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Other News We Heard Last Week


Local banjo player Greg Liszt is helping Bruce Springsteen promote his Pete Seeger tribute album.

Tuesday, May 30
Local banjo player aids The Boss’ detour from Thunder Road
Today’s Washington Post asks the eternal question, “If a banjo solo falls in the middle of a Bruce Springsteen concert, will anybody cheer it?” The plucking of Charlottesville native Greg Liszt inspired the query, as Liszt is now touring with The Boss (and 16 other musicians, including a tuba player) in support of Springsteen’s new tribute album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Though not everyone at Nissan Pavilion was enraptured by the old-timey music, reviewer J. Freedom du Lac was all over it: “The well-conceived set was overflowing with kinetic energy, as well as an incredible, almost cathartic spirit that Springsteen largely attributes to the source material itself.”

Wednesday, May 31
Stylists mourn Couric’s historic move
Amidst the bathos surrounding Katie Couric’s final day as host of the “Today” show—the nation’s most-watched TV news program for more than a decade—we were discouraged to discover this, um, meaningful commentary from The New York Sun about the UVA alumna (Class of 1979), who will take over the “CBS Evening News” in September. The Sun speculates that, once she becomes an oh-so-serious news anchor, “her impressive collection of strappy sandals, form-fitting tops, and shiny makeup may be gone for good.” Indeed, “Ms. Couric may trade her bolder outfits and hairstyles for tailored suits, classic pumps, pearl jewelry, stay-in-place hair, and matte makeup, observers say.” Which just leaves us wondering what these same observers had to say about Brian Williams’ tanning-booth addiction when he became anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” or whether Charlie Gibson’s thinning pate will be analyzed when he starts anchoring ABC’s program.

Thursday, June 1
City girls’ soccer team heads to regional championship
The Daily Progress reports this morning on the storybook ending to the Charlottesville High School girls’ soccer team’s dream-like season (18 wins, 0 losses): a 3-2 victory over a very competitive Loudon County team to clinch CHS’s first-ever journey to the Region II Championships. “This game was the culmination of a lot of hard work throughout the season,” CHS coach Steve Saunders told the Progress.

Friday, June 2
Proud Warrior on the fifth tee?
Golfers, are you looking for a solution to your Mulligan problem? Keswick Hall announced the answer today in a news release. The luxury hotel and golf resort now offers “Goga”—that’s right, yoga for golfers! The one-hour class “involves a series of yoga positions that focus on those areas of the body that are critical to a good golf swing.” As for us, we’re waiting for Yotinis—a series of upper body stretches that will facilitate the movement of the hand to the mouth during a rigorous workout at the bar.

Saturday, June 3
Arena helps Team U.S.A. keep it real in Deutschland
What’s all this business about staying in the suburbs or hunkering down in a border town? Bruce Arena, the onetime UVA soccer coach who now coaches the United States’ World Cup team, is not keeping his boys out of the fray as the globe’s elite soccer players prepare for World Cup action next week. Nope, the American team is staying in Hamburg, Germany, proper; in fact, their accommodations are only one mile from what today’s Washington Post calls “the notorious Reeperbahn, a.k.a. ‘Die Suendige Meile’ (The Sinful Mile).” “It fits our lifestyle, our mentality,” Arena told Steven Goff. “I want our players to enjoy the World Cup, and the way Americans enjoy every day is getting out and enjoying the culture… I think it’s invaluable to have them in the right frame of mind.” The American team will play their first game on Monday, June 12, against the Czechs.

Sunday, June 4
Cavs drop in first-round NCAA play at home. Ouch!
Virginia baseball suffered its second loss today in the double-elimination first round of the NCAA Regional, a heartbreaking defeat at home for the Cavs, who had gone 47-15 in the regular season. Speaking to The Daily Progress, head coach Brian O’Connor said the 15-4 rout by Evansville was the hardest loss of his “entire coaching career.” “I really felt like this ball club had something special about them.”

Monday, June 5
Ehrenreich: Don’t get too big for your britches
Famed social issues journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America effectively catalyzed “living wage” campaigns nationwide, and who has been living in Charlottesville lately, is moving north. Mother Jones’ online edition visits with her, and conducts a lengthy interview in the midst of the packing and so on. Among other inevitable downers about the new American economic reality, Ehrenreich shares this: “There’s a lot in our society that makes people with college degrees and white-collar jobs think they’re special and superior. But next time you’re seeing that person pushing the broom, remember, you may be one year, maybe even six months away from that yourself. You’re not special, not in the eyes of the owners and the CEOs. So we’ve got to get together; we’ve got to bridge that divide, get over that snobbishness.”

Categories
Living

Restaurant gossip


Eatin’ almighty: Steve Carell is reportedly a big fan of Crozet Pizza’s half-pepperoni pie.

Almighty appetites
He’s a fantastically wonderful guy.” That’s the report on Steve Carell, star of the big-budget cinematic extravaganza Evan Almighty, from Uncle Charlie’s manager Deke Shipp. This week, Restaurantarama has stars in our eyes, as we go hunting for Hollywood in, of all places, Crozet. And boy do we find it! Word is, with the filming of Evan in full swing, movie types are crawling all over that town’s eateries.    Make that “digging in on a semi-permanent basis.” Shipp says that, almost immediately after Uncle Charlie’s opened its doors on The Square in February, it began hosting a group of crew members who drop by almost daily for dinner and beers after long hours of set-building. When the now-famous ark (which, per the film’s plot, God orders Carell to build) was completed two weeks ago, Shipp says many of the crew came to Charlie’s for a wrap party. “The entire place was full and nobody was from Charlottesville,” he says. “We have pictures of 40 or 50 guys with Uncle Charlie’s T-shirts.”    Yeah, but what about the star wattage? Charlie’s, Crozet Pizza and the Three Notch’d Grill all report Carell sightings. “Steve Carell was here last Friday,” says Jon Bray of Crozet Pizza. Steve apparently likes his pizza half plain, half with pepperoni! (Don’t ever let us hear you say you can’t get useful news from this column.) And Cathy Berry, from Three Notch’d Grill, says Carell once got take-out—“enough for four people.” Nobody’s seen God, though. (By which we mean Morgan Freeman, of course.)    Various crew members seem to have chosen a restaurant to attach themselves to, though they’re not exactly stating their titles clearly: Berry says she’s friendly with the guy who “organizes all the vehicles,” while Shipp has gotten to know “Dave, the special-effects-makeup guy.” Shipp also told us a little yarn about being invited onto the Evan set. “We got to come up in the ark and go right behind the camera banks,” he says. “[Carell] walked up in full Moses garb and said ‘Hey, good to see you.’”     It’s good to see all that extra business, too, say the restaurateurs. “The working crew, they’ll come here on Thursday or Friday to order 20 or 30 pizzas, so they can feed the whole crew,” says Bray. “It’s really odd for us to accommodate that in terms of ordering produce. But we won’t say no to the business.” Shipp is more succinct: “It’s going to be a real bummer to see them go.”

What’s brewing in ConAgra

In other Crozet news, Starr Hill Brewery is now fully up and running in the ConAgra building. Owner and master brewer Mark Thompson says that, after a year of rejiggering part of the gargantuan space, he’s ready to produce about 5,000 barrels of beer this year, up from 3,500 last year in the old W. Main Street location (where Starr Hill Restaurant still sits). That’s a big jump, but it’s nothing compared to the 30,000-barrel capacity Thompson says the new facility could potentially handle. “We are going to be the next national beer brand,” he declares. The 20-year plan is for Starr Hill to be distributed internationally. (Restaurantarama loves the smell of frothy-headed world domination in the morning!)    Meanwhile, you’ll begin seeing more Starr Hill brews in stores around town, starting with Jomo Lager (which, as local beer lovers well know, used to be called Mojo—the moniker had to be scrambled due to a naming conflict with a Colorado-based brewery). The restaurant has gained a private-party room where the brewery used to be. And in three years or so, you can drop into the Starr Hill tasting room in Crozet and sample some suds on the giant building’s rooftop patio. “You can only imagine what it looks like out here as the sun sets over Jarman’s Gap,” says Thompson. Pretty nice, we bet—and even better with a beer.

X-Men:


Winging it: Angel (Ben Foster) lets his freak flag fly in X-Men: The Last Stand

George Lucas, eat your heart out.
With the arrival of X-Men: The Last Stand, we now have a sci-fi trilogy that rivals and, in some ways, surpasses the Star Wars saga. The characters may not have the iconic richness of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, and the movies themselves may not have the epic sweep (a sweep that finally engulfed Lucas, chewing him up and spitting out that second trilogy), but the emotional connection is there. And the X-Men movies, while going about the business of wildly entertaining us, have managed to play into the zeitgeist in ways we haven’t seen in these comic-book Weltanschauungs (it’s a fancy German word for “blowouts”) since The Matrix. Racial purity, sexual deviance, gender equality—these are a few of the themes that underpin the series. But they wouldn’t mean a thing if the movies didn’t keep delivering the goods. X-Men: The Last Stand not only delivers the goods, it achieves pop grandeur, moments of sublime pathos and mystic power. Wait—all of this from a movie directed by Brett “Rush Hour” Ratner? Has Professor Xavier been infiltrating my thoughts again?
One of the few problems with the X-Men movies has been that everybody’s so powerful, in so many different ways, that it all starts to seem like an elaborate game of “rock, paper, scissors” (only with fiery eye rays and adamantium claws). And X3 plucks yet more mutants from the Marvel Comics gene pool. After sitting out the first two episodes, fan-favorite Beast now makes an appearance, courtesy of Kelsey Grammer, who never lets on for a second that playing an enormous blue furball is any different from playing, say, King Lear. An “assimilationist,” Beast heads the government’s Department of Mutant Affairs (specifically named, one assumes, to remind us of the Bureau of Indian Affairs). Gifted, or differently abled, or however you want to describe them, mutants remain the untouchables of human society, genetic freaks who are reviled for how different they are, even though those differences amount to some of the coolest superpowers ever devised at a comic-geek bull session. Who, for instance, wouldn’t want to fly around like the angel Gabriel?
That particular power belongs to Warren Worthington III (Ben Foster), son of Warren Worthington II (Michael Murphy), who’s recently discovered a cure for what most mutants don’t consider a disease. In an early scene, set 10 years in the past, Warren III has locked himself in the bathroom, where he’s hacking away at the wings sprouting from his shoulder blades. All we see is the blood and the white feathers scattered about the floor. Where the X-Men movies continue to excel is at putting the “human” back in “superhuman”—a teenage boy’s horror at the changes his body is undergoing, for example. Like the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters is a boiling cauldron overflowing with hormones—but it’s also where these teenage mutants learn how to control their powers (some, unfortunately, never do adjust). It’s in this volatile crucible of outsized powers and burgeoning pubescence that this new “cure” is most debated. For example, Anna Paquin’s Rogue—a mutant who is still unable to touch her boyfriend without sucking the life right out of him—is more than a little curious about Dr. Worthington’s “X gene” antibody.
A major player in X1 and X2, Rogue is mostly shunted off to the side in X3. There simply isn’t enough room for everybody to spread their wings, literally or figuratively, but director Brett Ratner does a nice job of directing traffic, giving each character just enough time to leave a lasting impression. Among the newbies, Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) rolls over opponents like a fullback from hell. Among the oldies, Halle Berry’s Storm is still a tempest in a teapot, despite a bunch more lines, a brand-new hairdo and a skintight black-leather suit that Catwoman would have died for. Is this Academy-Award winner capable of emoting with more range than, say, the Channel 15 weather girl? Apparently not. Much better, as always, is Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, who looks more like a Dirty Harry-era Clint Eastwood every day. So virile that he can get away with muttonchops that would have made Captain Kangaroo blush, Wolverine spends most of X3 pining for Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who, if you recall, died at the end of X2.
But nobody ever really dies in comic books. And so Jean, having gone down in flames to save her fellow X-Men, predictably rises from the ashes. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Phoenix, the mutant’s mutant, a woman so telekinetically awesome that, like Carrie on prom night, she could bring down the school gymnasium simply by putting her mind to it. Like Berry, Janssen isn’t a terribly expressive actress, but if looks could kill (and we know they can) you can’t help but wonder whether X-Men: The Last Stand shouldn’t have been called X-Women: The Last Straw. A hydrogen bomb surrounded by slingshots, Phoenix turns out to be what the future of the world depends on. And in the movie’s opening scene, we see her as a young girl who’s paid a visit by the (equally young, through some astonishing movie magic) Charles Xavier (the silver-tongued, chrome-domed Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (the silver-tongued, silver-haired Ian McKellen). Still partners, these two go after their prey like a couple of college recruiters. She’s the only Class 5 mutant they’ve ever heard of.
Gently applying their theater backgrounds to comic-book dialogue, Stewart and McKellen remain the heart and soul of the X-Men movies, overlapping their acting styles just enough to make us wonder where Professor Xavier ends and Magneto begins. We still don’t know what caused their breakup, but they’ve come to represent the two opposing approaches to civil rights in this country: reform or revolution, nonviolent resistance or violent resistance, Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Yet neither of them has the soulful eloquence of Martin Luther King, or the fiery rhetoric of Malcolm X. They’re British to the core, maintaining a stiff upper lip as things spin out of control around them. Stewart’s so calm and soothing that you almost don’t notice how good he is—but just try to imagine anybody else in the role. As for McKellen, he has this uncanny ability to take a line or an expression right up to the point of parody, then stop. Any actor who could survive the costumes he’s forced to prance around in deserves our full respect.
Anyway, it’s not entirely clear what Professor Xavier thinks about the cure, which could be used as a form of genetic genocide. But Magneto, always itching for a fight, starts raising an army. This mutant militia holes up in the woods, like some right-wing survivalist types, then head to San Francisco, where Worthington Labs is based (in what used to be Alcatraz, natch). Climactic sequences can be so anticlimactic in these big-budget behemoths, but Ratner keeps his wits about him (as well as his wit). Many of us groaned when we heard that he was taking over for Bryan Singer, who did such a bang-up job directing X1 and X2, but we needn’t have worried. Ratner, heretofore best known for the Rush Hour movies, finds the poetry in pulp. Everything’s beautifully staged, nothing’s too overblown. And that climactic sequence, which involves relocating the Golden Gate Bridge and breaking into Alcatraz, masterfully showcases Hollywood’s own secret power: CGI F/X.
But where do we go from here? That’s not a question that tends to get asked after the third movie in a trilogy, especially one called The Last Stand. But there’s definitely a sense of “to be continued” as the remaining X-persons head back home to lick their wounds, bury their dead, and sharpen their claws. And there’s a sense that this comic-book premise—superheroes as an oppressed minority—has a lot of life left in it. Luckily, there are many more X-persons where these came from, and they’re definitely not shy.