives, Icelandic popsters Múm take it one step further. On occasion, Múm holds listening shows in pools where fans hear the band through special underwater speakers. While the concept may be akin to whales communicating with one another in a vast ocean, the idea isn’t too far-fetched for members…
Culture
Transmission By Hari Kunzru (Dutton, 276 pages, $24.95) The ever-tightening circles of detail that Kunzru (of the much-praised The Impressionist) employs in the telling of Transmission are, at first, off-putting, and the transitions of style – one clunky sentence, one florid one and then, perhaps, a marvel of precision – are truly dizzying. Yet Kunzru’s…
Culture
Four Souls By Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, 224 pages, $23.95) Erdrich has always constructed her fiction from equal parts of earth and fire. In her latest novel, these two forces combine to form one of her best books to date. Fleur Pillager journeys to Minneapolis to exact revenge upon John James Mauser, the logging mogul she…
Culture
Skinny Dip By Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, 355 pages, $24.95) It’s a lot easier these days not to get excited about a new Carl Hiaasen book, and the use of old characters and a near-boilerplate plot (for Hiaasen at least) doesn’t exactly bode well for Skinny Dip, in which we encounter blundering (but corrupt and murderous)…
‘S TERRFIC
A surprisingly casual-looking Rick Stanley mounted the stage for the second performance of his big George-and-Ira-Gershwin show in this year’s second annual Orlando Cabaret Festival. Somehow, I had expected a tux, or at least a boutonnière, but a loose striped shirt over de rigueur solid black theatrical duds set his body into relief against the…
ASHORE THING
So what ever happened to People’s Theatre, Orlando’s multicultural talent show? Our last sighting of them was in October 2003, when they performed a staged reading of an adaptation of Spike Lee’s School Daze at PlayFest, the first Orlando Festival of New Plays. At that time, their contentious residency at the Studio Theatre was coming…
BIG GAY DAYS
Sometimes you lose your handbag and break a heel, laugh it off and swiftly tuck your tail all the way home. Other times you simply fall flat on your face. At last week’s hard opening (as opposed to the more pliable soft opening on Thursday) of the new gay masterpiece theatre Pulse, my face was…
“And the same to your lovely children”
“Can you imagine that phone call, Cheney calling Edwards? (Laughing.) Boy, would I have loved to have heard that phone call. (Laughing.)” – Rush Limbaugh, July 6, 2004 (The time: The morning of July 6, 2004. The place: The private quarters of John Edwards. The phone rings.) Operator: Vice President Cheney on the line. Please…
