Never a good thing in the first place and never a good time for the Los Angeles commuter, a bank robbery late this afternoon northwest of the Westwood and Olympic intersection has shut down streets in the area. An armed robber described as a male black wearing a mask robbed a bank and split. Some streets were shut down as the LAPD routinely checked the area, but as one cop plainly told us in the......

Barbarella plays at the Arclight tonight. / Photo by atomicshakespeares via LAist's flickr pool. SPOKEN WORD The NYC-based nonprofit organization The Moth brings its StorySLAM to LA every first Tuesday of the month. If you’re good a spinning yarns, then StorySLAM is for you. They provide the theme and the mic – you put your name in the hat and if you’re picked, you have 5-minutes to tell your story – no papers allowed.......

The festival kicks off this morning with a director's coffee talk at the Landmark. Scheduled panelists include moderator James Mangold, Paul Haggis and the next Bond director Marc Forster. Tickets are $11. The big event today (and it's free!) starts at noon and runs until 6:00 p.m. at the Landmark Regent Theater. It's Live Earth Day: A Celebration of Earth and includes 50 short films commissioned by SOS-Live Earth. Some of the filmmakers who've......

Diary Of A Mad Housewife & The Last Of Sheila It's another crazy 1970s double feature. Directed by Frank Perry Diary Of A Mad Housewife stars Carrie Snodgress (rocker Neil Young's girlfriend for a time in the 70s) and Richard Benjamin as a young, well-to-do Manhattan couple whose marriage hits the skids thanks to obnoxious, self-absorbed hubby. The film feels dated, but Snodgress' Oscar-nominated performance still rings true. The gem on tonight's double bill is......

Big Bad Mama & Black Mama, White Mama Big Bad Mama, a 1974, Roger Corman-produced breasts-and-bullets flick, features the brilliant tagline, "The family that slays together, stays together." This B-movie version of Bonnie & Clyde is set in 1932 Texas and stars Angie Dickinson as a bootlegging, bank-robbing mom who joins up with Tom Skerritt and William Shatner to bilk society for all they can get. In between the robbing and killing are numerous sexy......

Grindhouse The week kicks off with a pair of rarely screened gems of black 1970s cinema, Brotherhood of Death about a group of black Vietnam vets who fight back against the Ku Klux Klan, and Johnny Tough, a coming-of-age movie about a troublesome teenager. That's followed by a dose of Italian horror, Autopsy and Eyeball. Then it's a trio of bizarre wonders: Coonskin, a Ralph Bakshi-directed animated blaxploitation spoof about a trio of animals (Philip......

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......

It's going to be a long time before any of this happens. If it happens. LA Mayor Villaraigosa and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom might go head to head for Governor. Both deny it though. A little closer to home, two bloggers debate over annexation and other issues in the Santa Clarita Valley. Should Stevenson Ranch, which has the highest sales-tax-revenue-generating strip mall in all of the county's jurisdiction, annex into the city of......

Who doesn't love the dramatic skills of Meryl Streep? Who doesn't think Anne Hathaway isn't the cutest thing? And who doesn't think the director of several episodes of "Sex and the City" and "Entourage" (including the pilot) will probably put together a good film? Ah, who cares? All we know is in order to promote the new Streep/Hathaway/Stanley Tucci flick, "The Devil Wears Prada" you can get a free large cup of joe at......

Join music fans from around the city in bidding a sad farewell to the Rhino Records Store in Westwood this weekend. After a couple of decades of selling records, then 8-tracks, cassettes and CDs, it will be shutting its doors; the very last parking lot sale is this Saturday and Sunday from 10am-4pm. That's at 2028 Westwood Blvd, in the parking lot. Everyone probably has their own favorite Rhino Records memory. They used to......

LAist is going on a delicious spree around LA from A to Z. Our week of F for Farmers' Markets was interrupted, but resumes this week. We're not blogging about the permanent Farmers' Market at 3rd and Fairfax, but the many certified farmers' markets around the southland that offer fresh produce from local farmers. LAist will visit a different market each day this week; today, it's Westwood. Parking in Westwood Village is a stressful......