While I started the weekend with a quiet night on Friday, Suzy got to go to a talk with Alice Munroe, part of the NewYorker festival, which she said was quite enjoyable.
Saturday started quietly as well, since we had plans for the evening. In the late afternoon, we took a train over to Manhattan to have dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant called Nam. Since we were going to an event at 7:30 that evening, we got to the restaurant for a 5:30 reservation, and when we arrived, they were just opening for supper. The server seemed to think it was funny we were eating so early -- and we were the only people in the restaurant the entire time. It made us think that we're not quite into the NYC groove ... New Yorkers who are out-on-the-town for an early show probably tend to go eat afterward, I think.
Anyhow, we each had a drink (the mohitos are very good) and for appetizers we had a dish of beef and greens (lettuce of some kind and cilantro) in rice paper wraps with peanut dipping sauce, and a dish with spicy grilled shrimp on a bed of vegetables in a vinegar sauce (sort of pickled, but fresh and crisp). Both were very good. For entrees, I had a crispy duck breast, with jasmine rice on the side. Suzy had a dish with grilled pork in a dark broth with noodles, veggies, and leafy greens on the side. Hers was definitely the better dish (though I liked my duck, it wasn't very crispy). All-in-all, Nam had very good food, and very reasonable prices. I definitely enjoyed it a lot more than the Vietnamese place we went to in China Town last month. I think we'll definitely go back.
After Nam, we headed to the IFC Center for another New Yorker Festival event: A panel on horror movies with directors Wes Craven and Hideo Nakata. It was really interesting, hearing both of them answer the same questions about making movies, what inspired them, the differences between horror movies and traditions in the East and West, and so on.
Poor Hideo Nakata had some stumbles with the language barrier at times, but he was still very interesting. The highlight moment for him was after the moderator asked the directors something along the lines of "How young is too young to watch your movies?". Hideo talked briefly about the cultural differences between Japan and the US, but ended up telling a story about how a friend of his watched Ringu (or part of it anyway) while holding his one-year-old son, and the child was frightened by one of the visuals in the movie. This lead to Hideo finishing his story by proudly proclaiming that "it was so scary it even scared a little one-year-old child". Hee hee.
Wes Craven was also fascinating, of course, but one thing I noticed about him is that I think he has a bit of a cheesy sense of humour. He'd often answer the moderator's questions with some sort of fake-out answer or gag. He even stuck a corny, setup-and-punchline joke into one of his answers. It was pretty funny to have this legendary guru of scary cracking goofy jokes like a kid. But he did say at one point that he was a class-clown in school...
There were only a few questions at the end, and one was posed by a woman who sounded extremely eager to talk to Wes. She gushed about how brilliant Scream was, then once he had answered her question, she (having stayed hovering bythe mic apparently) thanked him for his answer and then mentioned how she was writing a script for something similar right now. Heh. I think she was hping he would say: "Well gosh, let me read it!" Anyway, it was cool evening.
Sunday was a another quiet day, with school work for Suzy and, uh, work-work for me. We did go out to see some of the Atlantic Antic street fair that was taking place not far from us. We walked around and had a bite to eat. It was interesting to see. It was sort of like the Canada Day street market in Saint John, but with a lot more people, a lot more food, and less of a giant yard sale vibe.
We headed over to Pace at around 6:00 to see a taping of Inside the Actor's Studio. Thsi first one (for us) was going to feature Anthony LaPagila. Once we got there, Suzy headed in with the other students, while I took my freebie balconey ticket and went in to find a seat. As luck would have it (well, for me, if not for the show) it was a quiet night, and they told the balconey-dwellers that we could go sit in the downstairs audience. I took a seat a few rows back and off to the side at first, but then one of the show-runners came around asking us to move into the center section to fill empty seats in ones and twos. I ended up sitting in the front row of the regular seating, just behind the chairs where many of the students were seated.
Once thigns got rolling, I found it quite interesting, however Anthony LaPaglia, though he certainly seems like a nice guy, had a tendancy to ramble on in his answers, going of on tangents, or giving multiple answers to the same question. It ended up making the taping drag on a bit, and by the time the main segment was finished, we had been there for three and a half hours! They took a short break, then returned for the 10 questions, and the student Q&A. Once again, LaPaglia had some interesting things to say, but tended to take too long with each of the 10 questions. Again, he tended to give multiple answers and change his mind, etc. Then due to the late time (I think), James Lipton cut things off after probably only 5 or 6 questions from the students.
In the end, despite the length of the taping, and a few times where things really dragged*, I found hearing what he had to say interesting for the most part. I'll be interested to watch the finished show, and see how they edit it. I wonder if many guests are really long-winded, rambling, distracted, or otherwise bad at impromptu public speaking, but then end up being saved by editing? Still, cool to be there for a taping.
*The dragging pace wasn't entirely LaPaglia's fault either; the clips they used weren't always the best. They probably showed three or four just from Without Trace, and they were almost all of him getting angry -- hardly demonstrating his range. Plus, the clip they showed from his upcoming movie avout East Timor, called Balibo, was a scene where his character is seeing fields of dead people, victims of genocide, and he is crying and breaking down. The thing is, for a scene like that, you can't got to extreme emotion without the context; it just seemed weird and goofy without any lead-in beyond a brief description.
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