At The Movies INDIAN CUISINE "Ruchi Indian Cuisine is genuine good homestyle Indian food" Danny Raskin • Indian Chinese • South Indian & North Indian Specialties • Daily Lunch Beet • Weekend Special Lunch Buffit • Banquet Facility • Catering Services 50% oFF The Majestic' Martin Landau stars with Jim Carrey in a film about a blacklisted writer who loses his memory and ends up with a new life in a small town. I NAOMI PFEFFERMAN Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles Buy one entry & receive 50uo off second entree of equal or lesser value I during dinner time only. Limit 1 coupon per table. I Cannot be combined Nvith any other offer. I 1 coupon Expires December .31. 2001 11. NM a OPEN DAILY for Lunch or Dinner 29555 Northwestern Hwy. (in La Mirage Complex) Southfield (248) 352-3200 http:www.ruchiindiancuisine.com RESTAURANT MID-EASTERN, CHALDEAN St AMERICAN •Lambchops • Lamb Shish Kabob •White Fish Curry • Tabouleh • Hommus •Vegetarian Entrees • Fresh Catch •Chicken Shawarma • Etc. •Fresh Juice Bar • Cocktails and Wine 6123 HAGGERTY RD. OUST N. OF MAPLE)- BLOOMFIELD AVENUE SHOPS WEST BLOOMFIELD (248) 668-1800 27060 EVERGREEN (AT 11 MILE & EVERGREEN) LATHRUP LANDING LATHRUP VILLAGE (248) 559-9099 COUPON GOOD AT BOTH LOCATIONS r 50% OFF 1 Lunch or Dinner With purchase of a second lunch or dinner entree of equal or greater value • 1Coupon Per Couple • Not Valid With other Offers • Expires 12/31/2001 I • Dine In Only L I MN OM MI 1=111 IVIIT oodv Allen and I used to play a little game," confides Martin Landau, who portrays the owner of an aged movie house in Frank Darabont's new film, The Majestic. "I'd say, 'The Elm,' and he'd say, 'The Midwood.' I'd say, 'The Kenmore,' and he'd say, 'The Avalon.'" Landau and Allen, who collaborated on 1989's Crimes & Misdemeanors, were referring to the theaters both fre- quented while growing up eight blocks apart in Brooklyn. "They were like little palaces, all roco- co or art deco," recalls the actor, who was born in 1928. "You'd walk in off those hot streets into a nice, air-cooled theater and you'd spend all day watching Cagney or Jimmy Stewart. It cost all of 17 cents. Woody and I both fell in love with the movies at those old theaters. It was the only way to fall in love." Landau says he was drawn to The Majestic because the film honors those kinds of movie houses — now mostly gone — and the motion pictures they once screened. Set in 1951, the Capra-esque fable tells of a blacklisted Hollywood screen- writer (Jim Carrey) who gets amnesia and stumbles into a town where the local theater owner (Landau) mistakes him for his long-lost son. The two men are soon inspired to resuscitate the decrepit theater, called The Majestic, to its original Egyptian-style splendor. "Movie houses today just aren't the same kind of experience," laments the effusive Landau, who is of the same generation as the New York actors Marlon Brando and Paul Newman but didn't win his first Oscar nomination until he was in his 50s. "The modern cineplexes are mun- dane, dull boxes. But The Majestic pays tribute to the movie palaces that made people feel like royalty. It honors a time when pictures helped Americans get through grim periods like the blacklist and the war. Catering For All Occasions g s GET DETROIT ju 12/21 2001 70 Classifieds Results! (248) 354-5959 Late Bloomer Landau lived through some of those grim times. During World War II, his the movie palaces: "I want to become an actor," he told his boss, quitting on the spot. He met his best friend during those early years at a CBS audition around 1952. "I was given a number, 376, and this sandy- haired, bespectacled young man was num- ber 377," Landau recalls. "I reeked of the big city; he evoked middle America. But our predilections about the theater turned out Martin Landau, center; as Harry Trimble, is overcome with joy-when the man he believes to be his long-lost son to be exactly the same." The man's name was returns home, in "The Majestic." James Dean. Another major figure in Landau's Austrian-born father scrambled to rescue life was his acting coach, Curt relatives from the Nazis. In late 1939, he Conway, a former CBS director rele- helped smuggle eight ancient Torahs out gated to teaching after the Communist of Hitler's Europe and delivered them to blacklists destroyed his career. his Orthodox shul in Brooklyn. "Curt was never a Communist, but "I remember there was a joyful pro- he had signed a petition, backed by cession down the street," says Landau, leftist groups, to help a black man who at 17 became a cartoonist for the falsely accused of raping a white New York Daily News but at 22 decid- woman," says Landau, who later stud- ed he didn't want to spend his career ied at the Actors Studio and played a drawing pictures. homosexual henchman in Hitchcock's His mind turned to Broadway and North By Northwest. to the magic he'd experienced inside `Not Another Teen Movie' An irreverent comedy that skewers the conventions and cliches of a movie genre. NAOMI PFEFFERMAN Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles 111 ichael Bender and Mia Kirschner admit there's no Jewish archetype in Joel Gallen's Not Another Teen Movie — a "nasty and frequently hilarious assault on 20 years' worth of youth pictures," according to the New York Times. "The 'Jewish kid' isn't really a char- acter that's consistently come up in teen movies," says Bender, one of the comedy's writers and co-producers. Maybe that's why the football team in the film's fictional John Hughes High is called "The Wasps," suggests Kirschner, who plays the school's "Cruelest Girl" (a spoof of the film, Cruel Intentions). During a joint interview, Bender and Kirschner, both 26, say they became fast friends on the set but were opposite Jewish types in high school. Bender — who belonged to a prep- py clique called "The Plaid Boys" at his mostly Italian New Jersey school — was the "Token Jewish Guy." And Toronto-bred Kirschner — often kicked out of class for her defiant behavior — was the "not so nice Jewish girl." (She's since played a