The gauntlet has dropped again. After a few exit announcements that were noted yesterday, former LAist Contributing Editor Elina Shatkin today tweeted "can now add 'former Los Angeles Times staff writer to my resume.' I was laid off this morning." Shatkin, the amazing and brilliant writer that she is, had graced the Times' food and entertainment sections. more ›

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This video comes to LAist via the one and only Elina Shatkin. In the wake of Miss Teen South Carolina's comments from a few weeks ago, we prefer Miss Teen Arkansas. She's just better. Way, way, WAY better. more ›

July was a bittersweet month for LAist. We had a record-breaking month with nearly a million visitors coming to our humble site. Little did we know that some of the guests were big wigs from the venerable Los Angeles Times who left with two of our editors. more ›

A tip of the hat to disability blog The Gimp Parade for turning us onto Norway's own Boys on Wheels, a parody boy band fronted by Jesper Odelberg a wheelchair-bound guy with cerebral palsy who also co-stars in a Norwegian comedy show. This clip is a medley of 80s rock song parodies that gleefully skips from Euro pop to A-ha's "Take On Me" to Bryan Adams' "Heaven" to Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer." And... more ›

Before that dumbass vegan couple in Georgia starved their baby to death by feeding him soy milk and apple juice instead of breast milk (and all the subsequent outrage that caused), one woman was boldly going where few in the culinary world dare venture: making human cheese. More specifically, making Paneer from her own breast milk. I've often wondered what would happen if such an endeavor was viable on a mass scale. What kind... more ›

"I'm not trying, nor would I want to, to bring down the entire Hollywood filmmaking system or all of capitalism. And if I did, I'd probably get assassinated long before then," says Matt Hanson with a laugh, as he shows me around the gallery space for The Creators Series, a multi-media and performance event that visits Los Angeles this weekend. Unlike a traditional art exhibit or film festival, The Creators Series serves as a showcase... more ›

A tip of the hat to Anne Thompson at Variety for directing us to this first look at the trailer for the upcoming Coen Bros. film, No Country For Old Men. Perhaps returning to their roots in Blood Simple, the Coens have crafted a crime-thriller about a hunter who stumbles upon dead bodies, a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash near the Rio Grande. The film will hit American theaters in... more ›

Dear LAist, I could've sworn when I randomly popped into the Library Bar last night I saw you carousing with a bunch of people who all had name tags and were drinking free beer. What's up with that? How do I get in on the free beer action? And who was that dude with the bandana?! Love, Little Jimmy From Pasadena Good eye, Little Jimmy! You did indeed spot us at the Library Bar last... more ›

I decided this video couldn't wait, so today 9:20 A.M. is the new 4:20 P.M. A tip of the hat to The Documentary Blog for alerting us to the fact that filmmaker A.J. Schnack just posted clips from About A Son, his upcoming documentary about Kurt Cobain. The film features loads of audio clips from interviews with the Nirvana singer conducted by music writer Michael Azerrad, who was Cobain's "authorized biographer." About A Son is... more ›

Some people say that blogging on Sundays is worthless. Most of our favorite Gawker sites take the weekends off, for example, as do many of our favorite gossip blogs, as did the Lord. And even fewer people have any love for the old fashioned liveblogging, in all its nerdy glory. Two Sundays ago we were invited to liveblog the MTV Movie Awards. LAist Movie Editor Elina Shatkin did the majority of the liveblogging, and... more ›

It sounds like something straight out of Batman. Not the somber action movie from a couple of years ago, but the campy TV show from the 1960s. Apparently, the U.S. military semi-seriously considered a proposal for building a "gay bomb," a device that would unleash hormones into the air, turning enemy soldiers into homosexuals who were more interested in getting it on with each other than fighting. Shockingly, this idea was proposed by the... more ›

Unlike the Michael Cera gets fired from Knocked Up clip we mentioned a while back, this looks like it might be a real outtake from the movie. It features Jonah (Jonah Hill) spouting off to Alison (Katherine Heigl) about the disappointing lack of hot gay sex in Ang Lee's "boundary-pushing" film, Brokeback Mountain.... more ›

Singer/dancer/menswear icon Andre 3000 of Outkast will play singer/dancer/comedian Sammy Davis Jr. in a new biopic about the entertainer's romance with screen siren Kim Novak. Back in the mid-50s when quaint terms like "anti-miscegenation" were used to sugarcoat racist laws, Davis was an up-and-coming singer with a couple of albums under his belt, while Novak was a rising actress grinding her way through Columbia Studios' starlet machine. He had yet to join the Rat... more ›

Ever wondered what Star Wars would look like if it was re-edited to dialogue from Boogie Nights? This trailer offers you a glimpse into a polymorphously perverse remix of the two.... more ›

MTV to Bloggers: We sort of like you but not enough to give a shit about your coverage. LAist to MTV: We sort of like you but not enough to give a shit about your programming. When LAist was invited by MTV to live-blog the 2007 Movie Awards from an on-site "blogging tent," we asked ourselves one crucial question: is this going to be a cool opportunity to offer readers a unique perspective on the... more ›

7:13 - Saddest Realization of the Night: Although this was theoretically an awards show, it was in actuality a two-hour commercial for Transformers. I don't know how much of what happens on stage makes it to air, but the live feed in the Blogghetto was all Transformers, all the time. It's enough to make me hate the movie and hope it flops. Not that there's a chance of that happening. 7:10 - Best Moment... more ›

6:36 - Total Number of Celebs Who Have Visited the Blogghetto: 1. 6:34 - Dane Cook visits us in the Blogghetto. Despite my lack of interest in his comedy, he seems like a laid back, personable dude. Even though I like capping on him, I really don't dislike him. He gamely answers questions, revealing why he won't be in the upcoming Transformers movie. "I know this is going to sound like complete balderdash," he... more ›

6:22 - It's your last chance to text in your vote for Best Movie. I know it hasn't even opened yet, but I bet that somehow Transformers will win. 6:21 - Mike Myers gets a well-deserved laugh after he thanks his parents for teaching him to "never sell out" and immediately follows it with a deliberately over-the-top promo for a Pontiac sedan. Plug away. 6:19 - "Shall I shag him now or shall I... more ›

6:00 - The FIB-u-less Orbit gum lady (What kind of accent is that? Is she South African? British by way of Argentina?) gives the Dirtiest Mouth award to Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes. Their acceptance speech, which is delivered by not-so-silent Bob, is only one sentence long but somehow manages to get 70% bleeped out. The Orbit gum lady vows never to date either of them. 5:58 - Dane Cook jokes, "This just in,... more ›

5:46 - Total number of celebs who have visited the Blogghetto: 0. 5:44 - It's time for the next movie spoof, something about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 5:41 - Sacha Baron Cohen (looking handsome as ever) berates Will Ferrelll for not calling him after their tender on-set moment in Talladega Nights. He pulls Will Ferrell in for a long, shameless lip-lock that leaves them both rolling on the floor like fictional teenagers in a... more ›

5:30 - I can hear the press people and the MTV handlers trying to corral Jack Nicholson in the next tent over, which apparently isn't easy to do. We here in the Blogghetto have been promised by MTV that they will try to get as many celebs as possible in here. You know you're low on the totem pole when even Shia LaBeouf is too big to talk to you. 5:26 - Dane Cook... more ›

5:09 - Cue Vegas-style dancers and an old people's choir singing songs that are deliberately bleeped out. 5:06 - Sarah on Paris Hilton: "To make Paris Hilton more comfortable in jail, I hear they're going to make the bars of her cell out of penises." Big laughs. "I just worry she'll snap her teeth." Even bigger laughs. Cut to a very unamused Paris Hilton. 5:05 - Sarah announces that Paris Hilton will soon be... more ›

MTV, the network whose prescient forays into reality programming placed it in the vanguard of youth-oriented television, has decided that since this little ole thing called the Internet is catching on big with the kids, the way to capitalize on the immediacy of Web 2.0 is to brodacast the annual Movie Awards* live and (more importantly) allow schlubs like me high-stakes online journalists to live blog the event. This means that you'll get to see... more ›

From old-timey comedians like Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Oliver Hardy (Stan Laurel's rotund partner) to character actors like Sydney Greenstreet and Victor Buono to wild men like John Candy and Chris Farley, Hollywood has always had a special place for fat men, especially the funny ones. But in a body-obsessed, size 0 industry even Hollywood's corpulent comedians aren’t immune to downsizing. Fat -- whether used as epithet, compliment or neutral descriptor -- meant something... more ›

Before tomorrow night's MLS match pitting the LA Galaxy against DC United, Mexican rock band Kinky will play a special pre-game set for soccer and music fans. Kinky is five-member band from Monterrey, Mexico. Their song "Solo un Paso" from is the theme for Fox Sports en Español's 2007 MLS broadcasts, with the video featured n the channel's pre-game montage. Here's the video for "Sister Twisted," which features a gaucho with some amazingly rubber-limbed dance... more ›

Photo by Malingering Wait... the Summer of Love is officially over? And we're just finding out about it now?! Tuesday's LA Times featured a piece titled "There's not a lot of love in the Haight" focusing on the street kids and drug addicts that populate San Francisco's famed Haight-Ashbury district. The scoop? Although Jerry Garcia used to drop acid in the Haight, "the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War"... more ›

Written and photographed for LAist by Eric Reyers. In a city of movie lovers as picky about projection as they are snarky about snacks, elevating the theater-going experience is no easy feat. The redesigned Landmark Theater at the Westside Pavilion has made a bold gambit by transforming a small, typically janky mall theater into a high-end mecca for indie film. When it opens this Friday, June 1, Landmark's flagship venue in the Los Angeles... more ›

I could write a movie review of Knocked Up -- and maybe I still will -- but it will just be a long list of hilarious moments (there's the part where he does this one thing... and then she says this other thing...) in a movie overflowing with hilarity. Trust me on this: you will walk out of the movie floating on fluffly pink cloud of funny-ness, and I don't want to spoil a second... more ›

This is what happens when a cartoonist's creation refuses to obey.... more ›