Hasta La Gadget!

Here’s the best thing about attending an event like the Marrakech International Film Festival: It’s one of the rare opportunities that a critic has to truly walk into a screening knowing absolutely nothing about a film – to enjoy it (or not) based on its own merits, minus any hype or advance word of any kind.

Unlike Toronto (or New York or Sundance, which I attend on a regular basis), Marrakech (like Dubai, which I attended the last two years) has offered a slate of competition films which, for the most part, I’ve never heard of, made by directors and actors with whom I’m unfamiliar. Seeing a film with a clean slate – with no expectations based on reviews, buzz or trailers – is a treat, even when the film itself is not.

As it happened, because of a couple of interviews I had scheduled for Monday (one of which you can find here), my day was broken up in a way that only allowed me to see two films. But it then gave us the chance to explore one of the more magical spots in the city.

That would be Le Jardin Majorelle, a small enclosed garden given to the city as a gift by one of its former residents, the late fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent. Located in the middle of the city, it’s a lush pocket of greenery, containing a wonderfully varied collection of plants – primarily different varieties of bamboo, cactus and palms.

It’s enclosed within large, ochre-colored clay walls, with cerulean blue doors. It seems like a cliché to refer to it as an oasis, but it feels comparatively isolated and quiet, given the drastically heavy traffic in the narrow streets surrounding it. The compound includes a gallery of hand-painted Christmas greetings bearing Saint-Laurent’s message, “Love,” which he sent to friends each year, and a museum devoted to the history of Berber culture.

My movie day was brief and unfulfilling. The first of the two films I saw, Mirage, is part of the festival competition and stars the always-compelling Isaach de Bankole.

This commentary continues on my website.

Sony Pictures is in full-blown damage-control mode and has called an all-hands meeting following another huge leak of sensitive, confidential info. The new trove of data released by the so-called GOP (Guardians of Peace) includes more private employe…

The purpose of eating is to nourish your body — it is a basic need for survival — yet so many of us eat for other reasons. Feeling sad? Let’s eat. Time to celebrate? Bring on the food. No date tonight? That’s OK, order a pizza. It seems like we, as a society, are constantly eating! When practically everything we do and every emotion we feel leads to some form of eating, it’s no wonder we end up misusing food, overeating, and putting on excess weight.

In order to control your habits and overcome impulses, Dr. Phil suggests that you have to relearn how to identify your hunger signals and recognize the   different types of hunger you’re experiencing. To help you regain a normal, healthy perspective on when and how much to eat, Dr. Phil shares a Hunger and Fullness Scale in his new book,  The 20/20 Diet: 20 Key Foods To Help You Succeed Where Other Diets Fail. He suggests using this tool every day until you are more tuned in with the physical symptoms associated with hunger, as well as the differences between physical hunger, mind hunger, and habit hunger.

Before you start each meal, you should be at a 3. In fact, you shouldn’t ever let yourself fall beneath a 3. “If you wait until you’re just famished, you’ll eat anything that’s dead or seriously slowed down,” Dr. Phil explains in the video above. “You don’t want to get into that serious situation.” In other words, that’s precisely when you set yourself up for failure.

On the other end of the scale, instead of getting so full after a meal that your pants are busting and you feel nauseated, you should put your fork down when you reach a 6, even if there’s still food on your plate. “The ideal range is to stay between 3 and 6 so you never go to the extremes,” Dr. Phil explains.

Adapted from The 20/20 Diet: 20 Key Foods To Help You Succeed Where Other Diets Fail © 2014 by Phillip C. McGraw, Bird Street Books.

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Holy cow. I don’t know how professional skier Cody Townsend pulled off this insane ski line that saw him pretty much drop straight down and then through the most narrow of cracks while skiing insanely fast but he did it. The English language is not equipped to express how unbelievably mind-blowingly awesome his ski run was.

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