By SARA LENZ

On Saturday night, my husband and I were looking for a fun place to eat. We didn’t want anything too expensive or too far away. So I looked up Provo’s top restaurants and found Guru’s Cafe. It was just down the street at 45 East Center Street and looked like it offered a variety of food for a fair price (between $6 and $10), so we went.

Walking in, it looks like an old factory decked out in various retro art — very fitting for the college scene. One side of the wall is painted like a sunset while the other one is adorned in clouds. The tables are gold, and there are lots of things to look at while waiting in line to order.

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By SARA LENZ

Offering an alternative to the typical Provo indie restaurant scene, Terra Mia in Orem is a low-key Italian restaurant supplying authentic pizzas, pastas, and desserts including ZaZa gelato.

With a set-up similar to Guru’s cafe on Center Street in Provo (order and pay at a cash register, take a number and wait for your food), the atmosphere is simple and the service is laid-back with a fancy Italian twist.  A well-lit, open space with large canvas photos of Italy hanging on the tall walls, the restaurant has a welcoming vibe. Most spectacular was a square bar in the center of the room, wrapping around a tree growing right through it.

For about an hour and a half it’s OK to be a nerd. In fact, if you don’t get in touch with that inner, sci-fi loving self while watching “Gentlemen Broncos,” you’ll probably find yourself twiddling your fingers out of boredom.

The new film from Jared Hess, director of “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre,” takes us into a new world of spacey awkwardness.

In classic Jared Hess fashion, this movie opens with a creative montage filled with retro sci-fi book covers for each prominent member of the cast and crew. The 1969 hit from Zager and Evans, “In the Year 2525,” sets the tone and hurls the viewer back in time. Lasers, spacesuits and rockets: you’ll get it all.

“Broncos” tells the story of Benjamin, a home-schooled introvert with the social tenacity of a grapefruit, who aspires to be a prodigious sci-fi novelist like his idol, Dr. Ronald Chevalier.

At first glance, “The Book of Basketball” is 700 pages worth of NBA facts and figures provided by ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, affectionately known as “The Sports Guy” by his legion of readers.

Those statistics, however, are not the heart of Simmons’ monumental work, nor were they intended to be. Simmons himself argues that basketball and its players are impossible to grasp on stats alone, which is why he conducted three years’ worth of research watching game film and reading dozens of basketball books to put the numbers in their place.

Politics aside, the tradition of Iranian music and dance will live on by educating and entertaining audiences in a folkloric performance.

Eastern Arts presents Worldance 2009: Iran Zamin, honoring Robert de Warren, performing tonight at 7 p.m. at Kingsbury Hall at the University of Utah.

The performance will feature folk dancers from BYU, Eastern Arts International Dance Theatre and AVA Persian Music Ensemble.

“Eastern Arts has been doing this show for about 20 years and we have been at Kingsbury Hall for about 10 of that and we have done world dance featuring different countries in Eurasia, countries with a large Muslim community,” said Katherine St. John, director of Eastern Arts.