The Food in 'Eat Pray Love'

NYT Magazine with Susan Spungen, culinary consultant for 'Eat Pray Love'.

What kind of food were you making for “Eat Pray Love”?

Pretty straightforward, typically Roman food. So this one big first day, we had bucatini all’amatriciana, we had spaghetti alla carbonara, trippa alla romana, veal saltimbocca, we had carciofi alla giudia — Rome’s greatest hits. For a restaurant scene, we had, like, 25 extras, 6 actors, it was about 100 degrees out … and they put us in a kitchen down the street instead of the one in the restaurant we were working in. We had to trek up a hill, over the cobblestones to get the food to the set. And on top of that, there were, like, 100 tourists and paparazzi standing in between me and the set.

Nuns with Guns

Are those real nuns?

While the first poster for 'The Town' emphasized the ensemble/dramatic feel of the movie, this one makes a clear statement -- 'The Town' is an action flick. The imagery is arresting -- nuns in goofy masks with automatic weapons. If the heist sequence(s) live up to the visual impact of this one sheet, Ben Affleck may not have just a successful comeback on his hands, he may have a hit crime flick as well.

'The Town' has already been widely compared to Michael Mann's 'Heat'. I didn't buy it as being a possibility at first, but now I'm wondering. I know Affleck can deliver a movie with characters who are as conflicted as De Niro, Pacino, Kilmer, and the rest of the gang were in 'Heat' -- he does that kind of thing well. Like his nuanced directorial debut 'Gone Baby Gone', based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, 'The Town' is based on an award-winning novel by Chuck Hogan, 'Prince of Thieves', so depth of character should be there. But, can Affleck properly direct a bank job where you 'come in strong, through the front door' that will be as gripping and stylish moment to moment as the one in Mann's grand crime opera? Remains to be seen, however this poster suggests the goods are there, and I don't think Affleck would bluff us. He's just doesn't strike me a con-artist.

Hats off on a great poster. What we need now is a trailer that shows off Affleck's chops when it comes to directing action sequences. Deliver that and the box office will follow. Right now, though, the 'nuns with guns' thing works.

Special Edition Posters

Wired on limited edition posters for 'Scott Pilgrim vs. The World' by Martin Ansin.

Allegro con Brio

I like this passage from Glenn Kenny's review of 'The Expendables':

Some critics have complained, as critics will, that the picture's action sequences lack spatial coherency, which is a wonky way of saying that you can't necessarily tell who's kicking the living hell out of whom in a given scene. This does tend to be the case, but one should add that this is only really a problem when the viewer actually really cares about which character is going to walk away from the fight, a state of affairs that the film rather neatly, albeit perhaps inadvertently, sidesteps.

I also like this passage from Kenny's intro to his review of 'The Expendables':

...he had just had a scrotum reduction procedure. Which procedure he was describing to Gilliam, not only loudly, but in not insubstantial detail. Gilliam listened attentively, with that raised-eyebrow look of perpetual surprise/amusement that you sometimes see on him in photos. Eventually the actor got around to explaining just why he had gotten a scrotum reduction procedure: "I just got tired of how every time I would sit down one of my balls would slide up the crack of my ass."

'Ironclad' Clip

'Ironclad' Sneak Peek

Trailer Park Movies | MySpace Video

Paul Giamatti and trebouchets -- gotta love it.