Rafta, Rafta… is based on Bill Naughton’s 1965 comedy All in Good Time; here, the action is set within the Anglo-Indian community and moved to working-class Bolton. Khan-Din’s play was a critical hit at London’s National Theatre last year and went on to win the 2008 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. (Stateside critique has been similarly favorable.)

The title is culled from a Hindi song, and means “slowly, slowly.” The lyrics, as translated in the program by professors Faisal Devji and Rachel Dwyer:

Slowly, slowly she became part of me,
First my life, then the life of my life, and then life of life itself.

After their wedding feast — an overlong evening involving two sets of families, copious whisky drinking, spirited bhangra dancing, and a father-son arm-wrestling match — Atul Dutt and Vina Patel (Manish Dayal and Reshma Shetty in their fine Off-Broadway debuts) embark on their wedding night at Atul’s parents’ house. It soon becomes apparent, however, that their new home is not the ideal place to begin a new marriage: with the groom’s parents a thin bedroom wall away, their loving union remains unconsummated after six long weeks. When word leaks out after a frustrated Vina confides in her mother (Sarita Choudhury, whom we saw last fall as Frida Kahlo), some hilarious, but cringe-worthy interference ensues as both sets of concerned parents convene to decide how to best tackle the delicate situation.

The surface farce is stripped away to expose past wounds and some deeply-held resentments among the older married couples — what is it Tolstoy said of unhappy families? And as the often-obtuse and domineering patriarch (Ranjit Chowdhry) says of life, in a rare moment of reflection: “It might make you laugh… but one day it’ll make you bloody cry.”

No worries: this being a comedy, a happy ending is all but assured. That the play manages to feel both exotic and familiar is to the playwright’s credit. (He is currently working on the film adaptation.)

In addition to the impressive bi-level set by Derek McLane, the play features original music by Basement Bhangra™ founder DJ Rekha at rousing volumes.

Rafta, Rafta… is playing a limited engagement at the Acorn Theatre through June 21, 2008.

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?

On the 20th anniversary of Pi Day, 3.14 (naturally), SYB hosted a Pi(e)-themed potluck. Fellow pi and pie enthusiasts gathered in Sunnyside to enjoy the bounty of foods that were either in pie form, or related to π, i.e., round, spherical, cylindrical or conical. For the occasion, I made a round vegetarian shepherd’s pie — if such a thing can still be called “shepherd’s pie” — substituting a combination of portobello, cremini, oyster and shiitake mushrooms for the ground lamb layer.

This year, The New York Times ran a “Win a Pie on Pi Day” contest, soliciting submissions of poems about pi (“piems”?) or pi-ku (in three-line, 3-1-4 syllable format.) The most useful of these, like the MIT cheer “Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159!,” aid in the recall of the digits of pi. Among the the pi mnemonics I know of — most of which assign digits based on the number of letters in each corresponding word — my favorite remains: “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!”

The current world record for pi memorization belongs to Japanese mental health counselor (ha, now that’s ironic!) Akira Haraguchi, who managed to recite pi to 100,000 decimal places in 2006. I very humbly top out at about 35 decimal places — sufficient for computing the circumference of the known universe with an error no greater than the radius of a hydrogen atom.

Yeah, I think I can live with that.

In Times Square on Pi Day:

Oh, and despite never having taken those pesky Chem Regents, I can still chuckle appreciatively over the existence of Mole Day, celebrated annually on October 23 from 6:02AM to 6:02PM, i.e., 6:02 10/23. I leave it to SYB to devise an appropriate potluck theme in honor of that occasion. (“Avocado,” perhaps? *Groan*)

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.

The Other Boleyn Girl draws its inspiration from the rise and fall of the two Boleyn sisters Mary and Anne (played by Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, respectively), rivals for the attentions of King Henry VIII (who, continuing the onscreen tradition of hunky Henry Tudors, is portrayed by Eric Bana). The young women are portrayed like opposites: sweet blonde, scheming brunette. In their world, nubile female flesh is leveraged for financial and political favor; the girls are quite literally pimped out to the king by their father and uncle. Anne, of course, eventually wiles her way into becoming queen to the already married king, and loses her head to ambition.

The film is intended as a tale of sexual intrigue and family betrayals, set against the backdrop of the King of England’s break with the Catholic Church — an act with far-reaching consequences for the course of modern English history. Ideal for those who want a little eye candy with their history and, as very little is known of the real-life Mary Boleyn, who aren’t overly concerned with factual details. Screenwriter Peter Morgan, acclaimed for his work on The Last King of Scotland and The Queen, stumbles a bit this time out, glossing over the huge historical impact of the king’s divorce (and subsequent founding of The Church of England) and almost entirely loses inspirational steam once Anne takes her place on the throne.

More free love (banners) in Times Square. Marian Bantjes, Canadian designer, artist, illustrator and typographer. Remember Saks’ 2007 “Want It!” campaign?:

Chip Wass, New York-based award-winning illustrator and designer:

A week later, a small bomb would be set off steps from here, in front of the military recruitment center in Times Square.

Tonight’s film was Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais (Ne Touchez pas la Hache) — an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s novella, La Duchesse de Langeais. (The English title of the French film keeps the author’s original title, while the French “Don’t Touch the Axe” is culled from an ominous anecdote in the film.) The much-admired Antoinette de Langeais (chanteuse/actrice Jeanne Balibar), a married aristocrat with an oft-absent husband, is bored by her lavish, but empty Restoration-era Parisian lifestyle. She meets a Napoleonic war hero, the dashing General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu — yes, son of Gérard) — and the two begin an intense, but unconsummated flirtation, during which the duchess tantalizingly retains the upper hand to the endless frustration of de Montriveau – an imposing man clearly used to getting his way. Eventually, however, both control and power shift to de Montriveau and the story evolves into a tale of obsessive passion between two ill-starred, stubbornly unyielding — and thus frustrated – partners plunged into the alienating, often degrading, depths of love.

Afterwards, we sat through one of our more erudite post-film discussions, featuring guest Godfrey Cheshire (left), the director and New York-based film critic. I learned more in this single night about Rivette and the Nouvelle Vague (the French cinema movement, that is, not the musical collective) than in all my years of watching movies. Then again, the man behind such films as Céline and Julie Go Boating, Va Savoir and La Belle Noiseuse is generally considered the most experimental, and therefore the least screened, of his renowned colleagues Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut. It may have something to do with Rivette’s deliberately challenging films and penchant for length; one of the director’s earlier masterpieces, Out 1, is another Balzac adaptation that infamously stretches well over twelve hours long — 743 minutes, to be precise. That’s almost 9 Cloverfields! Sacrebleu!

David Slatoff:

James Victore:

Goodesign and Worldstudio:

Be on the lookout for LOVE from 42nd to 48th Streets, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues.

En route to the party, we made a stop at a surprisingly crowded Goodburger for — what else? — burgers. Make that a turkey burger for me, as I’d already exceeded my beef quota for the week. With the works, minus mayo: pickles, lettuce, tomato, onion, ketchup and mustard. Really good, but for me, Westville’s version still tops my list, and not just for hot dates.

Then on to MC’s where a group of revelers had gathered to unleash their inner rock stars on this last night of 2007. I’m referring, of course, to Harmonix “Rock Band,” a.k.a. the Best Party Game Ever. Sorry, “Guitar Hero,” but though the thrasher battles can be cool to watch, the ability to include other band members in a collaborative jam session makes for far more fun. “Rock Band,” which was released for PS2, PS3, and Xbox 360 on November 20, 2007 — three weeks after the launch of “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock” — allows players to perform in virtual bands by providing up to four would-be rockers with the ability to play the peripheral of their choice (mic, guitar, bass guitar or drums). The “instruments” are used to simulate the performance of actual rock songs by hitting scrolling notes on-screen.

The song selection is what you’d expect: as a group, we put together some rousing renditions of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” David Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” (check out this crazy Rock Band drumming action), The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” The Killers’ “When You Were Young” … and a whole lot of songs I didn’t know. Yes, I have an embarrassingly large gap in my musical repertoire when it comes to classic rock. I pitched in on vocals on Radiohead’s “Creep“ until on a lark, I took up the wooden sticks and discovered that I may be a drummer at heart. Not a good one, mind you, but a drummer just the same.

Me, banging the skins — a mini drum kit with four color-coded, pressure-sensitive heads and a simulated bass pedal:

Play well enough and the “crowd” gets into the act by singing and clapping along, as in an actual concert. Play badly, and the song will be cut short. There are ways to drive up the cumulative score (with bonuses and multipliers for consecutive correct beats/notes/phrases, or by playing in unison), but I was concentrating too hard on just getting through my sections, which was both frustrating and exhilarating at the same time.

And oh yes, before the night was through, there was also a very respectable performance of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” that really could only have been improved by more cowbell.

At ten minutes to midnight, we switched over to the live broadcast of Times Square, where Dick Clark was hosting the countdown for the third time after recovering from his 2004 stroke. Along with an estimated one million spectators in Times Square and over a billion people throughout the world, we watched as the new Waterford Crystal/LED-lit ball dropped to commemorate the final dwindling seconds of 2007.

To new beginnings. Happy new year, everyone!