Last night on Bravo’s “Top Chef: Las Vegas,” the six remaining contestants were greeted in the kitchen of the Venetian Hotel with a phone call from host Padma Lakshmi. Padma was hanging out in a hotel room with cookbook author and TV personality Nigella Lawson, and the quick fire challenge was to cook and deliver to them breakfast in bed.

Robin went first (how is she still here?) and made blintzes with goat cheese and pineapple. I don’t like goat cheese, but either way, that sounds disgusting. Eli made a reuben benedict with thousand island hollandaise sauce. Since they were staggered in groups of two, next was Mike and Kevin. Mike made a huevos Cubana with banana puree, and Kevin made steak and eggs. Then it was Jen and Bryan–Jen went with creamed chipped beef and Bryan made a 4-minute egg over corn polenta.

Nigella’s least favorite dishes were Robin and Bryan, and her favorites were Kevin and Eli. But she had to choose one winner, and that person was Eli. Since immunity is no longer issued, Eli’s prize was also quite cool…to have his recipe featured in the Top Chef Quick Fire Cookbook.

For the main challenge, the chefs had to draw knives, with each one representing a popular Vegas hotel. They would then have to create a dish based on the theme of that hotel for 175 guests, including the judging panel. The judges would be the regulars Tom Colicchio and Padma, as well as Toby Young and Nigella.

Mike drew New York, New York and he made boneless Buffalo chicken wings with a blue cheese dipping sauce. Jen had Excalibur and her idea was a medieval themed meat…so she made a New York strip with beets and red wine. Bryan had Mandalay Bay and made a halibut with a bouillabaise consomme.

Robin had the Bellagio and went with a panna cotta, which is like an Italian custard, but she also tried to make stained glass panels out of sugar and it all fell apart. Kevin had the Mirage and he made a wild sockeye salmon with compressed vegetables and a tomato broth. Finally, Eli had Circus Circus and took the biggest gamble by making a caramel apple and peanut soup with pulverized popcorn. Say what?

At this point, we’re all thinking Robin has hung around long enough….but for whatever reason, she’s been lucky because someone else in the field has performed worse each week. Well, let’s see what happens….

The favorites were Kevin, Mike and Bryan….and the winner was…Mike. You might think making boneless Buffalo wings was almost a copout, but he won based on execution, as Toby Young mentioned how perfectly crispy the chicken was. I’m getting hungry. Mike’s prize was a bottle of Terrato wine and a trip for two to the Terrato vinyards in Napa Valley.

The least favorites were (well who is left, right?) Eli, Jen and Robin. The judges mentioned that Jen’s steak was tough and that she has been floundering the last few weeks after getting off to a great start. Eli’s soup was pretty much a disaster, and Colicchio mentioned that it “texturally failed.” Yikes. And Robin’s panna cotta just didn’t work. She went on an on about how she bit off more than she could chew with the stained glass, saying, “I”m such a jerk.” Okay, that’s a bit harsh, but Colicchio then asked Robin if she was being influenced by the other judges. Meaning, was she trying to overcompesate for being less talented and trying to wow the judges instead? Good point, and last night that is what sent Robin home…or perhaps it was her body of work this season, because clearly she is not in the same class as Mike, Bryan, Kevin, Eli and Jen.

So FINALLY Robin is off the show and we can focus on these five really talented chefs heading into the final rounds. I think Jen or Eli is next, and this is going to come down to Kevin and the brothers Voltaggio. It has to, right?

Thanks for reading and see you all next week…

Writer-director John Boorman (“Deliverance,” “Excalibur,” “Hope and Glory”) has never been afraid of taking chances, and that definitely continues in this witty, suspenseful, and flawed 2006 thriller-cum-family drama. “The Tiger’s Tail” reteams Boorman with his lead actor from 1998’s “The General,” Brendan Gleeson (“In Bruges,” “28 Days Later“). This time, Gleeson is a renowned Dublin real estate capitalist with a calm but frosty marriage to wife Kim Cattrall, a strained but affectionate relationship with his Marxist teenage son (Briain Gleeson, the character actor’s actual offspring), and a business on the edge of collapse. All of that, however, is just par for the course until an exact double turns-up and appears bent on the most extreme form of identity theft.

As you might expect, this is a tale full of twists and turns. Unfortunately, several of them are weirdly contrived (think “Trading Places” meets “Ordinary People” with a distasteful dash of “Straw Dogs”) and many moments are just plain overheated –- at times Boorman seems to want to bludgeon us with composer Stephen McKeon’s score. Still, “The Tiger’s Tail” is salvaged by plentiful tension, humor, heart, and some very good performances, not only from Gleeson in a showy dual role, but also from son Briain and an especially moving turn by veteran actress Sinead Cusack. Best of all is a conclusion that takes the film to a place very few thrillers go. In his mid-seventies, Boorman remains a big-hearted filmmaker and this is a messy but big-hearted film.

Click to buy “The Tiger’s Tail”

* If the movie world had a “Friday news dump” the way they do in D.C., the news that Martin Scorsese’s Dennis Lehane adaptation, “Shutter Island,” has been moved from November of ’09 to February of ’10 might be so handled. No such luck for Paramount as Nikki Finke, Anne Thompson and Screenrant and pretty much every two-bit blogger on the ‘net, including me, has something to say. This is not the first promising film to be so switched. “The Wolf Man” was also shunted by Universal from the traditionally good-movie rich fall to the less auspicious late winter.

Finances are obviously at the root, but speculation is rife on how the move might have been influenced by the Academy’s recent switch to ten awards annually. In any case, I tend to buy at least two of Nikki Finke’s reasons — a simple delay to spread out the financial cost of marketing the film around during tough economic times (perhaps with the hope of a better 2010) and the fact that star Leonardo DiCaprio wouldn’t have been able to promote the film this autumn. Considering they had people already fairly worked about the film, it’s a definite sign of some fragility, I’d say.

* Will the Twitter effect make movies better? Is it even real? Michael Sragow has a decent, yet frustrating, article on the ongoing topic. (H/t Anne Thompson.)

* After making one deal to direct an extremely ill-advised possible “Battlestar Galatica” re-reboot, Bryan Singer has also signed on to do a remake of John Boorman’s King Arthur epic, “Excalibur.” I love John Boorman’s work in general and also tales of chivalry and swordplay, yet I kind of hate (or at least can’t sit through) the original film, which many love but I find unspeakably turgid. So, I guess I’m open-minded about what Singer will do with it. Can almost only be an improvement for me. Of course, neither of these films may ever actually happen. Bryan Singer’s next film is expected to be “Jack, the Giant Killer.”

An interesting note about the 1962 movie version of the fairy tale (one no one ever bothered to tell me…I always thought it was another name for “Jack and the Beanstalk”). Many musicals have had their songs removed to be released in non-musical versions over the years, this is one of the very few where a producer attempted to turn it into a musical after the fact.

* And because everyone else is giving it to you, I might as well also serve up the trailer for Michael Moore’s new “Capitalism: A Love Story.” It made me laugh but of Christopher Campbell, whose favorite words lately seem to be “dated” and “derivative” (but not “delightful” or “delovely”) and his crew of usual suspects mostly think it disappoints. Do these guys ever like anything? Campbell never seems to. In comments, JoblessInTampa has some choice words for the Eastern film geek elites on the issue of being out-of-step.