A Movie Came Out Last Year...

…written by a Brown alum ex of mine (the one ex who I feel I should have treated better, since I was even less adept at philosophical compromise then and quickly freaked out over her mystical beliefs and baffling sense of humor, but we remained civil, and she wanted kids anyway), called The Ramen Girl, starring the since-deceased Brittany Murphy. Film critic Don Willmott, sending some sort of harsh mixed message, called it “a vacuous but atmospheric analysis of the redemptive power of a good bowl of noodles.”

Oddly enough, though, this makes two exes of mine who at least considered writing noodle-oriented romantic-comedy screenplays with an element of magic, since years later, one — who is also a bit mystically-inclined, actually — considered writing a movie centered on the Tiger Noodles restaurant near Princeton. In a future era, all of these sorts of unintended recurring patterns will be as transparent to psychologists and sociologists as fight-or-flight responses are today, I suspect.

The Princeton one was in turn so moved once by a Jonathan Leaf play based on a real-life hostage-taking in DC by Palestinian terrorists back in the 70s that she had to go sit in the lobby for a while — all the more reason to see his current play, running for two more weeks, Sexual Healing, which was slated to have Ray J and members of the Jersey Shore cast attend it last week, I’m told, so maybe the play will be glimpsed on MTV. The Situation is theatrical.

Another Leaf play years ago featured fine actor Harry Lennix (Capt. Locke from the Matrix sequels) as Pushkin, and as it happens, he did a great job on last night’s penultimate Dollhouse episode. Now if only the final episode weren’t airing 8pm January 29, at the same time as the Smallville featuring the Justice Society of America — probably the only two pieces of TV entertainment I’ll have been interested in all season (though tomorrow, I’ll link to both me and Chris Elliott’s version of FDR making TV appearances…).