Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo is playing tonight at the Hammer Museum as part of Julian Hoeber's Demon Hill installation that is "an homage to the anxiety-producing, perception-warping" spots of the American roadside tradition. Sounds hoity-toity but...come on...it's Vertigo! Jacque Tati's Playtime will also be screened. Tickets required, but they're free. more ›

Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles is holding a presentation tonight at 6:30 pm on Los Angeles's Little Italy by Marianna Gatto. Did you know that LA is the country’s fifth largest Italian population? Did you even know that we had a Little Italy (used to be in Chinatown, btw)? Well hear Marianna Gatto, curator of History and Education for the City of Los Angeles, talk the city's vibrant Italian enclave during the 100-year period following the arrival of the first Italian pioneer in 1827. Book signing and reception to follow. RSVP: rsvp.iicla@esteri.it more ›

Book Soup hosts a discussion tonight at 7 pm on the life and work of Harry Smith, a filmmaker, musicologist, painter, ethnographer, graphic designer, mystic, and “collector of string figures and other patterns.” The event is being held in conjunction with the release of Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular. Book editors will lead the discussion and musician Jim Kweskin, founder of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, will also perform. more ›

As movie studios lay off staff and fling jobs to the four corners of the earth in search of savings, they would do well to honor the memory of Ray Dennis Steckler, director of such such freakisly low-budget sixties cinematic mess-terpieces as Wild Guitar, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, and of course, horror's first musical, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies. He died last Wednesday at the young age of seventy in Las Vegas. more ›

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Photo by puck90 via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr. more ›

Is Fox TV above the law? The Washington Post reports that Fox is challenging a $91,000 fine levied against them by the FCC for a broadcast of "Married by America" back in 2003 that featured reality show cast members licking whipped cream off of strippers' "digitally obscured" body parts. Since the FCC is controlled by an administration that is full of Fox fans will the network get away with it? It should be noted that just a few weeks before the naughty "Married by America" episode, the FCC fined ABC $1.2 million for an episode of "NYPD Blue" that featured a shot of a woman's bare bottom. Fox is refusing to pay a fine that's 7.5% of the amount that ABC ended up paying which already raises questions. more ›

DirecTV has finally come to the on-demand table but is it too late? Supposedly it's at least as bad as the Dish Network's offering - very limited functionality, automatically sending content to a set top box with limited storage and potential delays in viewing. more ›

We're sad to learn that actress Suzanne Pleshette has died in Los Angeles from lung cancer at age 70. Although she appeared in film very early in her career in such high profile projects as Jerry Lewis' The Geisha Boy and Hitchcock's The Birds, the vast majority of her time was spent in television. more ›

As you can see below it's slim pickins tonight. Last Friday the Wall Street Journal ran an article about all the smoke that the networks are blowing with their overuse of the word "new" as it applies to their programming. ABC's "all new (but partial) season of Lost" and the "all new funny" Carpoolers, which would be a welcome change for that sub par offering. I guess we're supposed to be excited about this and the fact that Victoria's Secret will be running it's first Super Bowl ad since 1999, mark your calendars. more ›

The unmatched director was a quotable genius. Here are just some of his funniest quips. Actors are cattle. Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms. Disney has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor he just tears him up. Drama is life with... more ›