Photo by ~db~ via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr It's official: Police have identified the Green Skeleton Bandit who was fatally shot earlier this week when he was caught in the act of robbing the AutoZone in NoHo by a US Marshal. He was 24-year-old Lawrence Dean Smith Jr. of Palmdale who used a knife and wore a skeleton-themed sweatsuit in his robberies. Fight for the right to ficus! Local activists in......

You can almost feel the grit coming off this picture | Photo courtesy of Lionsgate Entertainment I've always thought it was a shame that Jason Statham got stuck in the ghetto of glossy, empty action flicks. You'd never guess it by watching The Transporter 2 or Crank but Statham can be a legitimately good actor. I'm glad to see him in The Bank Job, a re-telling of the 1971 Baker Street bank robbery. Director......

The UCLA Bruins were gifted their third consecutive Pac-10 title by the referees in their game against the #7 Stanford Cardinal. With less than two seconds to go at the end of regulation Darren Collison drove to the basket and pulled up for a five-footer. Lawrence Hill went up and blocked the shot. Replays clearly showed that Hill got all ball and absolutely no body contact. So of course Hill got called for the......

Photo by susan catherine via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr A meeting last night in Oxnard brought out hundreds of parents angered over the recent shooting death of 15-year-old Lawrence King at the hands of a fellow teenager. They called for more vigilant security on campus and for more help for students who suffer from bullying. A multi-vehicle accident earlier this afternoon had two lanes of the 405 in Westwood shut down.......

The eighth grade student who was shot by a classmate at Oxnard's Green Junior High School on Tuesday died in hospital Wednesday. 15-year-old Lawrence King was shot twice at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday in a computer lab where at least 20 students were working. 14-year-old classmate Brandon McInerney was behind the trigger, according to witnesses. *UPDATE 12:30 p.m.: The 14-year-old suspect was charged with attempted murder (likely to be upgraded to murder) with a hate-crime enhancement......

UPDATE, 4:12 P.M., FRI., FEB. 15: KNBC reports that the Oxnard boy has been taken off life support and "his organs have been given away." UPDATE, 7:00 A.M., TH., FEB. 14: The shooting is now being treated as a murder case with possible hate crime motives. Go to our latest story on the Oxnard school shooting here. UPDATE, 5:33 P.M., WED., FEB. 13: Contrary to what CNN said below, the shooting victim, Lawrence King, is......

Photo courtesy of Picturehouse Entertainment After the awful Fred Claus, Vince Vaughn owes us some laughs and Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland might be just the ticket. It follows Vaughn and four hand-picked comedians as they cross the country to play an exhausting 30 shows in 30 nights. There are a bevy of on-stage celebrity cameos and Vaughn never lets his out-sized persona......

TALK What’s up with all the development in Downtown LA? What’s it going to look like in 5, 10 or 20 years? Moderated by Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times architecture critic, ALOUD at the Central Library features panelists Lauren Bon, Tom Gilmore, Martha Welborne and James Von Klemperer, AIA to discuss all things Downtown and development. 7 PM // ALOUD at the Central Library: Mark Taper Auditorium // 631 Fifth & Flower streets, LA......

The 80th Annual Academy Awards are scheduled to take place Feb. 24 at Hollywood & Highland's Kodak TheatreAuthorities have released the names of the victims in yesterday's deadly airplane collision in the skies above Corona. According to KNBC.com, "one of the victims -- Earl Smiddy, 58, of Moreno Valley -- was on the ground when he was hit by falling debris. The other victims were identified as Anthony Joel Guzman, 20, of Hesperia; Scott......

Jeffrey Lawrence Weaver was sentenced today to 40 years to life in prison for the killing of a man whose remains were left to rot in a Van Nuys storage unit. Weaver is one of two men convicted in this case. Today the "judge said he would recommend that Weaver never be released on parole" because of the extreme nature of the killing. The couple found this weekend dead of an apparent murder-suicide have been......

Trying to avert a state fiscal disaster, Gov. Schwarzenator is considering major cuts to the state budget that could result in the release of tens of thousands of inmates and $1.4 billion in cuts to schools, among other things. But he might meet some resistance from advocacy groups who object to the deep cuts. Boys and Girls, looks like we gonna have a good ol fashioned Sac town brouhaha. You guys remember Boy Meets......

One year ago today the South Bay lost a punk rock legend and I lost one of my oldest friends. Michael James Webber Dec 1, 1962 - Nov 11, 2006. Michael James Webber, a life long resident of Torrance, passed away on Saturday, November 11, 2006 in Torrance. Born in Inglewood, CA, Michael was 43 when he died. Born on December 1st, 1962, he attended Saint Lawrence Martyr followed by South High School. He went......

Monday Shalom Auslander presents Foreskin's Lament 7pm @ Vroman's Valerie Plame Wilson presents Fair Game 7pm @ Carpenter Performing Arts Center, Long Beach Barbara Firestone presents Autism Heroes 7pm @ Dutton's Slash presents Slash 7pm @ Borders, Torrance Lawrence Wright presents The Looming Tower 7:30pm @ UCLA Tuesday David Plante, with host Mark Danielewski, presents ABC 7pm @ Book Soup Michael Lent presents Christmas Letters from Hell 7pm @ Vroman's Tommy Lasorda & Bill Plaschke......

After the Trojans' plummet in the polls following the loss to Stanford and the release of the first BCS poll, many thought the team couldn't or wouldn't drop any further. Not so, as the AP is reporting that a chartered plane with 82 players aboard, headed to Indiana for tomorrow's Notre Dame game experienced an extreme drop while flying through a severe thunderstorm. Weather was so bad that the pilot had to abandon his first......

What happens when you take a jazz influenced visual artist and team him up with a group that transforms unoccupied storefronts and spaces into temporary art galleries and give them a large empty, ground-floor lobby of a former bank building in Beverly Hills? You get another amazing experience under the umbrella of Farmlab, which is a think tank, art production studio, and cultural performance venue doing multi-disciplinary investigations of land use issues that are......

We've covered the LA Times Book Prize nominees for the past few weeks and quietly rooted for our picks. The winners, announced at the annual hob-nob affair on Friday night, surprised us. We highlighted our picks weeks ago. What more did the committee have to do other than - you know - pick them? To wit: Biography We said Daniel Mendelsohn for The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Daniel freaking Mendelsohn, the......

Billboard has a lot of charts. And usually we just give you the No.1s. However, the line up for this week was rather uninspiring, and it seemed in everyone's best interest to instead list the top ten winners from just a few featured charts. So here they are. Issue Date : March 31, 2007 Top Independent Albums 1. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (Merge) 2. Type O Negative - Dead Again (Steamhammer) 3. The......

Grindhouse There probably isn’t a single night I wouldn't enjoy going to the Quentin Tarantino-curated Grindhouse Festival at the New Beverly. On Monday & Tuesday it’s a double bill of Rolling Thunder, a revenge flick about a Vietnam vet who goes on the warpath after his wife and son are killed by thugs, and The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a 1977 film that's set in 1946 about a hooded killer stalking the terrified residents of......

Venerable French magazine Cahiers du cinema (yup, it's still in existence) today launched its first English language edition, which will be available both in print and online for an annual fee. For $45, English-language readers will now be able to subscribe to a year's worth of the magazine (11 regular issues + 1 special issue). Cahiers will also offer free online supplements. Currently featured on the publication's Web site is a diary about the making......

A Word or 116: So I missed the first 10 minutes of the Grammys which meant that I missed the effing Police. I punished myself by watching the rest of the Grammys: a collection of posers I will never go see perform and whose songs I've never heard and will never care to hear. 24 is back with a 2 hour allotment but my understanding is that I'm not supposed to watch 24 anymore......

A Word or 11: Crap - I have no time to get snarky with you today. Tonight - Tuesday - February 6th, 2007 American Idol (Fox, 8:00 p.m.) It's off to San Antonio where they play both kinds of music, Country _and_ Western. NCIS/The Unit/The Unit (CBS, 8-11:00 p.m.) All new and 2x the Unit. Dateline NBC/Late & Order: Criminal Intent/Law & Order: SVU (NBC, 8-11:00 p.m.) All new. Gilmore Girls/Veronica Mars (the CW,......

Lakers 118, Wizards 102 - Some say the Gilbert Arenas - Kobe Bryant rivalry has sprouted, and LAist is pretty sure it's budding. Both players have denied any personal friction despite mild trash talking in the media. Their exciting play against each other in Washington demonstrated talent and mutual admiration. Kobe had 39 points and Arenas had 37, several of which came on spectacular plays against one another.     Kings 7, Panthers 0 - It wasn't the Miracle On Ice, but it......

A Word or 44: The first 1/2 of the "24" season premiere was quite good even though I don't understand how Jack found the terrorist dude before his house got blown up. Also, was there some anal play going on between Jack and the first terrorist guy? Kinky. Tonight - Monday - January 15th, 2007 "Lawrence of Arabia" (TCM, 5:00 p.m.) Quite possibly the best movie ever made. "Hamlet" (IFC, 6:00 p.m.) Classic Shakespeare......

As a commenter mentioned yesterday on our mysterious signs post, her favorite sign is the one at Moorpark and Laurel Canyon rooting Joey Lawrence on in Dancing With The Stars. Well, here it is. In a picture at least. Unfortunately, the sign has since been taken down. We hear Mr. Piken is a weird dude and eats a lot of cheese, but as anyone who knows this part of town, he sure does sell......

In a city so cultured that it boasts not one, but two excellent community college radio stations, Los Angeles doesn't play when it comes to our entertainment dollar. We've seen it all, most of it was eh, and we're barraged daily by opportunities to see major stars perform so when Joey Lawrence, Lisa Rinna, Drew Lachey and Joey McIntyre, along with 2006 winner Emmitt Smith and loser Mario Lopez, we weren't surprised when people......

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......

Two things went down yesterday that will probably make us look horrible in the eyes of the world. Not just in the way our enemies hate us, but in the ways our allies and those who are on the fence look at us. The first is the video above, of soldiers teasing young Iraqi kids -- who are clearly desperate for fresh water -- by making them chase after their vehicle for blocks before......

Take that Emmit Smith! Boo ya' Mario Lopez! Whoah Joey Lawrence!......

Pete Doherty, the fromer Libertines singer who had abused heroin and crack allegedly with Kate Moss, has been offered a job as a drug counsellor by his rehab clinic. - Female First Police guitarist Andy Summers writes in his autobiography about the time John Belushi rented a Jeep with him, took shrooms, and sped through a storm in Bali, ending in the pair rolling through puddles like kids - NY Daily News Sharon Stone......

The New York Times has launched a new Best Seller List for Political books and it's available online only. This move is surely meant to drive more traffic to their site and also the political list being online will hit a smaller number of people - including those who are say savvy to politics, being online, and the New York Times. So just what are the pundits reading these days? Here are this week's......