Snow Tempest

One of the best and funniest bits of social commentary on television is the recurrent bit, "This Week in Unneccessary Censorship" on Hollywood-based Jimmy Kimmel Live. Each week, in order to "help" the FCC, Kimmel explains, "We bleep and we blur things whether they need them or not." The show bleeps and blurs fragments of politicians' speeches and children's programs in ways that turn former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous dictum on...

Cyrus Kar, the Los Angeles documentary filmmaker who was imprisoned in Iraq for 55 days while the US government determined that he was not a threat, has been telling his story in press conferences and on Nightline. Kar says US soldiers manhandled him and called him "terrorist," while he explained that he was a US citizen and a veteran of the US Navy, and tried unsuccessfully to get the soldiers to let him call...

The problem with a sign saying "Warning: it's better to lose a minute of your life than your life in one minute. Watch the road." posted on a billboard or on the back of a bus is that the words themselves take almost a full minute to read. It's not that this or any of the slogans brought to you by the Operation Traffix safety coalition are misguided in their messages about keeping focused...

"Well, they have that in Canada!" No, we're not talking about sub-zero weather, moose, or Aero chocolate bars (although the chocolate is tasty). We're also not (yet) talking about the motion picture industry. Did you know that UCLA offers a program in Canadian Studies? Now, most Americans and Canadians may justifiably feel that they could function just fine in the other country without having to study it; the two nations are not that different...

We like bargains. We enjoy congratulating ourselves on not paying full retail price. And so we were lured to spend our money in Ventura County, where we don't live, rather than Los Angeles County, where we do. In his book The Reluctant Metropolis, William Fulton, an urban planner, calls the Camarillo Premium Outlets and the surrounding area "Sales Tax Canyon," arguing that by freezing taxes on personal property, Proposition 13 gave cities incentive to...

In a city with nicknames such as "Hollyweird" and "La-La Land," strange occurrences are pretty much par for the course. Nonetheless, this story about a large chunk of ice that crashed through the roof of a Fontana house and into a chair where minutes earlier a man had been sitting was spooky. Who would worry about getting crushed by ice while sitting in a pink chair watching television indoors in the middle of summer?...

Checking out Pennies From Heaven with no idea what to expect was an interesting experience. This 1981 movie is not the minor comedy we'd vaguely anticipated, but an artsy quasi-musical whose dramatic turning point involves a tap-dance striptease by Christopher Walken. Steve Martin stars in the movie but didn't write it; Dennis Potter did. It's a very visual musical (an American remake of a British television miniseries) that replaces the usual perky storyline with...

There's a reason that when you flip through the radio stations, it's the same junk all along the spectrum, and it's not that everyone else really does love Celine Dion. Sony BMG has agreed to stop giving payola (bribes) to radio stations and DJs, under pressure from New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Yes, he has documentation that people were given trips to Las Vegas in exchange for playing Celine Dion songs. Anyone...

The sky is blue. In most places, that sentence exemplifies a self-evident statement. Of course the sky is blue; what were you expecting, pink? Well, yes. Here in Los Angeles, the sky is nearly as likely to be pink, or violet, or, depending on the sun's heat on the ocean or fires in the hills, opalescent white or gloomy, smoky gray. There's a red sky at night on enough evenings that sailor's delight must...

Surprisingly for a comedy group known for training its members to develop specific, oddball characters, the July 16 performance of The Groundlings' new Saturday show, Groundlings May be Closer Than They Appear, featured only one sketch really based on a character. As a brassy, crooked financial consultant, Melissa McCarthy harangued the audience under the guise of a motivational speech. The performance was the funnier for its contrast with the sweet character, Sookie St. James,...