A & E

	Hellboy 2: The Golden Army By Frederik Sisa @ 2:00 PM July 18, 2008 Found in: Film I’ve always been puzzled by descriptions of Guillermo Del Toro’s breakout hit, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” as a fantasy movie. Despite questionable metaphysics and short-lived glimpses into a world of fauns, fairies, and “Silent Hill”-type monsters, the film is, at heart, a fairly straightforward wartime drama. But there’s no questioning the fantasy pedigree of “Hellboy II.” Epic machinery and a formidable menagerie of imaginary creatures – from humanoids with architecture growing from their heads to stone giants that double as the secret entrance to long-lost cities – makes “Hellboy II” the dizzying phantasmagoria people believed “Pan’s Labyrinth” to be. Think of the cantina scene from Star Wars, filtered and magnified through Del Toro’s own unique imagination. read
	‘Cubes’ — Go Ahead, Think Inside the Box By Frederik Sisa @ 1:00 PM July 18, 2008 Found in: Film The field’s already a tad crowded with commentaries on the peculiar nature of office life and its inhabitants, homo cubicularis. We’ve seen the absurd, the soul-crushing, the banal, the political, the bureaucratic, the conformist, the rebellious – all expertly skewered by the likes of the venerable “Office Space” and “The Office.” Enter “Cubes,” a film that starts out hinting at a limp retread of familiar terrain only to deliver a surprisingly attentive character piece. Structured as a series of interlocking, vignetted conversations between character pairs, this isn’t a film about the office drone’s relationship to the corporate environment, but about the relationship between workers in the context of corporate culture. “Cubes” looks beyond cubicle partitions to the barriers created by assumptions and expectations – and what happens when these break down. read
	Rush to Rush Street — You Can’t Go Wrong After a Smashing Opening By Bree Crocetti @ 6:00 AM July 17, 2008 Found in: Dining As soon as the staff meeting broke, my friends and I were the first to take seats at the bar at the brand-spanking-new Rush Street in Downtown Culver City (along with faithful http://triplecreme.blogspot.com/ readers Jessica and Andrew). read
	Doesn’t ‘Producer’ Sound Classier Than ‘Supervisor’? By Ross Hawkins @ 6:00 AM July 14, 2008 Found in: A & E If you look at the producers’ credits on films or television shows today, it seems they go on Forever. There’s Executive Producer, Associate Producer, Line Producer, Supervising Producer and more. "Just what does a producer do?" asked a young novice director at a recent American Film Institute Seminar. Several answers were given but none seemed satisfactory. read
	Hancock — You Will Find It Gritty, Realistic and Generally Successful By Frederik Sisa @ 10:00 AM July 11, 2008 Found in: Film Not based on any existing comic book, “Hancock” aims to leap beyond the bar described by the dreaded moniker of “comic book movie.” Gone is the origin formula rooted in traumatic events and scientific accidents, along with secret identities and the subsequent assumption of world-saving heroism. Instead: an alcoholic, amnesiac superhero with an abrasive personality and a destructive disregard, not to mention contempt, for the people around him — more Bad Santa than Superman. read
	Live Music, Fun and Festive — Sevilla Is a Place to Linger All Night By Bree Crocetti @ 8:00 AM July 10, 2008 Found in: Dining When my friend was attending grad school in Riverside, Sevilla was one of her favorite haunts. When I would visit her, we always dined there, upstairs in the bar, loading up on tapas and wine, while listening to some Flamenco guitar. A fellow Riverside grad was in town, and itching for some of their alioli and sangria, so we went to Sevilla, but opted for the closer locale in Long Beach. read
	The Wondrous World of Wall E By Frederik Sisa @ 10:00 AM July 04, 2008 Found in: Film “I don’t mean to say that storytelling is overrated (then again, maybe that’s exactly what I mean), but we know it's not necessarily the most important thing in a movie -- even a mainstream studio picture. How it feels will always be more significant than the tale it spins. Because it's a movie.” And thus Jim Emerson takes a waffling shot (http://blogs.suntimes.com/) at cinematic storytelling, the view that everything in a movie is meant to serve the “story.” Quoting Roger Ebert, “A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it,” and pointing to the formulaic nature of many movies, he piles it on: read
	Wait Until Next Week By Bree Crocetti @ 8:00 AM July 03, 2008 Found in: Dining Bree Crocetti’s weekly restaurant review , which usually appears in the Thursday edition, will be resumed next week. In the meantime, check out my blog. Hungry for more? Check out http://triplecreme.blogspot.com/ read
	For the Love of Dance: The Shakti School of Bharata Natyam’s Annual Program By Frederik Sisa @ 11:00 AM July 02, 2008 Found in: A & E In a lovely moment between performances at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center’s James Armstrong Theatre, as the program shifted gears from Company to student performances, dancers Namitha and Ananya Ananth offered the deepest bow I’d ever seen – a prostration at a worthy individual’s feet, with head and hands to the floor. As unfamiliar as the gesture might be to hand-shakers and huggers, there was no mistaking the great dignity and respect it embodied. Even now, days after the moment, I remain touched by its simple elegance and profound emotion. read
	The Happening: Something Happens, but It’s Not Good By Frederik Sisa @ 10:00 AM June 27, 2008 Found in: Film As the title, “The Happening,” says, something does happen in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest offering: we reach the end of the road for Shymalan’s aspirations of being a latter-day Hitchcock by way of Rod Serling. The cross-pollination of “The Birds” with “28 Weeks Later” and “The Twilight Zone” results in, arguably, the worst film in Shymalan’s portfolio to date and, perhaps, the death of his cachet. The Shymalan brand has lost its luster. A shame.read