Vol 06 Issue 48

November 27-December 3, 2008 VOL 6 NO 48

Lordy!

20 pages of Christmas!

www.lacitybeat.com

the season's most promising flix

It’s the most wonderful time of the year and the most wonderful boxed sets C o c o Ta n a k a s ay s t o B u y N o t h i n g !

B u t t h at i s n o t t h e A m e r ic a n w a y !

LOW PROFILE

GHOSTLY

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS “ALPINISMS”

COOL KIDS “BAKE SALE”

Since its formation in Los Angeles in 1993, Banda Pachuco has shot straight to the top of the charts and they have won countless fans with its exciting Latin rhythms and diverse music.

“88" featured in the movie Role Models, which opens in theaters 11/7. Hip hop duo is On the 2K SportsTour Now with Q -tip.

MADELEINE PEYROUX & WILLIAM GALISON “GOT YOU ON MY MIND”

METAL GOD

WAKING UP MUSIV

Get a FREE non-album track download from 2K Sports at www.2ksports.com/coolkids

HALFORD “LIVE AT ROCK IN RIO III”

The collaboration between acclaimed singer Madeleine Peyroux and multiinstrumentalist William Galison is a retro - sounding 11- song CD featuring an eclectic collection of songs made famous by everyone from Josephine Baker to the Beatles to Stevie Wonder, as well as three delightful originals.

Even Carly Simon gets in on the act, on “Shoulda Known”.

5.1 DVD + CD set featuring a DVD that contains Rob Halford and Co.'s performance at Rock In Rio III in 2001 plus a CD featuring the digitally remastered and expanded edition of the Resurrection album. The set consists of Halford, Fight and Judas Priest classics like 'Stained Class', 'Electric Eye', 'Metal Gods' and 'Breaking The Law'.

JOHN MICHAEL MONTGOMERY “TIME FLIES”

JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS “FIT TO BE TIED” From the bountiful collection of Joan Jett's hits, we have culled some of her best and most popular, in Fit To Be Tied. This CD includes the #27 song of all time, 'I Love Rock n' Roll', along with amazing hits like 'Crimson and Clover', 'I Hate Myself For Loving You', 'Bad Reputation', 'Do You Wanna Touch Me', 'Light Of Day' (written for Joan by Bruce Springsteen)...and the list goes on. CD is re -mastered and includes enhanced material.

JEFFREY STEELE “VOL. 2- GOLD PLATINUM NO CHROME STEELE GREATEST HITS”

VARIOUS ARTISTS MIXED BY STEPHANE POMOUGNAC “HOTEL COSTES VOL. 11”

Hear Jeffrey ’s versions of the songs he’s penned for stars like Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Trisha Yearwood, Randy Travis, John Michael Montgomery, Leann Rimes, Diamond Rio, Aaron Tippin, and Collin Raye, you don't want to miss this train of hits.

Also check out is Nov 18 releases "Hell On Wheels" and "Countrypolitan".

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PSCHENT

3 RING CIRCUS

John Michael Montgomery, stirs up the Fall of 2008 with his album.

Includes the radio hit “Forever ”.

Time Flies, another giant step forward for John Michael Montgomery, strengthening his position as one of the most versatile and compelling vocalists in country music.

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This acoustic and international mix takes us on a journey from Italy to Brazil without overlooking US and UK sounds. Features five exclusive new tracks from Variety Lab, Shazz, Stephane Pompougnac, Villa Black and a Costes' edit 'Enzo' by Kraak and Smaak.

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NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 3 LACITYBEAT

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LACITYBEAT 4 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

CONTENTS November 27-December 3, 2008 volume 6 issue 48

NEW AGE IN

EYEWEAR TOP FRAMES AT THE BEST PRICES

40TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION!

2 Pairs for $9900* Frame & Lenses

10 06 Letters. The Black Panther Returns! 25 Seven Days. On tap for Saturday?

07 Old News. Steve Lowery bemoans (get it?) the economy’s impact on gentlemen’s clubs. Think of the strippers!

08 Eco Topic. Coco Tanaka says, “Buy Nothing!” And I think I will!

09 Slow Go. Marc B. Haefele hangs out with Peter Sellars (the other Peter Sellars) at some schmancy journo conference at USC.

10 Holiday Film Guide. Andy Klein previews the cream of the awards season crop. Then he picks out the best DVDs for his holiday needs. And then he asks – and answers! – whether Hollywood is recessionproof. I think Andy should get the week off next week, but I doubt we’ll let him.

23 Eat. Miles Clements goes green at Akasha. A hemp chocolate gelato? Hell yeah! Plus restaurant-biz happenings, in Bites.

Blood and dumplings.

26 Stage. Don Shirley watches the Ovation Awards so you don’t have to, complains, as is his wont. Plus all the newest reviews, in Currently Playing.

27 Music. We blew out the music section to devote four million words to the best boxed sets for Christmastime. And we didn’t even get around to the new Hall & Oates!

Single Vision

We carry frames by

PRADA DIOR ED HARDY LINDBERG LA FONT

STANTON OPTICAL *Selected Frames Only

34 Clubland. Ron Garmon says goodbye to me, your editrix. So sad!

35 NightBeat. Joshua Sindell gives the gift that keeps on giving: trichomaniasis! Just kidding! It’s music!

Holiday Gift Guide. It’s 20 pages of Christmas. Forget what we said before about not shopping! Shop! Shop away!

On the Cover This cover was a gift to mi mamacita communista on my last day at CityBeat. Viva! Viva Fidel!

Editor Rebecca Schoenkopf rebeccas@lacitybeat.com Arts Editor Ron Garmon rong@lacitybeat.com Film Editor Andy Klein Calendar Assistant Arrissia Owen Turner Copy Editor Joshua Sindell Editorial Contributors Ramie Becker, Paul Birchall, Andre Coleman, Michael Collins, Miles Clements, Mick Farren, Richard Foss, Matt Gaffney, Andrew Gumbel, Marc B. Haefele, Tom Hayden, Bill Holdship, Jessica Hundley, Mark Keizer, Carl Kozlowski, Kim Lachance, Ken Layne, Steve Lowery, Wade Major, Browne Molyneux, Anthony Miller, Chris Morris, Amy Nicholson, Arrissia Owen Turner, Donna Perlmutter, Joe Piasecki, Neal Pollack, Ted Rall, Erika Schickel, Tom Sharpe, Don Shirley, Kirk Silsbee, Brent Simon, Coco Tanaka, Don Waller, Jim Washburn, Wonkette, Chris Ziegler Editorial Interns Gabrielle Paluch, Nathan Solis Art Director Paul Takizawa artdirector@lacitybeat.com Web & Print Production Manager Meghan Quinn Advertising Art Director Sandy Wachs Classified Production Artist Tac Phun Contributing Artists and Photographers Bob Aul, Jordan Crane, Scott Gandell, John Gilhooley, Alexx Henry, Maura Lanahan, Gary Leonard, Melodie McDaniel, Joe McGarry, Luke McGarry, Nathan Ota, Ethan Pines, Josh Reiss, Rosheila Robles, Gregg Segal, Elliott Shaffner, Bill Smith, Ted Soqui Sales Director Mark Kochel markk@lacitybeat.com Retail Sales Manager Amit Mehta amitm@lacitybeat.com Co-op Advertising Director Spencer Cooper Music & Entertainment Sales Manager Jon Bookatz Business Development Manager Diana James Account Executive Sarah Stacey, Bill Child, Andy Enriquez Classified Supervisor Michael DeFillippo Classified Account Executives Sarah Fink, Jason Rinka, John Schoenkopf, Dekeithrich Johnson VP of Operations David Comden VP of Finance Michael Nagami Human Resources Manager Andrea Baker andreab@ southlandweeklies.com Accounting Ginger Wang, Archie Iskaq, Tracy Lowe, Christie Lee, Angela Wang (Business Manager) Circulation Supervisor Andrew Jackson Receptionist Candon Murry Publisher Will Swaim LA CITYBEAT newspaper is published every Thursday and is available free at locations throughout Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. One copy per reader, additional copies are $10 each. Copyright: No articles, illustrations, photographs, or other editorial matter or advertisements herein may be reproduced without written permission of copyright owner.

All rights reserved, 2008.

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NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 5 LACITYBEAT

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LETTERS

Truth My first time reading both L.A. CityBeat and Mick Farren [“Truth, Justice, and the New American Way,” Nov. 6]. THANK YOU! (Yes, I was SHOUTING that!)

Because of reading something so wellwritten I again resent the way I was taught history. History in my parochial school was the memorization of events and dates with NO perspective to the world, other events, people, places and things with which I could relate and feel. Mick Farren just became my favorite history teacher.

–DJMPK Via lacitybeat.com I just picked up a copy of L.A. CityBeat for the first time to browse through during my lunch break. I came to the cover story and I could not stop reading. Thank you so much for such an informative and wellwritten piece. I enjoyed the history lesson and the comparisons and perspective.

I hope President-Elect Obama sees this

of better shape after decades of decline so the totally huge things will have to wait for another president or after you leave office. FDR had Social Security as his legacy; what will be yours? How about universal health care, everything covered – ohh, sorry, can’t do this since the United States education system is in such bad shape you might not be able to do this: If we have more coverage, you need more trained people to fill these positions when the United States doesn’t have the ability to train them? Barack, it’s only four to eight years of your life, and just think of what the future holds after your term(s) are over: Lots of money and/or a chance to do a better job than when you were president. There are the big bucks you can/will make going on the speaking tour and writing your book about being president, much like Reagan and Clinton made big bucks after being president, or maybe become like Carter, a so-called failure as a president but a

‘Too bad we can’t tax the drug dealers, huh?’ piece and indeed turns out to be our success after leaving office. GOOD LUCK political Superman. I’ll be picking up this and I’m looking forward to what they say magazine every time I see it and will look about you in the history books.

–Gerald Jannke forward to more op-eds by Mick Farren.

Hollywood –Rand Via lacitybeat.com Superman?!! Mick and your cover artist (uncredited?) should get with it. If any Wow, just like Barack Obama, Mick superhero seems Obamalike, it’s the Farren with his article – along with the Black Panther (a.k.a. T’Challa) who was designers of the cover – really knows how head of many African tribes and ruled to get a person’s attention. Hard-hitting in Marvel Comics beginning in 1966 like a Hollywood blockbuster movie (before the founding of the Black Panther trailer. Mick, you used a lot of great group, by the way). The Black Panther’s platitudes, but here’s a few of my own uniform was not red, white, and blue, concerning the state of affairs of America, but black, symbolizing the head of state. the world and our new President. Also, according to Wikipedia: “The Black Yeah, Barack did the impossible by Panther is entitled to the use of a heartgetting elected, which was an individual shaped herb that grants the person who achievement; now let’s see if he can consumes it enhanced strength, agility, achieve the impossible for the country. and perception.”

I think they used to call that “Chicago He already has given himself an out, stating on Election Night he might not be Seed.”

–Henry Rosebuds able to change things in a year or two or Santa Monica even a term. Hey, already thinking about reelection. Another stimulus package isn’t good enough; besides, how are you Editor’s note: The uncredited cover was going to pay for it? Try something totally designed by CityBeat art director Paul new like “Taxing the untouchables” – Takizawa, who also created the edenic Obama churches, nonprofits, much higher avec unicorn the week before the election and liquor /tobacco taxes, and all food. Too any other cover art that doesn’t have a specific bad we can’t tax the drug dealers, huh? creator listed on the contents page, because It’s going to take more than a village and he thinks it’s tacky to let us blurb him there. a new president and his team to really It’s his job, he says. No credit necessary. improve things. The globalized economy and instant communication are here to Send letters to editor@lacitybeat.com or do it up stay. You will probably be working on old school: Letters to the Editor, LA CITYBEAT, getting the country back into some kind 5209 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036.

LACITYBEAT 6 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

‘nothing’s wrong. We’re just tired’

OLD NEWS

GM, MOCA, the LAPD, and your local strip club

By Steve Lowery Monday, November 17 Things are tough all over as industries central to the strength of the American economy suffer and fall. Car manufacturers are in a death spiral, with none other than GM signaling it may be out of money soon. Likewise, that other bastion of American commerce, sex, has also been taking it on the chin, and not in the good “OK, but that’ll cost extra” kinda way. Recent reports say that local strip clubs have experienced a significant downturn in business due to tightening purse strings, rising – at one time – gas prices, erect unemployment, and stiffened consumer confidence. Also, nothing’s wrong, we’re just tired. Things are so bad that people can’t make a living off of fear and fancy boys anymore. Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs ministry formerly based in Arcadia, announces it’s going to lay off 20 percent of its workforce, about 202 jobs, with major cuts in their Things Jews Run and People Hillary Clinton May Have Killed departments.

Now, Focus on the Family probably wouldn’t have had to cut so many people except it spent about $600,000 to pass Prop. 8 here in California – which

means to stop gay sex in California, a bunch of Coloradans are taking it in the ass. Disgusting. Actually, this is the third straight year the ministry – which once boasted about 1,500 employees, not counting God (Who works as an independent contractor) – has had to lay off employees, and it just goes to show how tough things have been recently for hostility-based organizations such as Focus on the Family and the Republican Party, which recently had to take in boarders.

deserved something closer to the pool and now we hear they are talking more about a neighborhood of $13 million, or what is known as “guest house money” in Malibu.

Wednesday, November 19 The California Supreme Court votes 6 to 1 to review the legal challenges to Prop.

8, the recently passed voter initiative that forbids gays from marrying, falling in love, or yearning. The court will probably hold a hearing on lawsuits brought against Prop. 8 in March, an unusually quick turnaround that folks on either side of the issue believe bodes well for them. Prop. 8 supporters say the justices simply want to settle the issue and make sure no more gay marriages are performed, while opponents say the justices want to overturn the thing as quickly as possible. There is a third, more practical possibility that the justices want to have the issue cleared up quickly to ensure nobody loses a nonrefundable ice-sculpture deposit.

Tuesday, November 18 Word is the Los Angeles City Council will discuss a financial settlement for those injured by the LAPD in what has become known as the May Day Melee but was known at the time as “JESUS CHRIST, STOP HITTING ME! SERIOUSLY, OW! STOP IT. WHAT IS THAT, A SHOVEL?!” The melee left hundreds of immigration activists and journalists injured and left more than 15 cops with hurt feelings – words hurt, people! The settlement was first thought to be somewhere in the $10 million Thursday, November 20 neighborhood, but apparently those House Democrats elect Beverly Hills’s who got their asses stomped felt they own Henry Waxman to be chairman

of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It’s a key move since Waxman unseats former chairman John Dingell of Michigan who was a big honk for the auto industry and tended to work against any environmental initiatives that Detroit didn’t want. Waxman’s

environmental record seems more in line with President-elect Barack Obama’s green agenda and it also means that finally, FINALLY, the wants and needs of those who live in Beverly Hills will get a little attention in Washington. One side note: Waxman’s ascendancy is the first bit of Los Angeles-area business to come out of Washington since the L.A. Times folded its Washington bureau into the shared Chicago Tribune bureau. The result was pretty bad. The Times website was forced to run an AP story about Waxman for a few hours until someone from the bureau finally got around to writing about it.

Friday, November 21 The L.A. Auto Show opens at the Convention Center amid all that talk about all the nasty rumors that General Motors may have to move back in with its parents and that the American auto industry as a whole may be cooked, as if anyone who ever drove a Pontiac Sunbird couldn’t have seen that coming.

Obviously, the Auto Show is a significant bit of showing off for American auto manufacturers and they are doing their best to satisfy customers who want good gas mileage and cleaner vehicles without sacrificing luxury or doodads, something the Japanese and Germans have been increasingly able to supply to American customers. Domestic car makers have been frustrated in their attempts to get those customers back, but will try once again when GM unveils the Chevy Go Fuck Yourself and the Go Fuck Yourself, Eddie Bauer Edition.

Saturday, November 22 Holding.

Sunday, November 23 Someone in Los Angeles finally figures out how to get a lot of people out to a museum: Tell them it’s folding. About 450 people show up at the Museum of Contemporary Art to find out what’s going on with the museum that is reportedly millions of dollars in debt.

Hey, irony-laden installations don’t come cheap, unless by coming cheap that would make them more ironic, and then they do. I’m surprised to hear the museum is in financial straits. I was out at MOCA last year and it was packed, a line out the door. Of course, we were all there to see the excellent Murakami exhibition – why is it the Japanese know what we want better than we do?✶

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 7 LACITYBEAT

metro.net

ECO TOPIC

WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY?

Giving thanks for Buy Nothing Day

BY COCO TANAKA

Metro Briefs Bus, Rail Projects Get Go-Ahead Funding Metro is gearing up plans for a series of bus, rail and other transportation improvements throughout the county thanks to the recent passage of Measure R. Voters approved the funding plan that is expected to generate $40 billion for tra;c congestion relief projects over the next 30 years.

Red Line Hours Extended For Holidays Enjoy LA’s hottest night spots until the wee hours during the holidays and don’t worry about missing your train home. The Metro Red Line is running until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays only through December 27. Restaurants, nightclubs and businesses along the route are sponsoring the extended service.

Rosa Parks Human Rights Day December 1 Metro celebrates December 1 as Rosa Parks Human Rights Day, paying tribute to the spirit and memory of Rosa Parks. We urge all citizens throughout Los Angeles County to rea;rm their commitment to practicing tolerance and promoting diversity.

Time To Economize. Go Metro.

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The LA Community College District is o=ering 28,000 full-time students at its nine campuses a good reason to Go Metro – a six-month Metro pass for only $15. Eligible campuses are LA Trade Tech, LA City, Southwest, Pierce, Valley, Mission, East LA, Harbor and West LA colleges.

IT’S TOO LATE TO HARP ON grain-fed tofurkey, cage-free turducken or any other hyphenated portmanteaux of flightless birds whose gilt skin you’ll be knifing this Thanksgiving, so I’ll skip the “Green Your Gobbler!” bit. I know we all plan this miserable gluttony-palooza several days in advance, so there’s no sense in pretending we’re not all going to turn to the same overplayed, Snake Pit-evading traditions we’ve relied on for years. Maybe some of you will compost your leftovers or mash up locally sourced cranberries. I will remember to give thanks for you and your good deeds. You are just like the gentle-hearted pilgrims, with their buckled shoes and muskets.

Thanksgiving is my least beloved holiday, and not just because the even years are cursed with the Biennial Tanaka Family Cataclysm, wherein the cousins get wickeddrunk, Aunt Kay insults Grandma’s pie, and people storm out of the room sobbing, wishing aloud they’d never been born or wondering how they can turn this whole Cormac McCarthy dystopia into a potentially profitable screenplay – oh my god, a musical! – starring the Twilight kids or whatever.

No, I can handle the circus family, and the tryptophan hangover, and the general shame of realizing I just drank three bottles of Cabernet and am now crying in the locked bathroom because I will never write a screenplay good enough for the Twilight kids, and who do they think they are? No, it’s the day after Thanksgiving ’08, November 28, the aptly christened “Black Friday,” that grinds my gears. What’s more, I can’t even bitch about it in good conscience this year, because the economy is in dire straits and I suppose we need these morons to abandon filial pie-throwing in order to go to Costco and get all UFC for flat-screens.

See, after the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag clasped hands to celebrate Plymouth’s first “we didn’t screw it up” harvest, they took a catnap and then shopped the shit out of the following day, which is now supposedly the busiest shopping day of the year. Bigbox retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy have gone ahead and made the day after Thanksgiving a part-deux holiday to buy junk at insanely! low! prices! even though sources tell me that most of these stores advertising GPS units for the nifty price of $20 and a lap dance only have, like, five units to sell. I am not speaking from experience. I don’t

LACITYBEAT 8 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

do lines (especially the kind you stand in), I dislike tents, and extreme weather – frigidity or hellfire – makes me cranky, like I am now. Local news crews love this bedlam. You can practically hear the cameraman salivating over getting that perfect “spirit of the holidays” shot in which herds of Americans trample into GameStop like rabid wildebeest, screaming that THEY NEED THE 80-GIG PS3 NOW OR SOMEONE’S GONNA GET CUT! The same-day solution (which is not at all a solution in terms of finding an economic upturn): Buy Nothing Day. I am about 14 years late to the party on this one, but I’m planning on staying for a bit, and inviting friends. The alternative faux-liday advocating 24 hours of debit card detox was brilliantly founded by Adbusters Media, which challenges its celebrants to indefinitely postpone their mass shopping sprees. Its umbrella shelters Santa Monica Zombie Strolls (the moon-faced undead wander malls and frighten shoppers) and Whirl-marts, in which bizarre conga lines of folks with empty carts circle mall aisles.

Freaky, right? I know.

Anyway, the message is that buying more stuff – even eco-friendly stuff – is not the answer. Consuming less is a good start.

We’ve been here before.

In the interest of procrastination and research, I watched last year’s fantastic Morgan Spurlock-produced film What Would Jesus Buy? Not much, as it turns out. As Reverend Billy, performance artist Bill Talen sports big hair, a televangelist swagger, and a full-fledged gospel choir that goes city-to-city promoting the good reverend’s Church of Stop Shopping. In his crusade against the “shopocalypse,” he performs an exorcism on Wal-Mart.

Last year he brought “elves on strike” to the Grove. Dude’s a genius. Please, get in on that this year.

I basically detest Thanksgiving, but I am a big proponent of being thankful.

Be thankful that when the flames stop raging, we still live in California, which sure as hell beats any of the tornado states. Be thankful for the new dawn summoned by our president-elect. If you’re straight, be thankful that no one has revoked your immutable, sacrosanct right to marry the person you love. (And if you’re gay, please, please keep the faith.) On November 28, be thankful that in spite of all this hyper-discounted crap available, technically, you need absolutely none of it.✶

Slow journalism?

Less Lindsay Lohan, less of the time By marc b. haefele Last week at USC, a basement full of people questioned the basic news assumption of Fast and First. Primo pomo phrases buzzed: “No narrative choke points,” “narrative of objects,” “feeling of reportorial omnipotence.”

It was one of some 30 events in a fellowship seminar hosted by USC’s Annenberg School and Getty Arts Journalism program, which had both turned on the spigots of grant cash to create a luxurious full bath. The parameters came from slow food guru Josh Viertel: “Good, clean and fair.”

“It really isn’t about slowing down journalism in the time sense,” director Sasha Anawalt said, but about making it less mass-cultured. Less celebritycentered. I think the idea is that a slow food potato bakes just as fast as the other kind, but is much better for you.

USC-Getty’s three-week program was itself a slow feast, from its opening Nov. 1 dinner at Campanile to a Nov. 21 farewell supper at Locanda Portofino, by way of daily performances and seminars like this one. Had I known arts journalism could be like this, I’d still be reviewing classical music.

The two most articulate panelists were non-journos (not a rarity, for those who’ve witnessed journalism

panels). The first was the plaidest guy in the room: Mr. Jalopy, a black-rimmed artisan who invented the (stationary bicycle-powered) personal mobile drive-in theater and the World’s Largest iPod, turning technology’s discards into little masterpieces of personal engineering. Jalopy sees “No userserviceable components inside” labels as ethical challenges. “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it,” he says, asking for “screws not glues.” He thinks that ought to apply to journalism too. The user ought to be able to open up the story and peer inside to see its sources, how it is made, how it connects, how it might be used. “Hand it off to collaborators and it lives forever,” Jalopy says. I couldn’t agree more. Make the LAPD open the paperwork behind those May Day discipline cases.

The other was Peter Sellars, the international opera magus with the altitudinous forehead and towering crewcut of an old sci-fi movie’s 25th century genius. He is one of the world’s most articulate people and the only opera director (Adams’s Doctor Atomic and Messian’s St. Francois d’Assise) to have been on Miami Vice. But as long he’s telling me how to do journalism, might I suggest it’s time LA Opera

tackled modern classics like Busoni’s Dr. Faust and Krenek’s Johnny Spielt Auf? Sellars is a godlike, living whirlwind of words: You can see how easy it must be for him to persuade very staid institutions to roll the dice on some very weird projects. He pitched us that L.A.’s central narrative is its racial divisions and strife, that its metanarrative is the foreseeable conflicts and unbroken trends that led to the ’92 riot – and persist. “What is important is seeing what is coming, that what is seeded will grow.” This, he said, was the function of drama in classic Greek democracy. But classical drama didn’t stop Athens from cratering itself. A small shelf of books about the 1965 riot didn’t prevent L.A.’s Opus ’92. Still, Sellars made me think of the ’92 rising’s incredible operatic possibilities – martyred Latasha Harlins as soprano, Tom Bradley as the tragic, inept baritone, Rodney King the heroic tenor, Daryl Gates the evil bass.

And I realized I was thinking of Anna Deavere Smith’s 1993 play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992. This was Wagnerian journo drama (based on Smith’s own interviews) whose only music was its words. Twilight is the very embodiment – arty types might say quintessence – of the Slow Journalism everyone was

oh, thaT peter sellars!

NOVEMBER 27-december 3, 2008 9 LACITYBEAT

talking about, but no one mentioned it.

Photo-videographer Naka Nathaniel berated industrial-strength journalism’s conformism – “38 high-tech cameras covering David Beckham’s arrival.” But he must know that any assignment editor who sends one of those cameras to a South L.A. shooting instead will soon be shelving cans at Vons.

Nathaniel gets to do wonderful youare-there newspaper pieces partnered with New York Times writer Nicholas D. Kristof complete with Internet video, all with only $800 in equipment. This is slow journalism indeed, but for now it’s also the journalism of privilege. The Internet and the blog were mentioned too, quite often. “They’re what allow journalism to go deeper, to have open sources,” said Anawalt. I thought of the terrible daily melodrama of the L.A. Times trying to both ride the Internet dragon and make a profit. And that Sam Zell’s Spring Street henchmen might have found some useful ideas here.

It’s been a slow 150 years since the anarchist Pierre Proudhon called journalism “the cemetery of ideas.”

Yesterday’s great news story has always been today’s fishwrap, but the stories that last forever get to be called literature and sometimes art.✶

the

Curious Case of the Holiday Film season The ‘quality’ season’s top contenders

By Andy Klein It’s been a lackluster year for films – if you care about quality rather than quantity. By my estimate, there have roughly 500 films released in Los Angeles so far this year. There has been the occasional WALL•E or Tropic Thunder and Dark Knight, but the percentage has been atrocious.

Some of this is due to the ever-increasing practice of loading the end of the year with “quality” titles. We have another 64 films on the schedule in the coming five weeks – and, more to the point, they include more than half of the likeliest sources of Oscar nominations. “Quality” and “Oscar contenders” are hardly identical sets, let alone “quality” and “what the supposedly brilliant folks at the studios think are Oscar contenders.”

Nonetheless, there is some hope that the final stretch will compensate for the lackluster nine furlongs we’ve limped through so far in this year’s derby.

Haven’t the last two years sapped everyone else’s tolerance for politics as much as they have mine? I was hoping the part of my brain commandeered by obsessive election concern could luxuriate a while in post-election bliss.

But nooooo! We’re about to get a bizarrely high concentration of explicitly political mainstream features. My social conscience says I should be looking forward to classy productions like Ron Howard’s Frost/ Nixon (about David Frost’s 1977 interview with Richard Nixon) and Steve McQueen’s

Hunger (about the 1981 IRA hunger strike) – both of which open Dec. 5. They may turn out to be brilliant, but I don’t think I’m capable of absorbing both of them ... let alone in the same week ... let alone next week. (Too soon! Too soon!)

I’m saving my “seriositude” eyeballs for Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, fourhour-plus Che. With no disrespect to Opie and not-the-guy-who-starred-in-Bullitt, Soderbergh is one of our most brilliant directors, even on an off day; and no one could physically be more perfect for the title part than Benicio del Toro. Sure, I could see Frost/Nixon and Hunger in the same amount of time, but those are less intriguing, in part because it’s easier to pick sides. (Nixon bad, hunger strikers good.)

Che Guevara was a hero to my generation of lefties, and his reputation has plummeted in recent decades, so it will be interesting to see how Soderbergh views him.

By Christmas, I hope to have recovered enough for three other more or less politically centered releases. First up: Valkyrie (Dec. 25), the rumor-plagued Tom Cruise movie about the German military plot to assassinate Hitler late in the war.

Cruise’s personal life has tarnished his image, but he is a good actor (as well as a genuine movie star). If he really wanted to shake up his fans, he could have played Hitler – short, dark hair, good at ranting – but he’s more modestly taken the role of Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the plot. Despite several delays in its release, the movie’s strongest selling point is the

reunion of director Bryan Singer (X-Men) and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, neither of whom has topped their last collaboration, The Usual Suspects, in the subsequent 13 years.

Opening the same day is Waltz with Bashir, described as “an animated documentary,” which is intriguing in itself.

Israeli director Ari Folman searches for the meaning of a recurring nightmare about being chased by 26 vicious dogs. Rather than accept the obvious – who’s not afraid of being chased by vicious dogs? – he travels the world, interviewing old friends from his army days.

Also due Dec. 25 is Laurent Cantet’s The Class – winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s political in a broader sense and is another form of documentary hybrid. Cantet presents a year in the life of French schoolteacher Francois Begaudeau as he works at a racially mixed high school in a tough neighborhood of Paris. This would fully qualify as a fictional feature, were it not that Begaudeau plays himself and wrote the memoir on which the script is based. In short, it’s a two-hour reenactment. It may sound like an updated Up the Down Escalier or To Sir Avec Amour but it mostly avoids the genre’s cliches. It may also sound dreary, but it’s not.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, I have a guilty interest in The Day the Earth Stood Still (Dec. 12) – even though I think Robert Wise’s 1951 original is terrific, and I hate gratuitous remakes. There’s a strong chance that the fashionably requisite surfeit

of CGI will destroy everything that made the old version work, but the idea of casting Keanu Reeves as a wooden, inexpressive alien – who would have thought of that one? – may even trump the perfection of del Toro playing Che. Come Dec. 19, there is Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, which has Eastwood back in front of the camera as well as behind.

It’s a sentimental choice: That a 78-yearold actor can still be a credible tough guy – albeit a cranky old “get off my lawn” tough guy – is a ray of hope for the rest of us aging types (which includes you as well, buster). Few actors-turned-directors have been as adept at exploiting their star personas, and we can imagine Eastwood keeping it up into the next decade.

It’s necessary to approach The Wrestler (Dec. 19) with some trepidation: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s films have consistently failed to live up to his obviously lofty ambitions. And while Mickey Rourke is an amazing actor, he’s had an extremely rocky career. In his early supporting roles, he consistently blew stars off the screen, but, whenever he tried to position himself as a romantic lead, he stumbled. Here he gets to snog with Marisa Tomei, but his agingprofessional-wrestler portrayal sounds more like the kind of character work he does best.

I’m a sucker for complex time-travel movies, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I got a kick out of the clever, unpretentious Spanish genre entry Timecrimes (one of the handful of these releases I’ve

The authentic death of Tom Graeff

cont. on page 12 ➤

LACITYBEAT 10 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 11 LACITYBEAT

cont. from page 10

seen already). Thirtyish director Nacho Vigalongo has put together a droll, very nicely worked out story about a middleaged man who is accidentally transported back an hour or so in time and desperately tries to make sure that he doesn’t mess up the things he already knows are destined.

Think of it as Primer lite.

Finally, there’s the biggest oddball

release of the year from a major studio, or maybe from anybody: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It’s been more than 80 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this uncharacteristically surreal short story about a newborn who is, in all respects other than time on earth, a little old man.

Physically he grows younger and younger, meeting his father and then his son in age.

Eventually he regresses (progresses?) to infancy.

Does he then simply vanish? Fitzgerald managed to duck the issue by sticking to Button’s POV at the end – which is symptomatic of why no one has tried to film this tale before. It’s a classic case of a story that seems impossible to present visually (or at least photographically); in prose,

waltz with bashir

Fitzgerald could get away with images that don’t translate to anything in the real world. So, sight unseen, we have to give courage points to director David Fincher for even attempting Fitzgerald’s story as a feature, and to Brad Pitt for taking the title role (which, among other curiosities, should render him unrecognizable for much of the running time).✶

timecrimes

valkyrie

Is Hollywood Recession-Proof?

Ladies and gentlemen, your film issue think piece!

By andy klein Is Hollywood recession-proof?

In a word: no. In another word: yes.

In a phrase: It all depends on how you’re defining your terms.

You don’t have to be a wacko alarmist to believe that the current economic downturn is going to get way, way worse before it gets a teeny, weeny bit better.

In fact, you probably do have to be a wacko to believe otherwise. (Could it be that the whole crisis is trumped up?

A complete fraud designed by the evil People in Charge to soak the rest of us one last time before they lose their most obedient political toadies in Washington?

Probably not. But there’s enough wacko in me to occasionally entertain such possibilities.)

While there are many more pressing national issues about the crisis than How It Will Affect the Film Industry, our local economy is bound up with Hollywood tightly enough that it’s a legitimate subject for concern.

There is a myth that Hollywood is not merely recession-proof but even

depression-proof. That’s true if, by “proof,” you mean “able to at least stay afloat.” We are told that, in bad times, people will be willing to spend even more than usual for escapist entertainment. This notion started during the ’30s, primarily because the movie business was thriving in comparison to most other highly visible industries. No, the studios didn’t go out of business like so many other enterprises. But they did suffer.

According to some sources, U.S. box office receipts dropped from $732 million during the peak year 1930 to $482 million in 1933 – a decline of slightly more than a third; and most of this was the result of lower attendance rather than a change in ticket prices. (A caveat: Since the studios themselves were the main source of such info, the numbers may be unreliable – even more so than now, which is saying something.) This drop was despite the enthusiasm engendered by the new “talkies,” whose introduction happened almost simultaneously with the stock market crash and its ripples.

While there may be lessons from the

experiences of 75 years ago, the current situation – the entire culture and technology of entertainment – is different enough that the lessons should be taken with a grain of salt. In the ’30s, the only mass media alternatives for narrative entertainment were radio and reading, both wonderful but not a replacement for the big screen experience. Radio was “free” – unless you count tolerating commercials as a cost – and certainly benefited from movie defections.

Now, of course, the panoply of available entertainment sources is almost beyond comprehension, including a lot that are “free.” Yes, you have to pay for cable, and most of the time you have to pay for Internet access. But cable isn’t a necessity and you can surf the net without cost pretty easily.

As much as nothing can replace actually experiencing movies in a theatrical setting, the step down to TV is not as drastic as our grandparents’ step down to radio.

So theater attendance is likely to suffer even more than it did in the Great Depression.

But the health of the industry as a whole?

LACITYBEAT 12 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

Viewers may have a huge number of alternatives, but all the legal ones provide additional revenue streams to the studios.

(Estimates of the income lost to the illegal ones are even less reliable than the faded stats from the ’30s: It is in the interest of the MPAA and its members to cite dollar figures in the billions or tens of billions as they try to push the government into stricter piracy laws and yet even stricter enforcement.)

Another big difference from the ’30s is that the studios not only own a piece of the action from the multiple secondary markets (TV, cable, video rental, video sales, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, and the upcoming direct downloading through the Internet), they are also units within vastly diversified corporations. Unless the total cost of a night out at the movies goes down, theatrical distribution may suffer badly – which would be an aesthetic tragedy. But shed no tears for Disney, Fox, Paramount, Warner, Sony, and Universal: They’ve got their asses covered eight ways from Tuesday.✶

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Get Buying

Your economy needs you

By Andy Klein I know people who never buy DVDs but only rent. They are probably wise. They can also be a pain in the ass, since that makes them harder to find gifts for. (On the other hand, you can always be certain that, whatever DVD sets you give them, they won’t already have a copy.)

I know other people – I’m one – who need to own the physical object to keep forever and ever. We are pack rats, and you probably shouldn’t feed our jones.

(Note to gift-giving friends: Ignore that last bit.)

The great advantage of shopping for DVD packages as gifts is that the range of titles and of price is so huge. For instance, if I had a close friend wise enough to have pulled out of the market before the current plummeting, I would be very happy if he or she were to pony up the $399.98 for the six-season, 33-disc The Sopranos – The Complete Series (or at least the $254.99 it currently costs at Amazon, according to dvdpricesearch.com, a website any video purchaser should have prominently bookmarked). Hint hint.

If I had two such friends, I wouldn’t at all mind receiving Fox’s about-to-bereleased (on Dec. 9) Murnau, Borzage, and Fox Box Set for a mere $239.98 (and under $180 online). That’s frankly a bit pricey for 12 films on 12 discs, but the collection includes 10 features from film buff favorite Frank Borzage and two from F.W. Murnau, including the latter’s Sunrise, one of the supreme achievements of the silent era. Fox seems determined never to release Sunrise on a single DVD; this is the second time they’ve made it available only as part of a set.

But I’m not picky: I’d be just as happy with the company’s equivalent big release from last Christmas, Ford At Fox – The Collection (list $299.98), 24 John Ford films and a documentary, on 21 discs.

For all my poorer friends: Don’t despair. There are plenty of less-expensive alternatives you can get for me.

Many of you have yet to embrace Bluray discs, the Sony-backed hi-def format that prevailed over HD-DVD earlier this year, following a painful marketing war.

One of the biggest hurdles to widespread Blu-ray acceptance is that DVD has gotten too damned good. Nearly everyone could appreciate the jump in quality from VHS to DVD (not to mention DVD’s convenience factors). But if DVD looked twice as good as VHS, then Blu-ray looks maybe 10 to 25 percent better than most DVDs spinning in an upconverting player.

(The improvement is most pronounced on nature documentaries.)

For some of us that’s a compelling

enough difference, and the number of titles coming out on Blu-ray also makes the format more attractive. Fox has just started rolling out the James Bond series on BD with six individual titles ($35 list).

They can also be purchased a little more economically in two three-disc sets for $89.98.

These are the kinds of films that benefit

films in a slipcased “book” holder; I prefer the sturdier, more standardized cases on the individual releases.

Disney recently released WALL•E in five different configurations (one for Canada only) – one-, two-, and three-disc DVD versions, and two- and three-disc Blu-rays.

Tracking the differences is so complicated that the press release included a four-page

hugely from hi-def. The first set has one Sean Connery entry (Dr. No), one Roger Moore (Live and Let Die), and one Pierce Brosnan (Die Another Day). The second set has two Connerys (From Russia with Love, Thunderball) and one Moore (For Your Eyes Only). Each set puts its three

comparison chart. What’s curious is that the Blu-rays have way more features than their equivalent DVD packages and are barely more expensive. Frankly, all the Pixar films look dazzling in both formats, and this one is no exception.

Lovers of Westerns will be thrilled with

LACITYBEAT 16 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

the release of The Budd Boetticher Box Set (list $59.95, available for as little as $40, an incredible bargain), which gathers together five of the revered director’s seven Randolph Scott collaborations from the ’50s (The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station), all on DVD for the first time. The extras include scholarly commentaries, the documentary A Man Can Do That, and introductions by Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, and Taylor Hackford.

It’s not clear where to draw the line between “box sets” and various multi-disc Special Editions. So we’ll stretch that line a bit to give a shout-out to Paramount’s newest Billy Wilder reissue – Sunset Boulevard: The Centennial Collection (list $24.99). Don’t get it confused with the earlier “Special Edition,” which had a questionable transfer; the new transfer is substantially improved. Plus there are a bunch of new extras, as well as repetition of most of the old disc’s supplements.

I usually don’t care at all about fancy packaging, but I’m tickled by Mystery Science Theater 3000: 20th Anniversary Edition (list $69.99), which comes in a big metal lunchbox-like thing (presumably accounting for the $10 premium over the $60 list prices of earlier MST3K sets).

Nestled within are fake lobby cards that show Crow and Tom Servo within the films they are mocking, as well as a nice little Crow figurine.

Four episodes are included – First Spaceship on Venus, Laserblast, Werewolf, and Future War – only the first of which features beloved early host Joel Hodgson rather than almost-as-beloved later host Mike Nelson. The four discs include some informative (and often funny) extras, including a 90-minute “oral history” of the show, spread out over three of the discs, and the 2008 Comic-Con MST3K Reunion Panel (40 minutes), moderated by Patton Oswalt and actually featuring both Hodgson and Nelson on the same stage. (There were rumors.)

If these selections don’t seem appropriate for the video freak on your gift list, may I suggest checking out several other worthy sets I’ve reviewed separately this year, each just a Google search away.

They include Lubitsch Musicals, The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration; and Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition.

In addition, it would be criminal to overlook I Got the Feelin’: James Brown in the ’60s, which my colleague Chris Morris justifiably praised a few months ago. Now get buying. Your economy needs you.✶

LATEST REVIEWS AUSTRALIA It is 1939 and persnickety Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) has arrived from England to take possession of Faraway Downs, a remote Australian ranch where her husband was recently murdered. To avoid losing the ranch to a local cattle baron (Bryan Brown), Sarah must drive 1500 head of livestock to the city of Darwin, where the Australian military will buy them. For this, she enlists the Drover (Hugh Jackman), a rugged and ripped cowboy.

The two bicker constantly while crossing the desert, which can only mean they’ll be in love by the third reel.

Director Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited wannabe-masterpiece knowingly traffics in the cliches of old-Hollywood melodrama, yet still has the guts to confront Australia’s history of aboriginal mistreatment by having the tale narrated by half-caste Nullah (Brandon Walters). Later, Nullah’s journey becomes more prominent when the Japanese attack Darwin, not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Indeed, Luhrmann effor tlessly incorporates chunks of the country’s history and identity; and Australia’s scenery is gorgeously shot by DP Mandy Walker. But the movie is clunky in spots and too self-consciously eager to be considered alongside its Golden Age inspirations.

Although Luhrmann tempers his famously randy visual style, he can’t bend himself completely to the requirements of this material. He has tried to make a timeless epic wor thy of Australia the continent. Instead, he has made a flawed epic worthy of Australia the country. (Mark Keizer) (Citywide)

FOUR CHRISTMASES The secret to a happy, healthy relationship? For Brad and Kate (Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon) – both children of divorce – it means keeping marriage, kids, and extended families as far away as possible. But their annual Christmas dodge – a tropical vacation under guise of charity work – unravels when a fog bank grounds all flights and a news crew captures them on video. Suddenly, they’re faced with the obligation of not one, not two, not three – but four Christmases, one with each parent and whatever additional weirdos two credited writing teams saw fit to throw in.

Like all Christmas tales since A Christmas Carol, this is essentially a parable about people who learn the “real value” of Christmas and family via a miraculous, overnight holiday epiphany.

Like all Christmas movies since It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s also a variation on a previously successful formula, namely Meet the Parents times four. If one set of wacky relatives is funny, four is even funnier!

Well, not really. Despite the best efforts of Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, and Mary Steenburgen – along with the supporting talents of a very funny Jon Favreau, Kristin Chenoweth, and country stars Tim McGraw and Dwight Yoakam – more turns out to be less, largely because it’s all so calculated and obvious. Then again, Christmas movies aren’t supposed to be nail-biters. Debut narrative director Seth Gordon, segueing from the documentary success of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, mostly plays it safe, while Vaughn and Witherspoon do their level best to make an otherwise low-grade picture feel modestly entertaining. (Wade Major) (Citywide)

and heads for his small-town home where a strained reunion with his estranged mother Maggie (Sissy Spacek) promises to reopen decadesold family wounds.

First-time filmmakers Hunter Hill and Perry Moore seem to think they’re doing post-modern Tennessee Williams when, in fact, it’s more like backwater Ed McBain. Merging the two disparate story elements – crime thriller and family drama – never really works, which is a pity, given how good the family drama material is, whenever drug dealers and lowlifes aren’t popping in to spoil the moment. Cursory similarities to Peter Weir’s Witness, which pulls off a similar balancing act very successfully, only ser ve to magnify the problems.

Fortunately, Spacek still has the weight to carry an otherwise average film and elevate just about everyone and everything around her. In a film this uneven, that makes all the difference in the world. (Wade Major) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

MILK The facts are well known: In 1977, gay activist Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, making him the first openly gay candidate to win a major political post. A year later, he was assassinated (along with the mayor, George Moscone) by former supervisor Dan White. Less than a year after that, White received a lighter-than-expected sentence, thanks to the so-called “Twinkie defense.” This story – as well as Milk’s life in general – was extremely well told in Rob Epstein’s Oscar-winning 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk; and Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting), in his new fictionalization of the events, owes a tremendous debt to Epstein’s doc (which is emphatically acknowledged in the closing credits).

Van Sant opens with Milk (Sean Penn), dictating an audio tape to be played in the event of his assassination. This segues into both documentar y footage (Dianne Feinstein announcing the killings) and flashbacks of Milk, on the cusp of his 40th birthday, meeting lover-to-be Scott (James Franco) and deciding to give up his closeted, white-collar lifestyle and move to San Francisco. There is some compression of time and conflation of minor events here, but the film cleaves extremely closely to the facts. (Perhaps the biggest omission is understandable: You’d never know from the movie that the killings occurred only days after the Jonestown Massacre had blanketed the Bay Area in a cloud of horror and shock; dealing with this might have distracted from the movie’s focus.)

Penn looks so much like Milk that you wonder how the producers could have ever considered anyone else (like, at one point, Robin Williams); but on reflection you realize that he doesn’t innately look that much like Milk – which is a sign of how terrific his performance is. Josh Brolin is no less perfect as White, who is in many ways a more interesting subject for a film. In the end, the film is depressing, not as much for the likable hero’s absurd death as for its echoes of recent events: No one would deny that gay rights have come a huge distance in the last 30 years. So how come Prop. 8 just passed when its cousin, the Briggs Initiative – the fight over which dominates the final third of the movie – was handily defeated? (Andy Klein) (Pacific ArcLight, Pacific’s The Grove, The Landmark West Los Angeles, AMC Loews Broadway 4, Pacific ArcLight Sherman Oaks)

LAKE CITY On the run from drug dealers trying to locate thieving, junkie girlfriend Hope (Drea de Matteo), Billy (Troy Garrity) grabs Hope’s son Clayton (Colin Ford)

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE With their hypnotic sexuality and ability to seduce even the most virtuous of

women, vampires are frequently a metaphor for all sorts of lustful behavior.

Not so much zombies, though, which is why writer-director Bruce LaBruce’s queer horror satire-cum-philosophical polemic about sexually ferocious gay zombies is an edgily bizarre pleasure – droll, yet ultimately sensitive and thought-provoking. Young Otto (Jey Crisfar) is a not only a gay twink – he’s also a zombie, who rises from the dead in a creepy, rotted hoodie and with bleary yellow eyes, and staggers around Berlin eating cats and picking up sexually promiscuous gentlemen … whose innards he later slurps on. When Otto shambles onto a movie set being run by subversive underground filmmaker Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus) – who just happens to be filming her own movie about zombie revolutionaries (it makes sense when you see it) – Otto appears to have found the role he was born to play. However, Otto starts suffering flashbacks to events from his own former life – including his love affair with the beautiful boy (Gio Black Peter) who drove him to become one of the undead – leading to several unexpected revelations.

Along with the wacky zombie plot, LaBruce’s film is peppered with the filmmaker’s stylistic signatures – hefty dollops of near-hardcore sex and longwinded political diatribes against conformism and capitalism. Yet, the film is also peppered with strikingly clever ironic humor, underscoring the director’s notion that the world regards gays as being zombie-like monsters – and hinting at the subversive notion that love is as all-consuming as a zombie’s barbecue feast. Crisfar’s German accent is sometimes difficult to penetrate, but he engrossingly balances zombie-like ghoulishness with a strange vulnerability. (Paul Birchall) (Opens Friday at Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

SPECIAL “Most of us can’t be unique or important in a meaningful way,” concedes Les (Michael Rapaport), an L.A. parking enforcement officer, whose life is a spirit-crushing void of insults, microwave dinners, and emasculation from a boss who forces him to repeat the mantra “I am important and I keep the city running.” When Les enlists in a pharmaceutical trial for a pill that promises to erase self-doubt, he’s ecstatic at the side-effects – flight, telepathy, and teleportation, the perfect ingredients to upgrade from a zero to a crimefighting hero. By reading minds, Les prevents robberies by preemptively tackling the perps; on camera (and to local newscasters and police) he looks like the aggressor, and we too tentatively come to suspect that our vigilante might in fact be insane.

Shot for pennies – a cash limitation that benefits the production’s creativity and credibility –- writer-directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore’s haunting film keeps shifting the ground under our feet as Les ricochets between two sets of brothers, the comic shop geeks (Josh Peck and Robert Baker) who are his closest thing to friends, and the moneyed corporate cretins (Paul Blackthorne and Ian Bohen) who want to keep Les from ruining their investment in the new wonder drug. Rapaport is great casting – 6’4” and wild-eyed, he’s so big, intense, and earnestly vulnerable that we’re never sure if the wary reactions to him spring from a belief in his powers or fear that he might just go nuts on them.

When one of the bad guys tries to reduce Les to sniveling that he’s a nobody, like him, we ball up our fists. And later, when Les wrestles with the option of flushing his medicine, this memorable and smart noir suggests that a humble man’s real superpower is the ability to endure. (Amy Nicholson) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

Rudakova), the 20-ish daughter of the head of the Ukrainian EPA (Jeroen Krabbe), to force him to sign environmentally destructive contracts; they insist that transporter Frank Martin (Jason Statham, coming back for thirds) babysit her. They back up their request by outfitting both Frank and Valentina with explosive bracelets that will blow them to hellangone if they stray more than 100 feet from Frank’s car – or if they try to remove them, natch. In shor t, the latest from writer/producer Luc Besson combines the character from its two predecessors with a variation on the dilemma Statham faced in the unrelated Crank.

The basic plot idea is beyond inane – the minister won’t be able to renege on the contracts as soon as his daughter is released? Huh? – but this series left reality on a fast train before the opening credits of the 2002 original.

Oliver Megaton – not his real name, I was relieved to learn – is the credited director, and Hong Kong whiz Cory Yuen returns to stage the action scenes, which are half the movie and all that’s memorable. For the most part, the fights and chases are as implausible as the story, but there’s an extraordinarily clever escape-from-certain-death bit about 20 minutes from the end that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

(Andy Klein) (Citywide)

kidnap

Valentina

The Beautiful Truth. Documentarian Steve Kroschel follows a 15-year-old Alaskan as he sets out to investigate the direct link between diet and disease, and Gerson Therapy, an alleged alternative-medicine treatment for cancer. (AK) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3) Ben X. Ben (Greg Timmermans), who has Asperger’s Syndrome, spends much of his life in an on-line computer game, where he attempts to train for and block out the reality of his daily experiences. His on-line dream girl (Laura Verlinden) helps him devise a plan to get back at the bullies who torment him in real life. Writer/director Nic Balthazar’s debut film, based on a true story, is Belgium’s Academy Award Submission for Best Foreign Language Film. (AK) (Opens Friday at the Nuart) Fix. Tao Ruspoli directed and cowrote (with Jeremy Fels) this story of a pair of documentar y filmmakers (Shawn Andrews, Olivia Wilde) racing around L.A., trying to get the money that will put a friend in rehab and save him from three years in prison. (AK) (Opens Friday at the Downtown Independent) The Matador. Stephen Higgins and Nina Gilden Seavey directed this documentary about David Fandila’s quest to become the world’s top-ranked bullfighter. (AK) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

SEE THE MOVIE THAT’S

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YORK POST “A SOARING, CROWD-PLEASING FANTASY THAT’S A TALE OF

UNSWERVING LOVE.” JOE MORGENSTERN,

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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(Natalya

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 17 LACITYBEAT

CHECK DIRECTORY FOR SHOWTIMES

NOW PLAYING See Showtimes and Special Screenings for more info.

Capsule reviews by Andy Klein (AK), Paul Birchall (PB), Annlee Ellingson (AE), Mark Keizer (MK), Wade Major (WM), Amy Nicholson (AN), Brent Simon (BS), Joshua Sindell (JS), and others as noted.

Bolt. When Bolt (voice of John Travolta) knows his owner (or "person") Penny (Miley Cyrus) needs rescue from the evil Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell), he has an arsenal of superpowers. It's all special effects for Bolt's prime time TV thriller, but the twist is that the dog thinks his powers – and his enemies – are real, and the studio's ratings-hungry psychological tor ture has frayed the dog's nerves so much that he can't even enjoy his chew toys. One too many cliffhangers, and Bolt busts out to rescue his mistress. This animated feature touches on the divide between reality and heroism, but it's really centered on the bond between animal and owner, a truth as universal as WALL*E's antilittering stance. With that theme, Bolt plays it safe and sweet – this is comedy for moderates. It's so intent on being innocuous that,

“THE

when violent explosions shake the TV shoot, directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard cut to a mile away, so the only repercussion is an empty Big Gulp cup falling off a ledge.

Bolt isn't a dazzler, but it's entertainment with heart ... and without the Shrek template of 5 kiddie jokes to every stealthy adult gag.

(AN) Changeling. Clint Eastwood’s latest is based on the true-life L.A. case of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), whose son disappeared in 1928. When the LAPD “reunited” her with a boy claiming to be her son, she denied his identity. Despite ample corroboration from doctors, teachers, and neighbors, the LAPD – apparently in one of its most lawless and corrupt phases, which is saying a lot – was so obstinate about not admitting to a mistake that they insisted Christine was delusional and, without warrant, grabbed her and tossed her in a mental hospital. Around the same time, other cops were uncovering the deeds of serial killer Gordon Stewart Northcott (Jason Butler Harner), whose case proved to be related. In cleaving to reality, Changeling suffers even more from the structural awkwardness that often mars Eastwood’s films.

It's essentially a classic three-act drama ... but with two or three epilogues. The truer

FUNNIEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR!

VINCE VAUGHN AND REESE WITHERSPOON ARE TERRIFIC. THE PERFECT HOLIDAY TREAT!” Shawn Edwards, FOX-TV

“‘FOUR CHRISTMASES’ IS A HILARIOUS COMEDY.” Elizabeth Olubodun, OK! MAGAZINE

Eastwood and Straczynski cleave to the facts, the more lumpy the forward motion gets.

Everything is flawlessly tasteful, re-creating a beautiful, burnished period L.A. This is basically solid – enjoyable, if overlong at two hours and twenty minutes. (AK) A Christmas Tale. Christmas at the Vuillards is clouded by the recent discovery that matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has cancer.

All her children are showing up so everyone can be tested for bone marrow compatibility, even black sheep Henri (Mathieu Almaric), long banished from the home by his older sister (Anne Consigny), who despises him for reasons that are never entirely clarified. The latest from French director Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queen) is an often wrenching drama about a most unhappy family. In many ways, it's quite similar to Jonathan Demme's current Rachel Getting Married; but if the Demme film was uncompromising and realistic, Desplechin makes it seem like Hollywood fluff in comparison. The director throws so many characters at us at the beginning that I was confused about who was who for roughly an hour of the two-and-ahalf-hour running time. Once the connections become clear, however, this often bitter story almost becomes a thriller, as we fear the next outburst or revelation and its aftermath. By the end, Desplechin has left many details unclarified, in imitation of the raggedness of life itself. The result is always gripping and perceptive, without solving anything. (AK) Happy-Go-Lucky. When Poppy (Sally Hawkins), an elementary school teacher of irrepressible good humor, discovers her bicycle has been stolen, she decides to take driving lessons. Unfortunately, her instructor is the odd, prickly, racist Scott (Eddie Marsan), who finds her chirpy manner intensely annoying and maybe attractive. There's not much to summarize by way of plot in the latest wonder from Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets and Lies) – which is not to suggest any dearth of incident. But the film is more of a comic character study, buoyed by Hawkins's irresistible performance. The elfin Hawkins is simply a force of nature. At first, it's easy to react a bit like Scott the driving instructor and to wish that Poppy would crank down the effervescence a couple of notches. But once we see the compassion, the profound humanness, beneath her surface, she emerges as a complex, completely engaging character. Marsan (Miami Vice, Sixty Six) is excellent as well, alternately pathetic, contemptible, and creepy; and Karina Fernandez practically steals the show in a few brief scenes as a flamenco teacher. One of Leigh's most upbeat films, as well as one of the best. (AK) I've Loved You So Long. Recent parolee Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas), estranged from what remains of her family for 15 years, has a drab wardrobe of browns and greys to match her battered psyche. Lea (Elsa Zylberstein), her younger sister, takes her

“Barbaric, elegant, primitive, erotic, revolting, thrilling... more drama than most blockbusters!”

-Jeannette Catsoulis, THE NEW YORK TIMES

www.matadorthefilm.com

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BEVERLY HILLS Laemmle’s Music Hall (310) 274-6869 Wed. 11/26 : 5:20 • 7:30 • 9:40 Thurs. 11/27: 1:00 • 3:10 • 5:20 • 7:30 • 9:40 Fri.: 5:20 • 7:30 • 9:40 Sat. & Sun.: 1:00 • 3:10 • 5:20 7:30 • 9:40 Mon.- Thurs.: 5:20 • 7:30

into the Parisian home she shares with husband Luc, his mute father, and their two little adopted Vietnamese girls. As Juliette is slowly re-integrated into society both at large and in small, a slow thaw occurs, with unanticipated consequences for all involved. For those who have sampled even a bit of French cinema, the emotional contours of this film – the directorial debut of novelist and literature professor Philippe Claudel – are familiar. The studied warmth of its telling, though, wins out; in the end, this is a movie about familial silences and the great spaces in between, both in relationships and in one's head. The slow reveal of the full reason behind Juliette's incarceration gives the film some extra emotional heft, but this is first and foremost an Oscar-level showcase for Scott Thomas, as a woman who learns to purge herself of the swallowed self-loathing that has soured her soul. (BS) Quantum of Solace. In the first full-on sequel in the Bond series, 007 (Daniel Craig) goes after the organization responsible for the death of his true love Vesper at the end of Casino Royale. His efforts lead to Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a ruthless international corporate criminal who has managed to convince the world that he's an ecological crusader. Bond also zeroes in on Camille (Olga Kur ylenko), who is sucking up to Greene in order to further her own personal quest for vengeance. The Bond producersbrought aboard a director with no real experience in this sort of film – Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger than Fiction). One might expect an infusion of idiosyncrasy, but – outside of one interesting sequence intercutting a shootout with a performance of Tosca – there's no more stylistic individuality here than in Live and Let Die. If anything, Forster has trimmed away every non-action scene that isn't absolutely necessary to advancing the story ... and a few that probably are necessar y, given that the mechanics are often confusing. Everybody keeps talking about Bond's heartbreak, but 007 is so closed off that we never see it. The film may make gestures toward emotional content, but they feel strictly pro forma. All of which has the effect of turning the hero into something between a machine and a coldhearted bastard, with none of the drollery or charm that sweetened the mix in the old days. (AK) Role Models. After a car crash, two wastrels (Paul Rudd, Seann William Scott) are ordered by the court to spend 150 hours as "Bigs" (that is, overgrown children) mentoring Littles (precocious kids) for Sturdy Wings, a mentoring program founded by a brusque ex-addict (a hilarious Jane Lynch), who shoehorns her coke addiction into every sentence. In this mediocre comedy, both characters are (like the script) half-baked: Rudd portrays an inert grump, who could have been played by a rock; Scott is stuck playing yet another horndog, the kind of character he tried to outgrow with the brilliant bleak comedy The Promotion. Five writers worked on the script; none bothered to create a plot or jokes.

Director David Wain and the ensemble aren't trying much harder. Fortunately twelve-yearold actor Bobb'e J. Thompson is too young to pick up on the adults' apathy: Playing a hostile, breast-obsessed kid who looks like an elementary schooler but cusses like a pimp, Thompson shames all the bigger names sleepwalking through the movie by giving it everything he's got. (AN) The Secret Life of Bees. In South Carolina in the sixties, a 14-year-old white girl (Dakora Fanning) flees her abusive father, accompanied by the black domestic (Jennifer Hudson) who has raised her, and takes refuge with three beekeeping sisters. Gina PrinceBythewood directed and adapted the screenplay from Sue Monk Kidd's novel; Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, and Sophie Okonedo costar. (AK) Slumdog Millionaire. As a humble tea runner (Dev Patel) in Mumbai is poised to win the big prize on the popular Indian edition of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, he is picked up and beaten by the police, who want him to admit he’s cheating. His explanations of how he knows each answer constitute an entire autobiography in flashback, as we see him lose his mother to Hindu progrom on Muslims, get “adopted” into a gang of child beggars, and get abandoned by his brother (Madhur Mittal), who becomes a gangster. All along, he is driven to rescue, and reunite with, the girl (Freida Pinto) he has loved since childhood. Director Danny Boyle is best known for hard-edged, even nasty, films like

LACITYBEAT 18 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

Shallow Grave (1995), Trainspotting (1996), 28 Days Later... (2002), and Sunshine (2007), but here he’s teamed with screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), who is practically the anti-Boyle. The tension between Beaufoy and Boyle's disparate inclinations that gives Slumdog Millionaire most of its texture. To use a crude analogy, it's a bit like Stanley Kubrick shooting an abandoned Frank Capra project. (AK) Special. See Latest Reviews.

Synecdoche, New York. After receiving a MacAr thur Foundation “genius” grant, a small-time theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) decides to stage a brutally honest representation of his own life. He recreates his environs in a gigantic New York City warehouse and hires actors to play himself and the women in his life (Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Sadie Goldstein, Jennifer Jason Leigh). But, since the staging goes on for decades and becomes the center of his existence, he has to hire more actors (Tom Noonan, Emily Watson) to play everyone working on the project (including the actors) and then more actors to play those actors … on and on in an infinite regression. The directorial debut of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is just as brilliant and confounding as one might expect. Like Adaptation., its endlessly self-reflexive convolutions may make your head hurt, and there’s no way to catch everything going on in one viewing. The main difference from his earlier work is that Jonze and (to a lesser extent) Gondry played up the humor, seducing us into grimness through a candy coating.

Kaufman has made Synecdoche, New York far less funny. As a result, it may not be everyone's cup of tea. It's really quite brilliant. But it's also so difficult and so emotionally downbeat that it's hard to characterize it as "entertaining." (AK) Transporter 3. See Latest Reviews.

Twilight. A newcomer (Kristen Stewart) in a small Washington town falls for a classmate (Robert Pattinson), whose pallor and odd ways suggest he's one of the children of the night. Catherine Hardwicke (thirteen, The Nativity Story) directed this adaptation of the Stephenie Meyers bestseller. (AK) W. Oliver Stone's sometimes surreal biopic of George W. Bush, while not the ideological lambasting many probably expected, paints the current lame duck as a cross between Oedipus and Forrest Gump – a incredibly shallow man, way way out of his depth.

Stone's narrative intercuts between an apparent "now" – roughly 2002-2004 – and the previous 35-40 years, from a creepy fraternity hazing through a creepier public ascent.

Josh Brolin pretty much inhabits the role, even though he's a little too big, hunky, and handsome, even for the younger, brazen Bush. Richard Dreyfuss makes for an appropriately sinister Dick Cheney; and Jeffrey Wright and Bruce McGill nail Colin Powell and George Tenet, respectively. James Cromwell doesn't seem the least bit interested in replicating George H.W. Bush's voice or accent, yet he captures the sense of an old-money WASP, chilly and emotionally distant, too absorbed in upholding the family name, with little clue how to love his eldest son. As in Nixon, Stone seems to take minimal liberties. Of course he has to invent the domestic conversations in the Bush household. But his most frequent departures from the record involve transplanting famous Bush statements and gaffes into different settings – which seems well within the bounds of dramatic license. In some ways, W. could be considered a compilation – George Bush's Greatest Hits, if you will – except they're awful, not great, and they've proved to be flops, not hits. (AK) Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks, wonderfully game) are lifelong platonic friends, living together at poverty's edge in Pittsburgh. After meeting a gay porn actor (Justin Long) at their high school reunion, the pair decide they can escape Debt Mountain by shooting an adult film. With no experience in movies other than watching them, Zack enlists his coffee shop co-worker (a hilarious Craig Robinson) to produce and local sex deviants (including Jason Mewes and Traci Lords) to star. But the crux of director Kevin Smith's best film since Chasing Amy is that Zack and Miri's road to solvency will require these childhood buddies to have intercourse together. Even more than the hit-to-miss joke ratio, success depends on how well Smith handles the aftermath of

Zack and Miri having sex. The answer is: absolutely fine, considering that neither his interests (high school, sex, Star Wars) nor his abilities as a director have evolved much. Although at heart this is yet another comedy about a loser who scores with a girl way out of his league, the raunchy laughs mix with enough maturity and discipline to suggest that Smith may now be prepared to make a romcom really worth remembering. (MK)

SHOWTIMES NOV. 28-DEC. 4, 2008 Note: Times are p.m., and daily, unless otherwise indicated.

All times are subject to change without notice.

BURBANK AMC Burbank 16, 140 E Palm Av, (818) 953-9800.

Australia Fri-Sat 9:40 a.m., 10:40 a.m., 1:15, 4:50, 7:35, 8:25, 11:55; Sun 9:40 a.m., 10:40 a.m., 1:15, 4:50, 7:35, 8:25.

Bolt Fri-Sun 10:45 a.m., 1:20, 3:55, 6:30, 9:05.

Bolt in Disney Digital 3D Fri-Sat 9:45 a.m., 10:15 a.m., 12:20, 12:50, 2:55, 3:25, 5:25, 6, 8:05, 8:35, 10:40, 11:15; Sun 9:45 a.m., 10:15 a.m., 12:20, 12:50, 2:55, 3:25, 5:25, 6, 8:05, 8:35.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Fri-Sat 10 a.m., 12:35, 3:05, 5:35, 8:10, 10:45; Sun 11:40 a.m., 2:25, 5:05, 7:40, 10:15.

Four Christmases Fri-Sat 9:55 a.m., 12:30, 3, 4:30, 5:30, 7, 8, 9:35, 10:35, 12:05 a.m.; Sun 9:55 a.m., 12:30, 3, 4:30, 5:30, 7, 8, 9:35, 10:30.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sun 11:45 a.m., 2:10.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa: The IMAX Experience IMAX Fri-Sat 10:35 a.m., 1:10, 3:45, 6:15, 8:30, 11; IMAX Sun 10:35 a.m., 1:10, 3:45, 6:15, 8:30.

Metropolitan Opera: La Damnation de Faust Encore Wed only, 7.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 10:10 a.m., 10:50 a.m., 12:45, 1:30, 3:30, 4:10, 6:10, 6:50, 8:50, 9:30, 11:30, 12:10 a.m.; Sun 10:50 a.m., 12:45, 1:30, 3:30, 4:10, 6:10, 6:50, 8:50, 9:30.

Role Models Fri-Sat 10:25 a.m., 1:05, 3:35, 6:05, 8:40, 11:20; Sun 11:55 a.m., 2:35, 5:15, 7:50, 10:20.

Transporter 3 Fri-Sat 10:20 a.m., 1, 2:20, 3:40, 4:55, 6:20, 9, 11:10, 11:40; Sun 10:20 a.m., 1, 2:20, 3:40, 4:55, 6:20, 9.

Twilight Fri-Sat 9:50 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 11:50 a.m., 12:55, 1:25, 2:50, 3:50, 4:25, 5:50, 6:55, 7:25, 8:55, 9:50, 10:30, 11:50, 12:20 a.m.; Sun 9:50 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 11:50 a.m., 12:55, 1:25, 2:50, 3:50, 4:25, 5:50, 6:55, 7:25, 8:55, 9:50, 10:25.

AMC Burbank Town Center 8, 210 E Magnolia Bl, (818) 953-9800. Australia Fri-Sat 11:50 a.m., 3:35, 7:05, 10:40; Sun 11:50 a.m., 3:35, 7:05, 10:35; Mon-Thur 1:30, 5:10, 8:40.

Bolt Fri-Sun 11:15 a.m., 1:50, 4:25, 7, 9:35; MonThur 1:50, 4:25, 7, 9:35.

The Dukes 1:55.

Four Christmases Fri-Sun 11:55 a.m., 2:30, 5, 7:30, 10; Mon-Thur 2:30, 5:05, 7:35, 10:05.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year Fri-Sun 11 a.m., 1:45, 4:35, 7:20, 10:05; Mon-Thur 1:45, 4:35, 7:20, 10.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sun 12:20, 2:45, 5:20, 7:45, 10:10; Mon-Thur 2:45, 5:20, 7:45, 10:10.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sun 11:30 a.m., 2:10, 4:50, 7:25, 10:15; Mon-Thur 2:10, 4:50, 7:25, 10:15.

Twilight Fri-Sun 12:25, 3:20, 6:25, 9:25; Mon-Thur 3:20, 6:25, 9:25.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno Fri-Sun 11:25 a.m., 4:30, 7:10, 9:45; Mon-Thur 4:30, 7:10, 9:45.

AMC Burbank Town Center 6, 770 N First St, (818) 953-9800. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

CULVER CITY, MARINA DEL REY The Bridge: Cinema De Lux & IMAX Theater, The Promenade at Howard Hughes Center, 6081 Center Dr, Westchester, (310) 568-3375. Australia noon, 3:30, 6:30, 7, 10, 10:30.

The Backyardigans: Race to the Tower of Power Sat only, 10 a.m.

Barbie: A Christmas Carol Sun only, 10 a.m.

Bolt in Disney Digital 3D Fri-Sat 10:30 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 12:45, 2, 3, 4:15, 5:15, 6:45, 7:45, 9, 10, 11:15, 12:15 a.m.; Sun 10:30 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 12:45, 2, 3, 4:15, 5:15, 6:45, 7:45, 9, 10; Mon-Thur 11:45 a.m., 12:45, 2, 3, 4:15, 5:15, 6:45, 7:45, 9, 10.

Four Christmases Fri-Sat 10:45 a.m., 12:55, 3:05, 5:20, 7:40, 10, 12:15 a.m.; Sun 10:45 a.m., 12:55, 3:05, 5:20, 7:40, 10; Mon-Thur 12:55, 3:05, 5:20, 7:40, 10.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sat 11:30 a.m., 12:30, 1:50, 2:50, 4:10, 5:10, 7:30, 9:50, 12:10 a.m.; Sun-Thur 11:30 a.m., 12:30, 1:50, 2:50, 4:10, 5:10, 7:30, 9:50.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 11:45 a.m., 12:45, 2:15,

3:15, 4:45, 5:45, 7:15, 8:15, 9:45, 10:45, 12:15 a.m.; Sun 11:45 a.m., 12:45, 2:15, 3:15, 4:45, 5:45, 7:15, 8:15, 9:45, 10:45; Mon 11:45 a.m., 2:15, 3:15, 4:45, 5:45, 7:15, 8:15, 9:45, 10:45; Tue-Thur 11:45 a.m., 12:45, 2:15, 3:15, 4:45, 5:45, 7:15, 8:15, 9:45, 10:45.

Role Models Fri-Sat noon, 2:20, 4:40, 7, 9:20, 11:40; Sun-Thur noon, 2:20, 4:40, 7, 9:20.

Transporter 3 Fri-Sat 10:15 a.m., 12:05, 12:35, 2:30, 3, 4:55, 5:25, 7:20, 7:50, 9:55, 10:25, 12:20 a.m.; Sun 10:15 a.m., 12:05, 12:35, 2:30, 3, 4:55, 5:25, 7:20, 7:50, 9:55, 10:25; Mon-Thur 12:05, 12:35, 2:30, 3, 4:55, 5:25, 7:20, 7:50, 9:55, 10:25.

Twilight Fri-Sat 10:30 a.m., 11 a.m., 12:30, 1:30, 2, 3:30, 4:30, 5, 6:30, 7:30, 8, 9:30, 10:30, 11, 12:30 a.m.; Sun 10:30 a.m., 11 a.m., 12:30, 1:30, 2, 3:30, 4:30, 5, 6:30, 7:30, 8, 9:30, 10:30; Mon-Thur 12:30, 1:30, 2, 3:30, 4:30, 5, 6:30, 7:30, 8, 9:30, 10:30.

Culver Plaza Theatre, 9919 Washington Blvd, (310) 836-5516. Beverly Hills Chihuahua Fri-Sun 11:45 a.m., 3:50; Mon-Thur 4:10.

Changeling Fri-Sun 12:05, 2:45, 7:40; Mon-Thur 2, 7:40.

Happy-Go-Lucky Fri-Sun 2:20, 5:05, 7:35, 10:10; Mon-Thur 5:05, 7:35.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year Fri-Sun 12:05; Mon-Thur 2:15.

Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! Fri-Sun noon, 2:30, 5:05, 7:50, 10:25; Mon-Thur 2:10, 4:45, 7:35.

Religulous Fri-Sun noon, 2:05, 4:10, 6:15, 8:20, 10:35; Mon-Thur 2:05, 4:10, 6:15, 8:20.

The Secret Life of Bees Fri-Sun 5:30, 10:30; Mon-Thur 5:30.

W. Fri-Sun 11:50 a.m., 5:05; Mon-Thur 5:05.

Yuvvraaj Fri-Sun 2:15, 7:35, 10:25; Mon-Thur 2:10, 7:35.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno Fri-Sun 1:40, 5:45, 7:55, 10:05; Mon-Thur 2, 6, 8:15.

Loews Cineplex Marina Marketplace, 13455 Maxella Av, (310) 827-9588. Australia Fri-Sun 11:15 a.m., 1, 2:50, 4:45, 6:30, 8:30, 10:15; Mon-Wed 1:30, 2:30, 5:10, 6:10, 8:45, 9:40.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Fri-Sun 11:50 a.m., 2:20, 4:50, 7:25, 9:50; Mon-Wed 2:15, 4:50, 7:20, 9:45.

RocknRolla Fri-Sun 11:20 a.m., 2, 4:40, 7:35, 10:20; Mon-Wed 1:35, 4:15, 7, 9:35.

Role Models Fri-Sun 12:15, 2:40, 5:10, 7:45, 10:10; Mon-Wed 1:55, 4:25, 6:55, 9:30.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno Fri-Sun noon, 2:30, 5, 7:30, 10; Mon-Wed 1:40, 4:10, 6:45, 9:20.

Pacific Culver Stadium 12, 9500 Culver Bl, (310) 855-7519. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

UA Marina, 4335 Glencoe Av, (310) 823-1721. Bolt Fri-Sun 10:20 a.m., 12:40, 3, 5:20, 7:40, 10; MonThur 12:40, 3, 5:20, 7:40, 10.

Four Christmases Fri-Sun 10:30 a.m., 12:50, 3:10, 5:30, 7:50, 10:30; Mon-Thur 12:50, 3:10, 5:30, 7:50, 10:30.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sun 10 a.m., 12:20, 2:40, 5, 7:10, 9:40; Mon-Thur 12:20, 2:40, 5, 7:10, 9:40.

Open Captioned Performance - Selected Film - Daily .

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sun 11:15 a.m., 1:50, 4:30, 7, 9:50; Mon-Thur 1:50, 4:30, 7, 9:50.

Transporter 3 Fri-Sun 10:10 a.m., 12:30, 2:50, 5:10, 7:30, 10:10; Mon-Thur 12:30, 2:50, 5:10, 7:30, 10:10.

Twilight Fri-Sun 10:40 a.m., 1:30, 4:20, 7:20, 10:20; Mon-Thur 1:30, 4:20, 7:20, 10:20.

DOWNTOWN & SOUTH L.A. Downtown Independent, >251 South Main St, (213) 617-1033. Fix Fri-Mon 2, 4, 6, 8, 10; Tue-Thur 11 a.m..

Laemmle’s Grande 4-Plex, 345 S Figueroa St, (213) 617-0268. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Magic Johnson Theaters, Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, 4020 Marlton Av, (323) 290-5900. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

University Village 3, 3323 S Hoover St, (213) 7486321. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sat 12:15, 2:35, 4:55, 7:15, 9:35, 11:45; Sun-Thur 12:15, 2:35, 4:55, 7:15, 9:35.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 12:30, 3, 5:30, 8, 10:30, 12:45 a.m.; Sun-Thur 12:30, 3, 5:30, 8, 10:30.

Twilight Fri-Sat 1:30, 4:15, 7, 9:45, 12:25 a.m.; SunThur 1:30, 4:15, 7, 9:45.

HOLLYWOOD ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood, 6360 Sunset Bl, (323) 464-4226. Australia Fri-Sun 12:25, 7:15.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Fri-Sun 11:30 a.m., 2:10, 4:40, 7:10, 10.

Changeling Fri-Sun 10:30 a.m., 1:40, 5:10, 8:20, 11:20.

Four Christmases Fri-Sat 7:05, 9:30, 12:05 a.m.; Sun 7:05, 9:30.

Milk Fri-Sun 10:05 a.m., 1, 4:05, 7.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sun 11:05 a.m., 12:20, 1:45, 3, 4:35, 5:40, 7:35, 8:40, 10:25, 11:30.

Rachel Getting Married Fri-Sun 10:55 a.m., 1:35, 4:55, 7:45, 10:45.

Slumdog Millionaire Fri-Sun 10:20 a.m., 1:20, 4:15,

4:50, 7:40, 10:30, 11:10.

Transporter 3 Fri-Sun 11:25.

Twilight Fri-Sun 10 a.m., 10:35 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 1:05, 1:25, 2:15, 4, 4:25, 5:05, 7:25, 8:05, 10:05, 10:55.

Grauman’s Chinese, 6925 Hollywood Bl, (323) 4648111. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Los Feliz 3, 1822 N Vermont Av, (323) 664-2169.

Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Mann Chinese 6, 6801 Hollywood Bl, (323) 4613331. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Pacific’s El Capitan, 6838 Hollywood Bl, (323) 4677674. Bolt in Disney Digital 3D 10 a.m., 1, 4, 7, 9:55.

Pacific’s The Grove Stadium 14, 189 The Grove Dr, Third St & Fairfax Av, (323) 692-0829. Australia FriSat 11:35 a.m., 12:40, 3:20, 4:20, 7:05, 8:05, 10:50, 11:45; Sun-Thur 11:35 a.m., 12:40, 3:20, 4:20, 7:05, 8:05, 10:50.

Four Christmases Fri-Sat 10:30 a.m., 11:40 a.m., 12:50, 2:10, 3:10, 4:40, 5:40, 7:10, 8:10, 9:40, 10:40, 12:10 a.m.; Sun 10:30 a.m., 11:40 a.m., 12:50, 2:10, 3:10, 4:40, 5:40, 7:10, 8:10, 9:40, 10:40; Mon 10:30 a.m., 11 a.m., 12:50, 2:10, 3:10, 4:40, 5:40, 7:10, 8:10, 9:40, 10:40; Tue-Thur 10:30 a.m., 11:40 a.m., 12:50, 2:10, 3:10, 4:40, 5:40, 7:10, 8:10, 9:40, 10:40.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa noon, 2:25, 4:55, 7:25, 9:55.

Milk 10:50 a.m., 12:55, 1:55, 4:05, 5:05, 7:15, 8:15, 10:25, 11:25.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 11:10 a.m., 12:10, 1:50, 2:50, 4:35, 5:35, 7:20, 8:20, 10:05, 11:05, 12:35 a.m.; Sun-Thur 11:10 a.m., 12:10, 1:50, 2:50, 4:35, 5:35, 7:20, 8:20, 10:05, 11:05.

Role Models Fri-Sat 11:45 a.m., 2:20, 5, 7:35, 10:15, 12:40 a.m.; Sun-Thur 11:45 a.m., 2:20, 5, 7:35, 10:15.

Transporter 3 Fri-Sat 11:55 a.m., 2:35, 5:15, 7:55, 10:35, 12:20 a.m.; Sun-Thur 11:55 a.m., 2:35, 5:15, 7:55, 10:35.

Twilight Fri-Mon 10:45 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1, 1:45, 2:30, 4, 4:45, 5:30, 7, 7:45, 8:30, 10, 10:45, 11:30; Tue-Wed 11:30 a.m., 1, 2:30, 4, 5:30, 7, 8:30, 10, 10:45, 11:30; Thur 10:45 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1, 1:45, 2:30, 4, 4:45, 5:30, 7, 7:45, 8:30, 10, 10:45, 11:30.

Regent Showcase, 614 N La Brea Av, (323) 9342944. I Can’t Think Straight Fri 5:45, 7:30, 9:15; Sat 4, 5:45, 7:30, 9:15; Sun 4, 5:45, 7:30; Mon-Thur 5:45, 7:30, 9:15.

Vine, 6321 Hollywood Bl, (323) 463-6819. Vista, 4473 Sunset, (323) 660-6639. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

NORTH HOLLYWOOD, UNIVERSAL CITY Century 8, 12827 Victory Bl, (818) 508-6004.

Australia 12:20, 3:40, 7, 10:20.

Bolt 11:35 a.m., 12:50, 2:05, 3:20, 4:35, 7:05, 9:35.

Four Christmases 12:15, 2:45, 5:15, 7:45, 10:15.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa 11:45 a.m., 2:15, 4:45, 7:15, 9:45.

Quantum of Solace 11:20 a.m., 1:55, 4:40, 7:20, 10:05.

Role Models 7:25, 9:55.

Transporter 3 noon, 2:30, 5, 7:30, 10.

Twilight 11:15 a.m., 2, 4:50, 7:40, 10:30.

Loews CityWalk Stadium 19 with IMAX, 100 Universal City Dr at Universal CityWalk, (818) 5080588; IMAX Theater (818) 760-8100. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

NORTHRIDGE, CHATSWORTH, GRANADA HILLS Mann Granada Hills, Devonshire St & Balboa Av, (818) 363-3679. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Pacific’s Northridge Fashion Center All Stadium 10, 9400 N Shirley Av, (818) 501-5121. Australia Fri-Sun 11:45 a.m., 3:20, 7, 10:30; Mon-Thur 1, 4:30, 8:10.

Bolt Fri-Sat 11:25 a.m., 12:25, 1:55, 3, 4:30, 5:30, 7:05, 8, 9:45, 10:25; Sun 11:25 a.m., 12:25, 1:55, 3, 4:30, 5:30, 7:05, 8, 9:30, 10:25; Mon-Thur 1:05, 1:55, 3:30, 4:35, 5:50, 7:05, 8:15.

Four Christmases Fri-Sat 11 a.m., 1:10, 3:25, 5:35, 7:50, 10:10; Sun 11 a.m., 1:10, 3:25, 5:35, 7:50, 10; Mon-Thur 1:10, 3:25, 5:35, 7:50.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sat 12:15, 2:35, 5, 7:35, 10; Sun 12:15, 2:35, 5, 7:35, 9:50; Mon-Thur 2:35, 5, 7:35.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 11:15 a.m., 2, 4:45, 7:30, 10:15; Sun 11:15 a.m., 2, 4:45, 7:30, 10:05; Mon-Thur 2, 4:45, 7:30.

Role Models Fri-Sat 11:50 a.m., 2:20, 4:50, 7:20, 9:55; Sun 11:50 a.m., 2:20, 4:50, 7:20, 9:45; MonThur 2:20, 4:50, 7:20.

Transporter 3 Fri-Sat noon, 2:40, 5:15, 7:45, 10:20; Sun noon, 2:40, 5:15, 7:45, 10:10; Mon-Thur 2:40, 5:15, 7:45.

Twilight Fri-Sat 11:20 a.m., 1:20, 2:10, 4:15, 5:05, 7:10, 7:55, 10:05, 10:45; Sun 11:20 a.m., 1:20, 2:10, 4:15, 5:05, 7:10, 7:55, 9:55, 10:40; Mon-

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 19 LACITYBEAT

Thur 1:20, 2:10, 4:15, 5:05, 7:10, 7:55.

Pacific’s Winnetka All Stadium 21, 9201 Winnetka Av, Chatswor th, (818) 5015121. Australia Fri-Sat 11:35 a.m., 12:35, 3:20, 4:20, 7, 8, 10:35, 11:35; Sun-Thur 11:35 a.m., 12:35, 3:20, 4:20, 7, 8, 10:30.

Bolt Fri-Sat 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 12:15, 12:55, 2, 2:45, 3:25, 4:25, 5:15, 5:50, 7, 7:45, 8:30, 9:25, 10:10; Sun 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 12:15, 12:55, 2, 2:45, 3:25, 4:25, 5:15, 5:50, 7, 7:45, 8:30, 9:25; Mon-Thur 11:30 a.m., 12:15, 12:55, 2, 2:45, 3:25, 4:25, 5:15, 5:50, 7, 7:45, 8:30, 9:25.

Changeling Fri-Sat 10 a.m., 1:15, 4:20, 7:35, 10:45; Sun 10 a.m., 1:15, 4:20, 7:35, 10:40; Mon-Thur 1:15, 4:20, 7:35, 10:40.

Four Christmases Fri-Sat 10:25 a.m., 11:10 a.m., 11:55 a.m., 12:40, 1:25, 2:10, 2:55, 3:40, 4:30, 5:10, 5:55, 7:10, 7:50, 8:35, 9:20, 10:05, 10:50, 11:30; Sun 10:25 a.m., 11:10 a.m., 11:55 a.m., 12:40, 1:25, 2:10, 2:55, 3:40, 4:30, 5:10, 5:55, 7:10, 7:50, 8:35, 9:20, 10:05, 10:45; Mon-Thur 11:55 a.m., 12:40, 1:25, 2:10, 2:55, 3:40, 4:30, 5:10, 5:55, 7:10, 7:50, 8:35, 9:20,

10:05, 10:45.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year Fri-Sat 11; Sun-Thur 10:10.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sun 10:35 a.m., noon, 1, 2:25, 3:25, 4:45, 5:45, 7:15, 9:30; Mon-Thur noon, 1, 2:25, 3:25, 4:45, 5:45, 7:15, 9:30.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 10:05 a.m., 11:05 a.m., 11:50 a.m., 12:40, 1:45, 2:30, 3:20, 4:25, 5:05, 5:55, 7:05, 7:50, 8:35, 9:45, 10:30, 11:15; Sun 10:05 a.m., 11:05 a.m., 11:50 a.m., 12:40, 1:45, 2:30, 3:20, 4:25, 5:05, 5:55, 7:05, 7:50, 8:35, 9:45, 10:30; Mon-Thur 11:50 a.m., 12:40, 1:45, 2:30, 3:20, 4:25, 5:05, 5:55, 7:05, 7:50, 8:35, 9:45, 10:30.

Role Models 12:15, 2:45, 5:10, 7:45, 10:15.

Transporter 3 Fri-Sat 10:10 a.m., 11:40 a.m., 12:45, 2:15, 3:15, 4:50, 5:50, 7:30, 8:30, 10:05, 11:05; Sun 10:10 a.m., 11:40 a.m., 12:45, 2:15, 3:15, 4:50, 5:50, 7:30, 8:30, 10:05; Mon-Thur 11:40 a.m., 12:45, 2:15, 3:15, 4:50, 5:50, 7:30, 8:30, 10:05.

Twilight Fri-Sat 10:20 a.m., 10:50 a.m., 11:20 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 1:10, 1:40, 2:10, 2:40, 4:05, 4:35, 5, 5:35, 7:05,

7:30, 8, 8:25, 9:55, 10:25, 10:55, 11:25; Sun 10:20 a.m., 10:50 a.m., 11:20 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 1:10, 1:40, 2:10, 2:40, 4:05, 4:35, 5, 5:35, 7:05, 7:30, 8, 8:25, 9:55, 10:25, 10:45; MonThur 11:45 a.m., 1:10, 1:40, 2:10, 2:40, 4:05, 4:35, 5, 5:35, 7:05, 7:30, 8, 8:25, 9:55, 10:25, 10:45.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno Fri-Sat 8:15, 10:40; Sun-Thur 8:10, 10:35.

SANTA MONICA AMC Santa Monica 7, 1310 Third Street Promenade, (310) 395-3030. Bolt Fri-Sun 11:15 a.m., 1:50, 4:30, 7:15, 9:45; MonThur 2, 4:30, 7:15, 9:45.

Bolt in Disney Digital 3D Fri-Sun 10:45 a.m., 1:10, 3:40, 6:15, 9; Mon-Thur 1:15, 3:45, 6:15, 9.

Changeling Fri-Sun 11:50 a.m., 3:15, 6:45, 10; Mon-Thur 3:15, 6:45, 10.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sun 11:40 a.m., 2:10, 4:20, 7, 9:30; MonThur 1:45, 4:15, 7, 9:30.

Quantum of Solace Fri-Sun 11:30 a.m., 12:45, 2:30, 3:30, 5, 6:30, 7:30, 9:15, 10:15; Mon-Thur 1:30, 2:30, 4, 5, 6:30, 7:30, 9:15, 10:15.

Role Models Fri-Sun 11:55 a.m., 2:30, 5, 7:45, 10:05; Mon-Thur 2:15, 4:45, 7:45, 10:05.

Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, 1332 Second St, (310) 394-9741. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Loews Cineplex Broadway, 1441 Third Street Promenade, (310) 458-1506. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Mann Criterion, 1313 Third Street Promenade, (310) 395-1599. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

SHERMAN OAKS, ENCINO ArcLight Sherman Oaks, 15301 Ventura Bl, Sherman Oaks, (818) 501-0753.

Australia .

Bolt .

Bolt in Disney Digital 3D .

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas .

Four Christmases .

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa .

Milk .

Quantum of Solace .

Role Models .

Slumdog Millionaire .

Transporter 3 .

Twilight .

Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Laemmle’s Town Center 5, 17200 Ventura Bl, Encino, (818) 981-9811. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Mann Plant 16, 7876 Van Nuys Bl, Panorama City, (818) 779-0323. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Pacific’s Sherman Oaks 5, 14424 Millbank St, Sherman Oaks, (818) 5015121. Bolt Fri-Sun 11:10 a.m., 1:50, 4:30, 7:15, 9:55; Mon-Thur 1:35, 4:20, 7:15, 9:45.

Changeling Fri-Sun 11:45 a.m., 3:30, 7, 10:05; Mon-Thur 1:20, 4:45, 8:30.

Four Christmases Fri-Sun 11:05 a.m., 1:20, 3:35, 5:45, 8, 10:15; Mon-Thur 1:10, 4:30, 7:20, 9:55.

Rachel Getting Married Fri-Sun 11:30 a.m., 2:15, 5, 7:40, 10:25; Mon-Thur 1:15, 4:15, 7:10, 9:55.

Twilight Fri-Sun 11 a.m., 2, 4:50, 7:45, 10:30; Mon-Thur 1, 4:05, 7, 9:50.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, BEVERLY HILLS, CENTURY CITY AMC Century City 15, 10250 Santa Monica Bl, (310) 277-2011. Metropolitan Opera: La Damnation de Faust Encore Wed only, 7.

Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, 9036 Wilshire Bl, (310) 274-6869. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Laemmle’s Sunset 5 Theatre, 8000 Sunset Bl, (323) 848-3500. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Beverly Center 13 Cinemas, 8522 Beverly Blvd., Suite 835, (310) 652-7760.

Call theater for titles and showtimes.

for titles and showtimes.

Landmark’s Nuart Theater, 11272 Santa Monica Bl, (310) 281-8223. Ben X SubTitled Fri-Sun noon, 2:30, 5, 7:30, 10; Sub-Titled Mon-Thur 5, 7:30, 10.

Big Trouble in Little China Fri only, midnight.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show Sat only, midnight.

Landmark’s Regent, 1045 Broxton Av, (310) 281-8223. Bolt 1, 3:30, 6, 8:30.

The Landmark West Los Angeles, 10850 W Pico Bl, (310) 281-8223. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Majestic Crest Theater, 1262 Westwood Bl, (310) 474-7866. Synecdoche, New York 2:30, 5, 7:30, 10.

Mann Bruin, 948 Broxton Av, (310) 2088998. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Mann Festival 1, 10887 Lindbrook Av, (310) 208-4575. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Mann Village, 961 Broxton Av, (310) 2085576. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

WOODLAND HILLS, WEST HILLS, TARZANA AMC Promenade 16, 21801 Oxnard St, Woodland Hills, (818) 883-2262.

Australia Fri-Sun 9:45 a.m., 11 a.m., 3, 6:10, 6:40, 10:20; Mon-Thur 3, 6:10, 6:40, 10:10.

Bolt Fri-Sun 11:25 a.m., 12:20, 2:10, 2:50, 4:50, 5:35, 7:30, 8; Mon 2:10, 2:50, 5:35, 8; Tue 2:10, 2:50, 4:50, 5:35, 7:30, 8; Wed 2:10, 2:50, 5:35, 8; Thur 2:10, 2:50, 4:50, 5:35, 7:30, 8.

Bolt in Disney Digital 3D Fri-Sun 10:45 a.m., 1:20, 3:55, 6:30, 9:10; Mon-Thur 1:20, 3:55, 6:30, 9:10.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Fri-Sun 11:50 a.m., 2:20, 4:45, 7:10, 9:45; MonThur 2:20, 4:45, 7:10, 9:40.

Changeling Fri-Sun 10:30 a.m., 10; MonTue 1, 10; Wed 1; Thur 1, 10.

Four Christmases Fri 10:05 a.m., 11:20 a.m., noon, 1:55, 2:30, 4:25, 5:05, 6:55, 7:35, 9:25, 10:05, 11:50; Sat-Sun 10:05 a.m., 11:20 a.m., noon, 1:55, 2:30, 4:25, 5:05, 6:55, 7:35, 9:25, 10:05; Mon-Thur 1:50, 2:30, 4:25, 5:05, 6:55, 7:35, 9:25, 9:50.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year Fri-Sun 10:15 a.m.; Mon-Thur 1:05.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sun 10 a.m., 12:25, 2:55, 5:20, 7:55, 10:10; Mon-Thur 2:55, 5:15, 7:40, 9:55.

Metropolitan Opera: La Damnation de Faust Encore Wed only, 7.

Quantum of Solace Fri 10:40 a.m., 12:30, 1:30, 3:10, 4:15, 6, 7, 8:50, 9:50, 11:30; Sat-Sun 10:40 a.m., 12:30, 1:30, 3:10, 4:15, 6, 7, 8:50, 9:50; Mon-Tue 1:30, 3:10, 4:15, 6, 7, 8:50, 9:45; Wed 1, 1:30, 4:15, 7, 8:50, 9:45; Thur 1:30, 3:10, 4:15, 6, 7, 8:50, 9:45.

Role Models Fri 1:50, 4:20, 7:05, 9:30, 11:55; Sat-Sun 1:50, 4:20, 7:05, 9:30; Mon-Thur 4:20, 7:05, 9:30.

Transporter 3 Fri 9:50 a.m., 12:05, 1:15, 2:40, 3:45, 5:20, 8:05, 9:55, 10:50, midnight; Sat 9:50 a.m., 12:05, 1:15, 2:40, 3:45, 5:20, 8:05, 9:55, 10:50; Sun 9:50 a.m., 12:05, 1:15, 2:40, 3:45, 5:20, 8:05, 9:55; Mon-Thur 1:15, 2:40, 3:45, 5:20, 8:05, 9:55.

Twilight Fri-Sat 10:55 a.m., 12:15, 1:05, 1:55, 3:15, 4:05, 4:55, 6:25, 7:15, 7:55, 9:20, 10:15, 10:55; Sun 10:55 a.m., 12:15, 1:05, 1:55, 3:15, 4:05, 4:55, 6:25, 7:15, 7:55, 9:20, 10:15; Mon-Wed 1:55, 3:15, 4:05, 4:55, 6:25, 7:15, 7:55, 9:20, 10:05; Thur 1:55, 4:05, 4:55, 7:15, 7:55, 10:05.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno Fri-Sat 10:35; Sun 10:30; Mon-Thur 10:20.

Laemmle’s Fallbrook 7 Cinemas, Fallbrook Mall, 6731 Fallbrook Av, West Hills, (818) 340-8710. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

WESTWOOD, WEST L.A. AMC Avco Center, 10840 Wilshire Bl, (310) 475-0711. Call theater for titles and showtimes.

Laemmle’s Royal Theatre, 11523 Santa Monica Bl, (310) 477-5581. Call theater

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 27 New Beverly Cinema, L.A., (323) 9384038. Newbevcinema.com. Theater closed for Thanksgiving.

LACITYBEAT 20 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 28 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre, Santa Monica, (323) 466-3456.

Aerotheatre.com. Big Screen Classics – Singin’ in the Rain, 7:30.

American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood, (323) 466-3456.

Egyptiantheatre.com. New 70mm Print – West Side Story, 7:30.

CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theatre, Hollywood, (323) 655-2520.

Silentmovietheatre.com. Yasujiro Ozu – Tokyo Story, 7:30; followed by Brothers and Sisters of the Today Family. Space Junk – Mutant (unreleased director’s cut), midnight.

L.A. County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theatre, L.A., (323) 857-6010.

Lacma.org. William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Hollywood – Zander the Great (with live musical accompaniment by Bob Mitchell), 7:30; Blondie of the Follies, 9:15.

New Beverly Cinema Theater closed for Thanksgiving.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 29 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre Big Screen Classics – Vertigo, 7:30.

American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre New 70mm Print – West Side Story, 7:30; actor George Chakiris in person.

CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theatre The Magic of Stop-Motion – Alice in Wonderland (Lou Bunin, 1949), 6.

Homemade Horror – Weasels Rip My Flesh, 10; followed by Long Island Cannibal Massacre.

L.A. County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theatre William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Hollywood – The Battle Over Citizen Kane, 5; free. William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Hollywood – Citizen Kane, 7:30; introduced by curator Mary Levkoff.

New Beverly Cinema Vanity Insanity Triple Feature – Never Too Young to Die, 8; Action Jackson, 10; The Last Dragon, 11:59.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 30 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre Big Screen Classics – The Sound of Music, 4.

CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theatre An Evening with Don Hertzfeldt, 7, 9:30.

New Beverly Cinema The Adventures of Robin Hood, 3, 7:30; Captain Blood, 5:10, 9:40.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 1 New Beverly Cinema The Adventures of Robin Hood, 7:30; Captain Blood, 9:40.

UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Bl, L.A., (310) 206-3456 or cinema.ucla.edu/calendar. Out of the Past: Film Restoration Today – The Times of Harvey Milk, 7:30; free.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2 CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theatre L.A. Filmforum and Iota Center Present – Dot & Line Festival, 8.

L.A. County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theatre Tuesday Matinee – Meet Me in St. Louis, 1.

New Beverly Cinema Dolemite, 7:30; The Human Tornado, 10; Petey Wheatstraw, 11:30.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre Kevin Thomas’s Favorites – Five Easy Pieces, 7:30.

American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre Outfest Wednesdays – A Finished Life: The Goodbye & No Regrets Tour, 7:30.

CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theatre Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius – For Heaven’s Sake, 8; followed by The Kid Brother.

New Beverly Cinema American Graffiti, 7:30; Dazed and Confused, 9:45.

ALBERT R. BROCCOLI’S EON PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS DANIEL CRAIG AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND IN

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BY MICHAEL G. WILSON AND BARBARA BROCCOLI

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AND AT A THEATER NEAR YOU FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CHECK LOCAL LISTINGS.

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WEST LOS ANGELES The Bridge Cinema De Lux 310/568-3375 On 3 Screens Digital Projection Daily 11:45 AM, 12:15, 12:45, 2:15, 2:45, 3:15, 4:45, 5:15, 5:45, 7:15, 7:45, 8:15, 9:45, 10:15 & 10:45 PM Fri & Sat Late Shows 12:15 & 12:30 AM

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EAT

BITES

Two Great Flavors Eco-friendly meets comfort food at Akasha

By Miles Clements

PHOTO by roshEIla robles

Double Dipped Mere months after Philippe’s blew out the candles on its centennial celebration, rival French dippery Cole’s is set to reopen downtown for its own hundred-year anniversary. Eater LA and the L.A. Times reported on the details, with perhaps the most noticeable (and upscale) fact being that Neal Fraser (of Grace fame) is being brought in to consult. Of extra edible importance, though, is that the restaurant will be throwing a party for the Los Angeles Conservancy in December 4 and a secondary shindig in December 6 for its future customers featuring “100cent sandwiches.” Drop by 118 E. Sixth Street for a slice of pie, too.

Dig deep enough into Akasha’s details and it’s easy to see how the restaurant might remind some of that nagging culinary stereotype that paints Los Angeles as a city of lightstomached grazers, a population seeking little more than patches of macrobiotic greens and oxymoronic slabs of crueltyfree meat. Chef Akasha Richmond, after all, is dedicated to green ideals, and her Culver City restaurant follows through with organic everything. Even the servers are outfitted in eco-friendly garb. But visit Akasha for its stated purpose – food – and any thoughts of overzealous environmentalism will be pushed right out of your mind.

With its spring and summer menus, the restaurant’s healthy bent found strong seasonal support, as the warmer months brought naturally delicate dishes to the kitchen. But in the restaurant’s embrace of fall flavors Akasha truly proves itself, serving stouter plates that could pass the test of classic American comfort just about anywhere.

In the restaurant’s spot in the historic Hull Building, those culinary strides are made all the more striking. Up front, there’s a bakery for breakfast-bound eaters and a bar soused with organic cocktails and biodynamic wines. But beyond the bar, it’s all open space – a back wall of reclaimed wood seems a mile away, the sound-dampened ceiling looks to be up at cloud-level

Akasha: Green

clearance. The place is terribly attractive – contemporary mid-century cues – and impossible not to like.

Most of the New American menu is equally agreeable. The worldly conventions of modern California cooking are everywhere, easily edible in everything from the appetizers (order the masala shrimp) to the pizzas (try the pie of shiitake mushrooms, roasted squash and basil). Not all of the restaurant’s smaller plates are worthwhile, however, so it might be wise on the wallet to follow Akasha’s guiltlessly global menu straight to the entrees.

There, the South Indian-style salmon is a necessary plate for even the most meat-headed among us. The fish is cooked to a perfect pink and served with a tamarind-date chutney so sweet it could easily secure a spot on the dessert menu.

Even so, the chutney isn’t overpowering and actually makes a great foil to the fish, a tongue-pleasing pairing of sugar and salt that even cuts well against the accompanying curried cauliflower.

As poultry goes, there usually isn’t much reason to order chicken at a restaurant like Akasha, but here it’s a more-than-worthy option. Most of the dish’s success is derived from its obvious autumn flavors. Alongside the chicken, which, again, is cooked to the juiciest specifications, there are roasted hunks of heirloom squash, an apple puree and crispy cardamom spaetzle –

all the makings of a near-Thanksgiving meal. So it’s no surprise that the plate marries those components with ease, a classic seasonal dish that might just be one of the best examples of the restaurant’s simple style.

One marquee main plate that stumbles, though, is the Asian-style braised short ribs. The meat turns out plenty tender (there’s almost no knife work necessary), but the short ribs simply don’t taste a bit of their advertised star anise and ginger. That said, the parsnip-potato puree is a nice way to break up the typical meat-andpotatoes monotony.

The restaurant rebounds at dessert with an excellent carrot cake that’s matched with a tart ball of tangerine sorbet. There’s also a surprisingly smooth hemp-chocolate gelato with caramelized slices of banana. With the gelato, as with a lot of Akasha’s menu, it’s possible to find the stuff so green-minded that it might be misconstrued as prejudicial evidence of overbearing environmentalism. But it’s also exceedingly easy not to notice those organic attitudes at all. And when the restaurant’s food stands alone as well as it often does, that’s probably for the best. V Akasha, 9543 Culver Blvd., Culver City, (310) 845-1700. akasharestaurant.com.

Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Valet and street parking. Vegetarian friendly. Full bar. Food for two, $50-$100.

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 23 LACITYBEAT

Peared It’s a tough time to be in the guidebook game (hello, Michelin), a fact that might explain Zagat’s upcoming launch of its so-called Zagat Presents series here in L.A. New Yorkers have reportedly been eating up the Zagat-sponsored events, and the maroon-bound bookmaker explains that its restaurant partnerships will span everything from sneak peeks to special prixe fixe meals. There won’t be any advanced eating for the kickoff; instead, the first Zagat Presents on December 2 will focus on Santa Monica’s Josie and a special pearbased menu. Call (310) 581-9888 for details.

Behind the Scenes Culver City stalwart Fraîche winds down the year with another of its “insider” wine classes designed to peel back the curtain on the wine industry. On December 6, the restaurant prepares a two-hour class (or however long it takes to eat and drink your way to wine-based omniscience) on varietals from Champagne, the bonus being that attendees will be able to buy their most coveted bottles and bring them back to Fraîche free of any corkage fees. Call (310) 839-6800 for reservations.

It’s Good to Be King Viral marketing keeps sliding down its slippery slope as bloggers nationwide note the recent publicity stunt put forth

by Burger King. Hoping to capitalize on its reverse pickpocketing ads, the fast-food company has started dropping wallets around a number of metropolitan areas. Inside are fake driver’s licenses registered to the King, Burger King gift cards and even cash ranging from $1 to $100. Eager ad watchers are instructed to look for the next step in (anti-)viral marketing which suggests a rollout of BBQ- and ranchflavored condoms.

–MC Tips accepted … send treats to miles@ eatfoodwith.me or visit eatfoodwith.me.

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LACITYBEAT 24 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

Seven DAYs IN L.A.

Edited by Ron Garmon

Big sister is watching: Liz Wight of Love Grenades (see Tuesday)

Thursday 27

Day of the Dead Bird

There’s nothing like a full stomach. But then there’s the guilt trip that inevitably sets in after that second helping of stuffing.

Fear not, liberal! Gobble Gobble Give in Echo Park can assuage your guilt and give salvation to others. The deal is, people show up at the Echo with food, whether it’s a can of cranberry sauce or an entire roast duck, and then meals are handed out. Those who are feeling really guilty can drive food around town with other volunteers and fill some stomachs with turkey and mashed potatoes.

10 a.m. The Echo, 1822 Sunset Blvd., Echo Park, (213) 413-8200. gobblegobblegive.org.

(Nathan Solis)

Friday 28

The Geeks Have a Word for It

There is an epidemic among us. A new species has been identified and they’re much smarter than the average person. There’s no use in fighting them. The geeks are here. Why not embrace your inner geek and go to The Los Angeles Regional Science Fantasy Convention, or LosCon for short? The strictures of day-to-day life won’t bog down the folks at LosCon 35, where some panel topics will be “What if Superheroes Were Real?”

and “The Ethics of Cloning.” You have been warned. 10 a.m. $50. LAX Marriott, 5855 W. Century Blvd., L.A., (310) 641-5700. loscon. org. (NS)

Saturday 29

We All Scream for Dumplings

Esotouric, longtime purveyors of awardwinning, wacky, historical-landmark bus tours in Los Angeles’s most neglected neighborhoods, including “The Real Black Dahlia” and “The Birth of Noir,” brings you “Blood and Dumplings,” the criminal and gastronomic tour through Alhambra, Temple City, Monterey Park, El Monte, and Rosemead.

On the four-hour guided route, crime scenes will be investigated, and vegetarians will be accommodated – with (blood-free!) vegetarian dumplings, upon request, so call ahead. Noon4 p.m. $63, $5 dumpling fee. 370 W. Avenue 26, Cypress Park, (310) 995-4591. esotouric. com. (Gabrielle Paluch)

Sunday 30

Four-Door Dinosaurs

That L.A. even has an auto show is proof the universe has a sick sense of humor. The hundreds, if not thousands, of cars from around the world – including eco-friendly hybrids – displayed at The Los Angeles Auto Show seem

like pretty useless appendages in our current economy, and you’re not going there to put a lease on a million-dollar Cadillac. Los Angeles Convention Center is the place to have those American Beauty daydreams, where a car floats on red roses and beckons you to an alternate reality. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to fight those urges to buy a new car until the 30. At least gas prices are going down.

9 a.m.-10 p.m. $10. L.A. Convention Center, 1201 S. Figueroa St., (310) 444-1850 laautoshow.com. (NS)

Monday 1

His Assholiness

Denis Leary is heir to Keith Richards in terms of self-abuse. A chain-smoker and perhaps too keen a student of the late Bill Hicks, Leary sneers at wimps who go through two packs a day when he himself burns through two Bics.

This irrepressible Asshole No. 1 is at Book Soup tonight signing copies of Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid and making all a bit merrier at being assholes ourselves. 7 p.m. Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 659-3110. booksoup.com. (Ron Garmon)

Tuesday 2 Ground Zero

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 25 LACITYBEAT

The Zero Film Festival is a weeklong “fuck you” to the Hollywood movie industry. This Echo Park fest features dozens of films by filmmakers who just don’t have the greenbacks to make expensive movies. Opening night is Monday, but the first full day isn’t until today.

Confused? Good. Opening night (last night) offers live music with Of Aire and Warpaint and closing night (Wednesday) features Death to Anders and Love Grenades. $10. Dec. 1 at Gold Bear Academy, 2000 Hyperion Ave, Silver Lake, (323) 644-1585, and the rest of the week at downtown Independent Theater, 1228 S. Flower St., Downtown L.A., (213) 617-1033. zerofilmfest.com. (NS)

Wednesday 3

More Tales of Ribaldry

Jon Lovitz tried to impersonate the Queen of England on SNL and failed miserably. With his sing-song voice and his ruby red lipstick, who did this guy think he was fooling, anyway? Aw, who’re we kidding? We can’t stay mad at the guy who did the voice of the often forgotten The Critic and played the peeping Tom in Hell from Little Nicky. Nope, can’t stay mad at him. He’ll be at The Laugh Factory, probably clearing his throat with his signature “ack’em” and making everyone uncomfortable with his nasally voice. 8 p.m. $30. Laugh Factory, 8001 W. Sunset Blvd, Hollywood, (323) 656-1336. laughfactory.com. (NS)

currently playing Backseats & Bathroom Stalls. Rob Mersola's late-night farce throws Generation Y Manhattanites – four men, two women – into overlapping hetero and homo matches and mismatches within the sexual trenches, also allowing a few of the characters to despair over the shallowness of it all. It's brief and fast-paced enough not to wear out its welcome. Lyric Hyperion Theatre, Silver Lake. (323) 960-7829. plays411.com/backseats.

Closes Dec. 13.

Eat the Runt. Playwright/director Robert Riechel Jr. stars as a crazed fledgling playwright in Fresno, who enlists his dopey, groupie girlfriend (Victoria Engelmayer) to help him kidnap the reviewer – actually a moonlighting obit writer (Peter Leake) – who panned his opus. Riechel's pokes at the pretensions and delusions of artistes and their hangers-on are more convincing than some of the plot twists. Hudson Guild Theater, Hollywood.

(323) 960-7721. plays411/com/runt. Closes Dec. 13.

Fata Morgana. Director Marilyn Fox dusted off Ernest Vajdaís 1915 comedy about an 18-year-old Hungarian (Michael Hanson) who's coming of age in a remote country estate.

He's momentarily swept away – and apparently deflowered during the first intermission – by a glamorous Budapest relative (Ursula Brooks), who's 10 years older and shamelessly pampered by her hard-charging husband (Scott Conte). A few too many minor characters burden the narrative, but the heart of the play is persuasively bittersweet. Pacific Resident Theatre, Venice. (310) 822-8392. PacificResidentTheatre.com. Closes Dec. 21.

Leaving Iowa. A middle-aged reporter (Kevin Symons) returns to his Midwestern roots for two road trips – a literal one, in search of the ideal spot to scatter the ashes of his father (Gregory North), and a voyage down memory lane, as he recalls an excruciating family excursion led by his father three decades earlier, with vital roles played by mom (Jill Brennan) and kid sister (Erin Bennett). This Tim Clue/Spike Manton creation has a funny, sharp, cartoonish texture but also succeeds in demonstrating that even the cheesiest Americana can become glowingly nostalgic within the context of family. Laguna Playhouse, Laguna Beach. (949) 497-2787. LagunaPlayhouse. com. Closes Dec. 14.

The Little Dog Laughed. And so does the audience at Douglas Carter Beane's tale of homophobic hypocrisy in Hollywood (why, then, is most of the play set in New York?). A brazenly manipulative and tirelessly witty agent (Julie White) tries to

steer her upcoming movie star (Brian Henderson) away from his closet romance with a genial hustler (Johnny Galecki), whose complications include a sometime girlfriend (Zoe Lister-Jones).

The monologues, dialogues and quartets crackle, and the final plot twist is audacious. Director Scott Ellis brought two of his original New York actors to this Center Theatre Group revival.

Just grin and bear Beane's/the agent's uninformed wisecrack about L.A. theater. Kirk Douglas Theatre, Culver City. (213) 628-2772. CenterTheatreGroup.org. Closes Dec. 21.

STAGE

Miss Witherspoon. Satirist Christopher Durang follows a deeply depressed woman (brilliant Kelly Lloyd) into the after-life, saddling her with unpleasant reincarnations and encounters with other, more famous souls, when all she really wants is to just fade away. Yes, it's hilarious. Durang veers into some of his snappy dismantlings of various religions as well as less cosmic matters, before he ends the odyssey on a sweetly upbeat note.

In Joel Swetow's brisk staging for West Coast Ensemble, Pia Ambardar's spirit guide is a calming counterpoint to the central character's high anxiety, and Andrew Morris, Sara J. Stuckey and LeShay Tomlinson-Boyce are superb in supporting roles.

El Centro Theatre, Hollywood. (323) 460-4443. tix.com. Closes Dec. 14.

Oliver Twist. This is NOT the musical Oliver!, a school production of which happened to be playing about three blocks away on the night when I saw Neil Bartlett's newer version of the Charles Dickens classic. Fagin's ending is decidedly unhappier here. However, Julia Rodriguez-Elliott's staging is musical, thanks to David O's haunting (and occasionally amusing) choral and rhythmic refrains and strolling violinist Endre Balogh. Be prepared to suspend more disbelief than usual in the casting of Oliver (Brian Dare) and the Dodger (Shaun Anthony), who look like young adults, not kids. But Tom Fitzpatrick's Fagin, Geoff Elliott's Sikes and Jill Hill's Nancy are all convincing, and Ken Booth's lighting makes everything look atmospheric. This production approaches, but doesn't quite reach, the company's previous rendition of Dickens' Great Expectations. A Noise Within, Glendale. (818) 240-0910. ANoiseWithin.org. Closes Dec. 14.

The Year of the Hiker. On an Irish farm in 1960, the former man of the house (Barry Lynch) returns to his wife (Rebecca Wackler) their now-grown sons (Shawn Savage, Zack Gold) and just-marrying daughter (Amanda Deibert), plus his unmarried sister-in-law (Josie DiVincenzo), after an unexplained 20-year absence. John B. Keane's script does offer an explanation, of sorts, in the second act, but it's not especially convincing.

Sean Branney's production is solidly acted. Theatre Banshee, Burbank. (818) 846-5323. theatrebanshee.org. Closes Dec. 7. −Don Shirley

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W E ’ R E A LWAYS ON

2008 co-winners John Glover and Joe Spano

The Big Oh Well

Politics and the Ovation Awards

BY DON SHIRLEY After writing in October about some of the strange aspects of the Ovation Awards selection rules, I figured I had said enough about L.A.’s biggest theater awards program. I decided to skip the actual ceremony last week.

Later in the week, however, I began watching video clips from the evening, posted on YouTube for the first time in Ovation history. And my thoughts turned more and more toward the Big-Os. First, I was struck by a big, glistening irony. The L.A. Stage Alliance, which sponsors the Ovations and yearns to entice more people into attending live theatrical events, is giving us the option of watching most of its own biggest event on the Internet. Although the show drew a full house this year, I’m wondering if people who aren’t next year’s nominees or their friends – but who attended the ceremony this year – might decide in 2009 to skip it and just watch the proceedings on YouTube.

Not that the rudimentary videos are all that satisfying. In the clips I watched, the speakers are mostly in a small pool of light within what looks like a sea of darkness, although occasionally you can see an image of (empty!) theater seats behind the speakers. The audience can be heard but not seen. There isn’t much of a sense of what L.A. Stage Alliance executive director Terence McFarland called a gathering of the clan – and, of course, you can’t go to the party after the event.

Still, even if the video experience is second-best, I was glad to hear McFarland’s remarks.

He compared theatrical storytellers to the national political storytellers who were on stage during the past two years. And he wasn’t talking only about Obama – whose “No Drama” nickname is somewhat disingenuous, considering the inherent drama of his personal narrative. McFarland also referred obliquely to Sarah Palin, who went through “the actor’s nightmare” of not knowing her lines well enough.

American voters, said McFarland, are finally catching up with theater artists

LACITYBEAT 26 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

and “our ability to live with ambiguity and complexity.” Of course, the passage of Proposition 8 cast some doubt on that thesis. McFarland himself might be the first to agree – the announcer introduced him as “a future leader in the reversal of Proposition 8.” McFarland later referred to how “it falls to our courts to decide whom I can call my husband.”

Likewise, after winning an award, South Bay CLO producer James Blackman said that had he known God would be listening to his prayers, he would have asked for a reversal of Proposition 8.

The victory of the sinister initiative roiled the California theater world, and not only because everyone assumes that gay people are disproportionately represented in theater (has anyone actually done a study?). More controversy erupted after the election, when the artistic director of a Sacramento musical theater company resigned after criticism from several theater artists over his donation to the Yes on 8 campaign (he’s a Mormon, if that’s any explanation). His exit was then bemoaned by others who cited the dangers of witch hunts.

All of this could easily obscure the fact that the best way for theater artists to fight for same-sex marriage is to produce theater that illustrates the stakes of this issue – in a dramatically compelling way, of course. I don’t notice any plays on the list of Ovation winners or even nominees that could be said to do that (I didn’t see everything on the list, so please correct me if I’ve overlooked something).

Perhaps theater artists might consider the virtues of their position to be too obvious. But more obviously, a majority of California voters still don’t get it. The challenge is not merely to create a good play about this subject, but to create one that could reach and touch those on the other side.

Maybe I’ll see one of these plays honored at next year’s Ovations – whether I’m watching in person or on YouTube.V

S E I A

JESU

PR

MUSIC

S! Cheap Trick Budokan! (Epic/Legacy) Ah, misspent youth. In the mid-1970s, when I was spinning records at an FM station in Madison, Wisconsin, Cheap Trick ruled the club turf. The

band would pull into town about once a month – they were based in nearby Rockford, Illinois, and their management was based in “Madtown” – and every time they landed, they’d pack whatever toilet they were playing and simply rip the joint apart. They were goofy-looking, funny, melodic, loud – everything you could ask for in an entertaining rock band in those mainly dire pre-punk days.

Those gigs are a blur now, but I seem to remember having a great time.

I moved to L.A. in the spring of 1977.

About a year and a half later, I was browsing in Tower Records’ Westwood store, and was astonished to come across a very high-priced imported live album by my old homeboys. That set, Cheap Trick at Budokan, established the concept of what it meant to be “Big in Japan”; when it was finally issued in a domestic edition in early 1979, it became the theretofore middlin’-selling group’s biggest record ever, leaping to No. 5 and busting them out nationally.

The original 10-track album was boiled

Holiday gifts for those with scratch

You can give the gift of love this holiday season. You can give a coupon book for a back rub and some head. Or you can actually buy the ones you love some actual gifts, praise Jesus. Should you be so inclined, and not laid off, our critics round up the latest box sets, and two timeless necessities.

down from a 19-song concert, one of two recorded before throngs of shrieking, panties-wetting Japanese girls at Tokyo’s huge Nippon Bukokan in April 1978. The LP emphasized the poppy side of Cheap Trick’s repertoire – “I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender” were the breakout radio tracks. But, as the new Budokan! box makes plain, there was a lot more to the band’s sound than cotton candy.

You hear the tougher, ballsier numbers that got left on the editing-room floor – “Downed,” “Southern Girls,” “Auf Wiedersehen,” and such choice covers as Terry Reid’s “Speak Now (Or Forever Hold Your Piece)” and the Move’s “California Man.” For the first time, one gets to experience a truly representative early Cheap Trick live set.

Unfortunately, Sony’s Legacy catalog division never quite gets it right when it comes to my beloved Tricksters. Their 1996 box Sex, America, Cheap Trick was a scattershot melange of unreleased and alternate tracks. The new threeCD/one DVD Budokan! presents what is essentially the same material three times. The first night at the Tokyo venue is presented in both video and audio form, while the second night, with a virtually identical set list, is pointlessly spread over two discs. Go figure.

The best feature of this collection is the pretty wonderful DVD. It’s a pleasure to check guitarist Rick Nielsen’s Huntz Hall-on-acid antics and marvel at Robin

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 27 LACITYBEAT

Zander’s physical and vocal gorgeousness back in the day. The glamour boys in the band are the worse for wear in the 2008 interview and concert footage – Zander bears a terrifying resemblance to Vince Neil these days, while now-bespectacled bassist Tom Petersson looks like a middle-aged female history teacher. But their recollections of their Hard Day’s Night-like debut in Japan are a lot of fun for old Tricknics.

–Chris Morris

White Zombie Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (Geffen/UMe) There’s more than just the slightest hint of a warning in that title, and sure ➤

enough, buyers should be aware that there’s a very good reason at least 50 percent of the White Zombie music found on this set has been left buried from human ears for quite some time.

Long before frontman Rob Zombie and pals threw their vision of junk culture into a streamlined mix of Ministry’s industrial hell and generic thrash metal that scrambled its way to the top of the rock heap in the mid-’90s, the New York-based act was one more unfocused underground band among the Big Apple’s scrapheap of No Wave art-rock of the ’80s.

Which is why most fans of White Zombie’s Geffen years will have little time or patience for the first two discs of this set, which dutifully compile the group’s earliest vinyl-only singles, EPs and albums, most of which the group seemed quite happy to pretend never existed. On the Pig Heaven (1986) and Psycho-Head Blowout EPs (1987), as well as the full-length Soul Crusher (1987) and Make Them Die Slowly (1989) albums, Rob’s vocals were far from the boar-from-hell roar he still uses today.

Back then, he still sounded like frustrated illustrator Robert Cummings, fresh outta art school, while the band aspired to nothing more than slavishly imitating the Lower East Side racket kicked up by the likes of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore. And yes, there’s a reason why this was considered “underground rock” in the ‘80s: It’ll swiftly clear any room at a party.

When the band’s lineup solidified around the acquisition of Rights of the Accused guitarist Jay Yuenger, drummer Ivan DePrume and Rob’s then-girlfriend Sean Yseult on bass, the sound finally jelled as well: The final two discs collect both of the band’s Geffen albums in their entirety (La Sexorcisto and AstroCreep: 3000) along with several not-bad tunes created for movie soundtracks.

The accompanying DVD, festooned with every promo video, as well as live concert footage, from the major-label days may well be the main draw, as most fans will already have much of what they’ll consider “the good stuff ” on their iPods.

The group broke up when mainman Rob decided he didn’t need the others to comment on his monster-movie vision of sleaze-rock, which was proven when his solo album, Hellbilly Deluxe, was a huge success out of the gate in 1998. But whatever you may think Rob gained or lost by dissolving White Zombie, much of his unflattering baby photos are on full display here, and give the man credit for finally allowing his “sleeping corpses” to see the light of day.

–Joshua Sindell

Johnny Cash Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (Legacy Edition) (Columbia/Legacy) Johnny Cash remade his career with Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. When he stepped through the gates of the California slammer celebrated in his 1955 Sun Records single “Folsom Prison Blues,” he hadn’t had a major hit in years, and he was still shaking the pill addiction that had reduced his career to a near-shambles.

Folsom Prison turned him around commercially – it became his first Top 20 LP in a decade. Cash had been playing prisons for more than a decade, and this first performance recorded behind bars established for all time the Man in Black’s badass rep. A second live prison recording, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, followed a year later; it was bigger – it reached #1 – but it certainly wasn’t better.

Columbia/Legacy put out a very nicely restored CD version of Folsom almost a decade ago, with all the previously bleeped cussin’ reinstated. But there was more to the Jan. 13, 1968, performance, and the present “Legacy Edition,” comprising two CDs and a DVD, gives the most complete picture imaginable of the day’s events and their resonance.

Most of the original album was drawn from the first of two shows that Cash and his troupe performed in the Folsom mess hall. The new box presents all the music from both shows. It’s easy to see why producer Bob Johnston opted for takes from the first set: The captive audience was more responsive, and the performances were full of jittery energy.

By the second set, Cash’s voice had begun to fade.

It’s a pleasure to hear both gigs in their entirety, but the DVD’s 90-minute documentary is the real prize. Written by Michael Streissguth, whose 2004 book on the Folsom concerts are the basis for the film, and directed by Bestor Cram, it’s a crisp and frequently moving look at the event.

While there is no footage of the Folsom shows, photographer Jim Marshall shot hundreds of vivid pictures at the prison, and they splendidly illustrate the show.

A chorus of voices recalls the tension and excitement of the day; Cash’s gabby bassist Marshall Grant is the most satisfying witness. Less thrilling are animated vignettes depicting some of the songs.

The most powerful stuff in the picture focuses on a couple of the inmates in the Folsom audiences. One, Millard Dedmon, talks about the sad denouement to his release from the facility, in which his son followed in his criminal footsteps and met a violent end on the streets of L.A. The other, Glen Sherley, was an aspiring musician and songwriter who’s “Greystone Chapel” was performed by Cash at the prison. Cash succeeded in securing Sherley’s release, and they testified together at a congressional hearing on prison reform. But Sherley couldn’t come to terms with life outside the walls, and the film climaxes with the story of his tragic decline. This new edition of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison belongs as rightfully to Sherley as it does to its star.

–CM

23 tracks that bump the periodization forward to 1983 and rope in the nonpareil work of fellow Philadelphia International producer Thom Bell to share in Gamble & Huff ’s glory. Bell’s here represented by the head-spinning impact of the Delfonics’ “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “I’ll Be Around” by the Spinners, both illustrative of his signature warmhearted approach and of the producer’s influence on these bejeweled and mooddriven tunes.

The liner notes take the necessary pains to weave Philadelphia International’s story into the music – the nervy idealism of Gamble & Huff, the duo’s strong social consciousness and determination to get some of the ferment of the 1960s into their productions (contrast with Berry Gordy’s insistence all Motown acts steer far from controversy, an edict that

Various Artists Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia (Sony Legacy) When I was growing up, there was an expression around my house– “Everything went to hell when Creedence broke up.” This reflected not just my mom’s fussiness about Top 40 radio, but a certainty that pop music had ceased to be about core human feelings, the immemorial stuff of R&B in general and Philadelphia International in particular.

This distinctive and important R&B subgenre has been celebrated with CD reissues and retrospectives in the past. Most notable of these is Legacy’s own 1997 box The Philly Sound: Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff & the Story of Brotherly Love. What keeps this 71-tune, four-disc wonder from simply another reheating of oft-boiled bones is the addition of

LACITYBEAT 28 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

rankled no less than Marvin Gaye), the way these songs tap the heart of the big, unfriendly city they represent.

The craft of a song like Billy Paul’s “Me & Mrs. Jones” is subtle and demanding, but the art lay in the elegantly simple elucidation of a very old story, making you know the complex, even noble, feelings we invest in sordid and misery-making things like adultery. That the dignity of even doomed love is more powerful than all the preachers’ syllogisms is advanced again and again in productions like “Break Up to Make Up” by the Stylistics ➤

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and the Manhattans’ “Let’s Just Kiss and Say Goodbye,” either of which is enough to make me want to punch up old phone numbers and make a fool of myself over something irretrievably gone. The sermons, however, are of the very best ever committed to vinyl, with the O’Jay’s “Backstabbers,” “For the Love of Money” and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody” even more of a revelation in a time when bling-jingle seeks to drown out any more human sound.

Such skillful insinuation works just as well on the upside of life, as the Philly sound went charging into the disco era with increased speed and agility. the Spinners scored hugely with “The Rubberband Man,” but P.I. house band MFSB cranked out what is arguably the 1970s dancefloor anthem, “T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia),” with the irresistible “Let’s get it on/It’s time to get down” chorus a heady burst of utopian joy that time will never stale nor varicose veins hobble. Nobler still is the O’Jays’ “Love Train,” the power and glory of which I saw brought full-roaring back at Sunset Junction 2007. The O’Jays, the remaining two original members creaking with antiquity, set thousands to dancing on the viscous pavement, all of us joining hands and ready to boogie into a newer, better world. –Ron Garmon James Brown Star Time (Polydor) The impulse at Xmas time is always to grab the newest/biggest/hottest/largest thing out there as a present. But, people, you can’t beat the classics, and Star Time, which has been in print for 17 years, is simply one of the insuperable boxed compilations. The Hardest Working Box in Show Business, you might say.

This four-disc James Brown retrospective was in the first wave of CD catalog reissues, but it has remained a sturdy entry. Its 71 tracks, impeccably selected by producers Harry Weinger, Cliff White, Oscar A. Yong, and Bill Levenson, still sound hot. The liner notes, which won a Grammy in their day, get the job done without going overboard. And the music? You really can’t do better.

At the time of its release in 1991, some citizens probably needed a reminder that singer/bandleader/groovemaster James Brown was a crucial American musician.

He’d been on ice in a Southern cooler for three years: In 1988 he was bagged by an army of state troopers after a two-state traffic chase and convicted for various drug, weapons, and driving violations.

the years – in fact, the sixth volume of Hip-O Select’s essential series of singles collections is due any day now. But Star Time is the only JB set that brings forth the full grandeur of Soul Brother Number One’s still-astonishing achievement.

This box should be in every American household. I’m really not kidding. If it isn’t in your manse, grab it and stick it under the tree for somebody. Even yourself.

–CM Various Artists Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 (Rhino, 2001)

Star Time was a major validator of JB’s enormous talent and import, and was a critical part of his ’90s image rehabilitation.

The box also served as a celebration of Brown’s 35 years as R&B’s top performer.

(He’s still listed as No. 1 in Joel Whitburn’s rundown of the Billboard R&B charts, with 118 chart singles to his credit.) The package kicks off with “Please, Please, Please,” the incantatory 1956 number that became his first hit, and ends with “Unity,” the 1984 single that partnered Brown with hip-hop inheritor Afrika Bambaataa. None of the late hits for the Scotti Brothers label are here, but I can’t say I greatly miss “Living With a Hernia” – I mean “Living in America.”

The set surveys JB’s major developments in native rhythm, from the rough, screaming early hits through danceable ‘60s soul explosions like “Out of Sight” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and later groundbreaking “new new super-heavy funk” – “There Was a Time,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine),” “Get On the Good Foot,” “The Payback.” These tracks, and the rest, permanently changed The Beat.

And even if you don’t know the songs, you know the samples by now.

There are many individual James Brown albums I wouldn’t live without (Live at the Apollo Vol. 2 and In the Jungle Groove, anyone?), and a plethora of magnificent compilations have been released over

The first monument to what would come to be called “garage rock,” if not “punk” or even “proto-prog,” Nuggets began life as a 1972 project of Elektra prexy Jac Holzman (whose shell-like ears presumably had something to do with why we have all those great albums

by Love and the Doors to trip to), with no less than future Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye writing the notes.

Hawked on late-nite TV throughout this favored land to just the kind of freak guaranteed to be sucking on a fat bone of marihooch, the original double LP was 57 tracks of homemade U.S. whack, suitable for deafening.

This quickbuck repackaging of a soonover historical moment when basically any gang of shufflers and miscreants had a serious shot at temporary stardom was, by force of badass example, an early harbinger of punk. Reissued on Sire in

LACITYBEAT 30 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

1978, the Nuggets brand gained traction in the CD era once Rhino began using it for their own ransackings of the era, with other labels mining this insanely rich seam in series with derivative-jokey titles Pebbles, Microdots, ad gloriam.

The never-to-be-replicated formula of Yardbirds ... cheap guitars + LSD + bored kids = the rebirth of the blooz is evident even on the tracks done by industry pros like the Standells (“Dirty Water”), the Magicians (“An Invitation to Cry”) and the Third Rail (the commuter satire “Run, Run, Run”), never mind regional oddities like “Liar, Liar” from Minnesota hodads the Castaways and the TexasDylanesque honk of Mouse & the Traps’ “A Public Execution.”

Almost all the bands on the original Nuggets were short-run ephemera that crashed and burned in spectacular ways, making the level of achievement on songs like the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” and “Oh Yeah” by the Shadows of Knight almost heartbreaking. The Red Hot Chili Peppers took years to attain such greatness and not even the Stones had a first crack out of the box like “Psychotic Reaction” by the Count Five, a band Lester Bangs confabulated memorably about. Of the whole haul of musicians here, only the Thirteenth Floor Elevators’ Roky Erickson, Ted Nugent of the Amboy Dukes, the Blues Project’s Al Kooper and Todd Rundgren of the Nazz (whose “Open My Eyes” is a maximum R&B adrenaline-bomb worthy of the Who) went onto anything like the Big Time, even if Joey Levine of the Third Rail did get to be the voice of the Archies.

So much for the mere first disc of this set of four and here’s the principal justification for the whole sell-the-shit50-times rodomontade that is the box set.

The Nuggets box ladles out an additional 91 songs that far from exhaust the wonders of first-wave U.S. psych. Slick fellows like the Beau Brummels, the Mystery Trend, and Arthur Lee & Love get looks in, along with fictional acts like Max Frost & the Troopers, whose ominous “Shape of Things to Come” is from the A.I.P. drughead classic Wild in the Streets (1968).

The D.I.Y. garage ethic gets an extended workout, but no hayshaker act from any point of the compass was as wiggy and outre as Keokuk, IA incendiaries Gonn, whose 1967 single “Blackout of Gretely” opens with the Morrisonian declamation “The universe is permeated with the odor of kerosene.”

This box set got me though the Dubya years. More one can scarcely ask of digitalized sound.

–RG

DECK THE HALL Don’t miss the holiday festivities at Walt Disney Concert Hall!

Wed DEC 17 8pm

Holiday Organ Spectacular David Higgs, organ • Lisa Vroman, soprano • Mindy Ball, harp Enjoy a delightful mix of sacred and holiday music that conveys the beauty and joy of the season … plus a sing-along or two!

Sun DEC 21 11:30am & 2:30pm

Sat DEC 20 2pm • Sat DEC 21 7pm

’Twas the Week Before Christmas

Holiday Sing-Along

Los Angeles Philharmonic • Sarah Hicks, conductor Members of Westside Ballet, special guests • David Prather, host

David Prather, host • Angeles Chorale

The Nutcracker Suite, The Night Before Christmas (with narration) and other glorious holiday music for orchestra. � Up to half-off for children 12 and under

All ages can sing “Rudolph,” “Frosty,” “Jingle Bells,” and more with organ, choir, band, and a very merry special guest! Lyrics sheets provided.

Mon DEC 22 8pm

The Count Basie Orchestra A Swingin’ Christmas One of the hottest bands anywhere cooks up a jazzy Christmas celebration featuring its inimitable Kansas City sound, from holiday favorites to the best of Basie’s hits.

NEW YEAR’S EVE

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Clubland

Saturday • December 6 • 4pm

AMOEBA AUCTIONS

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Sunday • December 14 • 4pm

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Sharing stories of his remarkable life and experiences with music and cultural icons from his more than 70 years of photography. He will also sign copies of his book, Jazz, Giants, Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard. Amoeba’s Jazz room will feature live DJs and a delectable assortment of musical treasures, including jazz imports, rare, out-of-print titles. MOSAIC box sets, vinyl, Blue Note t-shirts and more!

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Halcyon Daze R (and/or) R Occasionally Jove nodded, Paul Bunyan snored, and even Popeye gave Bluto’s ass a rest now and again, along with all that tiresome manicure-mangling biz of opening spinach cans with one’s fists. Thus did I pass my weekend, a mildly bunged right ankle hobbling my usual crazed trawl through Clubland. Friday night, I did try out the new all-occasion press pass given me by the very excellent folks at The Roxy and was rewarded by 30 or so minutes of grooves laid down by DJ Jason Bentley. It was only midevening, but the floor was already jammed with twentyish weekendhipsters and their girls as a couple dozen solo males circled, all horned up and snouting. My own plans in that direction were still some hours from the first unsnapped bra-strap, so I loped slowly eastward through the mile or so of friendly Boys Town grab-ass that is Santa Monica Boulevard on a pleasant weekend’s eve. The shrooms kicked in a few minutes after I turned right at Fairfax and the next few hours were dominated by Vic Morrow and Sonny Chiba swapping histrionics in Message from Space (1978), a loony Star Wars knockoff unspooling for a roomful of giddy cine-kids at the Silent Movie Theatre. It was all a riot of color and dubbed dialogue and I clearly remember dancing up Wilshire later to David Bowie’s “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family” barking in my earphones and tender hands giving me a much-needed foot massage later. With Saturday night came scrappy indie Papermade Records’s stunt at Pehrspace: six bands off their roster – The Happy Hollows, The Widow Babies, AM, Primos, Dirt Dress and Traps, ps – playing in onesong shifts. Equipment and speakers ringed the main room and tunes faded into one another with impressive speed, as each band came off the mark like a champion sprinter.

If there was better rock ’n’ roll to be had in L.A., it was going off even farther from the radar than this quasi-underground art space.

Do we have the best music scene in the world or what?

Goodbye, Commie Girl This is her last issue with us and it seems like only eight months ago when Rebecca Schoenkopf made editor, and local journalistic

Received Opinion was giving CityBeat another six months’ life at most, with many overlubricated types buttonholing me at parties with bizarre rants and premonitions of doom.

I know this town too well to expect anyone to cop to being wrong (ever), so it falls to me to notice the sky didn’t fall, the relaunch was a significant success, and La Schoenkopf turned this paper into something near the town’s last journalistic holdout against mainstream mediocrity and paralysis. If there’s anything The Old Boy Net hates quite so much as an assertive woman, it’s one who turns out to be right.

So, this brimming bucket o’ crow goes out to them. Eat hearty, babies. On a personal note, I’ll never forget when Madame Editor named me Best of Boyle Heights, a valentine to a writer she admires (there’s no accounting for taste) that drew a small amount of quasiracist spite from Eastside bloggers, with one calling me a “glamorized druggie.”

There’s no rag of glamour so poor that someone won’t envy it, but it’s nice to know they care. Nicer still to have had the confidence of such a daring and gutsy lady. You rock, Becca, and I’ll miss you terribly.

Roxxx Off Becca herself wasn’t sounding mournful at all at Hollywood Roxxx, which harlequinade Steven Harlow Productions throws at The Viper Room on Monday nights. Especially as she accused the lead singer of My Evolution of stroking his wee-wee – her eyes, she said, they burned! – which lent some small interest as the band itself was little better than the three-chord wormfood that used to play The Garage back in the distant day. Paul Takizawa, Amit Mehta, and sulky sexbomb Meghan Quinn (adorably Vargas Girl’d in leopard-print and pedal pushers) were also on hand, all of us squeezed together

LACITYBEAT 34 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

at this packed benefit for The L.A. Mission, a cause very dear to my cankered heart.

Jason C. and Mike Miller showed up to do a short acoustic set of well-loved Godhead tunes, displaying the industrial powerhouse’s songwriting to surprising advantage. Sexy blonde Mea (as in “mea culpa”) fronted a trio of pretty fellows as meandmymachine, whose straight-ahead industrial-tinged hard rock had begun to pop like a string of firecrackers just as the Beat contingent was packing it in. After horny ineptitude and accomplished acoustic balladeering, it was good to hear the rock brought to Roxxx at last. The room was on a rising arc of energy as my ride legged out the door and I after it. Lovely Meghan stayed to have her photo snapped with her friend, guitarist Ashes, an elongated d00t with a nice line in brooding good looks.

–Ron Garmon

Ashes to ashes

BLITZEN TRAPPER The guys in Portland’s Blitzen Trapper must make delicious Dagwoodstyle sandwiches when they’re taking breaks in the studio. Envisioning their lunches is as easy as hearing their music: Eric Earley’s crew start off barebonesbasic like the Band, and then dog-pile on their arrangements ever y sonic spice and topping they can manage. The result is a music that frequently sounds rustic … for about a second or two, before mutating into a folk-rock Frankenstein, with graftedon parts of various ’70s alloys (more Dylan, Parsons) and ’90s miscellanea (Beck, Wilco, Flaming Lips). Respect must be paid.

Sun. at The Echo, 1822 Sunset Blvd., Echo Park, attheecho.com.

Thursday, November 27

Turkey. With your friends and/or family.

Friday, November 28

Bell Biv DeVoe. New Jack Swing yourself crazy after a day of Black Friday shopping.

House of Blues Sunset Strip, West Hollywood, hob.com.

Melvins, Big Business, Porn. Big, bad bludgeoners the Melvins bring the heavy. The Troubadour, West Hollywood, troubadour.com. Also Sat. Metro Station, The White Tie Affair, Tyga. Emo-pop plus synths plus Miley Cyrus’s brother, Trace, on vocals equals Metro Station; a minor rock sensation with a ver y iffy shelf life. Club Nokia, downtown L.A., clubnokia.com.

Soulfly, Bleed the Sky, Incite. Max Cavalera’s a busy guy, releasing both a new Soulfly album (Conquer) as well as Cavalera Conspiracy disc in the same year. Key Club, West Hollywood, keyclub. com.

The Temptations, The Four Tops. The soul legends carr y on. A tribute to fallen Top Levi Stubbs is to be expected. Gibson Amphitheatre, Universal City, livenation. com.

Saturday, November 29

Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez. Ry Cooder and more play a benefit concert for Operation USA’s hurricane relief in Cuba, Haiti and the Gulf Coast.

Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, guacfund.org.

Brujeria, Mushroomhead, Pinhed. A night of brutal, Mexican-gangster-themed and masked nu-metal mayhem. House of Blues Sunset Strip.

Celtic Thunder. Theatrical, folk-estra pop from five rugged lads from the Emerald Isle. Nokia Theatre/LA Live, downtown L.A., nokiatheatrelalive.com.

Celine Dion. And, speaking of theatrical, the French-Canadian chanteuse has escaped Vegas and revisits the rest of the land. Honda Center, Anaheim, livenation. com. Also Tues. at Staples Center.

Dir en Grey, The Human Abstract.

Japanese art-metal crew Dir en Grey returns with new album, Uroboros. The Wiltern, Los Angeles, livenation.com.

Holly Golightly & the Broke-Offs.

Cult favorite British songstress plays a rare show.

Spaceland,

Silver Lake, clubspaceland.com.

M83, School of Seven Bells. Anthony “M83” Gonzalez is joined by Brooklyn trio School of Seven Bells. Music Box @ Fonda, Hollywood, henr yfondatheater. com.

Sergio Mendes. The Brazilian bossa nova star brings his jazz up north. Club Nokia.

Zach Hill, Subtle. Crazed drummer Hill (Hella, Team Sleep) is joined by Oakland avant-garde sextet Subtle. Knitting Factor y, Hollywood, knittingfactor y.com.

Sunday, November 30

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.

Cleveland gangstas-with-soul project strength and loyalty. Club Nokia.

Neil Hamburger, Maria Bamford.

Laugh and groan with one ver y funny woman, and one hopeless, sad sack of a man. Spaceland.

Ill Nino, Otep, Walls of Jericho, Sangre. A good night of nu-metal talent, and Otep Shamaya is always a ferocious per former. Key Club.

The Jonas Brothers. Tween and teen sensations the Jonases admittedly play catchy power-pop.

Hollywood Palladium, Hollywood, livenation.com.

Tomorrow’s Bad Seeds, Iration. L.A. rap ’n’ jam crew Tomorrow’s Bad Seeds are teamed with fellow reggae rockers Iration. House of Blues Sunset Strip.

Monday, December 1

Steel Panther. Laugh off your tr yptophan with comedy-metal antics. Key Club.

Tesla, Cinder Road. Hard-touring Sacramento rockers Tesla have a devoted

following. House of Blues Sunset Strip.

Tuesday, December 2 Camp Freddy, Drive A. The all-star jam session that is Camp Freddy continues; plus local teen rock crew Drive A. The Roxy, West Hollywood, theroxyonsunset.com.

No Age. Savage hardcore from blistering local punks. The Troubadour.

Secondhand Serenade, Cute is What We Aim For. Acoustic alt rockers and emo punks with names that barely fit on T-shirts. House of Blues Sunset Strip.

The Sisters of Mercy.

Aging Goth trailblazers revive their longdormant sound. Music Box @ Fonda.

The Smashing Pumpkins. Spacebilly and his fun-time gang make the kiddies, laugh, cr y, yawn. Gibson Amphitheatre. Also Wed.

Wednesday, December 3 The Hanson Brothers, Triclops! Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band. Collision alert!

Here’s hockey-lovin’ goof-punks (The Hanson Brothers); Bay Area avant-punk dudes (Triclops!); and friendly, eccentric, Seattle family-rockers (Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band). The Echo.

Jonathan Richman. Still “going faster miles an hour,” we assume. El Rey Theatre, Miracle Mile, theelrey.com.

Sebastien Tellier, Heartsrevolution.

Suave French crooner Tellier is quite frank on latest album, Sexuality. With Hearts Revolution. Music Box @ Fonda.

–Joshua Sindell

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JONESIN’ CROSSWORD "Court Case"--time to mix and match.

by Matt Jones ACROSS 1 Horrorcore hip-hop group whose fans are called Juggalos, for short 4 Longtime Boston Symphony Orchestra director Ozawa 9 World book?

14 Org. whose logo displays an eagle holding two guns 15 Statement accepted as true 16 Occasional Stooge 17 Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong et al.?

19 Transition from one topic to another 20 Introduce a new product 21 Florida city about an hour and a half from Disney World 22 Chinese name of Taoist philosopher Lao-Tzu 23 Key at the top left 26 More sharp 27 Much-maligned imports of the 1980s 29 Brain scans, for short 31 Goes bad 32 Device that cuts your fingernails without even touching them?

35 Electric shaver company 36 People who walk nervously during loud, stormy weather?

42 Greek god of love 43 "Bonne fete ___..." ("Happy Birthday" line, in Quebec) 44 Donald Sutherland mystery film of 1971

46 Gift recipients 48 Dir. opposite SSW 50 Abbr. meaning "in the same place," in footnotes 51 Sweater fabrics 52 Sesame seed paste 54 ___-ski 55 Amount paid on a natural gas bill?

58 Actress Witherspoon of "Four Christmases" 59 In base 8 60 Prefix meaning "ear" 61 Word before code or shirt 62 Character who dies in "Top Gun" 63 "Smoking" alternative DOWN 1 When Independence Day and Bastille Day take place 2 Board game with the categories "Data Head" and "Word Worm" 3 Spanish actress who starred in "Sex and Lucia" and "Spanglish" 4 Short story writer H.H. Munro's pen name 5 Force out of the country 6 "There's no ___ team" 7 Exercise in the park 8 Contacts while surfing the Web, perhaps 9 Org. 10 Band who sang "Pictures of You" in 1990 11 Will bequeather 12 Necklace charms with powers 13 "Womanizer" singer of 2008

18 Like weightless situations in space, for short 24 Antiperspirant brand once advertised as "strong enough for a man" 25 Budget brand of Intel CPUs 26 Org. with a shelter outreach program 28 ___ Fein (Irish political party) 30 Actress Peri of "Frasier" 33 Musical conclusions 34 Pit left by an acne scar 36 Highway cop 37 Roast subject, perhaps 38 Good-for-nothing 39 Former Secretary of State Root 40 River famously crossed by Caesar 41 ___ high heaven (really reek) 42 First name of a 1990 Johnny Depp title character 45 Phonograph inventor 47 Curvy letters 49 "At Last" singer James and namesakes 53 Competent 55 Keep all for oneself 56 "The Name of the Rose" author Umberto 57 Get from ___ B

For those who are over the age of 60 and who are feeling stressed or depressed, hopeless, sad, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, anxiety, or insomnia. UCLA is conducting a 4-month research study using a study drug in conjunction with Tai Chi Chih (a set of slow-paced movements) or health education. If you are not currently receiving any psychiatric treatment with effective medications, you may qualify. Medical and psychiatric evaluations and limited physical exams are provided as part of the study. Evaluation and study drug are provided at no charge.

©2008 Jonesin' Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) For answers to this puzzle, call: 1-900-226-2800, 99 cents per minute.

Must be 18+. Or to bill to your credit card, call: 1-800-655-6548.

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Find last week’s Jonesin’ Crossword answers on page 39

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 36 LACITYBEAT

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Week of Nov. 26 ARIES

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY (March 21-April 19)

The European Union has had rules banning the sale of ugly carrots with knobby protrusions, cucumbers that are grossly curved, and equally unaesthetic specimens of 24 other fruits and vegetables.

Recently that changed, however. The stiff standards were relaxed. "It makes no sense to throw perfectly good products away, just because they are the 'wrong' shape," said the EU's commissioner for agriculture. I suggest you make a metaphorically similar shift, Aries. It's time for you to expand your capacity to welcome some fine, useful things that happen to look a bit imperfect.

TAURUS

(April 20-May 20)

In the Broadway play "Passing Strange," the narrator praises the healing power of mysterious songs, saying: "You know when the music goes right over your head, bypasses your mind, and strengthens the part of you that's most beautiful?" That's the kind of nourishment I encourage you to seek out in the coming week, Taurus. You need soul-toning experiences that elude your rational understanding -- encounters with wise animals, waking dreams, unpredictable love, exotic music, and twilight whispers that blissfully boggle your imagination.

GEMINI

(May 21-June 20)

According to the imaginative reporters at the Weekly World News, the devil doesn't sit by passively as people beseech God for help and consolation.

Using his own version of stealth technology, the evil one "intercepts or jams" up to one-third of all prayers on their way heavenward. Timid and fuzzy prayers are the easiest for him to block. Just in case there's a grain of truth in this claim, Gemini, take special measures when you send out appeals for assistance in the coming days. You need and deserve attention from higher powers, both the earthbound and divine kind. To ensure that the devil (or one of his surrogates) can't interfere, formulate your messages concisely and communicate them with crisp confidence.

CANCER

(June 21-July 22)

Lame-duck U.S. President George Bush is mostly dreaming of his retirement these days, although he takes time out now and then to create executive orders that undo environmental protections. Barack Obama is planning hard for the monumental recovery he hopes to lead when he assumes the presidency, but his time won't come until January 20. Meanwhile, all the things that have been falling apart under Bush's watch are continuing to fall apart, only bigger and badder. Writes Josh Marshall in Talkingpointsmemo.com, "We're paying mightily for having no captain at the helm at one of the most perilous points in our recent national history." In regard to your own personal life, Cancerian, please avoid acting like America. Don't wait for some formal deadline before you make your moves. Expedite

the transition from the old order to the new with the force of a thousand ecstatic activists.

LEO

(July 23-Aug. 22)

"It's better to be clumsy than clever," says an ancient Chinese book called Poets' Jade Splinters, "better plain than affected, better crude than weak, better eccentric than vulgar." That's a good prescription for you to use in the way you live your life in the coming days, Leo. Here's another observation from the same text that should also be helpful: "Inspiration enters at the border between hard work and laziness." That suggests you've got to work hard and discipline yourself in order to earn the right to inspiration, but often the inspiration flows in when you're goofing off or giving yourself some slack.

(Source: tinyurl.com/ 5qu7fv.)

VIRGO

(Aug. 23-Sept. 22)

In 1952, renowned modern composer John Cage created the infamous "4'33"." It's a "song" that consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of pure silence.

Recently a San Francisco performance artist, Jonathon Keats, did a remix of that tune and made it available as a ring-tone. I'd love for you to be inspired by those two geniuses in the coming week, Virgo. It'll be an excellent time for you to come to a perfect stop, fill yourself with stillness, and bask in the healing power of undiluted nothingness.

LIBRA

(Sept. 23-Oct. 22)

I urge you not to Google the word "duh," Libra.

If you do, you'll mark yourself as a conformist trend-slave, joining over 33 million people who have already done it before you. Furthermore, you will be in danger of wasting the potential the cosmos is offering you, which is to reap rich rewards by exploring brave new frontiers on the edges of your awareness.

So please be insanely curious about stuff you've never heard of and people you've never met. Research subjects that tantalize your imagination and stick your nose in where it supposedly doesn't belong. But don't Google "duh."

SCORPIO

SAGITTARIUS

(Nov. 22-Dec. 21)

I got an invitation through MySpace to audition for an upcoming production of the "Vagina Monologues." While I was honored to be asked, I wasn't sure that the kind of audience members who would come to see the "Vagina Monologues" would want to hear me, a man, expound on the central topic.

Upon reading the fine print, however, I found out that the producers were indeed seeking some male actors. The metaphorical moral of the story, Sagittarius, is to be open to invitations, opportunities, and requests that may at first seem odd, misdirected, or irrelevant.

CAPRICORN

(Dec. 22-Jan. 19)

From 1987 to 2006, Alan Greenspan was Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve and a major force in shaping the world's most powerful economy.

When the recent troubles hit, Congress called on him to testify. With shocking humility, he confessed that there had been a flaw in his model of reality. All those years he'd believed that "free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies." Now he saw he was wrong.

While I'm sorry for the collective pain his mistaken ideas have unleashed, I'm elated for him personally: How many 82-yearold men are open to the possibility that their philosophy of life needs adjustment? For that matter, how many people of any age are receptive to changing their ideas about how the world works? I invite you to take your inspiration from Greenspan, Capricorn. Be curious about how your own major theories might need revision. Doing this heroic deed will energize you with good karma and fresh mojo.

AQUARIUS

(Jan. 20-Feb. 18)

What's the healthiest, holiest rebellion you could launch, Aquarius? What would be the most constructive way to channel your longing to live in a more perfect world? How might you overthrow the status quo in ways that would so thoroughly enhance the greater good that even the people bent on preserving the status quo would benefit? Given the fact that you are in a phase when your trouble-making skills are dovetailing very nicely with your ability to bestow blessings, these are excellent questions for you to consider.

(Oct. 23-Nov. 21)

Researchers have determined that you've got longer than you imagine to salvage food that has dropped on the floor. Bacteria don't get a foothold and start growing on your pizza or muffin for at least 30 seconds. Keep that in mind as an all-purpose metaphor in the coming days, Scorpio. Anything that you fear has already been spoiled or tainted may actually be possible to restore and redeem. You probably have more time than you thought.

A ApartmentRentals

PISCES

(Feb. 19-March 20)

A column in the Washington Post called "The Style Invitational" has identified the "Top 10 New Religions." I'm calling your attention to two that might be attractive to you in the coming months, a time when you'll probably have urges to transform and expand upon your spiritual practices. First, there are the Oxymormons, who engage in polygamous monogamy. The second group is the Salivationists. They speak in tongues like some other sects, but they also speak in drool. A third option, of course, is for you to whip up your own brand new, totally

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unique religion using just the parts you really like from all of the other traditions. However you do it, Pisces, I encourage you to be playfully creative as you get more disciplined about your relationship with the Divine Wow.

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818-344-3742, MONTY@ DPL-Surveillance-Equipment.com, www.DPL-Surveillance-Equipment.com READINGS BY JULIE Specializes in Love Relationships. Restores broken love affairs. Tells Past, Present and Future. Why suffer another lonely day or night when you can be happy for the rest of your life? One call will convince you.

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APPLE VALLEY Now open! 19179 Bear Valley Rd. Now Open! Apple Valley Commons (760) 247-7799 ARCADIA Santa Anita Mall Kiosk (626) 574-2040 BALDWIN HILLS Baldwin Hills Mall Kiosk (323) 291-6827 BALDWIN PARK 14540 Garvey Ave. (626) 472-6196 BURBANK Burbank Empire Center (818) 842-2722 CARSON 20820 Avalon Blvd. (310) 329-9325 CERRITOS Now Open! 12603 Towne Ctr. Drive (562) 809-5650 Los Cerritos Center Kiosk (562) 860-7714 CHINO 3825 Grand Ave. (909) 591-9740 CITY OF COMMERCE 5438 E. Whittier Blvd. (323) 725-9750

CITY OF INDUSTRY 17515 Colima Rd. (626) 839-5155 COMPTON 237 E. Compton Blvd. (310) 603-0101 CORONA 2540 Tuscany St. (951) 898-0980 390 McKinley St. (951) 549-6400 CULVER CITY 10814 Jefferson Blvd. (310) 838-1044 CYPRESS 6856 Katella Ave. (714) 899-4690 DOWNEY Stonewood Mall Kiosk (562) 904-9085 Downey Landing (562) 401-1045 FONTANA 16771 Valley Blvd. (909) 427-1800 Now Open! 16695 Sierra Lakes Pkwy.

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HAWTHORNE 5070 Rosecrans Ave. (310) 263-2949 HOLLYWOOD 1503 N. Vine St. (323) 465-0640 HUNTINGTON PARK 6400 Pacific Blvd. (323) 826-9880 INGLEWOOD 3419 W. Century Blvd. (310) 673-1443 LA HABRA 1401 W. Imperial Hwy. (562) 694-8630 LAKEWOOD 4329 Candlewood St. (562) 633-5030 LONG BEACH 2894 Bellflower Blvd. (562) 429-8223 LOS ANGELES 100 N. La Cienega Blvd. (310) 659-0775 3458 Wilshire Blvd. (213) 380-2299 LYNWOOD 3170 E. Imperial Hwy. (310) 603-0036 MARINA DEL REY 13455 Washington Blvd. (310) 821-7111 BURBANK CITY OF INDUSTRY COMPTON CULVER CITY GLENDALE

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MIRA LOMA 12459 Limonite Ave. (951) 361-1850 MONTCLAIR 5094 Montclair Plaza Ln. (909) 398-1579 MONTEBELLO 2028 Montebello Town Center Dr. (323) 728-8708 MOORPARK Now Open! 766 Los Angeles Ave. St. 6 (805) 530-0988 NORCO 1180 Hamner Ave. (951) 372-0096 ONTARIO 961 Milliken Ave. (909) 481-7897 Ontario Mills Mall (909) 987-0313 PASADENA 368 S. Lake Ave. (626) 395-0956 PICO RIVERA 8724 Washington Blvd. (562) 942-8527 REDONDO BEACH South Bay Galleria Kiosk (310) 370-7131 MONTCLAIR MONTEBELLO NORTHRIDGE NORWALK

SANTA MONICA 2530 Wilshire Blvd. (310) 828-1279 SHERMAN OAKS 14360 Ventura Blvd. (818) 907-1871 TORRANCE 24329 Crenshaw Blvd. (310) 891-6991 Now Open! 21841 Hawthorne Blvd.

VALENCIA Coming Soon! 24201 Valencia Blvd., Ste. 2018 WALNUT PARK Coming Soon! 2106 E. Florence Ave. WEST COVINA West Covina Mall (626) 851-9992 West Covina Mall Kiosk (626) 939-0409 WESTWOOD Coming Soon! 1095 Broxton Ave. WHITTIER 12376 Washington Blvd. (562) 789-0911

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RHINO

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HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 4 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

A Special Advertising Supplement

staff Ad Director MarkKochel

Ok, readers, it’s time! Go! Go get presents!

Come on! You can do it! We know you can!

What are you waiting for? Why are you just sitting there reading? Is it that you don’t know where to go?

Yes—yes, that’s it, isn’t it? You don’t know—do you?

Well, well, well. Aren’t you lucky that we here at CityBeat have once again teamed up with the local businesses to bring you the very special tome you have right here in your hands— The 2008 Holiday Gift Guide. It’s true: we’ve got many worthy gift ideas in these pages.

So many, actually, we don’t know if you’re really ready.

You see, it’s just that these ideas are really solid. Powerful, even. So much so that we are actually scared to give it to you. You might spend too much and then you’ll be in danger of having bar none the best Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa ever, which may not sound bad to you right now, but think about years to come! How will you ever be able to enjoy the holidays again knowing that you cannot possibly have a better time than you had in 2008?

Just consider it, readers. Use caution, that’s all we’re saying.

That, and welcome to the The 2008 Holiday Gift Guide.

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 5 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Sales Manager Amit Mehta Sales Jon Bookatz, Spencer Cooper, Diana James, Sarah Stacey, Bill Child, Andy Enriquez Art Director Paul Takizawa Production Manager Meghan Quinn Advertising Art Director Sandy Wachs Publisher Will Swaim LOOK FOR OUR LAST MINUTE GIFT GUIDE ON DECEMBER 11!

For more info Call (323) 938-1700

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Best Brands, Best Prices (Call for additional locations) 1015 N. La Brea Ave., W Hollywood, 90038 (323) 883-0219 A Special Advertising Supplement www.bestbuy.com Technology should serve people, not the other way around. You might say that we Amoeba Music love technology, but we’re not in love with The World’s Largest Independent Music technology. Technology makes a lot of Store promises, and we’re here to make it live it 6400 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles up to those promises. For people. Through (323) 245-6400 a Reward Zone program membership (or www.amoeba.com a Reward Zone-branded credit card), Music-lovers of every breed know the relationship magic happens in a they have not celebrated the holidays variety of ways. An exclusive magazine, properly until they’ve gotten lost in members-only coupons and sales, and the corridors of Amoeba Music a few times.

Reward Zone Racing Club are just a few With hands-down the largest in-store examples of the special efforts expended selection of records, CDs, LPs, cassettes, to meet members’ special needs. And of DVDs, laserdiscs, VHS tapes and rare course, Reward Zone program members memorabilia available anywhere on Earth, the Sunset Amoeba is the center of get a nice benefit for staying true to the blue (and yellow). With operations in Southern California’s music and movies the United States, Canada, Europe, and retail universe.

Amoeba stocks every genre imaginable, China, Best Buy is a multinational retailer from jazz to punk, drum-and-bass to folk, of technology and entertainment products rap to rockabilly, classical to Afro-samba, and services with a commitment to growth and innovation. roots to death metal, and synth-pop to Balinese Gamelan (that just about covers f it, right?). Throw in a knowledgeable staff, top-notch customer service, listening stations, and the lowest prices in town, Blick Art Supplies and it’s easy to see why it’s the record The Best Art Supplies at the Best Discount store of choice for knighted rock stars 7301 West Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles to perform in. It’s also why Amoeba is (323) 933-9284 staying put while other record stores bite www.dickblick.com the dust.

You’ll find the store brimming with Amoeba is Southern California’s creative materials and art supplies for number one independent source for painting, drawing, kids projects, scrap music. booking, crafts, ceramics, graphic design, sculpture, print making, calligraphy, and much more, even audiovisual equipment, f and books and media. Since 1911, artists have turned to Dick Blick Art Materials for dependable savings, a huge selection, Bark Avenue and fine customer service on art supplies.

Dog & Cat Boarding, Accommodations & Gift boxes are great for the holiday Daily Care season, as well as gift certificates for 545 S Main Street, Los Angeles supplies or workshops and community 3016 S. Hill Street, Los Angeles events in the store.

(213) 748-7485 www.barkavela.com Bark Avenue, the dog and cat daycare, f boarding, grooming, training, doggy gym, Agility Club and art and photo gallery, has now opened its second downtown location CD Trader at 545 S. Main Street. The new location New And Used Music offers a fenced outdoor dining area for 18926 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana you and your furry friend, complimentary (818) 705-3544 Wi-Fi to exercise your laptop, an indoor www.cdtradertarzana.com lounge area with coffee and HD TV. Even We may be called CD Trader, but don’t hourly daycare is available so you can let the name fool you. Sure we have the drop off your pup while best CD selection in the Valley, but did shopping, dining or seeing a movie. you know we have records, too? We have any kind you want: cheap ones, expensive Come in with your best furry friend and ones, new and used, audiophile or not, the register today. Day care includes mental ubiquitous and the collectible, disabled stimulation, socialization, exercise, and and not. And we even have a great movie good price value. The boarding staff is well trained, and offers cage-free cuddling selection—good ones and bad ones. No kidding. We are ready 7 days a week to time, and over-night companionship.

Please book holiday boarding early! Also, buy your stuff for lots of money, or sell you stuff for very little money. Your loved Bark Avenue Foundation, Bark Avenue’s associated charity, is accepting donations ones are waiting to be joined with their future favorite music or movie this holiday for homeless animals.

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 6 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

TRUST THE CLASSIC INDIES

13616 Ventura Blvd. Sherman Oaks 818-995-7603

www.freakbeatrecords.com • freakbeat@adelphia.net

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

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Live In-Store Performance

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Support your local indie music stores!

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 7 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

A Special Advertising Supplement season. We have it right here, and we’ve got it for cheaper than any of the other guys, even on the other side of town. f

Falcon Theatre

Comedy, Drama, Life, Performing Arts Space 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank, 91505 (818) 955-8101 www.falcontheatre.com In today’s not-so-funny times, even “the person who has everything” sure could use a good laugh right about now. The Falcon Theatre has the perfect medicine for these ailing spirits: the Two-Play Laugh Pack. Each one includes a ticket to two hilarious comedies, “Surviving Sex,” by David Landsberg, and “Everybody Say “Cheese!”” by the Falcon’s own funny man Garry Marshall, at a $10 savings from regular prices! And to top it off, buy two Laugh Packs and get a $20 certificate to the Daily Grill! Contact the theatre for details. f

Freakbeat Records

The Right Place for the Your Favorite Music 13616 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks (818) 995-7603 www.freakbeatrecords.com Chances are you’ve got friends who always have those stories about finding legendary albums really cheap somewhere totally unexpected. Maybe you’ve even found yourself nearly fighting some guy for a rare recording that you know you’ll never see anywhere again. The truth is that finding the best records and CDs often means knowing where to look. You can have all the retail resources you want at your fingertips, but in the end it all comes down to being in the right place at the right moment. Freakbeat Records is the rightest place in town.

Freakbeat has an easily browsed setup and a talented set of buyers. They have a whole room of 99 cent CDs. Most importantly they have the knowledge and the know-how to point you in the right direction. Freakbeat Records makes it its business to be the place you go to look for music. Just remember, there’s no such thing as dibs. f

LACMA

Los Angeles County’s Museum of Art 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

(323) 857-6000 www.lacma.org

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 8 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

With 100,000 objects dating from ancient times to the present, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States. A museum of international stature as well as a vital part of Southern California, LACMA shares its vast collections through exhibitions, public programs, and research facilities that attract nearly a million visitors annually.

With current exhibits like Francis Alÿs: Fabiola, the Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008, or Hearst the Collector, make this holiday season a time to expand your mind. Upcoming exhibitions include: Shell-Shocked: Expressionism after the Great War: Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, and Franz West, so give the gift of a membership, or join yourself now and enjoy free admission all year round. f

Mad Platter

Used Records 1223 University Ave Riverside, Ca. 92507 (951) 328-1600 www.rhinorecords.com Mad Platter is keeping the ears of Claremont and Riverside well-fed with all the freshest and spiciest sounds.

From the large splashes to the latest underground ripples, these guys work to keep their customers happy and in the know.From rock and noise to underground hip-hop, Mad Platter delivers like never before thought possible. Meanwhile, its sister store Rhino never reneges on its commitment to music on the local, national and international level, taking local musicians’ recordings on consignment and hosting shows on its in-store stage, besides stocking the best stuff available anywhere.Check out their DVDs and other memorabilia as well.

Rhino and Mad Platter are Claremont and Riverside’s greatest musical connections.

The Mad Platter is nestled next to UCR in University Village and stocks an everchanging selection of music and movies with even more of an ear bent and finely tuned to the Inland Empire. f

Music Center

Los Angeles County’s Performing Arts Center 135 N. Grand Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles (213) 972-3335 www.musiccenter.org The L.A. Music Center, home to the L.A. Philharmonic, L.A. Master Chorale, Center Theatre Group, and L.A. Opera, has year-round, world-class programming in all the performing arts, where it’s all about inspiration, exhilaration, and entertainment. Very special this holiday season, the Kirov Ballet and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre present the beloved family holiday classic, The

Mountain High Resort

Forget The Dow, Ride More Pow 24510 State Highway , Wrightwood, 92397 (888) 754-7878 (760) 316-7830 www.mthigh.com With different kinds of ticket deals all season long, winter sports can be affordable even in Southern California.

Ticket deals make a great holiday gift for family and friends! Save up to $34 per ticket with the 6-Pack, consisting of six adult 8-Hour lift tickets good any day this season, including holidays, for just $179, and must be purchased between November 1, 2008, and January 14, 2009, at mthigh.com or one of over 250 ski and snowboard shops in Southern California.

The cost breaks down to less than $30 per ticket so guests save $34 per day on peak weekends (regularly $64). See mthigh.com for a complete listing of sales locations.

6-Packs are not available at the resort.

This winter there are Women’s Beginner Snowboard Clinics for women, 30 years and up. Women’s Beginner Clinics are the perfect way to discover the thrilling sport of snowboarding. Small classes, female instructor, individual help with equipment, and teaching tailored to women’s learning styles make your first day on a snowboard hassle-free. A perfect gift for your mom, wife, or friend! f

Noisebug

Vintage Musical Gear 252 a. North Main Street, Pomona, 91766 (909) 622-4556 www.noisebug.net Noisebug is located in downtown Pomona in the Arts Colony and around the corner from The Glass House which is the premier music venue in The Inland Empire, and filled with arcane musical gear gleaming with forgotten gems of yesteryear and highlights of our present time. Here you will find keyboards, drum machines, guitars, basses, guitar effects and other odds and ends of the musical world. . Noisebug is also home to Plan B who are the only hand built American analog modular synthesizer maker who

Includes two new studio tracks: "Forever" and "Purifier."

The Last Record Store 11609 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles (310) 478-4217 www.recordsurplusla.com The best thing about Record Surplus is their massive inventory. The next best thing about Record Surplus is their entire attic room full of 92-cent items. They have a whole room full music for less than a mere dollar. That’s whole albums for less than one measly low-quality song on iTunes! Don’t you know what that means?

It means more music than you can even listen to that day for the price of a burrito!

It’s like if a record store were having a yard sale all the time.

With 20 years of experience under their belt, Record Surplus’ managers Neil Cantor and Mike Colstock Jr. know how to make you happy. That’s by giving you one of the largest music selections on the West Coast for cheap, and helping you to feel the noise in whatever way they can. The last record store you’ll ever need to go to is Record Surplus.

COREY CROWDER “GOLD & THE SAND”

TOOTH & NAIL

Record Surplus

Corey Crowder returns with a new release blending his southern upbringing with his love for old jazz classics to form his unique smooth sound.

THE ALMOST “NO GIFT TO BRING” Underoath's Aaron Gillespie returns with a new EP for the holidays.

f

Reptile Super Show

California’s Largest Reptile Trade Show 1101 W. McKinley Ave. Pomona, 91768 (619) 281-7387 www.reptilesupershow.com Pomona Fairplex and L.A. County Fairgrounds bring you California’s largest exotic animals and reptiles show. Jan 3-4, 2009, vendors from all across the country will gather around over 300 tables of unique and rare animals, to share trade secrets. $8 adults, $5 kids (12 and under).

The show is sponsored by Kingsnake. com and Zoo Med Laboratories, as well as the Sheraton Fairplex Pomona, which will be offering special rates to reptile show visitors. Sat 10-6, and Sun 11-5, come see bearded dragons, natural history books, and check out the San Diego Herpetological Society, but don’t worry!

No venomous reptiles are allowed!

DEMON HUNTER “45 DAYS” 45 days is an exclusive audio/visual journey that follows every step of the band during this ground breaking tour and digs deep into the lives of their fans like no band documentary has before.

Features 1 CD & 2 DVDs.

f

BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE “DICHOTOMY” The band's third release sees the return of original guitarist Jon Star and debut of new drummer Brandon Lopez.

Lyrically, the album is somewhat of a concept, giving a nod to C.S. Lewis' classic Space Odyssey.

Rhino Records

Rhino Records/Video Paradiso Independent Since 1976 235 Yale Ave., Claremont (909) 626-7774 www.rhinorecords.com Rhino Records, under the same ownership as Mad Platter, stocks new and used CD’s, DVD’s, & LP’s to Claremont and Riverside year after year, keeping the kids’ heads

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 9 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Store Hours: Mon.-Thurs. 10am-9pm Fri. & Sat. 10am-10pm Sun. 11am-7pm

TOOTH & NAIL

f

First live CD and DVD from the band LIVE.

TOOTH & NAIL

Nutcracker, December 17-20 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. This fairy tale ballet, choreographed in 1934 by Vasily Vainonen, has dazzled audiences around the world and is a perfect way to celebrate the festive holiday season. Tickets can be purchased at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion box office; gift certificates are available and make a great present for loved ones during the holiday season.

f

LIVE “LIVE AT THE PARADISO AMSTERDAM”

TOOTH & NAIL

A Special Advertising Supplement

ACTION FRONT/VANGUARD

pound, sauter, file and test daily, created by none other than Cal Arts graduate and electronic musical instrument pioneer Peter Grenader. It’s worth the trip, if not just for the modular magic theater. Open late every Art Walk on the 2nd Saturday of each month.

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 1 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 10 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 11 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

LA CITYBEAT DOT COM � NE 2nd W Y LO EA CA R A TI T ON

WE’RE ALWAY S ON

Tina s Trees

A Special Advertising Supplement

Quality Christmas Trees for over 30 Years!

Frequent Shipments of Fresh Trees 4827 Sepulveda Blvd., Sherman Oaks BETWEEN THE GALLERIA & 101 FWY 9 AM to 9 PM (818) 990-2571 www.tinastrees.com

Christmas Trees  Wreaths  Garland  Delivery  Flocking  Flame Retardant

filled with the freshest music. Rhino is located in downtown Claremont (“city of the tress and phd’s”) and is 5000 sq ft of music goodness and also home to a keen selection of books, toys, stickers, record players and a full line of audio accessories. Adjacent to Rhino and accessible through the back parking lot, one finds Video Paradiso whose selection of films for rent and new and used DVD sell through rivals the best independent video stores in LA. Their “Director’s Sections” are not to be missed! f

Rockaway Records

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Saturdays = Youth (Mute/EMM)

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Starflyer returns with Dial M, one of the most personal and lyrically moving records in the band’s history.

The idea of youth - wasted, gilded or otherwise - has always featured prominently in M83's music.

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Expectants (Stillborn Records/EMM)

Combining influences such as Fear Factory, Decapitated, Crowbar and other monsters of metal on their Stillborn debut, they've truly shattered the mold!

The band has toured with the likes of American Head Charge, Five Finger Death Punch, Hatebreed and more!

Serving Music Lovers Worldwide 2395 Glendale Blvd., Silver Lake 323-664-3232 www.rockawayrecords.com Whether you’re shopping for a serious music collector or a casual fan, Rockaway Records has the perfect gift. Rockaway’s selection of used CDs, DVDs and vinyl is extensive, and they have an incredible amount of memorabilia both in-store and online.

Rockaway has been buying and selling music collectibles worldwide since 1979.

Check out their online store to see their vast selection of high-end vinyl and memorabilia. They have everything from rare Beatles paraphernalia to hard-to-find vinyl, awards, T-shirts and posters from all your favorite musicians.

And for the everyday music fan, Rockaway’s store is packed with records, CDs, DVDs, books, magazines, posters, guitar picks and more. Bring in your unwanted items and trade them in for more buying power this holiday season.

Rockaway buys, sells and trades music and collectibles every day, so their inventory is constantly changing. Stop in the store and visit their website regularly for the best selection. If you are looking for something special, give them a call.

They might just be able to make your holiday dreams come true. f

Duck Season Vol. 3 (Nature Sounds/EMM)

DJ Babu from seminal hip hop group, Dilated Peoples, presents the third installment of the highly successful, Duck Season series. Special guests include Dilated Peoples, DOOM, MOP, Little Brother, and more.

HOLLYWOOD & HIGHLAND

6801 HOLLYWOOD BLVD • 323-769-8520

BLOCK AT ORANGE

20 CITY BLVD • 714-769-4400

ONTARIO MILLS

4522 MILLS CIRCLE • 909-481-8585

*On sale from 11/11/08-12/02/08. While supplies last. Prices may differ online @ virginmega.com. Savings based on manufacturers’ retail price.

SecondSpin.com

Retail Stores for the Internet’s Largest Buyer and Seller of Used CDs, DVDs and Games!

1332 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica (310) 395-4334 14564 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks (818) 986-6866 1781 Newport Blvd., Costa Mesa 949-650-8870 www.secondspin.com

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 12 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

Going to the music store and coming out with a stack of new CDs, movies or video games is the greatest thing since going to the grocery store and coming out with a stack of sliced bread. No, wait. Actually, it’s much better. Sliced bread doesn’t come with artwork and lyrics sheets – and don’t try to sell it again when you need a little cash.

It’s been a long time now that Second Spin.com has dominated the field as the best place to get mountains of that used media fun for discounted prices, or to sell discs for good old money and trade. These guys always have some kind of deal going on. From now until December 25th, for instance, the un-faze-able “buy 3, get 4 free.” Personally, that covers my entire family, plus four free ones for me. I don’t even think they do those kinds of deals with sliced bread. f

Sky Dive San Diego

Southern California’s Sky Diving Experts 13531 Otay Lakes Road, Jamul, CA 91935 (619) 216-8416 www.skydivesandiego.com Whether it’s your first jump ever, or your 1,000th jump, Skydive San Diego, Inc. is the best choice for catching thrills.

Private airport and facilities are dedicated solely to skydiving, and modern turbine aircrafts with up-to-date technology, and professional, licensed instructors will ensure that your sky dive is a safe but thrilling adventure from 13,000 feet that you will remember forever. Multiple training buildings, a bunkhouse, deluxe packing lofts, a grass landing area, a BBQ deck and patio, and incredible scenery to match make it great for spectators, too.

We invite anyone and everyone to come and enjoy a day of fun in the sun. We have a beautiful viewing area for friends and family to watch people sky diving and landing their parachutes. Even if you aren’t jumping, come on out and watch!

Skydive San Diego, Inc. has every size of rig and main you need. We rent Infinity Rigs with Icarus Safire main parachutes in sizes 229 - 129. Rates are $25/jump or $80/day. f

Swivel Industries

Cool Custom Shirts P.O. Box 480355 Los Angeles, CA, 90048 info@swivelindustries.com www.swivelindustries.com The online shop for hot rod and pinup girl tees for boys and girls, is always fashionable and stylish. All T-Shirts come in cool retro packaging, just pop on a bow and you’re ready to go. Get 10% off at the online store in the check out process, by putting “City Beat” in the coupon code.

Will ship up to December 23rd, and will also ship overseas. Makes great gifts for the holidays, or just so. f

A Special Advertising Supplement Timewarp Music

New and Vintage Music Gear 12255 Venice Blvd., Mar Vista (323) 600-5050 www.timewarpmusic.com At Timewarp Music, an independent musician’s paradise, Owner Shane Gudlow is always on hand to offer his expert service and advice, and he has a lot to share after 20 years in the music business. His experience led him to open a music store that is truly part of the neighborhood. Stop in today and pick up a great gift for the musician in your life. Timewarp Music has become a primary destination for musicians of all types. Whether you’re shopping for an instrument, need to get your amp repaired or guitar setup, or want to sit in on an impromptu jam session, Timewarp has everything you desire.

Independently owned and operated, Timewarp specializes in new and vintage guitars, basses, keyboards, drums, effects pedals, amplifiers and more. They also have an impressive selection of vintage musical instruments available for rent, and perform expert-level equipment repair at very reasonable prices. f

Tina’s Trees

Fresh Christmas Trees 4827 Sepulveda Blvd., Sherman Oaks (818) 990-2571 www.tinastrees.com Tina’s Trees, dedicated to providing service and quality for over thirty years, has moved locations, but is still in Sherman Oaks to wish you happy holidays. Tina’s Trees are guaranteed to be fresh, straight through January, and makes a fresh cut on each tree to open up the pores, which have been clogged by sap. They immediately fill the bowl with water while it is on the lot. In addition to picking up your tree for recycling, they will drain the water from your stand and vacuum up the needles for a fee starting at $10. Remember, never burn any part of a Christmas tree in a fireplace! f

UPS

The UPS Store (call for more locations) 5482 Wilshire Blvd.

(323) 939-6001 www.theupsstore.com We’re ready to help get your gifts where

they’re going—on time, safe and sound.

Our friendly packaging experts have the know-how and the resources to pack everything to arrive intact. Come to us for unparalleled service and low UPS™ shipping rates on a variety of reliable shipping options: UPS Next Day Air®, UPS 2nd Day Air®, UPS 3 Day Select™, UPS Ground, and International. Now you can also store your address book online, to make shipping even easier when you register for My UPS. We’ll store up to 2,000 addresses in your My UPS Address Book, which you can conveniently import from an external source, like an iPhone. f

Urban Tails

A Neighborhood Pet Store 7515 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles (323) 933-2100 www.urbantails.net Wondering where Hollywood’s hottest bitches hang out? Urban Tails’ lush new digs on Beverly Blvd. and Gardner radically redefine the traditional pet supply store for the better. Enter Zack Grey and Karena Martin’s sprawling, zen-like loft space and you’ll encounter innovative supplies for dogs, birds, cats, fish, and reptiles at competitive prices.

Premium, holistic and raw pet foods – plus the added bonus of a friendly staff who encourage you to bring your pet companion shopping—make this a great place for the best pet parents. Hang out by the Koi pond and shop the Green Zone featuring all eco-friendly products, that’s getting shout-outs from Hollywood celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Portia DeRossi. f

Virgin Records

8000 W Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90046 (323) 650-8666 www.virginrecords.com Virgin Records began in the early 1970’s as a small, independent label based in London. Today, Virgin Records is part of EMI, the third largest music company in the world. A wide array of artists call Virgin their recording home, including: A Perfect Circle, Richard Ashcroft, Beenie Man, Ben Harper, Boz Scaggs, Blue Man Group, Blur, Chemical Brothers, David Bryne, D’Angelo, Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim, Perry Farrell, Gang Starr, Gorillaz, Janet Jackson, Lenny Kravitz, Massive Attack, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Rolling Stones, Tina Turner and Yanni.

The growth of Virgin Records in the United States reflects the maverick philosophy which has characterized the entire Virgin organization since its humble begining over a quarter century ago: a devotion to seeking and embracing artists who possess the talent, vision, and passion to create something new and impactful.

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 13 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

CELEBRATE THE 2008 HOLIDAY SEASON

AT THE MUSIC CENTER Tickets and information:

(213) 972.7282 or LAMC.org

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

Holiday Wonders Christmas Around the World Saturday, December 6, 3:00 p.m.

Saturday, December 13, 3:00 p.m.

Messiah Sing-Along

Sunday, December 7, 7:30 p.m.

Monday, December 15, 7:30 p.m.

Rejoice: Respighi + Rutter A Classic Christmas

Sunday, December 14, 7:00 p.m.

Kirov Ballet and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre

December 19, 2008 Seating opens at 6pm

6:30pm to 8:00pm Music Center Plaza

(limited capacity).

First come, first served.

Breakfast with Santa

Saturday, December 13 Sundays, December 14 & 21 11:30am-1:30pm

The Nutcracker December 17 – 20

Tickets and information: (213) 972.0711 or musiccenter.org

Patina Catering’s popular Breakfast with Santa returns this year with a gourmet brunch, carving stations, holiday cookie decorating and a build-your-own pancake bar.

Take photos with Santa and enjoy other delectable treats!

Adults $39; children under 12 $18; children under 3 free

Reservations (213) 972.7565

Walt Disney Concert Hall

’Twas The Week Before Christmas Los Angeles Philharmonic with members of Westside Ballet

Celebrate the sounds of the season and join the fun at this holiday ‘must-do’.

Saturday, December 20, 2:00 p.m.

Sunday, December 21, 7:00 p.m.

PLÁCIDO DOMINGO

The Music Center Holiday Sing-Along offers a free evening of singing among the twinkling lights of the plaza.

Bundle up, bring your friends and family, and sing along with live musical accompaniment.

ELI AND EDYTHE BROAD GENERAL DIRECTOR

JAMES CONLON

Program support provided by the James Irvine Foundation, The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, The Ahmanson Foundation, The Annenberg Foundation, James A. Doolittle Foundation, and The Wachovia Foundation.

No photography, videotaping and recordings of any kind. Program and information subject to change. In case of rain, event will be cancelled. For more information: musiccenter.org or (213) 972.3660.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CALL

Holiday Sing-Along David Prather, host Angeles Chorale

MUSIC DIRECTOR

Sunday, December 21, 11:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m.

The Count Basie Orchestra A Swingin’ Christmas Monday, December 22, 8:00 p.m.

Tickets, information and additional concerts: (323) 850.2000 or LAPhil.com/DeckTheHall

Song sheets provided.

Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 5th Floor Active Arts at the Music Center is a series of low or no-cost events for the artist in everyone. Come sing, dance, play music, and tell stories downtown.

Be Active.

Up to half-off for children 12 & under, both performances

Through December 14 Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

Tickets and information: (213) 972.8001 or LAOpera.com

For more information about REDCAT visit redcat.org.

For more information about Center Theatre Group, visit CenterTheatreGroup.org

(213) 972.7211 O R VISIT musiccenter.org HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 14 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

The Nutcracker featuring the Kirov Ballet and

Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre

December 17 — 20, 2008 DOROTHY CHANDLER PAVILION

Tickets can be purchased at , 213-365-3500 or the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion box office.

For more information, visit musiccenter.org or call 213-972-0711.

Kirov Ballet’s The Nutcracker. Photo courtesy Kirov Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre.

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 15 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

CELEBRATE WITH THE ENTIRE FAMILY!

Now On View

Armor (detail), Italy (Milan), c. 1600–1610, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1938, photograph © 1990 The Metropolitan Museum of Art This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was made possible in part by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.

“More than 150 highly prized objects...”

—Los Angeles Times

Send it with love. We’ll package it with care.

We’re ready to help get your gifts where they’re going. On Time, safe and sound. Our friendly packaging experts have the knowhow and the resources to pack everything to arrive intact.

Come to us for unparalleled service and low UPS(TM symbol) shipping rates on a variety of reliable shipping options: UPS Next Day Air® UPS 2nd Day Air® UPS 3 Day Select® UPS Ground International Stop in for details or visit us at www.theupsstore.com 5419 HOLLYWOOD BLVD @ WESTERN In the Ralphs Shopping Center • 323.460.6323 M-F 8am - 8pm • Sat 9am - 5pm • Sun 11am - 5pm

3183 WILSHIRE @ VERMONT Above the Metro • 213.351.1338 M-F 9am-7:30 pm • Sat 11am - 5pm

13636 VENTURA BLVD. @ WOODMAN Sherman Oaks • 818.906.3544 M-F 8am - 7pm • Sat 9am - 4pm • Sun 9am - 4pm

2202 S. FIGUEROA ST. @22ND Los Angeles • 213.749.1249 M-F 8:30am-7pm • Sat 9am - 3pm (5pm in Dec.)

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lacma.org or 323 857-6000

^

Happy Holdays

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 16 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

$5 OFF PACKAGING

When we pack 2 packages

Limit one coupon per customer. Not valid with other offer. Valid at participating locations only. The UPS Store centers are independently owned and operated. Offer expires 1/31/09 ©2008 Mailboxes Etc., Inc.

NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 17 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

VARESE SARABANDE

ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK “THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E.” Available for the first time on CD, the soundtrack to this “cult classic” spy-spoof series, a spin-off of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. It features music by Dave Grusin (who won a Best Score Oscar for the The Milagro Beanfield War and was nominated for “It Might Be You” from Tootsie and the score for On Golden Pond), and also includes the theme to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. by Jerry Goldsmith. The TV show starred Stefanie Powers as U.N.C.L.E. agent April Dancer (a name suggested by Ian Fleming), and Noel Harrison as her partner, Mark Slate.

Store Hours: Mon.-Thurs. 10am-9pm Fri. & Sat. 10am-10pm Sun. 11am-7pm

Ask About our

$

59 VIDEO PACKAGE

San Diego’s Oldest, Largest Operation

619.216.8416 | SkyDiveSanDiego.com HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 18 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

Where can you enjoy amazing beers surrounded by the LA’s spectacular skyline?

The

Bonaventure Brewing Co.

Happy Hour: Monday - Friday 3:30pm-7:30pm Kitchen open ‘till Midnight

• Need a Warrant Recalled?

• Want to Smoke Pot on Probation?

• All Criminal Defense, from Drugs to Murder.

404 S. Figueroa Street, Los Angeles (213) 236.0802 www.bonaventurebrewing.com

Harvard Law, Affordable

Valet Parking is on Flower street, $4.50 for the first 4 hours with our validation.

Take escalators to the fourth floor and make a right to Bonaventure Brewing Co.

Office: 323-653-1850

Hours: Monday - Friday 11am-1am Saturday & Sunday 5pm-1am

(Ok to call from custody, 24-hours services)

DETOX

Call Jerry (310) 466-1240 NOVEMBER 13-19, 2008 45 LACITYBEAT NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008 19 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

LIL ROB “ VOL . 1- BEST OF ”” Lil Rob, the biggest Latin Rap artist in the game today, comes out with this highly anticipated Best Of Lil Rob, featuring hits, favorites and a few unreleased cuts from the vaults. Includes guest appearances from Royal T, Mr. Sancho, OG Playboy, Proper Dos, DTTX and more.

Mr. Sancho has released three solo albums and is also a member of three different Rap groups (Califa Thugs, Los Soldados and Los Borrachos). This VARIOUS ARTISTS collection, mixed by DJ AK “CHICANO RAP JAMS SUPERMIX” features hits, favorites and 2008 non- stop mix releases featuring the very some unreleased gems. best and most popular artists in Latin Rap from the Low Profile label. This collection contains tracks from Chicano Rap artists including Lil Rob, Baby Bash, Mr. Sancho, Frost, Royal T, Silencer. Mr. Shadow and more.

LOW PROFILE

MR. SANCHO “VOL. 1- BEST OF MR. SANCHO”

Features the most popular Chicano and Black Rappers on the West Coast like Big Sike from The Tupac Camp, Mr. Sancho, The Dogg Pound, Dazz Dillinger, Mr. Knightowl, Royal T, JayO Felony, Big Capone, Califa Thugs, Lil Bandit, Vmf, And Og Playboy.

VARIOUS ARTISTS “SLOW JAMS VOL . 2Æ) Features 18 original tracks from the top selling recording artist: MC Magic of the NB Ridaz, Brown Bboy, Mr. Sancho and top producers Fingazz and Royal T.

LOW PROFILE

VARIOUS ARTISTS “VOL. 1- WEST COAST CHRONIC”

DEMOLITION

TWISTED SISTER “LIVE AT THE ASTORIA” The legendary Twisted Sister return with their live CD/DVD recorded at London's Astoria Theatre on a very hot summer night in 2004. The critics hailed Twisted Sister's performance as one of their greatest ever. This concert was kept in a vault for the past four years. When the band looked at the footage, it brought back the heat, passion, intensity and audience participation that was a level far above all expectations.

LOS DIFUNTOS “LOS DIFUNTOS”

Store Hours: Mon.-Thurs. 10am-9pm Fri. & Sat. 10am-10pm Sun. 11am-7pm

The punk sounds of Los Difuntos features the charismatic Christian Torres on vocals and guitar. Produced by Michael Rozen, this Los Difuntos CD has all the classic ele ments of rebel rockers The Clash, Rancid and Tiger Army.

Now playing on Complete Control on Indie 103.1 FM

HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 2 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

NICKLE &DIME

LOW PROFILE

LOW PROFILE

Since its formation in Los Angeles in 1993, Banda Pachuco has shot straight to the top of the charts and they have won countless fans with its exciting Latin rhythms and diverse music.

LOW PROFILE

BALBOA

BANDA PACHUCO “QUIERO CONTIGO”

ROIR

BAD BRAINS “BAD BRAINS”

THE DEVIL MAKES THREE “ THE DEVIL MAKES THREE”

Since the original release of this title on cas sette format, the Bad Brains have achieved certain immortality among punk and hardcore rockers that followed them. All material on this CD was recorded at 171-A Studios, NYC in Oct. of 1981.

RENDEZVOUS

With his eighth album, jazz bassist Wayman Tisdale bounces back (from a bout with bone cancer) with an upbeat, genial, somewhat vo cals-oriented set. Tisdale still plucks his electric bass a-plenty and there's an abundance of mellow, easygoing jazz here, but he makes room for guests Toby Keith, the Gap Band's Robert Wilson, Raw J, Marvin Sapp and Dave Koz.

Rahsaan Patterson lights up the Season with his first ever Christmas project. Debuting eight new original songs and showcasing the soon to be classic Christmas At My House, The Ultimate Gift also features the perennial favorite Little Drummer Boy, reworked and styled as only Rahsaan can.

MILAN

ARTISTRY

WAYMAN TISDALE “REBOUND”

RAHSAAN PATTERSON “THE ULTIMATE GIFT”

Mixing styles from the ragtime and country music of the twenties and thirties to the rock and roll and punk music of their adolescence, The Devil Makes Three pushes the boundaries of acoustic music.

THE WHISPERTOWN 2000 “SWIM”

Alluring and revolutionary, bright and buoyant, exemplary in their ability to evolve from what is expected, the Los Angeles-based musical collective has created its majestic, engaging sophomore disc.

BAD DOG MCCOY TYNER MUSIC

JONATHA BROOKE “THE WORKS”

VARIOUS ARTISTS “ROUGH GUIDE TO LATIN LOUNGE”

A full-length album of previously unheard lyrics

by Woody Guthrie, set to original music written and performed by Jonatha. With support from Joe Sample, Steve Gadd, Christian McBride, Greg Leisz and features duets with Keb' Mo', Eric Bazilian, and Glen Phillips with a special guest appearance by Derek Trucks.

Diverse Latin flavors from around the globe nu-bossa from Madrid, barrio funk from Venezuela, Cuban ska from Havana, sambajazz from New York, boogaloo blues from Cali and soulful Latin house from London! The sub tle blend of electronic beats with samba and salsa flavors invites you to reach for that ice cold drink and dream of hot summer days.

MCCOY TYNER “GUITARS” CD+DVD

VARIOUS ARTISTS “ROUGH GUIDE TO LATIN STREET PARTY”

With a song stack covering the old and the new, McCoy (and mates, Ron Carter and Jack De Johnette) finds common ground alongside a group of handpicked guitar and banjo players who owe everything to his seminal music, spanning the last 40 years. DEREK TRUCKS, BELA FLECK , BILL FRISELL, JOHN SCOFIELD, MARC RIBOT.

This party collection of Latin street beats represents both mainstream and alternative visions of m sica bailable (dance music).

From retro cover versions to digital mash-up remixes, RG To Latin Street Party has it all: Salsa, merengue, cumbia, reggaetone, Latin soul, and all points in between.

� HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 20 NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER 3, 2008

WORLD MUSIC NETWORK

Known for their dreamy harmonies, countless hooks, and a sound that is both completely modern and nostalgic. The fresh vocals of Morgan Nagler and Vanesa Corbala are paired with the avant blues guitar of Tod Wisenbaker and the robust bass of his brother Casey.

Playing SPACELAND the month of December.

Store Hours: Mon.-Thurs. 10am-9pm Fri. & Sat. 10am-10pm Sun. 11am-7pm

ACONY

WEST INDIAN GIRL “4TH & WALL”

WORLD MUSIC NETWORK

MILAN

Live at The Palladium 12/06 in LA & HOB 12/07-08 in San Diego.