Entries tagged with 'Movies'
Posted by Adam Kuban, May 5, 2008 at 11:45 PM
I love it when a plan comes together. For years, I've been wanting to get a clip of the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever, the bit where John Travolta's Tony Manero orders two slices of pizza from Lenny's, double-decks them and struts down 86th Street in Bensonhurst. After mentioning the film earlier tonight, I dug around on YouTube, found the opener, and trimmed the vid down to just the relevant pizza-related footage. Enjoy ...
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Posted by Adam Kuban, April 12, 2006 at 1:58 PM
Some of you pizzaheads may already have Pizza! The Movie on your radar. Word is that the producers (see photo, above) have finished it and it's being screened at various film festivals. The nearest screening to Slice HQ will be in Trenton, New Jersey, on Sunday May 7 at 2:30 p.m., as part of the Trenton Film Festival.
Anybody up for making a pizza road trip out there? Here's the plan: We'll take the 12:13 p.m. NJTransit Northeast Corridor Line from Penn Station and arrive in Trenton at 1:37 p.m. Round-trip Off-Peak tix are $19.50 each. From there, it's a short walk to the Contemporary Club (just across from the statehouse), where the movie will unspool.
Following Pizza! The Movie, we'll hit up Pizza! The Pizza at the legendary DeLorenzo's Tomato Pies on Hudson Street. (And don't even ask about the DeLorenzo's on Hamilton Ave. It's closed on Sundays.)
It looks like I'll have to buy tickets by mail-order. E-mail me ASAP if you'd like to go, so I can get you in on the purchase: adam [at] sliceny [dot] com Tickets are $8 each.
PIZZA! THE MOVIE
When: Sunday, May 7
Where: Trenton, NJ
Getting There: We'll take NJTransit (12:13 p.m. Northeast Corridor Line)
Estimated Cost: $42.50 ($19.50 roundtrip train ticket; $8 movie admission; $15 or so at DeLorenzo's)
Posted by Adam Kuban, December 19, 2005 at 3:25 PM
Pizza the Hut would be proud.
Pizzas and photographs by Christine Castro, from her Flickr photostream.
Posted by Adam Kuban, December 19, 2005 at 11:54 AM
The following cluster of photos will no doubt be bewildering. But bear with me. Today's theme is "lights." And lots of them. It's a theme that strings together the over-the-top Christmas decorations of Dyker Heights and the below-the-ankle action of Saturday Night Fever.
That, and the fact that both spectacles take place in roughly the same area of Brooklyn. After that, the association kinda falls apart.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, October 7, 2005 at 10:30 AM
"In Yonkers, New York, a pizza battle is being waged. But there can only be one hero. Rossi vs. Bianco. Sauce vs. crust. Angela vs. Tony. Now ... the last thing anyone expected to happen ... just happened. Grab a slice of romance. A Tale of Two Pizzas."
Looking to catch a Romeo and Juliet story that takes place in pizzaland? A Tale of Two Pizzas opens tonight at the AMC Empire 25 in Times Square. The 7:30 p.m. screening ends with a Q&A session with the cast, including a couple of the guys from the Sopranos, Vincent "Big Pussy" Pastore and Frank "Phil Leotardo" Vincent.
Reviews
From the oven to the table, a tale of love [New York Times]
2 Vincents get pizza the action [New York Daily News]
box doodle from ATaleofTwoPizzas.com
Posted by Adam Kuban, July 30, 2004 at 11:22 AM
Yeah, I'll Check Out A Movie
BUT EVERYBODY LOVES PIZZA Danny Aiello's character, Sal (left), pulls a slice from the oven at Sal's, in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. In one of the movie's most memorable scenese, Bill Nunn's character, Radio Raheem (right), explains the dichotomy of love and hate, the film's central theme.
Spike Lee's latest joint, She Hate Me, opened Wednesday. And though we haven't had time to catch it yet, you can bet Slice's ass will be in the seats sometime soon. One: We're big Spike Lee fans. Two: The film's title references Rod Smart's He Hate Me jersey from his days in the now-defunct Xtreme Football League (XFL). Three: Hot lesbians (right).
But for now, She Hate Me gives us an excuse to touch on Mr. Lee's 1989 joint, Do the Right Thing. Pizza plays an important role in Do the Right Thing, as it is an Italian-American-owned pizzeria in Bed-Stuy that becomes the flashpoint for a neighborhood showdown and, ultimately, a murder at the hands of the police.
The film follows Mookie (Mr. Lee) in his job as pizza deliveryman for Famous Sal's Pizzeria. Sal (Danny Aiello) has a "Wall of Fame" in his pizzeria that features photos of Italian folks only. Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito) notices there are no famous black people on the wall, despite the fact that Famous Sal's is in a predominately black neighborhood and that most of Sal's customers are African American. This, along with the heat, sets in motion a series of events that echo the differing philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr. (non-violence, passive resistance) and Malcolm X (revolution, proactive resistance). We'd like to go into the underlying themes that the movie explores, but our cultural-interpretation skills are rusty; we'll let you read this article for all the weighty semiotics involved.
Anyway: It's hot out. Buggin' Out wants African Americans on the wall. Sal doesn't. At first Sal's regulars think Buggin' Out is full of it and tell him not to worry. But slowly people start coming around to his point of view. It comes to a head when Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) comes in, boom box in hand, blaring Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" (the only song that ever issues forth from his radio). Sal tells him to turn it off. Raheed turns it up instead. Sal smashes it with a bat. Raheed grabs Sal. They fight. Chaos breaks out. The pizzeria is smashed and burned. The cops come. The cops kill Raheed. And finally, Smiley, a mentally challenged neighborhood dude, enters the burning pizzeria to hang up one of his picture postcards of King and X shaking hands (which he has been trying to sell to various people throughout the movie).
Slice has always liked this film, both for the pizzeria in which it largely takes place and for its challenging nature—we never know quite how to feel after watching it. Which, is, we suspect, Mr. Lee's aim.
The movie was inspired partly by a racially charged incident in Howard Beach in 1986, in which a group of white residents beat and chased three black men, ultimately killing one. The incident began at a pizzeria there.
Slice has been to New Park Pizza, where the tragic real-life event occurred, though not out of morbid curiousity—Ed Levine recommended the place to us.
We would, however, like to visit the street where the fictional Sal's Famous was located. We gleaned the address from the DVD after pausing and slow-tracking through shots: 162 Stuyvesant Avenue.
Posted by Adam Kuban, June 7, 2004 at 4:03 PM
How Deep Is Your Love ... for Pizza? Enough to cram two slices into your face at once? [From the website
myatari.]
I was goofin' around on the Web yesterday and found this image of Tony Manero (John Travolta) from Saturday Night Fever eating pizza. Employing a novel approach to downing two slices at once, Mr. Manero has folded the pieces around each other. Filmed in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, Saturday Night Fever's main character would have grown up around plenty of good pizza. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of worthwhile pizzerias still operating in those neighborhoods. L&B Spumoni Gardens (Bensonhurst) and Lento's (Bay Ridge) come to mind.
Update: Tony Manero double-folded his slices at Lenny's.
Posted by Adam Kuban, May 21, 2004 at 10:53 AM
Speaking of pizza in movies, Page Six reports that actor Robert Downey Jr. was at Dino's Pizzeria in Astoria filming a movie:
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Posted by Adam Kuban, May 20, 2004 at 2:13 PM
No Pizza for You, Joey: Joey Ramone, whose birthday was yesterday, in a video capture from the movie Rock 'N' Roll High School. To the right of Joey's head, you can make out the stack of pizza boxes that the rest of the band is tearing into. The band's manager only lets Joey eat health food.
Yesterday, May 19, was Joey Ramone's birthday. Although the frontman of legendary punk rock band The Ramones died in April 2001 of lymphatic cancer, his friends and family have continued to throw the annual bash that had been his tradition.
To honor Joey in our own little way, we present to you a couple of our favorite scenes from the 1979 movie Rock 'n' Roll High School.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, November 11, 2003 at 1:00 AM
Will Ferrell makes me cry. I just saw Elf last night, and the guy's antics had me laughing to the point of tears.
Ferrell plays Buddy, a human raised by elves. When Buddy is confronted with his true identity, he's off to New York City, where his father lives. Before leaving the North Pole, he asks Santa (Ed Asner), "What's New York like?"
Santa replies, "There are a few things you should know. If you see gum on the sidewalk, leave it. It's not free candy. There are thirty-five Ray's Pizza. They all claim to be the original, but they aren't. The one on 11th is."
I turned to Citysearch to find the Ray's in question. Typing "Ray's Pizza" into the search field yielded forty-nine Ray's, more than thirty-five cited in the movie, but that's because the search returns results like "Ray Bari Pizza." Only one fits the description. But this establishment, located at 465 East 11th, forsakes originality, dubbing itself Famous Ray's. Let's hope the name discrepancy doesn't confound Buddy.
Even without a NYC pizza reference, this movie would have been endearing. Rated PG and with a storyline that doesn't deny the existence of Santa, Elf is destined to become a classic Christmas movie; we'll be seeing it yearly on TV alongside "It's a Wonderful Life" and "A Christmas Story."
The Rough Guide's take on Famous Ray's.
To play with your own electronic Etch-A-Sketch, visit the Elf website and find the Games section.
Posted by Adam Kuban, October 13, 2003 at 3:20 PM
Pizza delievery in Tehran: I would have thought it unlikely. Heck, I didn't even know Iran had pizza. A trip to the movie Crimson Gold might do me some good then. A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times:
Mr. Kiarostami, the lion of contemporary Iranian art cinema, and Mr. Panahi, who has established himself with "The White Balloon" and "The Circle" as one of Iran's leading urban filmmakers, set out to explain what drove the robber, a pizza deliveryman and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, to his desperate, self-destructive act of violence. The answer is not altogether surprising, and at times "Crimson Gold" exhibits a finger-pointing didacticism as it exposes the cruelties and inequities of a society sharply polarized by class and corrupted by selfishness, snobbery and cynicism. But the occasional obviousness of the film's themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods, and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, Hussein.
