Marisa LaScala: Writer, Editor, and Good Addition to Your Bar Trivia Team

'Dirty Girl': The Edgy Misfit

“'No one likes a dirty girl,' a high school principal tells Danielle (Juno Temple), the firecracker at the center of Dirty Girl. He’s wrong, of course. Plenty of people love a dirty girl, this film’s writer and director Abe Sylvia first and foremost. Danielle, growing up in Norman, Oklahoma in 1987, is the very picture of fun feistiness. She wears high espadrilles, piles on the makeup, smokes cigarettes, goes too far with boys in her Mustang convertible, and mouths off to people in an adorable Southern drawl. She sounds like a cliché, but Temple’s performance makes this dirty girl is a formidable heroine in high-waisted short shorts."

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

Fall Foliage Tip 
A good rule of thumb is that the leaves change later the more south you go and the closer you stick to the coast. “This is because these areas are lower in elevation and tend to stay a bit warmer than inland,” says Marek D. Rzonca of the Foliage Network. If the weather cooperates, leaf season in southeast New Jersey—near Wildwood and Cape May, for example—can continue through early November.

Click through to read the rest of the item on the Condé Nast Traveler Tumblr. They have a great photo up on the site, too.

'Love, Wedding, Marriage': We Recommend Therapy

"Yet it’s not the premise to Love, Wedding, Marriage—and its strict romantic view that equates divorce with failure—that is the movie’s biggest flaw. Instead, it’s the way the film uses its premise to indulge the worst romantic-comedy tropes, scenes featuring zany speed-dating, bad karaoke, soap-opera-style revelations, a fake suicide attempt, schmaltzy third-act toasts, multiple uses of the phrase 'once upon a time', dramatic revelations, and wacky marriage therapies, plural. Did I mention that Ava has a three-week deadline to save her parents marriage before their big, surprise 30th anniversary party that she refuses to cancel?

Love, Wedding, Marriage goes for broad, just-shy-of-slapstick humor. Only Mulroney doesn’t have a feel for the right tone, rhythm, or look of a romantic comedy. In one scene, the marriage therapist that Ava sends her parents to—played by Christopher Lloyd in the most disappointing cameo of his ever put to film—has them run through some pre-therapy exercises that includes them hopping around and snorting air through their noses. Surely, this was supposed to be played for comedy.

In reality, there’s nothing really all that funny about watching Jane Seymour and James Brolin flopping around on screen. It’s almost more sad than funny. When Mulroney tries for some more directorial flourishes, he favors the more dramatic series of extreme close-ups, lingering ponderously on Mandy Moore’s face.

Then again, there isn’t much in the material to elevate with better direction. Much of the dialogue, written by Anouska Chydzik and Caprice Crane of the recent 90210 and Melrose Place reboots, is therapy-speak. People often say exactly what they feel. They talk about fulfillment, prioritizing, and validation. If there is a single least-funny word in the English language, it just might be 'prioritizing'."

 

Click through to read the full review at PopMatters.

 

I've always been a huge fan of Jane magazine (sadly, I missed out on Sassy), so I'm so happy to be on xoJane!

It Happened to Me:  My Birth Control Was Recalled

Knowing that my birth control was possibly defective was frightening. Finding out from a city-centric blog was just galling. The last time there was a recall for cars, I'm pretty sure I heard about it on a popular morning news show as I was getting dressed. My TV was mum about this birth-control deal. Yet the last big BMW recall in late-September affected only 190 cars; Qualitest Pharmaceuticals' shipped out 1.4 million packages of possibly defective product.

"There are no immediate health issues," associated with the recall, Qualitest spokesman Kevin Wiggins was quoted as saying on CNN.com. "The unintended consequence of pregnancy is really the issue."

How that doesn't fall under the heading of "health issue" is foggy, but the message is clear. There wasn't a real chance of unintended death; unintended life, maybe.

Click through to read the rest of the essay on xoJane.

Give Me Liberty
The Liberty Hotel, Boston, MA

A trendy Beacon Hill crowd starts to arrive at the Liberty Hotel lobby. You grab a drink from the lobby bar—perhaps a Juniper Blossom, made of Tanqueray, St. Germain, and grapefruit—and look out onto the soaring four-story atrium. The grand space is marked with towering arched windows, wrought-iron chandeliers, and mahogany furniture. If you didn’t know, you might never guess that the place was once a jail.

Yes, until the 1990s, the hotel was the old Charles Street Jail, which housed inmates such as Sacco and Vanzetti and James Michael Curley (who was imprisoned there for fraud but ran a successful campaign for alderman while he was interred). Developer Carpenter and Company and architect Cambridge Seven Associates teamed up to repurpose the property. The old cellblocks are now stylish catwalks with sitting areas for guests, the original “drunk tank” has (fittingly) been turned into a bar, and some of the original jail cells are now dining nooks at the on-site restaurants. Eighteen of the 298 guest rooms also are set up within the landmark jail building (with the rest in a newly constructed 16-story tower).

While there are many nods to the Liberty Hotel’s history, thankfully, there’s nothing prison-like about the guest accommodations. Spa-like is more apt, with luxurious bathrooms with separate deep bathtubs and rainfall showerheads. And, with a spot right at the foot of the Longfellow Bridge, many of these rooms look out over the Charles River.

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Harvard’s Yard
The Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA

Harvard Square teems with activity. Students crowd coffee shops in the morning and grab beers in bars at night. Bargain-hunters rummage trough bookstores and vintage shops. Couples on dates share falafel sandwiches and sample tacos in the neighborhood’s surfeit of restaurants. Culture-vultures take in an indie film at the Brattle Theatre (617-876-6837, brattlefilm.org) or a performance by the American Repertory Theatre (617-547-8300, amrep.org).

It seems as if The Charles Hotel isn’t just well positioned to take advantage of the life of the neighborhood—it is part of the life of the neighborhood. The hotel’s Regattabar is regarded as one of the best jazz clubs in Boston. (The 26-year-old club has won Boston magazine’s “Best of Boston” award no less than 14 times.) Its Noir, a 1940s-style bar serving classic cocktails like the Mai Tai and the Old Fashioned, was recognized as having the “Best Nightlife” by Food & Wine magazine, and revelers spill from inside to outside on warm nights. Even the courtyard at the entrance to the hotel, which abuts the Kennedy School of Government, is a happening spot for community events, hosting everything from a weekly farmers’ market in warm-weather months to an ice-skating rink in the winter.

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Holiday-on-Hudson
Hudson House River Inn, Cold Spring

Who needs to travel to New England to see fall foliage? As it turns out, you can drive less than an hour and still catch a spectacular autumnal display over the Hudson River. And the best place to take it all in is the Hudson House River Inn in Cold Spring.

The Inn itself, sitting majestically on Main Street and cozied up to the River, dates back to 1832 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Guest rooms have that comfy bed-and-breakfast feel, with antique-looking furniture, floral bedspreads, and patterned wallpaper. But, opt for a room with a full balcony, and chances are you’ll ignore the rest of your accommodations for a chair out on the terrace, where you can look across the River to the wooded Storm King State Park.

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"Terra Nova Offers a World of Possibilities

 

In recent years—certainly since Lost, if not earlier—new dramas have announced their arrivals with splashy, cinematic pilots. Terra Nova‘s premiere certainly delivers on spectacle. The shots swoop and zoom, whooshing their way across CGIed planets, through dystopian cities, and over unspoiled hills. And, yes, there are dinosaurs. There’s the majestic brachiosaurus that looks like a graceful precursor to the giraffe, and there’s the gnashing, barbed-tail acceraptor, also known as “the Slasher.” The dinosaurs look great; the most stunning image in the premiere occurs when a child tries to feed a brachiosaurus a tree branch, only to be lifted up by the beast when she doesn’t let go. It’s a fun, playful moment that doesn’t make you look for the seams in the special effects.

Yet, for all of its visual flourishes and two-hour running time (with commercials), the Terra Nova premiere doesn’t feel like it belongs on the big screen at the multiplex, like the best drama pilots do. It doesn’t feel like a movie; it feels like a really, really long TV pilot. There’s a lot of clunky setup, a lot of piece-moving to send the main characters back to Terra Nova, and a lot of explaining of rules once they get there."

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

 

Returning Home to Larchmont

 

Afterward, festivities moved on to Rye Brook’s Doral Arrowwood. Upon arriving in the ballroom, guests were wowed with soaring centerpieces topped with cherry-blossom branches. 'I originally wanted low centerpieces, because I thought of tall centerpieces as being these big candelabras and over-the-top things. But the ceiling at Arrowwood is so high that you really need tall centerpieces; otherwise, the room looks kind of empty. Lauren Sozmen of Loli Events came up with the idea of branches with cherry blossoms, and we went from there. We got the height that we needed without interfering with conversation around the table.

Click through to read the rest of the article, or download the PDF.

I interviewed local vendors in all aspects of the wedding industry--cake bakers, caterers, musicians, DJs, florists, stationers, photographers, and planners--and solicited their reports on recent wedding trends. The result is a massive survey--spanning 26 pages in the magazine--that's packed with good ideas for those planning a wedding. You can read it online here or download the PDF above.