Antonio's Italian Pizza Kitchen (CLOSED)

NOTE: Antonio's closed in 2016.

Located at 4648 West Market Street in Greensboro, Antonio’s Italian Pizza Kitchen offers pizza, subs, pasta and more for lunch and dinner. There are pizza, pasta, and wine deals on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays respectively.

I’ll always have a soft spot for classic red sauce Italian, and Antonio’s certainly fits the bill. Everything from the name to the copious usage of Italian flag colors to the red checkered tablecloths is predictable, but there are actually quite a few surprises here.

To start, the menu is surprisingly varied. You’ll find all the usual suspects (mozzarella sticks, New York-style pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, etc.) here, but Antonio’s also offers everything from salmon and veal dishes to lite and gluten-free fare to sandwiches that will make you look twice. Case-in-point: the Turkey Holiday (roast turkey, turkey bacon, and provolone with cranberry aioli) lets you experience Thanksgiving year-round.

Antonio’s also has two separate entrances. One leads to the dining room, the other to a counter for takeout orders. I opted for the latter for my first visit, which gave me a glance of the kitchen. If nothing else, Antonio’s appears adequately staffed.

The food, however, proved to be uneven. The Boom Boom Porchetta (roasted pork, sautéed spinach, and provolone with pesto mayo) sounded great on paper, and indeed the well-herbed meat delivered on flavor, but the bread was slightly burned and the sandwich was on the greasy side. An order of fried calamari was fair. While they did well to avoid overcooking (rubbery squid is a friend to no one), the breading could have been crispier.

These inconsistencies aside, it is hard to argue with the pricing here. My sandwich was $8 and included a salad, and many lunch-sized pastas run about the same. There are also $7.77 lunch combos that include drinks.

I’ve yet to try the pizza here, and that alone is worth a return visit. So far, however, Antonio’s has all the makings of a once-in-a-while spot: too uneven to rely on regularly but too interesting and affordable to dismiss entirely.

7.5/10

Mad Max: Fury Road

In the future, nuclear wars have rendered the world a barren wasteland where fuel and water are scarce. Amid this backdrop, former police officer “Mad” Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) wanders the desert haunted by the memories of his dead loved ones. It isn’t long before Max is captured and put to use as a forced blood donor for the War Boys of the Citadel, a massive colony run by the tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Meanwhile, one of Joe’s trusted operatives, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), betrays him by attempting to take his harem of child-bearing wives to freedom. As they flee Joe’s forces, her journey and Max’s become intertwined.

In the three decades since the last Mad Max movie (the disappointing Beyond the Thunderdome), Mel Gibson aged out of the title role and director/series creator George Miller faded largely into obscurity, emerging to direct family fare such as Happy Feet. Given these circumstances, it’s a small miracle that a fourth Mad Max movie got made at all. It’s a considerably larger miracle that a movie with a recast lead, a threadbare plot, and minimal dialogue manages to be as successful as it is.

At first glance, Fury Road appears to be the quintessential big, dumb action movie. There’s merit to the charge: a good deal of the film is taken up by a car chase as Furiosa steers a massive war rig away from myriad wheeled pursuers. However, this is an action movie with style and heart. Visually, it takes its cues from The Road Warrior, but it turns the volume way up. The cars are stacked, spiked, and armed to amusingly implausible degrees. The War Boys are suicidal pale mutants, eager to huff chrome paint and seek the glory of the afterlife. Joe himself (who shares an actor with but is unrelated to the antagonist of the first Mad Max) is a scarred old man whose respirator mask makes him look like the nightmare child of Bane and the Joker. There are massive dust storms and creepy crows, guitars that shoot flames and motocross grenadiers. Frequent Hans Zimmer collaborator Junkie XL provides a score that lends operatic grandeur, and Miller’s preference for practical effects means there is an absence of conspicuous CGI.

Despite this insanity, Fury Road is more than just the sum of its explosions. There is some deft messaging at play here. The Citadel evokes remerging old society: efficient, yes, but hierarchal and brutal. In contrast, Furiosa’s mission – to live (and breed) safely and freely – smacks of naïve idealism but one can hardly fault its noble intent. There is probably much more to the mythology here, but so little is given on-screen (seriously, don’t expect long monologues or expository speeches) that it places the actors in the unenviable position of implying their characters’ backstories wholesale. In the case of the two leads, they pull it off quite well. Hardy neither looks nor sounds like Gibson, but the core of the character is still there: a once-moral man who has lost much of his humanity through tragedy and violence. Meanwhile, Theron is wholly believable as an iron-willed warrior determined to atone for past wrongs (even if we don’t know what those wrongs are). Unfortunately, the rest of the characters aren’t as compelling. Joe is a one-dimensional ham in a scary mask, his wives get little in the way of development, and War Boy defector Nux (Nicholas Hoult) plays too much like comic relief to empathize with.

Bombastic, frenzied, and flat-out strange, Fury Road reads like Twisted Metal meets Fallout meets rock opera, but don’t let the packaging fool you: there is enough substance here to sustain the crazy ride.

8.25/10