Festival fanatics find an old standard turning about their head this week: "Hooray for Hollywood!" The Hollywood Film Festival features dramas, docs, mocks, horrors & even music videos. Highlights include The Upright Citizens Brigade (Wild Girls Gone), one of David Carradine's final roles (The Rain), North Korean defectors (Crossing), hipster murders (The Scenesters), Ugandan children (War Dance Returns), 30-year old "boy" scouts (Scout's Honor) & the worst Christian pop group in the world (Jesus People) - all in the Arclight's reserved-seat, caramel-popcorn splendor. But if, like yours truly, you've emerged from the Red Line to find yourself too lazy to walk down to Sunset, pop into the Egyptian for the Arpa International Film Festival. Arpa kicks off with Venezuelan spy-romance Venezzia (the most expensive Venezuelan film ever made) and continues with Armenian historical dramas and a ton of bizarre shorts. If sexy dolls, entomologists, Muslim stand-up, or Spanish gynecologists appeal to you, definitely stop by. more ›

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Forget the pageantry and regal demeanor of the Rose Parade, the 31st Occasional Pasadena Doo Dah Parade is the ultimate antidote. Billed as being the loud and irreverent twister sister of the aforementioned annual march down Colorado Boulevard, the parade promises to "send up a woolly range of mischiefs, grounded superheroes, political pundits, homegrown satirists, art car inventors, and other bohemian frolickers." more ›

One day the golden touch of Judd Apatow will fade and one of his films will bomb (--but I'll be piling into the theater along with everyone else this weekend to marvel at the daring of John C. Reilly. more ›

Listen to the interview here: Bobby Slayton is an icon, he's been doing stand-up for 30 years, everyone in the industry knows him, and generations of us have grown up on his comedy. At his live show the crowd gets warmed up with a video of practically every single well-known American comic, from Don Rickles to Robin Williams, giving props to Bobby. I've been listening and seeing Bobby Slayton perform for 25 years, listening to... more ›

Sunday night I crept down an alleyway, drank a bunch of absinthe and watched a girl get her eyes gouged out with a knitting needle. The gouging wasn’t real, but the absinthe was. Welcome to Los Angeles' theatre du Grand Guignol de Paris. The Grand Guignol was a theater in the Pigalle district, the seamy underbelly of Paris. The theater’s focus varied slightly with shifts in management, but the subject matter of its short... more ›

Well, at least the New York Times finally published a dateline from Azusa, CA. more ›