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The Prisoner of El Centro Avenue

Steven Mikulan
It's 8:30 on a warm evening in May 1997, and a reading of Justin Tanner's new comedy, Coyote Woman, has just ended at the Cast Theater. The play, about a young woman who undergoes Jekyll-Hyde transformations after she believes a coyote has bitten her in Griffith Park, is vintage Tanner......
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The Prisoner of El Centro Avenue

Steven Mikulan
Off the stage, Tanner has comfortably embraced the mother he had once wished dead. Sally Tanner, who changed her own name at the same time her son changed his, is now a Muslim, teaching quilting and supervising a halfway house for the mentally ill in the San Francisco Bay Area......

To Hav and Hav Not

Ernest Hardy
Last year, when Soul Food and Eve's Bayou opened within weeks of one another, conversation in my largely Afro-American and Latino barbershop spun squarely on the two films, with comparisons favoring the decidedly mediocre Soul Food. Explaining his preference (and echoing the sentiments of many in the room), a twentysomething......

Disney's Asia Minor

Ella Taylor
Without its fabulous animation, Mulan would add up to little more than a serviceable variant on the Disney drill: Wasp-waisted proto-feminist heroine - aided by a cute critter or teapot, a court jester played by a famous voice, and several faithful flunkies who morph into drag queens for song-and-dance backup......

The Truth Is Out There

Manohla Dargis
There's a scene in the big-screen version of the television show The X-Files when Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), the good-looking FBI agent with a permanent case of the heebie-jeebies, steps into a back alley, unzips and pisses on a peeling, crusted poster for Independence Day. Independence Day earned a lot......
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Only the Lonely

Jonathan Gold
The concept of the single-item restaurant is well known in Los Angeles: Lawry's for prime rib, Tommy's for hamburgers, Philippe's for French dip. If you want crab, you might head to the Crab Cooker; if tofu, to Tofu Cabin. There is precedent for this: The first Paris establishment to call......
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A Fluctuating Sameness

Alan Rich
Any entertainment that consists of two or more consecutive events under the same management qualifies as "festival" - from Bayreuth to Ojai - and the crowds come running. I'm not sure whether last week's "Resistance fluctuations," which was identified as "a new & unpredictable music festival," actually qualified as "entertainment";......

Times Marketing Sprint

LA Weekly
Lest we had any nagging doubts about the sincerity of L.A. Times publisher Mark Willes' promise to "break down the wall" between advertising and editorial at the paper ("with a bazooka, if necessary," he vowed), last Wednesday's Times reassured us. Wednesday, you will recall, was the day after the election,......

Wedgeless

Harold Meyerson
I. Conventional Wisdom Error No. 1 - The Lungren Lock The talk in political circles these days is all about how the affable and passionate Dan Lungren will dispatch the painfully cautious Gray Davis - a candidate whose emotional constipation rivals Bartleby the Scrivener's - in the gubernatorial runoff this......

They're Off!

Marc B. Haefele
So. For the first time in 84 years, we've got a real Los Angeles County sheriff's race. Chief Lee Baca, with 32 percent of the votes cast, will face Sherman Block, whose 36 percent was probably the worst showing at the polls by an incumbent sheriff this century. The only......