Friday, August 8, 10 a.m.-ish: I'm at The Hundred-Foot Journey, and five minutes into this lighthearted foodie dramedy, I'm already regretting my decision to only have yogurt for breakfast. With director Lasse Hallström's camera slavering over the creation of steaming, succulent pots and grills of Indian cuisine, all of it enhanced by spices and oils whose aromas are practically wafting off the screen, this is not the movie to see if you're hungry. Considering screenwriter Steven Knight's T-shirt-ready dialogue - which features such pithy bromides as "Life has its own flavor," "We cook to make ghosts," and the grammatically vexing "Food is memories" - it's not really the movie to see if your brain is hungry, either.

Friday, August 1, 9:50 a.m.-ish: Movies based on Marvel comics are routinely, sometimes annoyingly formula-driven. But 10 minutes into Guardians of the Galaxy, I really hope every subsequent Marvel release steals from this one, because all the studio's films - hell, all films period - should open with Chris Pratt doing a Singin' in the Rain soft-shoe to Redbone's "Come & Get Your Love."

Maybe you'll need to have seen a lot of stage farces, or feel like you've seen every stage farce, to appreciate what writer/director Jim Hessleman is doing in the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's world-premiere presentation Love, Lies, & the Lottery. Because this isn't just, as its title implies, a traditional, door-slamming slapstick, despite the numerous doors to be slammed. (Or rather, here, gently closed.) This energetic, sometimes hilarious, incredibly busy production is more accurately a comedic greatest-hits package, and one boasting a larger number of familiar genre conceits than you would've thought squeezable into two hours of stage time. You could teach a semester on Intro to Modern Farce using Hesselman's play as your textbook and still not cover everything in time for the final.

When you first walk in the doors of downtown Davenport's recently opened Hot Glass art studio, there are a few things you might notice right off the bat.

Initially, your eye is drawn to the vibrant splashes of color on the shelving units to the left: multi-hued glass bowls, vases, and paperweights, all located beneath a striking, meticulously assembled, golden glass chandelier that wouldn't look out of place in the ballroom of Beauty & the Beast.

To your right, you see much of the studio's equipment: a workbench and containers of colored glass and a pair of sizable furnaces, one of whose indicators reveals its interior temperature to be just over 2,300 degrees.

On the opposite side of the studio, through the windows facing River Drive, you're treated to a view of Modern Woodmen Park so picture-perfect that the ballpark should consider using it on souvenir postcards. (Hot Glass is located at 104 Western Avenue, in the rear of the Davenport Printing Company facility.)

But if you turn around and face the direction you came in, you'll find what is the most beautiful sight in the entire studio, at least for Hot Glass Executive Director Joel Ryser and his co-founder son Logan: a large sign on the wall listing the names of local organizations, businesses, and individuals who provided the money, equipment, and experience necessary to make their dream studio a reality.