After a last minute hunt to find a restaurant to eat in before seeing a movie, I ended up getting a table at Bar Americaine. Bobby Flay's other restaurant (he also runs Mesa Grill which I used to have an interest in going to) but I sorta no longer do. We chose Americaine because of it's proximity to MOMA and to the movie and it was a short list of options. The decor is nice but the now sort of typical, colorful, whimsical large Manhattan restaurant idea. The service was attentive but the food wasn't hitting the mark. Needless to say it was removed from Michelin 2007 and for good reason. I had a Johnny Cake with duck and a raseberry demi-glaze for an appetizer and a piece of skate so heavily covered in some thick ridiculously creamy stomach that I couldn't finish it. It sorta made my stomach turn. Sauces, in a thick creamy style, are so... over. They have been for about 10 years too. Weird that Flay sadly hasn't caught on.
Babel, the new movie with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and a bunch of random people that the director found to throw into the movie, should be called Intolerable because it is. I think Alejandro González Iñárritu is an excellent director and writer but his movies are all becoming very similar. The whole three overlapping and interconnected stories was EXCELLENT in Amores Perros but the third time I just feel like it is getting tired. The best story is set in Japan with a deaf mute girl and one of the best scenes in the movie is when she enters a big club. The experience of a deaf mute girl in a big dance club is horrifying and unbelievably one of the most striking pieces of film I have seen in awhile. However, not enough to see the movie again or highly recommend it. The cinemaphotography is also really beautiful in the film but it won't hold your interest for the entire time, sadly. Every time the story went back to the Moroccan story (the Brad Pitt story), I rolled my eyes and nearly fell asleep (which I did in turn a few times).
Roxy for Halloween was insane. And by insane I mean that gold card members (You have to nearly bend over backwards sucking yourself of to get one, but is WORTH IT since it is free to get in in a bunch of places once you get one) had to wait in a line halfway down the block. The regular line was down the block and around the corner. That is just ridiculous. It is also ridiculous that Peter Rauhofer is still spinning because even though he seemed to entertain the crowd, most people I know agree that the music was atrocious. I even recognized (and I am not even a DJ) that he had the same mix playing three times! However, there was unbelievable costumes (Marie Antoinette), some seriously hot boys, and an unreal crowded dance floor. I guess it was expected but I was surprised given that lately Roxy has been a little less than packed. Very fun though, I came home at 5 which means the night was really good, haha, and I got to see the Brazilian boys in Boston who are always fun and entertaining to hang out with.
I also saw The Prestige this weekend with Huge Jackman and Michael Cane. I love Michael Caine and Jackman. One is hot while the other is just a spectacular actor, haha. Christopher Nolan, the Batman Begins and Memento director, is equally as amazing. His filming, sets, and just overall appearance of the movie are always terrific and The Prestige certainly holds true to that. I actually thought that with one minor tweak this movie could have been excellent, but instead it was really good. It definitely was very entertaining, interesting, and pretty well acted. But it would have been excellent if they didn't gave away one minor detail that gave away the surprise twist a little too early.
Set in a stylized late-Victorian world of dueling music-hall magicians and diabolically clever inventors, it has a satisfyingly puzzlelike structure, zipping around in time and scattering clues throughout its busy scenes and frames. Like “Memento,” also directed by Christopher Nolan and based on a story by his brother, “The Prestige” is a triumph of gimmickry, a movie generous enough with its showmanship and sleight of hand to quiet the temptation to grumble about its lack of substance.
The point of a magic trick, after all, is not the content, whatever that might be, but the ingenuity of its conceit and the skill of its execution. And “The Prestige” — the title is a magician’s term of art referring to the climactic surprise that seals a successful trick — manifests an enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts of illusionism that is pretty much irresistible. It is a mock-gothic costume drama with more than a touch of Las Vegas extravagance, a larger-scale, flashier — if ultimately less haunting — relative of “The Illusionist,” another recent cinematic tale of 19th-century abracadabra.
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