ritter

Starting Sunday, actor Jason Ritter will be back onscreen as attorney Julian Markston in Season 2 of the CBS legal drama “Matlock,” loosely inspired by the 1980s and ’90s Andy Griffith show of the same name. He still gets a thrill when he thinks about the cast he gets to work with, which includes Skye P. Marshall, Beau Bridges and Oscar winner Kathy Bates.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

“You almost, but not quite ever, forget that you’re working with an absolute acting legend,” Ritter says. “Kathy is so sweet and so kind and such a team player and collaborator that it helps to sort of stop that voice in your head from going like ‘It’s Kathy Bates!’ every time it’s a scene with her.”

The 45-year-old L.A. native, part of an entertainment family that includes his late father, sitcom legend John Ritter, didn’t offer up many details about the new season but did say viewers can expect more on-the-edge-of-your-seat episodes. (If you need a refresher of last season, episodes of “Matlock” are available on Paramount+.)

“It has the same pace and fun mystery as the first season, but now my character’s secrets have been revealed,” says Ritter, who regularly posts about the show and his fellow actors on Instagram along with humorous bits.

At home with actor-wife Melanie Lynskey, whom he married in 2020, and their 6-year-old daughter, there aren’t any great mysteries that need to be solved, but there is work to do before bed.

“When midnight starts,” Ritter says, “we’re probably finishing up the jobs, as we call them — you know, the dishes and the chores and cleaning everything up, which is a lovely habit that I’ve gotten into from [my wife]. I always used to just wake up to the nightmare from the night before and I’ve learned to really appreciate waking up to a clean area.”

After lights out and some sleep, his ideal Sunday picks up hours later and is filled with plenty of coffee, some miniature golf or a nature walk and more.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

7 a.m.: A different kind of call time
I will wake up usually at 7. If our daughter is going to school, then I have to wake up at 7 so I can start making her lunch and getting stuff ready. But if she’s having a bit of a sleep-in [on the weekend], then I still have to wake up at 7 to make sure everything times out. And then I’ll make her little lunch and her breakfast. While she’s eating breakfast, she usually gets to watch an episode of something. That’s my prime scrolling through social media time.

9:30 a.m.: Time for more coffee
We would all pile in the car, and our first stop would probably be a coffee stop. We are a big coffee family — not our daughter. We always make a pot of coffee in the morning. And even though we’ve had several cups already, we’ll stop at Go Get Em Tiger, one of our favorite coffee places in L.A. We’ve come to know a lot of the baristas there, so we get to chat about life and everything. And then we’ll be back on the road.

10 a.m.: Miniature golf or a ‘beauty’ walk
Our daughter and I will go to Castle Park, which is the miniature golf place in Sherman Oaks. My daughter and I have really bonded over miniature golf, and that’s sort of our little thing. Any miniature golf course has a real special place in my heart, but Castle Park is the place that I went to as a kid. The course is basically the same. It’s just so fun to watch [our daughter] get better and better at golf; even though, recently she’s become obsessed with par.

If mini golf didn’t take up so much time, my daughter and I like to go on these little beauty walks where she gets on her scooter and puts her helmet on. We just walk around the neighborhood, and she can’t pick any flowers. But we can pick up little flowers or leaves off the ground. So anything that she sees that’s beautiful, she picks up, and we make a little bouquet. And what’s so amazing about it for me is to see what she finds beautiful on those walks.

1 p.m.: A chopped salad and fries for lunch
There’s a place called Angelini Osteria that has a salad that I really enjoy. It’s called the Alimentari Chopped Salad. It’s got avocado and chicken and bacon and currants and almonds. It comes with two dressings, but I usually just do the sort of lemony kind of oily dressing. And it is just so delicious. I am the only meat eater in my family. At some point, maybe my conscience will get the better of me, and I’ll switch over to their diet. Angelini also has very good french fries. When we’re on the road and the lunch that I’ve packed hasn’t been enough for [my daughter], french fries is one of those safe things that if we’re in a bind, we can pick them up from almost anywhere.

2 p.m.: Time for the Museum of Jurassic Technology
Another favorite thing that I would do is go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I just love that place. It’s so fascinating. It’s one of those places that if someone’s coming in from out of town, I love showing them. I love taking them there without telling them anything about it and just watch them kind of explore. And it’s just such a mysterious, magical place.

5 p.m.: Fresh escape room fun
Then I would see if I could get a bunch of my friends together, and we would go do an escape room somewhere in town. It’s just one of my favorite things to do, and they’re all over the place in Los Angeles. I would go to maybe 60out or Maze Rooms or one that I had never heard of. There’s an app called Morty that helps find escape rooms and keep track of the ones you did if your memory is poor like mine. If I can’t convince my friends to do another one right after in the same location, then we would be done by 6. It would be time to go back home and make our daughter’s dinner and get her through the entire dinner-bath time-bedtime phase.

9 p.m.: Dinner and “The Bachelor” before bed
My favorite thing is when Melanie and I order in from a place called Bulan Thai Vegetarian Kitchen. It has these incredibly delicious hot wings. Our daughter will be asleep in the other room. And we get to eat some delicious Thai food and watch some silly show or some serious show.

If our daughter has gone to sleep around 8, this will usually be maybe 9, 9:30 depending on if I’ve fallen asleep in the bed next door. This is also why sometimes it gets so late and bleeds into the next day. Because by the time we get to have our alone fun, dinner and watching time, it’s 9:30, 10, and some of those “Bachelor” episodes are two hours long.

And yes, I promise that somewhere in this day, I have showered. [Laughs] That is another very important element of our day. It’s the one that can go by the wayside. But we always try to check in with each other. Like, “Have you showered today? Have you showered? OK, you go and then I’ll go.”

Ron Howard’s new film “Eden” is a true story about disenchanted Europeans, who, in the 1930s, escaped from their society and decamped on a lonely rock in the Galapagos, only to see their handmade utopia devolve into petty power struggles and murder. It’s also lurid proof that Charles Darwin missed out on the truly juicy survival-of-the-fittest action by about a hundred years.

This is certainly unusual material for a mainstream stalwart like Howard, who knows his way around heroic problem-solving narratives (“Apollo 13,” the Thai cave rescue movie “Thirteen Lives”). But in screenwriter Noah Pink’s melodramatic imagining of incidents both well-documented and mysterious, one can see this Hollywood veteran on a mission to loosen the shackles of his reputation and have some nasty, brutish fun. To wit: A perma-sneering Jude Law greets intruders naked; a wild-eyed Ana de Armas insults and tries to seduce everyone; Vanessa Kirby lets foreplay include the pulling of her diseased tooth; Sydney Sweeney gives birth alone while growling at a pack of wild dogs.

The result may not be terribly illuminating about the (sub)human condition, despite the shout-outs to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. “Eden” is probably closer to an expensive reality show about mismatched survivalists. But as August fare goes, it’s a sticky, sweaty hoot, well cast and paced like a disreputable beach read, even if you might sporadically wish Werner Herzog had gotten first crack at this material. (It was also covered in a 2013 documentary.)

The first transplants to the uninhabited island of Floreana were German botanist Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Law) and his devoted, ailing partner, Dore (Kirby). Scolds who glorified suffering against the world’s wrong turns, the pair sought a radical reboot of society in rugged isolation, save the inconvenient fact that Ritter’s grandstanding philosophical missives back home were published in newspapers, turning them into eccentric folk heroes. Soon, their precious suffering took the form of new neighbors: idealistic war veteran Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl) and his wide-eyed young wife Margret (Sweeney), who are looking for a new, self-sufficient way of life for their budding family.

It’s difficult to imagine a worse addition to this oil-and-water mix of high-minded nonconformist cranks and hard-toiling middle-class settlers than a capitalist sybarite. Enter the grandiose Baroness Eloise (De Armas), carried like Cleopatra onto the beach by her male lovers (Toby Wallace and Felix Klammerer), and ready to claim Floreana as the future site of an exclusive luxury resort called Hacienda Paradiso. Her first order of business, however, is pitting the scowling Ritter and bland, industrious Wittmers, who had managed a bearable distance so far, against each other.

The island, given an appropriately sickly, uninviting sheen by cinematographer Mathias Herndl, clearly wasn’t big enough for all of these new-world experimenters. But the movie’s two hours offer plenty of room for their portrayers. Howard’s generosity with his actors keeps this ensemble a charged group of clashing molecules. You wouldn’t mistake anybody’s turn for a full-throated or, conversely, subtle characterization — there’s a messiness to the cutting that prioritizes motion over stillness — but the broad strokes of personality are fun.

At its most raw (or is it overcooked?), when de Armas’ loaded-gun vibe veers toward camp or Law peacocks his pomposity with a hint of desperation, the situation may remind you of some insane pre-Code potboiler like 1932 “The Most Dangerous Game,” when a tale of people at their worst seemed all the more fascinating for unfurling in an exotic locale. Just because this corrupting pity party doesn’t crescendo so much as peter out isn’t any more of a reason to dismiss “Eden.” A little time spent with the farcical maneuverings of isolated megalomaniacs means you can skip reading the news that day.