London Kills Him

Ella Taylor
No one could accuse Gary Oldman of going with the flow. While British working-class film trades in its hereditary gloom - even Ken Loach is making comedies these days - for perky little numbers custom-built for a swift American pickup (Brassed Off, The Full Monty), Oldman's first directing effort hauls......

Saddam and Gomorrah

Steven Mikulan
It was a little like The Twilight Zone," says director Barry Levinson about Bill Clinton's latest sexual red alert. "I came into the kitchen to read the paper, and there's a scandal about a young girl and the White House in it, and the possibility of war with Iraq. I......
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Ludwig Lives

Alan Rich
It may well be true, as a colleague pointed out in last Sunday’s L.A.Times, that the Beethoven glut has reached the point of absurdity, that the hundred-or-so available recordings of the Fifth Symphony are 95-or-so too many. It is equally true, however, that the DNA of great works of music......

McKinley Assassinated

Marc B. Haefele
The McKinley Building doesn’t jut over the horizon. It’s not the city’s tallest, oldest or most significant architectural landmark, but it once was a building that assured you — after you walked into its soothing, European-style courtyard — that the world was a better place than it had seemed a......

Is This Any Way To Run a Country?

Harold Meyerson
Presume not that I am the thing I was; For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self; So will I those that kept me company. And with these words, from the concluding scene of Henry IV, Part II, Shakespeare’s Prince Hal......

Def Hef

Kateri Butler
Hell, it was as inevitable as Bill Clinton getting caught. The VIP smoking area, that is — the velvet rope, the bouncer check ing for wrist bands. Of course, we were more concerned about hitting the hosted VIP bar at the Garden of Eden, where Playboy TV, which was celebrating......

A Day in the Life

Ricardo Earlye
I spend the morning watching the clock. Literally watching the second hand move around the face. Clicking off second by second. Anticipating the second hand reaching 12, so I can see the minute hand actually move. It does. I see it move several times, around and around. Oblivious to the......
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A Pretty Good Chinese Restaurant

Jonathan Gold
We all have spent a certain amount of time in the last decade in pursuit of the great Chinese restaurant, the mythical Taiwanese café or the swank Cantonese seafood Valhalla we instinctively know must exist among the several thousand Chinese restaurants in the Los Angeles area. And though that ideal......
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Wrap Party

Jonathan Gold
All India Café This place is at its best when you bring the fewest preconceptions to the table, when the food least resembles its regional roots. The restaurant’s signature dish is probably the "frankie," a Bombay street snack that the Westside Bombay Cafe brought to Cal i fornia and perfected,......

Nature Boy

Sara Catania
Adam Werbach fidgets in his dressing room, swilling bottled water and waiting to tape a talk show called The Couch. A wardrobe guy pops in to eyeball Werbach’s corduroy cargo pants and his wide-lapeled Naugahyde blazer, donned en route to the Burbank studio. The guy nods and Werbach relaxes —......