[2 articles]
Flicked Off: 'When In Rome'
http://www.theawl.com/2010/02/flicked-off-when-in-rome
by Choire
February 1, 2010
Somehow, we ended up at this movie over the weekend, just us and some
girls who were really lonely. And a few really angry boyfriends. You
guys. Little Kristin Bell, barely there. Josh Duhamel, a lunk with a
nice brow. A plot (magic love fountains!) that not even Annie
Hathaway could paste together with her face. And, what's more, a
ghostly drive-by from Judith Malina. Born in the 20s, the daughter of
German rabbi who emigrated to America in 1929, the twice-widowed
avant-garde theater superstar has not had a film or TV role since the
69th episode of The Sopranos, broadcast in April of 200as Paulie's
nun-aunt who reveals that she is actually his mother, causing him to
flip out. (Then she dies.)
Malina met and later married Julian Beck when she was a teen; they
ran the Living Theatre, left New York for Europe and returned off and
on throughout the 60s and 70s. Malina's memoir, The Enormous Despair,
documents the experience of arriving in America in the late 60s, and
also meeting Ginsberg, Leary and Dali.
She appeared in Dog Day Afternoon (and played the grandmother in The
Addams Family movie in 1991. Beck himself would, in 1986, have a
good-sized role in… Poltergeist II, though he had died the year previous.)
And now Malina shows up in When in Rome as a witchy, angry Italian
grandmother of a groom, who spits on Kristin Bell. Why wouldn't she?
The Living Theater, at 21 Clinton Street, appears to be in some sort
of vague yet deep financial trouble. Malina's second husband, the
theater's co-artistic director Hanon Reznikov, died in 2008. Malina
had signed a ten year lease in 2006. And now, the theater is
accepting $10 donations online to stay
alive. http://buildthelivingtheatre.org/
--------
From:
http://www.fairfieldweekly.com/article.cfm?aid=16535
** When in Rome
Directed by Mark Steven Johnson. Written by David Diamond & David
Weissman. With Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel. (PG-13)
A Guggenheim curator (Kristen Bell) scoops up four coins and a poker
chip in a fountain and finds herself being wooed by five suitors in
When in Rome, a decent time-filler that coasts on its star's prim
charm. Perpetually unlucky in love, Beth is in Rome for her sister's
wedding, where she falls for the best man, Nick (Josh Duhamel), a
sportswriter who doesn't initially return her interest. But they're
both accident-prone he was famously struck by lightning during a
college football game so we know they belong together. Back in New
York, Beth is pursued not just by Nick but by a sausage magnate
(Danny DeVito), an Italian painter (Will Arnett), a male model (Dax
Shephard) and a creepy street magician (Jon Heder, doing Criss
Angel). Heder is inspired, while Shephard is about as likely a male
model as Ben Stiller, but that's the joke.
As Nick's profession and the cast of suitors indicates, director Mark
Steven Johnson, who wrote Grumpy Old Men, and screenwriters David
Diamond and David Weissman, who wrote Old Dogs, want to keep guys
awake, not with nudity and toilet jokes (the movie is so clean its
PG-13 rating is inexplicable) but with uncredited cameos and
appearances by famous athletes. Others may appreciate Living Theatre
co-founder Judith Malina as one of those curse-hurling Italian woman,
the Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah as a DJ and glimpses of the
Guggenheim's 2008 Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective, here curated by Beth.
Her other curatorial duties were actually handled by the artist
Slater Bradley, who gets namechecked like he's Damien Hirst.
Fortunately for Beth, when that coveted Slater Bradley becomes
unavailable, Nick's got just the thing a picture of the moment he
was struck by lightning, taken by some famous Italian photographer.
And then it's back to Rome, don't you know. "Man, I had a blast
helping you grow," says Dax which may turn out to be the most
honest line in a rom-com this year.
.
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