Brian Bentley

Greeting from the Chili’s bar in LAX’s gate 42B. I’m writing this on my Blackberry as I watch the Mavericks try to even their series with the Warriors, so please forgive any typos. I will admit right away that I am pretty po’d due to my return flight being delayed nearly 4 hours and the Mavericks inability to pull away in this game so bear with me.

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The following email just hit my inbox:

“Congratulations on your acceptance into Level 4 of the Conservatory at The Second City Training Center!”

What does it mean? 16 more weeks for Level 4 and 5, plus 4 weeks of graduate shows….and that I’m doing what I need to do.

Friday afternoon was the much anticipated Level 4/5 audition, and I almost missed it. I had a 12:30 flight and let’s just say due to some poor planning when I arrived I heard “FINAL BOARDING”. This is the second week in a row that I’ve arrived within 20 minutes of my flight’s departure. One of these days I’m going to end up missing one of these flights. “When you play with fire scarecrow…” In my haste, I also forgot to check the weather for LA and boarded wearing shorts and t-shirt. Little did I know it was 55 in LA and dropping. When I finally got to SC, I changed into jeans in the backseat of my rented Ford Taurus (the. worst. car. ever.)

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Review: “Hot Fuzz”
Run time: 2:01

A “parody” or “satire” usually skewers the material on which it is based. The “Naked Gun” movies were extremely slapsticky and could be best described as “loose send ups” of police movies, where the case itself is hardly anything more than a reason to set Leslie Nielsen in glorious motion. “Hot Fuzz” is neither parody or satire, it is straight up brilliant. I love the British sense of humor because it is very straightfoward and direct without the mugging and wink-wink, tongue in cheek efforts to make it funny by accompanying a joke with a silly face or gesture.

From the same people that made “Shaun of the Dead”, “Hot Fuzz” is smart and funny, but never once tries to give off the feeling that it’s not meant to be a big budget, blow stuff up cop movie. The writing is sharp, the stars have obvious chemistry, and there are so many funny references to other cop movies (“Bad Boys 2″, “Point Break” to name a few) without being a “Scary Movie” type film. The plot is outlandish, and the gratuitous gore is hilarious, but aren’t big budget cops movies supposed to be that way?

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are the stars, and real life best friends offscreen. They play off each other so well and it translates to the film. Look for Peter Jackson as a knife wielding Santa Claus, and Cate Blanchett as Pegg’s girlfriend, Janine.

Rating: 5 out of 5

They say everything has it’s opposite. What goes up, must come down. Well, the opposite of a great “Amigo Friends” Saturday night show, would be the Level 3 class show this afternoon. We had such a great, tight “Amigo” show Saturday with a near capacity audience and then today we just stunk it up for the 7 people in attendence. I realize it’s a class show and is there for us to put our training to use, but oofah today was bad. I don’t know if it was the pending auditions weighing on us or what, but we just plain stunk.

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Wow. All I can say is wow.

I never thought that the first show of “The Amigo Friends” (TAF) would be sold out and that they would be turning people away. If you would have asked me what my prediction would have been for attendance, I would have said a theater half full of our friends with some polite laughter, but was I wrong. The SC theater was packed and the crowd was so into what we were doing. I don’t think I have ever seen a crowd that hot before, laughing, clapping, really getting into it. When we walked offstage we all looked at each other with this look of “what the hell just happened out there?” It was such an incredible experience and I’m so glad I got to spend it with the other 8 amigos. I want to say thank you to everyone that came out, and those that tried to get in but were turned away – you know who you are and what group you fall into. A special thank you to my friend Glenn Morshower and his wife Carolyn who came out for the show.

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Saturday morning I had a meeting with casting director Shari Rhodes in the morning, but a camera snafu caused me to have to reschedule for later this week. Shari has done a ton of casting for some big name movies and she’s very active in casting movies still today. Lucky for me I knew how to fix the camera and hopefully, that will land me a job on one of Shari’s movies.  :)

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