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An American Steakhouse with a California Perspective
Located on the fifth floor of the Four Seasons hotel, Seasons has been relaunched as an American steakhouse with a California perspective; gone are the heavy side dishes and the serious interiors. In its place: more refined entrées, lighter sides, and a contemporary décor of warm tans, rich woods and deep lapis.
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The Indian Hyphy Rapper
With a new album out this year and a double LP on the way, Bay Area rapper Haji Springer hopes to find his niche with mainstream success as one of the only successful Indian rappers in the United States. The self-proclaimed 7-11 rapper, who split his youth growing up in San Leandro and at his family's ice cream shop in San Francisco, mixes a healthy dose of hyphy beats and humor on his Thizz Entertainment release Hello Buddy.
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SF Station Blows It Up
The last time I shot these kids from the UK was opening for The Bravery at the Fillmore and it was one of the best live shows I've ever seen and this time was even better. From the first step that vocalist Paul Smith took to the last hit of the bass drum of Tom English it was a non stop party. Paul's amazing words and acrobatics would make even a Cirque du Soleil acrobat envious, and the rest of the band plays like they were born with instruments in their hands.
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A Satisfying Conclusion to the Series
Jason Bourne is very much the anti-Bond in The Bourne Ultimatum, the concluding chapter (or so we've been promised) to the series that began five years ago with Doug Liman's adaptation of Robert Ludlam's bestselling novel, The Bourne Identity and continued with The Bourne Supremacy with Paul Greengrass at the helm. The gritty locales, a cynicism-heavy espionage storyline, small-scale action scenes, and an intense turn from Matt Damon as the reluctant title character all contributed to a positive reception from critics and $500 million dollars combined for the first two films in the series.
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Something (Endearingly) Stupid This Way Comes
"Saturday Night Live" producer Lorne Michaels has an infamously spotty track record when it comes to the big screen, but perhaps that's to be expected: Stretching five-minute sketches into feature-length productions is never a simple task, especially those featuring characters whose defining trait is their willingness to fall down on cue. Rod Kimble, the aspiring but hopelessly incompetent stuntman who attempts to steal Evel Knievel's thunder in Hot Rod, is just such a character.
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Fact and Fiction
Jane Austen is considered by many to be one of the world's greatest authors. Well, she certainly knew how to write chick lit. That is, the complexities of courtship and affairs of the heart. However, Austen herself never married and had no significant known relationships. How is it then that someone with no such experience could write about love so insightfully? Becoming Jane has its own theory on that matter.
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March of the Polar Bears (and the Walruses)
Optimistically marketed as the next March of the Penguins, Arctic Tale is a documentary centered on the polar bears and walruses that make their home in the cold, unforgiving Arctic. Shot over five years by husband-and-wife team Sarah Robertson and Adam Ravetch on high-definition video, Arctic Tale was developed, at least partly, to convey the consequences global warming has had on the Arctic. That the voice over narration by Queen Latifah was co-written by Kristen "daughter of Al" Gore shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Gore's anti-global warming, pro-environmentalism advocacy...
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Woefully Conceived, Poorly Executed "Comedy"
Written by Ken Marino and David Wain (and directed by Wain), The Ten is an uneven collection of sub-par comedy skits, masquerading as vignettes, centered on the Ten Commandments. As the title suggests, each commandment gets its own standalone vignette, but each story gets introduced by an onscreen narrator, Jeff (Paul Rudd), standing in front of two huge stone slabs carved with the Ten Commandments.
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A Noe Neighborhood Knitting Nirvana
There's a new sisterhood at my work that's been growing over the past year and it's made up of knitters. I only joined this club a little over a month ago. I've always heard that knitting was a fun and relaxing activity, but I was a little skeptical of that claim at first. I thought that learning something that looked complicated like knitting would cause me to pull my hair out more than it would put my mind at ease.
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The Education of Today's Sushi Chef
Following an injury that extinguished her soccer avocation, twenty-year old Kate Murray found herself in search of her next big love. Sushi helped her body recover and nightly visits to the sushi bar lightened her spirits. Soon she began thinking about sushi in a professional way: as an opportunity to parlay to others the joy she got out of the sushi experience. It could also end her string of dead end jobs. So says her biographer of this point of her life, Trevor Carson, in his new book, The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi from Samurai to Supermarket.
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