At the corner of Prince Street and Roosevelt Avenue sits Sifu Chio, an unassuming restaurant which my parents introduced to me as one of the best places in town to get a bowl of authentic Hong Kong-style wonton noodles – a simple thing, done very well. (Chowhounds like the dumplings.)  The restaurant isn’t quite a dive, but the aesthetic is rather plain and utilitarian: open kitchen, florescent lights overhead, menus on the table under glass and every dish served in disposable plasticware. We were the only ones in the shop this evening, probably owing in no small part to the river of wretched rainwater coursing along the sidewalk in front.

What had started out as an order of a few bowls of wonton noodles expanded to include a side of Chinese beef brisket, a dish of Chinese broccoli, a bowl of noodles and fish balls, and a bowl of shrimp watercress dumplings.  As the driving rain pounded against the darkened windows, we eagerly scarfed down every bite.

Hard to pinpoint precisely what sets these noodles apart from the hundreds of other bowls I’ve eaten over the years. Dumplings made to order — delicate, tender skins with deliciously fresh filling — are certainly one factor.  Mostly, I think, it’s the perfectly textured noodles. In Cantonese, the word to describe them is “song,” a wonderful adjective which has no true English equivalent. Song can be used to describe a bitingly crisp wedge of fruit, a firm yet succulent shrimp, or here, snappy, springy noodles.  Al dente in this context comes close, I suppose, but doesn’t quite get to the heart of the irresistibly pleasurable sensation: of tooth meeting initial resistance, then bursting through to tender, juicy center.  “Toothsome” (definition 2) is the best general English translation, though I find it lacking in the poetry of “song“.

Later that night, the second annual Sunnyside Shorts Film Festival, which had been scheduled to take place at The Sunnyside Gardens Park, was driven indoors to the newly inaugurated Sunnyside Senior Center at Sunnyside Community Services  (Note to self: 39th Street — not the same as 39th Place. A girl raised in Queens should know this. I plead temporary rain-blindness.)

We sat at round formica-topped tables to watch the 16 submissions by filmmakers hailing predominantly from New York — among them a few Sunnyside locals — with contributions from Europe and South America.  Several of the short films were set in New York City, and covered an array of genres: animation, documentaries, comedic skits, one painfully earnest teen film student exercise, a sock puppet music video…

Quality varied widely. My favorite was Yolanda Pividal’s 16-minute “Two Dollar Dance” — a poignant examination of the Latino clubs dotted along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights where a clientele of immigrant men, isolated from mainstream society, gather in the evening to pay for female companionship, if only for the duration of a song — an update of the “dime a dance” girls of the taxi-dance halls of the 20s and 30s. (Unsurprisingly, the workers at these places are often exploited.)

But as credits rolled on the experimental “interpretive dance” short (oof), I discreetly slipped out with SH and AP, in search of the less challenging pleasures of frozen yogurt: green tea and blood orange for me.

The advertising campaign — full sized billboards denigrating the fictional Sarah Marshall (a somewhat bland Kristen Bell) — caused some strife with real-life Sarah Marshalls everywhere, but audiences and critics responded positively. Who can’t identify with a little heartbreak, after all?

My favorite bits — no, not what you think, dirty birds! — involved the hedonistic, pseudo-spiritual Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), who was both vacuous and almost admirable in his ruthless honesty. (Is it always the best policy?) And I’ve long been a fan of Segel, who wrote the film’s Infant Sorrow songs and the tunes for his character’s Dracula musical. We knew Segel had it in him after his “Slapsgiving” song follow-up to the legendary “Slap Bet” episode on How I Met Your Mother.

Incidentally, Segel’s HIMYM co-star Neil Patrick Harris was profiled in the Sunday Times that day, in a piece during which he referenced both Trent Reznor and Scooby-Doo…. making it very difficult for me to decide which of the two actors I like more. (Yes, yes… I know.)

On J’s rooftop (from which the Macy’s July 4th fireworks are not visible), ominous clouds began gathering overhead as our coterie huddled together, waiting for the payoff appearance of our birthday guest of honor. A successful “surprise!”… followed by a hasty retreat downstairs for a Turkish buffet.

J had outdone himself with the arrangements for the feast: hummus, falafel, Mediterranean Salad, Sigara Borek (pan fried cigar-shaped crispy pastries stuffed with feta cheese), Chicken Adana (char-grilled ground chicken seasoned with spicy red pepper) and Grilled Lamb Meatballs with Rice.

And to end things on a sweet note, another birthday cheesecake: this one from Artisanal — a rich, creamy concoction with pecan-shortbread crust and pecan praline crunch topping. Delicious!

Juliet Stevenson stars as Julia, a Seattle-based woman vacationing in Malta with her husband (Daniel Stern). Unbeknownst to him, she is there to fulfill a long-ago promise to reunite with her French lover, Alex (Tchéky Karyo) with whom she had an intense affair on the island years earlier. The premise called to mind a bit of Before Sunrise — that wondrous film about “two nice kids, literate, sensitive, tentative, intoxicated by the fact that their lives stretch out before them, filled with mystery and hope, and maybe love.” Except here, the two parting lovers decided to meet not in six months, but in twenty-five years, after much of their lives have been lived. In the intervening time, the once aspiring writer Julia has become a middle-aged librarian married to a jigsaw puzzle-obsessed insurance salesman, and Alex an oft-divorced literary journal editor. Once the pair is reunited, complications ensue, and the results are mixed: part screwball comedy, part bedroom farce and part bittersweet romance.

Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin was tonight’s guest, and talked about getting this film made in a climate where most Hollywood films have a young, often male, sensibility. The economist turned filmmaker well understood the steep challenges a film such as hers would face in financing; in this case her husband, producer David Gordian, was able to fund the film in Canada and Europe, where Carr-Wiggins claims the system is much more welcoming towards women directors and character-based films than in the United States.

Because the film was fully financed at the outset, Carr-Wiggins had full control over her film – a rare privilege for a second-time director. She was able to cast her favorite actress in the lead; Stevenson has a long list of British television and film credits, but is probably best known for her role as cellist Nina in Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) — the late great Anthony Minghella’s film debut.

While the film has a certain intriguing “What if…?” premise, the execution was a bit too ham-fisted for my tastes. (Does the husband really have to be so cluelessly boring, the daughters so gratingly self-absorbed?) Credit is due, though, for framing the story around a middle-aged woman — a demographic grossly underrepresented in current cinema — and for the not entirely predictable ending.

A Previous Engagement opened in New York and Los Angeles for Mother’s Day weekend, on May 9.

“There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.’”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Sensible Thing”

Were truer words ever written?

Michael Shannon stars as Son Hayes, who along with younger brothers Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs), shares the hard memories of being abandoned as children by a violent drunk of a dad, who reforms and remarries, eventually becoming a loving father to four more sons. The older Hayes boys are formed of a certain Southern stereotype, which until the eye-opening trip last summer, I would have assumed to be some a kind of gross exaggeration: one lives in a pup tent pitched in his brother’s yard; the other, literally, in a van down by the river. The intensity of the young men’s bitterness burns deep, sharpened by their lives of constant struggle, all sparingly presented with minimal dialogue and improbably beautiful landscapes. (Credit to Adam Stone for the cinematography.)

A laid-back Shannon was tonight’s guest, fresh off a Public Theater rehearsal for Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Little Flower of East Orange, in which he plays Ellyn Burstyn’s junkie son; The Times called Shannon’s performance “undeniably commanding, if at times exhausting.”

That seems to be a recurring theme throughout the little of Shannon’s oeuvre I’ve seen; I still recall his creepy, but memorable turn as a devout ex-marine in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

The part of the seminar I most enjoy is hearing the backstory of how these independent films get made. In this case: Arkansas-native Nichols, while a student at the North Carolina School of the Arts, had watched some scenes Shannon filmed with his professor Gary Hawkins at the Sundance Labs. Nichols was so taken with the brooding actor that he wrote an entire screenplay with Shannon in mind, eventually contacting him through Hawkins about starring in his film. And in a turn of events sure to frustrate aspiring screenwriters everywhere, Shannon read Nichols’s script, was likewise impressed with the student’s work, and agreed. Just like that.

The way Shannon described it this evening, the entire shoot was a labor of love. Nichols’s whole family was involved in aspects of the film’s production: his parents and assorted family friends hosted much of the cast and crew in their homes, his mother was put on craft services duty, cooking dinner for 30 every night. Nichols’s brother wrote the film’s music while his father was a driver on set and an all-important funder. (David Gordon Green, director of All the Real Girls, the 2003 romance starring Zooey Deschanel, has official producing credit.)

Shannon was an engaging, if not particularly chatty, presence… slightly less scary in person than on screen. He did more than once say he wished that Nichols could have been at Town Hall tonight himself to explain the film better. Nichols, however, was unavailable, due to attending his own wedding the day before. Good excuse.

This year’s festival featured a week-long engagement of Poor Boy’s Game, directed by Clément Virgo and co-written with Nova Scotian writer/director Chaz Thorne. The film premiered at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival and was selected later that year for inclusion at the Toronto Film Festival. It stars Rossif Sutherland, the 6′5″ dark eyed, half-brother of Kiefer and son of Donald.

Sutherland plays Donnie Rose, a brooding young man recently released from prison, where he has served nine years for a brutal beating that left a black teenager handicapped for life. Nine years later, Donnie is a changed man, but his gritty, racial tension-filled surroundings in Halifax remain much the same. Sparked by the desire to settle old scores, a local boxing champ from the black community (Flex Alexander) arranges a grudge-match with Donnie. And although it’s clear that the intent is bloody vengeance, Donnie accepts the challenge and the $20,000 payment to fight. The victim’s father (Danny Glover), moved by a desire to overcome the violence of his and Donnie’s shared past, forms a tortured and unlikely alliance with the ex-con, leading up to a climactic showdown in the ring.

I’ve seen my share of mass destruction on film, but something about boxing movies always makes me cringe behind my fingers.

After dinner, we did some date location scouting in Midtown — no, not for me — passing Elmo along the way.

I’d been intrigued by Kyotofu, the Hell’s Kitchen branch of a Kyoto dessert bar and cafe chain, since it opened in October 2006, touting Japanese-inspired, homemade tofu-rich desserts. New York magazine called Kyotofu “a magnet most nights for dainty, delicate females and chirpy, dessert-nibbling aesthetes of the opposite sex,” which described the clientele inside architect Hiro Tsuruta’s mod, white jewel box of a dining room pretty accurately. We settled into stools around the front bar, in full view of the glass enclosed kitchen, to sample two desserts from chef Ritsuko Yamaguchi’s menu of sweet and stylish tofu, fruit, green tea, chocolate and sesame creations. (The cafe also features an extensive cocktail and beverage list, light savory bites, and on occasion, Sunday tea service.)

The Tofu Cheese Cake, topped with candied ginger, was wonderfully airy with a hint of tanginess, but I loved Kyotofu’s “Signature Sweet Tofu,” served with a shallow boat of kuromitsu black sugar syrup, candied apricot and a crispy black sesame tuile. The silken texture was reminiscent of the Chinese doufu fa, but creamier, with just the right amount of sweetness. Ed Levine called the dessert “strangely beguiling.”

Downtown location coming this summer.

Roger Ebert called My Fair Lady “the best and most unlikely of musicals…The songs are literate and beloved; some romantic, some comic, some nonsense, some surprisingly philosophical, every single one wonderful.”

Controversy surrounded the casting of Audrey Hepburn instead of Julie Andrews for the part of Eliza Doolittle; Andrews had originated the role on stage to great acclaim, but producer and Warner Bros. Studio head Jack L. Warner chose established movie actress Hepburn for her greater box-office appeal. My Fair Lady went on to be nominated for twelve Oscars, winning eight (including best picture, actor and director). Hepburn, whose songs were (in)famously dubbed by Marni Nixon, was not nominated for Best Actress that year; ironically, Andrews was nominated… and won for Mary Poppins. In his Academy Award acceptance speech, Rex Harrison, the man who had played Professor Henry Higgins opposite them both, thanked “two fair ladies.”

The MoMA theater was packed tonight with fellow devotees of Hepburn and Harrison’s repartee, Lerner & Loewe’s classic songs and photographer Cecil Beaton’s delightful costumes.

The My Fair Lady DVD has a dual soundtrack, which features two songs with Hepburn’s original singing voice so listeners can judge for themselves how inadequate it was. (Contrast the scene with Nixon’s final cut here.) Interestingly, Harrison himself, despite extensive vocal training, was unable to sing his role either, which resulted in his signature quasi-speaking song delivery throughout the film. Sexy Rexy’s deliciously patrician tones reportedly inspired the voice of Stewie Griffin on “Family Guy”.

Under the Same Moon is the story of a young boy (Adrian Alonso) making a perilous journey across the U.S./Mexico border to be reunited with his mother (Kate del Castillo), who is working as a maid in Los Angeles. The film also features brief cameos by America Ferrara of ABC’s Ugly Betty and Grammy Award-winning Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte.

I was reminded of another film set against the thorny backdrop of illegal immigration: Gregory Nava’s excellent El Norte, which I first watched in Sra. Slavin’s sophomore Spanish class. There, it was a brother and sister fleeing war-torn Guatemala for a “better” life in California (“Take me! I’m a strong pair of arms!”); Under the Same Moon broadcasts similar messages about the plight of undocumented Mexican workers struggling to survive in the United States.

The main focus, though, is about the love between mother and son. Despite an all-too-predictable trajectory and deliberately heart-tugging melodrama, this film managed a few surprisingly effective emotional moments, thanks in large part to Alonso’s performance as Carlitos. The 14-year old Mexico City-born actor (who plays a 9-year old, believably) is familiar to American movie goers for his role as Antonio Banderas’ precocious son in 2005’s The Legend of Zorro.

Reviews have been mixed: The New York Times dismissed the film for its mawkishness and lazy caricatures (“It has bad white people, hard-working brown people and morally ambivalent people of mixed race.“); The Washington Post praised the film for its “affecting story, indelible characters, urgent topical relevance and superbly calibrated sentimentality.”

The post-screening discussion was with William Wolf (left, in the photo above), author and former film critic for Canada’s Cue Magazine, New York magazine, Gannet newspapers and the New York Observer, and current member of New York Film Critics Online, an organization of 26 Internet film critics based in New York City. Wolf was charmed by Under the Same Moon… and though I’m probably one of those he describes who “rebel against manipulation,” darned if I didn’t get a little misty-eyed at the ending, too.

I was last on campus in late October for the talk with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. Since then, his cultural history of music since 1900, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has landed on several “Best of 2007″ lists including those of The New York Times, New York magazine and Slate. Earlier this month, the book was selected as a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Gothamist posted an interview with Ross today, in which he names Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood as his current soundtrack to the city. Disappointingly, the 33-minute piece (which has received raves all around) was disqualified from Oscar contention as it recycled parts of Greenwood’s 2005 BBC-commissioned suite “Popcorn Superhet Receiver.”

Ah, we still love you, Jonny.

The conceit: a videotape retrieved from the area “formerly known as Central Park” after an apocalyptic incident code-named “Cloverfield.” Described as Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project (sprinkled with 9/11 anxieties), the entire film is shot with a handheld camera, so those sensitive to motion sickness should consider themselves forewarned. (With a running time of 84 minutes, the shaky camera work is intense, yet mercifully brief.) The movie begins at a downtown loft party, populated by a certain type of insufferable New Yorker, on a night when Manhattan comes under attack by an enormous, briefly-glimpsed monster. What is the morbid fascination movie-goers have with watching New York City get destroyed?

Cloverfield has a lo-fi look, but impressive special effects, which allegedly cost a little over $30 million. To put it in perspective, that’s just $10 million more than Will Smith’s salary for I Am Legend, the other NYC-based apocalyptic film in theaters now.

Here, the single camera POV works well in conveying the chaos and mass confusion. The disorientation and visceral panic of being down in the streets in the midst of the destruction kept the tension high throughout. As typical for this type of film, my emotional investment in the characters was minimal — let’s face it, they’re not a particularly sympathetic group — but the alternating glimpses of original tape footage, showing one of the telegenic couples during recent, happier times does work effectively in jarring juxtaposition. (It is in those sweetly intimate snippets that we see hints of director Matt Reeves’s previous work with Abrams on the WB’s “Felicity.”)

The Times’s Manohla Dargis appreciated Cloverfield quite a bit less (“Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm“), but other critics responded more positively. More importantly, from the studio’s perspective, so did audiences, who flocked to theaters opening weekend to the tune of $41+ million in ticket sales, surpassing the January record of $35.9 million set by the Star Wars special edition re-release in 1997.

By the way: a gigantic reptilian beast laying waste to Manhattan, dropping vicious crab/spider creatures along the way — sure… could happen. Cell phones working during the siege — hmm, seems unlikely, but… well, okay. But reaching Bloomingdale’s from Spring Street on foot via subway tunnel in a few, albeit action-packed, real-time minutes? The audience at our afternoon screening audibly scoffed. C’mon… it’s clear that writer Drew Goddard, director Reeves and producer Abrams all hail from L.A. because as any New Yorker could tell you: that just makes no sense whatsoever.

Somehow I made it back to my apartment without transit delay-causing incident, and there I remained for the next 48 hours.

The one good bit of timing was that my home confinement fell just days into the free month of HBO I argued out of Time Warner after my service went out for two days last week. I ended up re-watching, at least in part, a few films I’d seen (and liked) in the past, including Little Miss Sunshine and Children of Men. One I hadn’t seen before: A Good Year, the rather bad and embarrassingly clichéd movie about a ruthless bond trader (played by flash-tempered Russell Crowe) rediscovering la joie de vivre in a Provençal vineyard. Marion Cotillard as his local love interest is all but unrecognizable from her star turn in La Vie En Rose. But on mute (and on meds), the film plays like a beautifully shot travelogue. Ah, I will get back to southern France one of these days.

I was excited to come across Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which was one of the most trippy, moving films I’ve seen in theaters in recent years. The vision of Joe (Jim Carrey, whom I generally dislike) standing in the living room of an abandoned Montauk beach house, reliving his first (and soon to be vanquished) memory of his lover, Clementine (Kate Winslet), as the walls crumble around him into the Atlantic Ocean — just devastating.

In a funny bit of synergy, I noticed that Saturday’s word of the day on Dictionary.com was “lacuna” — the name of the fictitious company whose memory-erasing services are the focus of the film’s action.

lacuna \luh-KYOO-nuh\, noun;
plural lacunae \luh-KYOO-nee\ or lacunas::
1. A blank space; a missing part; a gap.
2. (Biology) A small opening, depression, or cavity in an anatomical structure.

By the time I finally emerged from my apartment on Three Kings’ Day, it was as if I had stepped into another season. Gone was the icy chill of just a few days ago; in its place: sunshine and temperatures in the 50s. And in January!

The shoppers at the I.S. 44 flea market on Columbus and 77th Street seemed to take it all in stride.