Flicked Off: 'When In Rome'

Somehow, we ended up at this movie over the weekend, just us and some girls who were really lonely. And a few really angry boyfriends. You guys. Little Kristin Bell, barely there. Josh Duhamel, a lunk with a nice brow. A plot (magic love fountains!) that not even Annie Hathaway could paste together with her face. And, what’s more, a ghostly drive-by from Judith Malina. Born in the 20s, the daughter of German rabbi who emigrated to America in 1929, the twice-widowed avant-garde theater superstar has not had a film or TV role since the 69th episode of The Sopranos, broadcast in April of 200-as Paulie’s nun-aunt who reveals that she is actually his mother, causing him to flip out. (Then she dies.)

Malina met and later married Julian Beck when she was a teen; they ran the Living Theatre, left New York for Europe and returned off and on throughout the 60s and 70s. Malina’s memoir, The Enormous Despair, documents the experience of arriving in America in the late 60s, and also meeting Ginsberg, Leary and Dali.

She appeared in Dog Day Afternoon (and played the grandmother in The Addams Family movie in 1991. Beck himself would, in 1986, have a good-sized role in… Poltergeist II, though he had died the year previous.)

And now Malina shows up in When in Rome as a witchy, angry Italian grandmother of a groom, who spits on Kristin Bell. Why wouldn’t she? The Living Theater, at 21 Clinton Street, appears to be in some sort of vague yet deep financial trouble. Malina’s second husband, the theater’s co-artistic director Hanon Reznikov, died in 2008. Malina had signed a ten year lease in 2006. And now, the theater is accepting $10 donations online to stay alive.