At the movies with Dan Slevin

Eat Pray Love is what they used to call, in the old days, a “women’s picture” and the advertisers who have paid good money to annoy audiences before the film make sure you know it: feminine hygiene products. A chromosomal anomaly on my part means that I’m not in the target market for this film (or the bestselling book that inspired it) but I’ll give it a go. Manfully.
Julia Roberts plays Liz, a phenomenally bad playwright and (supposedly) successful author who has a crisis and ends her (supposedly) unsatisfactory marriage to bewildered and hurt Billy Crudup. Never having lived without a man in her life she goes straight into a relationship with handsome and spiritual young actor James Franco.
Still unhappy, and a source of enormous frustration to her ethnically diverse best friend Viola Davis (Doubt), she uses her share of the Crudup divorce to take a year off and find herself - Italy for the food, India for the guru and Bali for Javier Bardem.
This is a film about shallow people trying to be slightly less shallow. The well-off are entitled to their crises as well as the rest of us but after two and a half hours Roberts’ character has failed (it seems to me) to learn anything. She’s still listening to other people tell her how to live and she’s still (literally) running after a man that will complete her.
Written and directed by Ryan Murphy, creator of the tv shows “Glee” and “Nip/Tuck”, perhaps Eat Pray Love is the the Green Party alternative to Sex and the City - a gay man’s fantasy about what women really want. Is that helpful?

Sunday was a marathon day at the movies for your doughty (I first typed that as doughy which would serve equally well) correspondent. After sharing Julia Roberts’ vapid brain for a Titanic length of time I stayed in my Embassy seat for Luchino Visconti’s 1963 epic, The Leopard and the three hours and ten minutes flew by.
While there’s no denying the masterpiece-ness of the film the giant Embassy screen couldn’t help revealing (in one scene) an extra playing a corpse slyly opening his eyes, checking something off camera, then closing them again. You’d never have seen that on the Steenbeck. These Sunday afternoon classic screenings at the Embassy are a most welcome addition to the film buffs’ calendar. Keep an eye on the schedule.

Then it was around the harbour to the Lighthouse in Petone for the National Theatre Live production of Phédre starring Helen Mirren (a replay from earlier in the year).
I’m not sure who is supposed to be reviewing these presentations - me or Lynn. The audience is not sharing a room with the actors so it isn’t theatre; it’s one continuous unedited performance so it isn’t really cinema; and the National Theatre business case means these productions will never be available for home viewing so it isn’t television either. And yet…and yet…you must watch them when you get a chance because they are so good.
I normally steer clear of reviewing anything in these pages that you can’t actually watch and Phédre is now long gone, but I do recommend that you pick up a brochure and check out the rest of the season. Outside of (possibly) a Festival of the Arts you’d never get to see a Complicité production but now you can pop down to the flicks to see the acclaimed A Disappearing Number in a comfy seat for less than the price of a student standing standby ticket in the West End.