Hurdy Gurdy Man vs. Inspector Callahan
Forget about Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers. It has always been the real serial killers who freak me out the most. Son of Sam, The Hillside Strangler, The Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer - these guys are more chilling than any Hollywood creep [...]

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Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: The First of Roger Ebert’s ‘Great Movies’ 
Great movies belong to everyone really, but for the better part of 10 years film critic Roger Ebert has been making it his business to ensure we know about them. In 1996, in addition to his duties as a film critic reviewing roughly 250 new releases each year, he began writing a [...]

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Director Sean Penn and author John Krakauer
9/18 LA Premiere of Into the Wild (2007)
(AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
Last night at the Los Angeles premiere of Sean Penn’s new film Into the Wild, I had a small glimpse behind the curtain of the movie marketing machine for the first time. What did I see? Another curtain actually. This was [...]

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Intermission at The New Beverly Cinema 7/24/07
The New Beverly Cinema has been many things over the years, but until Sherman Torgan came along it never seemed to be the same thing for very long. In the 1930s it was a vaudeville theater. In the 1940s, mobster Mickey Cohen turned it into a nightclub called Slapsie [...]

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I wasn’t going to go.  All day long I kept coming up with excuses.  It’s too far.   It’s a work night.  I don’t really want to see Shooter again.  I’d rather go see the Siodmak film at The Egyptian.  After a while though, I realized these were all the same reasons I hadn’t gone before and [...]

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