The Daily Traveler: Lunar New Year Around the World

 

Not only did I enjoy researching this article—and all the delicious dinners that accompanied it—but I turned it around in less than a week.

Lunar New Year: Cool Hotel Perks and Special Events Around the World

Start off the Year of the Snake at one of these festive destinations—then venture out for citywide celebrations.

Las Vegas

THE HOTEL: Bellagio Las Vegas

THE PACKAGE: From February 14 to February 17, you're invited to the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse—China's equivalent to Camp David (and formerly the hotel's Tuscan Kitchen)—to dine on cuisine normally reserved for royalty, presidents, and prime ministers. Bellagio chef Hao Baoli—known for modernizing ancient menus from the library of the Forbidden City—leads a ten-course tasting menu, paired with wine and cognac, cooked and served by staff direct from the real Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, and presented on dishware from China. (Tickets are $500 per person and can be purchased via Bellagio’s concierge at 866-906-7171). For something a little more casual, the Bellagio's Conservatory and Botanical Gardens are also decked out in a New Year theme through March 3.

VENTURE OUT: Las Vegas holds its CNY in the Desert Festival from February 8 to February 10, with cultural performances, a fun run, a lantern festival, and other events taking place throughout the area all weekend. The Chinese American Chamber of Commerce follows suit with the Chinese New Year Celebration and Asian Food Festival on February 17, with dragon and lion dances, martial arts demonstrations, Japanese taiko drummers, acrobats, and traditional dances from China, Japan, Polynesia, Vietnam, and Korea.


Click through to read the rest of the article at the Condé Nast Traveler.


Photograph courtesy of The Bellagio

The Daily Traveler: Wacky Travel Accessories II

If you enjoyed my other article about the strangest travel gear, here is the addendum.

Even More Wacky Travel Accessories

The Walker's Path Illuminating Belt

When stumbling around in the near-dark, for obvious reasons it's best to be as unencumbered as possible. Flashlights tie up your hands, and headlamps mess up your hair (not to mention blind anyone you talk to). This LED belt provides 100 lumens of unhindered, crotch-level illumination, the angle of which can be adjusted from floodlight to spotlight. You do run the risk, however, of looking like a Care Bear in the midst of a Care Bear Stare. Available at Hammacher Schlemmer, $60.

 

Click through to see the rest of the slideshow at the Condé Nast Traveler.

PopMatters Best Films of 2012

My contribution to PopMatters' year-end wrap-up.

The Best Films of 2012

No. 4: Lincoln

In tackling one of the United States’ most iconic figures, a man who looms largest in American history, Steven Spielberg’s success is in matching Abraham Lincoln’s grandiosity with his film’s smallness. Instead of an all-encompassing biopic, Spielberg chose to focus on the final months of Lincoln’s life and his most important political success: the passage of the 13th amendment. And, while there is certainly much political theater surrounding the amendment, with flamboyant characters on both sides of the debate, Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner choose to keep the showiest scenes away from the president. He has a couple of emphatic, passionate monologues, but mostly you get a sense of the man through the tiniest moments: a rambling story, a bawdy joke, a wordless and restless afternoon pacing the White House with his son while Congress debates, a sullen glance. As the 16th president, Daniel Day-Lewis is in full control of this remarkable restraint—though he’s buoyed by a supporting cast rising to meet his greatness. Like the characters in the film, with Lincoln you get the sense that everyone is striving to quietly accomplish their most important work.

Click through to read the rest of the list at PopMatters.

PopMatters: 2012 Film Recap

My contributions to PopMatters' 2012 film recap.
 
The Worst Films of 2012

No. 6: Dark Tide

Apart from a few pretty underwater scenes, there is no joy in watching Dark Tide, about a diver (Halle Berry) who swims with sharks for passion and profit. The story is uninvolving, with threads that dead-end never to be picked up again and people who make stupid choices for reasons that are never explained. The characters are spoiled—a thrill-seeking businessman coerces Berry’s character to take him on a free-dive that they both know is dangerous, and he spends the entire film throwing his weight around while she pouts about it—and spend most of their time arguing, all to serve an emotional arc that never materializes. Even the visuals become murkier and murkier, with the main characters blending into the background as an impending storm, opaque water, and people indistinguishable from either (or each other) all flood the screen. You’re better off with the sharks.

No. 8: The Devil Inside

It’s not just the fact that the theatrical version of The Devil Inside ended with a title card directing viewers to the film’s website for more information that made audiences howl with disgust. It’s bad form, to be sure, especially considering that the website hosted videos that none-too-subtly revealed further twists that would’ve been obvious had they been in the movie to begin with (and, with a running time of a mere 83 minutes, it’s not clear why those scenes weren’t included in the first place). No, it’s the very idea that The Devil Inside—an obvious and uninspired exorcism tale that treads on the same themes about faith that have been explored since The Exorcist—merited any further investigation into its surface-level plot that’s the true insult.  


Click through to see the rest of the list at PopMatters.

DVD Review: Taken 2

Thanks to Key & Peele, I kept thinking of this as "Tooken 2" while I was reviewing it.

'Taken 2' Dutifully Follows the Most Standard of Sequel Formulas

All of this setup is really piece-moving to allow Mills to, in his words, “Do what I do best”—meaning charging after the bad guys without any backup, and taking them down. Sometimes there’s hand-to-hand combat; sometimes he gets a gun and just starts firing. There are neat little sequences, but no surprises: Everything that follows is as you would expect. It’s not that the action is poorly handled, but it’s just good enough to get Mills from the hordes of anonymous bad guys to the slightly more important bad guys to the really bad guys. At no point does Taken 2 deviate from this goal, or work any harder or get any smarter than it needs to be.

Click through to read the full review at PopMatters.

January Issue: Theater Extras

A small FOB item about a local seat-filling service.

He'll Save You a Seat

From his office in White Plains, Jed Canaan can pack a house. His business, Theater Extras, provides enthusiastic seat-fillers to achieve that standing-room-only look.

Theater Extras’ 4,200 New York members pay for the privilege: $99/year for access to pairs of tickets or $175/year for packs of four tickets, plus a $4 processing fee per ticket used (a portion of which goes to Broadway Cares, Equity Fights AIDS). They can then log into theaterextras.com to request first-come, first-served tickets.

Why would managers want to give away tickets for free? “They don’t,” Canaan says. “But if Tony voters are coming, or if they know a critic will be there, they’ll come to us because they’re confident we can fill the house on short notice.” 

For obvious reasons, theaters want Theater Extras to remain a secret, which leads to a lot of misconceptions, Canaan says. No, it’s not just the worst seats at the worst shows (seats are all over the house, and even great shows want full houses on the days the critics arrive). No, tickets are not offered only at the last minute (theaters know within two or three days how the house is selling). No, it’s not just used for theaters (there are also tickets to sporting events, concerts, and museums).

Canaan came up with the idea for Theater Extras while working in PR. He discovered the need for the service after talking to theater owners—he’s always been a theater fan himself. “My favorite show is The Book of Mormon,” he says, “but that’s not available through my site because, obviously, it’s been selling so well.”                  

New Show Review: The Carrie Diaries

A couple reasons why I like The Carrie Diaries better than Sex and the City

'The Carrie Diaries': High School Origin Story

...

The Carrie Diaries
keeps that trademark narration, but maintains the idea that it’s comprised of diary entries. No one assumes that people are interested in reading the inner thoughts of a 16-year-old Carrie, and no one is paying her to write it. That detail alone makes The Carrie Dairies more endearing than its adult counterpart. If the lessons Carrie learns are a little too pat, if her sentiments are a little too treacly, and if her word choices are clunky and awkward, it’s okay. That’s what teenage diaries are for.

...

The consumer-oriented, label-obsessing focus of Sex and the City is also thankfully absent from The Carrie Dairies. Instead of rattling off the names of fashion houses, the names the girls drop are ‘80s cultural touchstones: Indochine, Interview magazine, Rob Lowe. When Carrie talks about how much she prizes the few possessions she has of her mother’s—a purse and a pair of sunglasses—the brand names are never mentioned. She treasures them for emotional reasons, not status-seeking ones.

...

Click through to read the entire review at PopMatters.