Two to talk about at RFC

When you're listening, you hear movie chatter in surprising places. Tuesday at yoga – yes, I'm an on-again, off-again yogi – the class was all abuzz about "Food, Inc." The documentary about an industrialized food industry opens today at the Robinson Film Center. Now, it's not that I wouldn't expect yogis to be interested in the doc. They're healthy. They care about what they eat. Their buzz makes perfect sense. What's interesting is how movies like this become sincere lifestyle conversation pieces. As often is the case with talk about docs, people use the subject as a starting point for their own inquiries. You can participate in one of those publicly on Saturday at 3 p.m., when there will be a panel about community gardening and all things salubrious. (Full disclosure: The panel is sponsored by the host of my yoga class, but he wasn't the one who started the Tuesday conversation!)

Additionally, my Facebook inbox has been all a chatter about the 20^th anniversary screenings of Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," also at RFC. To call this masterpiece about race relations "a masterpiece about race relations" only scratches the surface. "Do the Right Thing" remains an astounding piece of filmmaking not only because of its subject, style and form – all brilliant, by the way – but also because it successfully uses humor to seriously examine the tension between nonviolence and in-your-face protest. If you haven't seen this on the big screen, do it.