Tag Archive for reviews

Date Night: Dinner & A Reading

Dinner and a movie. We’ve all done that hundreds of times, right? It’s an American institution. In New York, they have dinner and a show, but the choices are somewhat limited in the rest of the country. That is, everywhere but Los Angeles. And in the “Only in L.A.” category falls my dinner last night, but we’ll get to that in a second. First, a little background.

Last September, as my fiance and I were ramping up for our wedding, we went out for our last dating anniversary at a restaurant we’d wanted to try ever since seeing the head chef on Top Chef Masters. That chef was Suzanne Tracht and the restaurant was Jar. It was fantastic. Everything we ate that night was just crazy good and if the place wasn’t just a tad above our normal eating out budget, we’d be there every week. We did however, sign up to be on the mailing list.

Cut to 5 months later and we decided that instead of fighting all the crowds on Valentine’s Day, we’d wait a couple weeks and hit up Jar again. Come to find out it was also right around our three month wedding anniversary, it seemed perfect. (Yes, we’re big on anniversaries. Any excuse to go out to eat, really.) Read more

Catching Up with Pop Culture: Inglourious Basterds

For various reasons, some valid (getting married) and some not (sheer unadulterated laziness) I’ve been lagging behind the cultural zeitgeist on a few things over the past couple years. So, with the injection of the perfect storm of Netflix/HDTV/BluRay into my former 20th Century entertainment center comes some better late than never reflections on some films or yore. Being that this film came out last year, I see there no reason to warn of spoilers.

Un Poster d'Italiano

First up, is the comical romp through German occupied France during the gay old Forties known as INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. After snoring through JACKIE BROWN, just not feeling KILL BILL(s) and being bored to tears with his half of GRINDHOUSE, DEATH PROOF, even though I was at a midnight screening at Mann’s Chinese Theatre passing a gallon size cup of Jack & Coke back and forth with a dozen of my closest friends, you could say that Quentin was close to being relegated to just “that interesting character I’ll watch interviews for” and not for the visionary director he once was.

Well, that all changed last night when my eyeballs were done being Tarantinoized once again. And while I still think PULP FICTION is his best work by far, with RESERVOIR DOGS a close second, BASTERDS definitely comes with guns blazing up the rear to third.

As I was watching/reading the movie, (which by the way will require a second viewing for that very reason), it occurred to me that when QT is firing on all cylinders, with his chapters and splintered timelines, he’s basically been making foreign films his whole life. This time, he just went it did it. And did it well, no less. Read more