Photo by Robert L. Wells There's really no point to discussing the plot of this movie as it's nearly identical to the other movies in the franchise: Indy gets dragged into trouble with bad guys (Russians this time), travels to a place with a lot of cobwebs and gets wet and/or mucky in the process and then runs from fire/mud/water/big rock/CGI something-or-other while dodging bad guys and dragging along a sidekick and then, of course,......

My boy Carson Daly takes a lot of heat. People complain that he is a late night talk show hack, and that he is basically unwatchable. Sure he is not the leader of the pack, maybe not even close to the leader, but his show rocks and it's about time people appreciate it before he's replaced with someone even lamer. We'll admit that his opening monologue is always just a bunch of poorly delivered......

You can tell it's a TV "sweeps" month because shows are pulling out all the cliffhangers, disasters and stunt casting tricks in the Tinseltown TV book. Eric Delko almost dies on CSI: Miami. Emmitt Smith shows up on How I Met Your Mother. Fine. Whatever. But last night's airing of Grey's Anatomy really takes the cake for asking a lot of an intelligent TV audience. Meredith Grey (hence Grey's Anatomy) drowns while working on......

Comet McNaught may be visible in Southern California for the rest of the week (it is now brightest in the Southern Hemisphere but has hung around Northern skies longer than expected). It's the brightest comet in our sky in 42 years, and can be seen chasing the sun at sunset with the naked eye. In recent days, McNaught has also been photographed in daylight. Discovered last August by an Australian astronomer, the comet is......

New Year's Eve is so overrated. Bars, clubs and restaurants charge up the wazoo for drinks and eats that you'd never think about paying any other night of the year. So if you don't feel like dodging drunks on the freeways at 12:15 a.m., stay in, invite a few friends over and toast to 2007 in the comfort of your own home. While waiting for the ball to drop, why not rent a flick......

Remember the college application question that asked if you could have dinner with anyone – who would it be? The standard answers included Jesus, grandparents, Abe Lincoln, etc. But we skipped that question and chose another because we couldn’t think of anyone interesting enough, at age 17 anyway, to keep our attention span during the dinner hour. But now we’re older and wiser, living in LA and addicted to the TV shows constantly stored......

So LAist admits to being one of the five people to actually watch most episodes of the FOX freshman series Vanished. When it launched late in the summer, the promos tempted viewers with the promise of a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a la The Da Vinci Code with all the action of 24. But after watching the so-called “series finale” on the web this weekend--which was a real letdown--LAist would like to call......

Taking the Jesus Pill, showing in a limited engagement on Wednesday nights at King King, is decidingly Angeleno. It is a rock-goth-opera promoted by Polly Parsons of the fabulous Amoeba and at the helm is Charles Terrell, with a cult following all his own. He writes, directs and stars in this revival that raises true questions about what can happen when a preacher goes too far. Taking the Jesus Pill also raises the hemline......

LAist tries not to play favorites. So for those who just are haters of Laguna Beach and all the O.C. stands for, enjoy the above clip of a MadTV skit on the tenn-popular show that has just launched its third season. For those who can't get enough, we encourage you to pop the Laguna Beach, Season 2 DVD on your netflix or grab from your fav. tenny bopper. The DVD relives all the moments......

If you can't stomach the thought of sitting through "Snakes on a Plane" this weekend, you might want to consider a movie featuring rich girls on a bus. "Material Girls," starring Hilary and Haylie Duff, opens this weekend and it's worth a look, despite its troubled production history and bad reviews. The sisters Duff play the Marchetta sisters, Los Angeles cosmetics heiresses, who lose their riches and learn to live like the rest of......

photo of Belle and Sebastian with the LA Philharmonic by chotda Slowly creeping my way down Highland Boulevard in some of the worst LA traffic I've ever experienced, almost completely surrounded by my soon-to-be fellow audience members, I was mentally preparing myself for a night consisting of sweet little diddies and teen misfit anthems from not only Belle and Sebastian, but Belle and Sebastian backed by the LA Philharmonic, with The Shins opening for......

After being all 4th of July-ed out, this LAist poster settled in for a mellow night in front of the boob tube. But the network pickings were slim. We're talking skinnier than Nicole Richie. NBC-4 showed two hours of dreck with America's Got Talent. FOX aired two hours of So You Think You Can Dance. And ABC offered viewers George Lopez, Freddie (yes, Prinze Jr. has a TV show) and two repeat episodes of......

Last night we caught Eddie Izzard at the Coronet Theater, where he is appearing all week and trying out new material. While he claims to use no drugs, we want whatever pumps through his bloodstream in ours. The man of a thousand tangents took us through evolution (the original title of Darwin's book was "You're a Fucking Monkey"), bees and honey (we can't replicate his "worker bee song" here, but it's worth it), torture......

Quick -- what happens when you want to put on an American Idol-esque show during the summer TV doldrums, and Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest are busy spending the bizillions they earned during the regular TV season? You get David Hasselhoff in the role of Randy; Brandy playing Paula, some Brit “journalist” named Piers Morgan playing Simon; and an aging Regis Philbin taking over Seacrest’s role in a two-hour waste......

We have to thank KCRW for bringing us Joe Morgenstern from the Wall Street Journal, who delivers weekly movie reviews in prose that mellifluously flow into our aural space. Most of the time we agree, but we were surprised at his review of the latest installment of the X-Men series. "Terrifically entertaining... a single great idea." We're thinking more along the lines of "mildly entertaining... a few cheesy moments." If you witnessed X2: X-Men......

Truth be told, LAist hasn’t been dying to see a movie on opening night for a long, long time. But there is just something about global climate change as a result of a consumption-driven society that just gets us all in the mood – so we headed out to the ArcLight this week to see An Incovenient Truth. YOU MUST GO SEE THIS MOVIE. It will change your life, or at least the way......

LAist would like to admit we were wrong: Tonight, we taped Lost and ended up watching the finale of American Idol -- all two hours and three minutes of it. We got sucked in during the first hour and needed to watch the show to to its cheesy, glorious conclusion with Katharine McPhee and Taylor Hicks singing "I've Had the Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing. Oh yes, and then Taylor being crowned......

Are Ben Stiller, Christina Applegate and Taye Diggs American Idol groupies? While they weren’t the only celebs that Fox tcaught on camera at the Kodak, the sightings show how much this pop competition has become a red-hot ticket in Hollywood. Even the networks pulled their regular programming, and those not watching AI were given the choices of Stephen King’s “Desperation” on ABC or the Academy of Country Music Awards on CBS. NBC really threw......

The Cinespia film society screens Detour, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, tonight at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Going to see the final resting places of old Tinseltown names like Rudoph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Peter Lorre, Janet Gaynor and Tyrone Power is cool enough -- but add a flick and music to the mix and how much more Hollywood can you get? Bring food, drinks and blankets. Tall chairs are not allowed. Detour Saturday, May......

So Mischa Barton's character Marissa Cooper was killed in an auto accident in the third-season finale last night. Maybe that'll infuse some life into the Fox show that jumped the shark after its first season. But what's to happen with rich boy/poor boy Ryan Atwood (Ben MacKenzie)? Here's what we hope for: We all know that Ryan has anger-management issues. A "drunken and vengeful Volchok" caused the accident, so we expect Ryan to get......

On last night's American Idol, we found out that either Sherman Oaks' own Katharine McPhee or the gray-haired dude Taylor Hicks will be your American Idol. Ubiquitous host Ryan Seacrest revealed that less than 1 percent of the 50 million votes cast separated the three contestants. (Has anyone else noticed that with all his jobs lately, Seacrest is probably too tired to shave and be annoying?) Poor Elliott Yamin got the boot, and out......

Edward Norton must have not caught our great Valley debate earlier this year. If he had, he would have not spoken yesterday, on KCRW about the Valley as "north of Los Angeles" rather than being "northern Los Angeles." But that debate gets annoying. Although, maybe Norton had a good point in his statement. His movie being released this Friday in select theatres, Down in the Valley, is yet another movie to be added to......

May isn't just a television sweeps month, it’s also a do-or-die time for shows “on the bubble.” Those shows have a 50-50 chance (or less) of getting renewed by their networks. It’s an especially precarious time for the shows on the WB and UPN because those two networks are merging to become the CW in September, so all the old shows can’t possibly fit on the prime time schedule. While we’re kind of hoping......

Last week NBC's Deal or No Deal made it into the Nielsen Top 20 primetime television shows -- twice. The Howie Mandel-hosted show, which we guess airs on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, seems to be popular with the common folk. So last night, we checked it out for a minute. Unlike other game shows like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, the show doesn't use any gray matter. You pick one case at a time......

So last night LAist was playing the David Caruso Drinking Game, where players imbibe according to Caruso’s acting tics, uh, we mean nuanced performance. While watching CSI: Miami, we couldn’t help but marvel at Horatio Caine’s mysterious ways and the magic of television. First off, how much makeup does Caruso have to wear? We watch the show on high-definition, and we’re wondering how the stuff doesn’t melt off his face. It’s caked on kabuki......

Relaxing last night after the Festival of Books, we caught the Dotch Cooking Show, which Lindsay discovered last summer. It was every bit as weird and delighful as she promised. "Beef bowl is in your dreams. You want to eat it now." We don't really care whether a contestant chooses "Deal" or "No Deal," whether or not they become a millionaire, or what's behind door #3, but somehow the question "Beef bowl or pork......

There’s something disturbing about Barry Watson’s hair on the new ABC show What About Brian, which premiered Sunday night in the usual Grey’s Anatomy 10 PM slot. In one particular scene, Raoul Bova's character (an Italian model) says something the audience has been thinking throughout the show: “It needs some product.” Watson's coiffure is analagous to the show: a little limp, a little boring, but workable. Here's Brian's premise: seven friends live in Los......

San Clemente has never looked so seedy. The sleepy town just outside of Orange County is the backdrop for Rian Johnson's first film, Brick (note: Brick is an advertiser on LAist but this is not advertorial). We won't argue that the film should join the pantheon of great LA/So.Cal flicks we've been talking about recently or that it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's just the best film we've seen this year. There......

California is overrepresented in the finalists in The Next Food Network Star reality show: two are still standing, and they're both from California. First there's Guy Fieri from Johnny Garlic's up in Santa Rosa. But despite his location, Guy's not wine-country-ish at all: he's got spiky blonde hair, wears skate shorts and cooks healthy-ish home versions of crap we all like to eat: the fried, the BBQd, the spicy, the tequila-soaked. He's somewhere between......

This LAist contributor would watch a BMW ad if it promised Clive Owen, so we happily handed over the $ to see Inside Man yesterday without complaint. Plus Denzel Washington? Crime thriller — whatever. We know a chick flick when we see one. We kid. It is a crime thriller, and director Spike Lee knocks it out of the park. Everything moves along at a good clip, and it's got some nice twists and......