The first thing we did back in Milan was to have a long lunch by the Giardini Pubblici with Albert S., a Nigerian Aristocrat who relocated from England to Italy in the mid-90s. After lunch he suggested we see a movie. When we got to the theater, Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby was the only English-language film playing, a full year after its American release no less, but Albert couldn’t have been more thrilled. His only time in the states was a semester at Talladega College, and he has only fond memories, as is evidenced by his sizable contributions to the school’s collection of Angolan artifacts. So there was no stopping him from marching right up to the booth and ordering tre biglietti, per favore. Read our full reviews after the jump!

Cliff: What happened over the course of the next two hours, I can’t say. The film hardly made an ounce of sense. It was like a very long joke that the actors were making up as they went along, and one got the distinct feeling that no scene was ever rehearsed more than once. The humor was not in the jokes, then, but in the sheer implausibility that what was happening on screen was, in fact, happening. We emerged from the theater as from a dream. It was a pleasure to see the cobblestones and the old folks drinking coffee and the models and the men chasing after them dressed in black, all just where we had left them.

It’s true what they say: Spring really is the only time to bicycle in Tuscany. Between mid-April and June, the weather is nothing short of perfect; warm but not hot, sunny but not dry. Today Cliff and I took a long ride across the hills on the coast, with a brief stop at the Santuario di Montenero to hear the Benedictine monks chant the vespers in procession. It’s almost 2am now, but I can’t sleep; the air is too crisp with Mediterranean energy. When we travel, we try to pack 10 or 15 DVD’s that remind us of our good old home town and ward off the jetlag blues, and what could be more cheerful than a 1950’s rom-com romp with our favorite vaguely European nymph (and the mascot of this site!), Audrey Hepburn? That’s right, we pulled Funny Face out of our little grab-bag – read on for our bleary-eyed thoughts.

Olive: Pizzazz! Its a word you keep hearing in this movie, uttered by the formidable Kay Thompson as fashion mag editrix Maggie Prescott, and it’s what Funny Face is all about. Thompson’s real claim to fame, of course, was as the creator of the incomparable pizzazz-possessor ELOISE, who was an inspiration to me as a little girl growing up in the big lonely city, and continues to influence me to this day (I absolutely can’t live without planked medallions of beef tenderloin, passé as it may be). With her flamboyance and comic timing, Thompson manages to upstage not only Audrey, gorgeous as a bookish intellectual type (yaaawn) turned fashion model (pizzazz!), but also Fred Astaire as Dick Avery, a heterosexual fashion photographer with a penchant for musical theater. Apparently based on celebrity portraitist Richard (Dick) Avedon, Dick falls for the girl while photographing her in a wedding dress, which leads to an utterly bizarre courtship punctuated by equally surreal musical numbers. But no matter! Audrey flits around Paris in gorgeous dresses, rebuffs a French philosopher lech by clocking him with a rare statue (pizzazz!), and ultimately ditches her dreary intellect for fashion and romance! Bonjour Paris!

Cliff: We were riding along the coast, where the hills were like great swollen green sweaters. About midday we became hungry for lunch, and we decided to stop at the first town we came across.

Piombino appeared down below us, perched on a cliff overlooking the water. As we approached, we spied the central piazza and a statue of a topless mermaid asleep on a rock. Children climbed on her without concern, pulling themselves up by her dangling fingertips and green copper hair. We wheeled our bicycles past them, helmet straps unfastened, and chose the only restaurant that had tables set up outside.

I got a Campari with a nastro dell’arancio, and Olive ordered by pointing to what was on the chalk menu under pesce. It ended up being a single lobster tail charred black and dripping with spicy green oil, served on a bare tin plate.

Every few minutes, a different person came over to the table, offering to take us to Island of Elba, where Napolean lived out his final days. The island was directly across from the town. It could be seen clearly without binoculars, and on a boat it couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes. No, no, we said, shaking our heads, smiling. Otherwise we didn’t say much. Bicycling is hard work, and the sun was very bright. Campari is good to drink in the sun.

We watched A Prairie Home Companion last night, but to be perfectly honest, I was drifting in and out throughout the film. Olive and I set off for a bicycle tour of Tuscany next week, and the lower-body training is exhausting. I also had one or two Rob Roys with dinner, which didn’t help matters. But from what I saw, I don’t think I missed much. Click below to read our full reviews.

Cliff: A Prairie Home Companion is a perfectly good NPR radio show, but it should not have been made into a movie. Midwesterners and their sense of humor are a lot like academics and their dissertations: Only interesting to themselves, and to one another. The one thing I really enjoyed was the singing, which brought me back to my old Yale Glee Club days. Jolly, jolly are the days, ‘neath the elms of dear old Yale…In fact I was so deep in reminiscence after the movie finally ended that I made myself another Rob Roy in the study, and looked up my fellow ex-tenor I, Richard Mansfield, who I hadn’t spoken to in six years. “Hello?” a small, terrified voice answered after two rings. I suddenly realized that it was one o’clock in the morning, and I hung up right away on Richard’s Japanese wife. Childish, I suppose, but the point is that I would expect more from an Altman film.

Olive: Well, I’ve never listened to A Prairie Home Companion, because on Saturday afternoons I have my Daughters of the American Revolution meeting, and then the girls and I like to go to Payard for chocolate and Banyuls – so as you can imagine, I don’t exactly rise with the dawn on Sundays. It’s always been my position that a screenwriter shouldn’t expect you to have listened to his radio show, because an artistic work must be able to stand on its own, and it’s fair to say that A Prairie Home stands, stumbles about, and falls over like a toddler who crashed into the screen door. Though it seems to have been intended as an ode to radio or the past, with a side of bitter midwestern humor about death and religion, it comes out as a confused, middle-aged mess. Basically, the theater where PHC is broadcast every week is being bought out by the evil company of the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), but the Midwestern performers put on their last show like it was their first. Also, someone we barely get to meet dies backstage in his shorts, thanks to an angel, who also attempts to protect the theater and lethargically comfort people. Unfortunately, Virginia Madsen’s angel was one step up from the one in Barbarella; benign, expressionless and blond. Also, Lindsay Lohan is laughable as a suicidal teenager, who turns into a high powered CPA with a smoker’s rasp and a pony-tail. If that’s what heaven looks like, I’ll take Tommy Lee Jones.

No sooner has the last tweed coat stepped off the Paris runway, than the New York Spring social season is fully atwitter. It’s difficult to find time for oneself in the great Metropolis, what with the American Academy of Dramatic Arts gala tonight, the Winter Garden Red Cross Ball on Thursday – healing the world’s ills can be terribly trying! Still, it all becomes worth it when you see how gorgeously diverse our world really is, on a charming program like the Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth – with stunning images of wildlife that have never been captured before. Who knew the birds of paradise had such lovely plumage? Perhaps they were inspired by Galliano’s Fall accessories?

It was with that Springtime glow that Cliff and I picked up David LaChapelle’s Rize. See our morning-after thoughts after LaJump:



Olive: Much like 300, Rize boasts a beautiful, fat-free cast going to battle – which is about where the similarities end. In Rize, we meet Tommy the Hip Hop Clown, a gentleman who used to deal drugs but found solace in his work as a birthday party clown who dances to hip hop music, and became so popular that he began to train at-risk youngsters to “clown dance”. After a while, “clown dancing” evolved into “krumping”, which involves less facepaint (just a little) and more spastic movements and ripping of one’s clothes. All the makings of an inspiring documentary, were it not for LaChapelle’s ham-fisted handling of the subject matter – including a ludicrous suggestion that the dancer’s African heritage informed the dance style, despite the fact that most of them have not traveled beyond the borders of their South Central neighborhoods! Also irksome were his campy editing choices, not one but two scenes of dancers Krimping against the California sunset, and sentimental handling of death and religion. The best scenes occur when LaChapelle stops editorializing and lets those Krampers do their Cramping – the pure kinetic energy coming out of those bodies jolts the movie back to life like a defibrillator.

Cliff: Rize…I haven’t been this confused since that Matthew Barney exhibit at the Guggenheim. Every time it seemed like the movie was going to actually develop a character or explain the difference between “krumping” and “clown dancing,” the director would insert some sort of inspirational montage.

“Who’s that?” I had to keep asking. “Shhh,” Olive kept telling me. That’s when I heard Linda, our housekeeper, walking down the hallway. I paused the movie.

“Linda come in here,” I yelled. “Do you know what krumping is?”

Olive smacked me on my bad shoulder. “Cliff!” she hissed under her breath. Linda appeared in the doorway, hands in her pockets.

“Never mind, dear,” Olive told her, “Cliff was just thinking out loud.”

“You left your cufflinks in your pants again, Mr. Cliff,” Linda told me. “Please, try to remember. If they go into the washing machine…” she shook her head in dismay at the very thought, took two short steps into the screening room and dropped the cufflinks into my hand.

“Thank you dear,” Olive told her. She waited until Linda had left the room, then turned on me.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Why would Linda know anything about Crump dancing? She’s Portuguese.”

“Have some more ice tea,” I said. I poured Olive a glass, and we re-started the documentary. I still had no idea what was going on. I jingled the cufflinks in my pocket. One thing was sure: There’s nothing like the feel of real tortoise shell.

Well three packs of Dramamine and two overboard backgammon sets later, we’re back from a month of tall ship sailing along the coast of Brazil. There were a lot of things we missed. It’s practically impossible to make ice cubes on a sail boat, and the South Americans still haven’t mastered the art of brunch. But we missed watching movies most of all. So we decided to jump right back into it with a two-hour-plus Terrence Malick film, The New World (see our reviews after the jump).

Olive: The New World features a tremendous amount of people staring at each other silently, which reminded me of my extended family in Switzerland; slightly disconcerting, but certainly polite. Wonderful! There was also a good deal of people not doing much of anything, muddy Englishmen looking crazed with hunger, noble natives looking proud and savage, and everyone brushing their hands along the tops of fields, a trick that directors seem to love (see Gladiator, 300). In the end, if the movie was “about” something, it was something of a fairy tale, about a beautiful, curious princess.

Cliff: I am not an emotional man. While I have been known to occasionally anthropomorphize the S&P 500 as an irredeemable woman, I am generally not given to bouts of sentimentality or corniness. But I admit that The New World made me shed a tear. The film has so much fantasy in it that it requires that you suspend your disbelief, which may take a few scenes, but once I did I was completely drawn in. If movies are like vacations, The New World is like waking up lost in the middle of Southern France with no money; disturbing, but actually very nice once you get over the initial shock. I had heard only bad reviews of The New World before Olive and I saw it, which only goes to prove that 99% of people are wrong 99% of the time.

It was the day before we were to leave for South America, and I [Cliff] was in a sour mood. Albert Stevenson had thrown a party the previous night, and I hadn’t been invited. I don’t consider Albert to be one of my closest friends by any means, but he’s one of my oldest, and sometimes that’s enough. More than enough to be invited to a party, anyway. Olive assured me that it must have just been an oversight on Albert’s part, but I wasn’t so sure.

When I’m really upset, nothing calms me down like a long cruise down the East River Drive, beginning on 125th street going all the way down to the Battery, so we called down to the garage to bring up the Jag. Olive came along, of course. She doesn’t drive herself, but she enjoys the ride just the same as I do, sometimes more. My favorite section is the view of Roosevelt Island, and the stretch past East River Park by the Williamsburg Bridge. But the snub was still bothering me on our way back uptown, so Olive suggested that we see a movie, something mindless. We ended up settling on 300. Read our reviews after the jump.

Cliff: While highly enjoyable, this was quite possibly the dumbest movie I have ever seen. I heard it described by one reviewer as a “fascist tone poem,” which I think is fairly accurate, but here’s my opinion: If you took a 15-year-old boy and put him in a cabin in the woods with nothing but pornography, Fox News and a signed letter from all of his teachers and classmates saying that they hated him, and you told this boy to write a screenplay, 300 would be it.

Olive: I’m a simple woman with little in the way of formal education, and am therefore hard-pressed to find fault with a movie so full of glistening, rippling pectorals and abdominals and other kinds of -als whose names and geographies are alien to a woman of my intellect. Perhaps a lady with loftier convictions would quibble about the films historical inaccuracies; while the Spartans allegedly did push Persian diplomats down a well, Leonidas’ army was famously composed of middle aged men with heirs, rather than gorgeously lubricated young colts who could shame the sun with their luminous musculature. Yes, I have nothing but praise for 300 – Cliff is the clever one.