Don't try this at home -- or at the Civic Center Metro Station. / Photo by puck90 via LAist's flickr pool. TRANSIT TALK Metro is studying alternatives for connecting the Gold, Blue and Expo lines through downtown Los Angeles. This study will examine linking the future Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension (near the Little Tokyo/Arts District Station) and the 7th Street/Metro Center Station. Tonight Metro will update the public on the project and allow......

Life doesn't stop in LA because it's raining. / Photo by kristi.nicole via LAist's flickr pool FILM The American Cinematheque’s Outfest Wednesdays continue at the Egyptian. On the big screen tonight is With You! -- director Yaniv Dabach’s documentary on the formation of New York City’s first gay rugby club, the Gotham Knights. A discussion with Dabach follows the screening – plus there’s a reception hosted by Absolut. 7:30 pm // American Cinematheque at......

Tonight is the perfect night to cozy up inside a darkened theater and to go on a journey into the unknown. A really cool piece of LA history and lore comes to life on screen tonight at the Egyptian The American Cinematheque "presents a rare screening of six short films by the enigmatic Dutch/LA artist Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975) and the Los Angeles premiere of Here Is Always Somewhere Else, Rene Daalder's critically acclaimed......

COMIC BOOK ART The gallery named for the year that brought us Hypercolor T-Shirts, Yo! MTV Raps, and Salt N Pepa's single "Push It" (that's 1988 for those who didn't immediately connect) is currently featuring "Under the Influence: A Tribute to Stan Lee" in a show that runs until February 1. Preview some of the artwork online and then activate your Spidey webs and crawl over to Melrose Ave. 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. //......

As part of their Golden Globe Foreign Language Nominee series, American Cinematheque is screening The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tonight at the Aero Theater. Director and noted artist Julian Schnabel will be on-hand to introduce the film. It tells the wrenching story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of ELLE magazine who suffered a stroke at the age of 43 and spent the rest of his life able to move only one eyelid.......

Oh L.A. and your crazy kooky vagrants! Please meet Crazy Doll Lady (as we are calling her), pictured in the photo above. She and her scary puppet friends hang out around Sunset and Vine every day, and wait outside the Hollywood Public Library every morning for food handouts. Say hi to her if you see her...or drive by real real fast like I do! Even if the Globes are cancelled, Academy Awards organizers are......

Who has been the most potent force in filmmaking over the last twenty years? Steven Spielberg? Tom Hanks? Tom Cruise? Joel Silver? How about John Lasseter? His Pixar films have enjoyed unparalleled critical and commercial success since the debut of Toy Story in 1995. Tonight at the Egyptian you can see the whole story of Pixar unfold when the American Cinematheque screens The Pixar Story. Featuring never-before-seen material from the Pixar library, archival animation......

MUSIC: Machine Project is back with an evening of experimental folk music mix. The evening features the sounds of Ryan Fuller, Julie Carpenter, Laura Steenberge, Ruthann Friedman, rickyricky, Pilar Diaz, Pawko and Marshweed. 8 pm // Machine Project // 1200 D. N. Alvarado, Downtown // Free. THEATRE: The Anteus Company presents two nights of eight Noel Coward plays. Night Two takes place tonight featuring the plays: Come The Wild - Red Peppers, Fumed Oak,......

BOO-ya! There's still time to check out some Halloween events, including the Hollywood Hell House and Bordello's Voodoo Vixens Burlesque show tonight at 10p. This accident on the 5 may tie up traffic until tomorrow: authorities are still counting only 3 casualties, but who knows how drivers will react to the construction and clean-up now taking place. First the water, then the power, now the phones? Mayor Villaraigosa is proposing a 9-percent phone tax.......

Yesterday I attended American Cinematheque's tiki festival at the Egyptian. The television clips segment was an episode of Hawaiian Eye, a cheesy wanna-be Hawaii 5-0 with some of the most camp moments imaginable. Interspersed between the "commercial breaks" were B-movie coming attractions and hilarious ads ("Salem makes your taste fresher!"). There were a variety of vendors selling tiki wares, and after the movie, King Kukelele and his Friki Tikis got the courtyard hoppin' to......

American Cinematheque heats up the Egyptian this weekend when they expand their annual Tiki Sunday to fill three days with films and events. Friday night the festivities were kicked off with a screening of George Roy Hill’s epic film, Hawaii, starring Julie Andrews. Saturday July 7th at 4pm there will be a can't-miss screening of rare, 1960s tiki-themed television clips from the collection of artist Kevin Kidney. Stay after the screening for a Luau......

Diary Of A Mad Housewife & The Last Of Sheila It's another crazy 1970s double feature. Directed by Frank Perry Diary Of A Mad Housewife stars Carrie Snodgress (rocker Neil Young's girlfriend for a time in the 70s) and Richard Benjamin as a young, well-to-do Manhattan couple whose marriage hits the skids thanks to obnoxious, self-absorbed hubby. The film feels dated, but Snodgress' Oscar-nominated performance still rings true. The gem on tonight's double bill is......

Big Bad Mama & Black Mama, White Mama Big Bad Mama, a 1974, Roger Corman-produced breasts-and-bullets flick, features the brilliant tagline, "The family that slays together, stays together." This B-movie version of Bonnie & Clyde is set in 1932 Texas and stars Angie Dickinson as a bootlegging, bank-robbing mom who joins up with Tom Skerritt and William Shatner to bilk society for all they can get. In between the robbing and killing are numerous sexy......

Silverlake Film Festival The 2007 Silverlake Film Festival heads into its second and final week. Highlights include… El Benny - A biopic based on the life of Benny Moré, considered by many to be the greatest Cuban singer of all time. The film concentrates on a period in the early 1950s when Moré left the orchestra of Duany and founded his own "Banda Gigante." The King of Kong - Washington resident Steve Wiebe decides that......

Grindhouse Monday and Tuesday it's The Muthers, a combination blaxploitation and women-in-prison flick that stars Janine Bell and Rosanne Katon as a pirate duo who must rescue Bells sister from the private jail of an evil coffee plantation owner, followed by Fight for Your Life, a revenge thriller about a pacifist black minister whose family is taken hostage and tortured by a trio of convicts, until he finally snaps and wreaks his vengeance. Wednesday and......

Grindhouse The week kicks off with a pair of rarely screened gems of black 1970s cinema, Brotherhood of Death about a group of black Vietnam vets who fight back against the Ku Klux Klan, and Johnny Tough, a coming-of-age movie about a troublesome teenager. That's followed by a dose of Italian horror, Autopsy and Eyeball. Then it's a trio of bizarre wonders: Coonskin, a Ralph Bakshi-directed animated blaxploitation spoof about a trio of animals (Philip......

Curated by… Guy Maddin Bizarro Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin (Tales From The Gimli Hospital, Careful, The Saddest Music In The World) has been invited to curate a program of films culled from the extensive collection of the UCLA Film Archive. His choices include On Dangerous Ground, Make Way for Tomorrow, Ministry of Fear and a slew of his own short films, all of which will screen over the next couple of weeks. But tonight Maddin......

written by Bill Krohn for LAist The American Cinematheque honors Dutch-born filmmaker Paul Verhoeven this weekend (Marc 2-4) with a slate of Verhoeven films from the Netherlands and from Hollywood, where he spent the 80s and the 90s making big-budget studio pictures like Total Recall, Robocop and Basic Instinct. Although he's best known for the latter, Verhoeven was a renowned European filmmaker before he joined the Hollywood ranks, and this weekend is a good......

Drawing Restraint Why woo your sweetheart with such tediously traditional notions as flowers, teddy bears and edible panties when you could watch Matthew Barney and his inamorata Bjork going at each other with flensing knives on the deck of a Japanese whaling vessel in Drawing Restraint 9? And if that's not enough Barney for you, there's the making-of documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint. His work has sometimes been described as a "hauntingly dreamlike fantasy......

Monday, February 5 Creative Screenwriting Magazine is sponsoring a free screening of Children of Men followed by a Q&A with writer/director Alfonso Cuaron and co-writer Tim Sexton. WHEN: Mon., Feb. 5 at 7:30 PM. WHERE: DGA Theater, 7920 Sunset Blvd. (betw. Crescent Heights & Fairfax) RSVP: Go to the Creative Screenwriting website and sign up to receive information about future events. You should then receive an email with further instructions about how to sign up......

That film the Beastie Boys adoringly spoofed for this video is the campy 1968 Euro spy movie Danger Diabolik, and it's playing at The New Beverly tonight and tomorrow. Danger Diabolik - If being a super villain really was all about dashing around the globe in the coolest mod clothes and sleekest sports cars while staging elaborate jewel heists before returning to your posh, super-secret lair to shag your blonde accomplice, this movie is......

Special Screenings & Limited Releases Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her opens for a week-long run at the Nuart in West L.A. Saturday at 7:30pm The American Cinematheque screens a real, live 70mm print of Lawrence of Arabia at the Aero in Santa Monica. See this movie on the big screen the way it was meant to be seen! Major Releases The Good Shepherd & The Good German -- I......

Before the current tyrannical rule of Tony Pierce, Carolyn Kellogg was the editor of LAist, in a time many yearn for. But she decamped for the University of Pittsburgh, where she's getting an MFA in creative writing. In between bouts of homesickness, she blogs about books and podcasts interviews with writers who rock at pinkyspaperhaus.com. Top 10 LA Things You Don't Realize You'll Miss, Until It's Too Late 10. Beaches. I hardly went to......

-- Weep softly that you didn't get into tonight's sold-out, special screening of Dreamgirls at LACMA. Now dry your tears and pick up the pieces. If you're desperate to pay $25 to see a movie, you can catch Dreamgirls at the Arclight in its "Pre-Release Exclusive Engagement," which runs Dec. 15-24. Your "event-priced ticket" includes a "souvenir program" and a commemorative Dreamgirls' lithograph available only during this 10-day engagement (and forever after on eBay).......

What can I say about a film where images of Shirley Temple are juxtaposed with swastikas? Where Fairuza Balk's voice comes wailing through a snail? Where there's a scene of a naked man with cerebral palsy lying in a giant clam as he appears to be masturbated by a woman who's wearing a rubber monkey mask while a racist folk song plays on an old record player? I'm not totally sure I didn't hallucinate......

Last month the American Cinematheque screened the ultra-rare early '80s classic "Urgh! A Music War", a collection of new wave and punk groups (Devo, The Cramps, X, Dead Kennedys, The Police, etc.) that were bubbling under and destined to make it big. Because of legal wranglings involving missing contracts, the film cannot be re-released or turned into a dvd because without the contracts one cannot amend it to provide for what could be a......

Some call it cheesy, some call it rad. Sort of like how aloha means opposite things, perhaps so does "Blue Hawaii", the 1961 Elvis classic. "Lady in the Water" apparently is no good, "Superman" was lame, maybe something light and vaguely familiar? But what really matters is that it's playing on a big screen in an airconditioned classic theatre in Hollywood, the Egyptian at 4pm. This is the film that Elvis sang "Can't Help......

One week ago LAist went to the American Cinematheque to celebrate the 90th birthday of actor Glenn Ford. He starred with Bette Davis, Debbie Reynolds and Rita Hayworth; he played good guys in Westerns, bad guys in noirs, and Christopher Reeves' farmer dad in the 1978 Superman. The Cinematheque screened Gilda, one of Ford's best-remembered films (due in no small part to Rita Hayworth's stunning beauty). Those of us who had hopes of seeing......

LAist and our friends at RES Magazine would like to send you and a guest to this month's screening at the Egyptian Theatre on Tuesday, April 18th at 8 PM. We hear there are short films and a music video or two on the bill. Then after the screening, hang around for drinks and a set from resident DJ Kiino Villand. Fine Print: Affiliates of LAist, other -ist sites, RES Magazine and the American......

Monday: The Next Herb Wesson Unless you spent the $225 for the series that includes Al Franken and Ann Coulter tonight at The Gibson, you’re out of luck. Rather, we recommend you check out local celebrity politico Eric Garcetti at the Improv Olympic on The Blank Blank Show in Hollywood. Tuesday: "This foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating." The face behind This Modern World, political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, will present and sign his......