Adrienne Crew

Poor David Denby. In this week's "New Yorker" magazine, the critic screens "Batman Begins" and "Mr.& Mrs. Smith" and doesn't like what he sees. Regarding the Batman script, he writes Working with a screenplay he [director Christopher Nolan] wrote with David S. Goyer, he has attempted a solemn creation myth... Neeson, wearing a pointy little beard, teaches Bale to be tough by knocking him down as he tells him things like "You fear your...

Remember when the Southern Californian landscape sported signage designed for the literate motorist? One couldn't travel very far without spotting a storefront, blade sign or canopy displaying a playful name or pun. We snapped this one (click photo to enlarge) on La Cienega, south of Wilshire. In the coming weeks, we hope to post pictures of others as we find them. Where have you seen the last remaining punning signs in SoCal? Send us...

Silver Lake-based author, Joy Nicholson, doesn't focus solely on the Southern California region, but her two books certainly capture many aspects of the region's anomie. Her first book, "The Tribes of Palos Verdes," chartered the journey of a young girl lost admist the SoCal surf culture after her parent's divorce. Nicholson's latest novel, "The Road to Esmeralda," travels further south to record the adventures of a couple living in Mexico. When she's not writing,...

June 2005 offers lots of opportunities to view local and not-so-local artists' impressions of Los Angeles....

A new article about Holocaust Museums in the London-based online magazine called "Spiked" mentions LA's own Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance. Truthfully, Tiffany Jenkins, the author of the piece, gives the institution more of a scolding than props. She writes: The Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles transforms the history of the Holocaust into a discussion about everyday intolerance. It is suggested that there is a slippery slope between shouting and shoving,...

Was anyone else watching ABC7 News 11 PM broadcast last night? We're still pondering why --in a day involving 2 high speed police car chases, Anne Bancroft's death and the arrest of two California men with possible links to al-Qaida -- ABC producers decided the top story should be a report about local documentarians now missing in the Namibian desert. Perhaps ABC network told local affiliates to tailor their top news story to tie-in...

This LAist is nothing if not perverse. When we lived in San Francisco, we wrote film scripts. Now that we live in LA, we're writing a novel. In any event, we'd somehow amassed a large library of recent film scripts purchased from the Script Shack and other script vendors. After moving the equivalent of 40 pounds of paper to the Southland, we've discovered that we have no room in our LA abode, so we...

We have a bone to pick with Flavorpill Productions. Our LA Flavorpill newsletter for May 31- June 6 landed in our mailbox on Tuesday. It's taken a while to digest their list of "hand picked" happenings, but we noticed that LA Flavorpill favors the Merce Cunningham Dance Company twice. First there's the wrap around ads for Dance at the Music Center's presentation of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Ahmanson Theatre June 2-6....

"Chinatown" screenwriter Robert Towne shares stories about screenwriting at the Writers Guild Foundation Spring Storytellers Series tonight at 7:30 PM. The Writers Guild Theater is located at 135 S. Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. For reservations, call (323) 782-4692. Tickets are $25 for WGA members and academic faculty. Students get in for $15 with ID. A different kind of legend will speak downtown at the Central Library tonight: Kamau Daáood -- The Language of...

L.A. theater critic Rob Kendt's theater blog, the Wicked Stage, is back with fresh entries and, unfortunately, he's got a big story to parse this week as news filters out that the [Music] Center Theater Group (CTG) new artistic director, Michael Ritchie, has eliminated programs focused on the development of new plays and playrights, effective July 1, in order to spend more time and funding on staging new plays rather than work-shopping them in...