L.A. Confidential DVD, Usually ships in 24 hours Buy now from This movie was made in 1997, and was a very slick movie.

The movie was based on a 1990 book of the same name by James Ellroy, and was at one time considered very difficult to base a book on. But, finally the book was converted into a screenplay by Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland, and turned into this movie that won two Oscars (Best Supporting Acress for Kim Basinger and Best Adapted Screenplay (a vindication of the efforts by Curtis and Brian)). The movie is considered a good effect of a new-generation noir movie, with a great direction by Curtis.

The movie was acclaimed by most critics, although it earned only around $30 million profit in the US (costing 35 mil and making 65 mil), but it must have also been earning a lot more from the DVD market and from the international market. The movie primarily stars 5 characters (Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pierce as 3 cops in the LAPD; Kim Basigner in an award winning role; and James Cromwell in the pivotal role of Capt Dudley Smith as the Police Captain who wants to build the crime system lorded over by himself. It is set in the 1950 s Los Angeles, and for those who did not know what the city was like at that time, it presented not a very clean picture.

There was a lot of cop violence, corruption in the police force, sleaze in Hollywood, a lot of buzz about call girls who were styled to look like top movie actresses, drug addiction, tabloid journalism out to expose corruption and crime so as to sell more (although that does not seem to have changed). The movie focuses on the intersection of all these, and tries to end at a positive end with some of the forces of corruption reduced and the police administration wanting to make a clean sweep of the police force so that it can be a respected force. The roles of these three cops is the most pivotal, since it is they who drive the various scenes and acts of the movie.

The youngest and freshest to the Police Force is Detective Lieutenant Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce), the son of a legend from whom much is expected. He is a change from the brutality and corruption in the police force and is basically honest, although he is shown to be manipulative in the end. However, these attributes set him aside from the other policemen, especially when he testifies in a jailhouse brutality trial in which a long-serving member of the police force is implicated and has to retire.

The next is Officer Wendell Bud White (Russell Crowe), who is a man who uses force a lot, and is much feared. He has no love lost for Exley, especially when his partner is removed from the police force based on Exley s testimony. However, when his former police partner is killed in the Nite Owl massacre, he becomes much more involved in the case.

He does not take kindly to women beaters, and is tender to the victims. He is also being used by the Captain to take down rival mafia leaders. The third cop is Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a very slick cop, who is in the limelight.

He serves as the technical advisor to a crime television show, and also funnels a lot of information to Danny DeVito (who is connected with Hush-Hush magazine), including making arrests almost in front of the camera of the magazine. The main event of the movie is the massacre of the patrons of an all-night diner, called the Nite Owl massacre. The investigation of this leads to a call-girl racket in which Kim Basinger is involved, and Russell Crowe starts having an affair with her.

The others also get involved during investigation, and eventually the trail leads to a small cabin in the middle of nowhere where the actual person behind everything is revealed, and then Guy Pearce kills him, and then manipulates the police command by playing on their need to have a hero emerge from all this, this hero being Guy Pearce. The movie had some casting difficulties, after all, there are 2 Australian stars in key points of the movie, but after seeing the movie, one can appreciate all the performances. If you want to admire the film art, and also appreciate a fast movie, then buy this movie.

e.g. Cardiff or CF1 I can't lie, folks: I've been in a bad mood all day.

My head hurts, I'm tired, and it's been raining for two days straight, forcing me to do things like clean the house and do laundry rather than go outdoors. And so there's really nothing left to do put play a lot of snotty, ineptly recorded punk rock records until their own hilarious pissed-off-ness cancels out my own. This is why I recommend Killed By Death, a blog dedicated to uploading out-of-print/just plain forgotten 7"s from old-school punk and hardcore bands--not art-punk, post-punk, or any other kinda hyphenated punk--lost so far underground they got dirt and worms in their pockets.

Just reading the lyrics to Detention's "Dead Rock'n'Rollers"--"Why couldn't it be Barry Manilow?/I mean I was never crazy about John Lennon but at least he didn't drown to death in his own puke"; "And what about you Jim Carroll?/ All your friends have/ What are you waiting for?

/ Do it!"--has put me in a better mood already. I've especially been enjoying the ultraviolent 2002 7-inch from Wolf Eyes hardcore/thrash offshoot Violent Ramp, which is probably making my headache worse, but at least making me smile.

with a high-growth investment opportunity," said Mr. Howsam. "I look license agreements with major studio and distribution partners.

It will be Mr. Howsam's notable 20-year career in the entertainment industry includes financiers. He also served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of entertainment and education divisions.

Mr. Howsam also served as founding production and distribution services. Additionally, he has produced more Award -nominee William H.

Macy, Meg Ryan, LL Cool J and Elliott Gould, audiences in the U.S. in April.

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It's Free! Once upon a time, Leondaro DiCaprio starred in a crappy movie called The Basketball Diaries . It told the story of Jim Carroll, an acclaimed poet who had been quite the ball player in his younger days.

He also started abusing heroin at a young age, which may or may not have played a role in the end of his athletic career. Here's a 1991 interview with Carroll that covers his life and times in hoops. It's NSFW, and pretty long, but pretty fascinating if you care about city hoops in the 1960's and 1970's.

Or all the pro stars who got their start in that scene. Comments [0] Permalink Email This Linking Blogs Share This Add this post to..

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us YardBarker Ballhype Fark It's dusk in Tijuana's red-light district, and two bouncers are slouching outside a strip joint called the Chicago Club. A car rolls up, a window rolls down, and the American guy on the passenger side starts asking questions in awkward Spanish. Looks like business as usual.

But then I climb out of the passenger seat that's right, it's me in the car to make sure they hear me right. "That sign across the street," I say, pointing toward the towering words MOLINO ROJO in scarlet neon. "From what year is it?

" The guys look at each other. They have seen many things on this block, but an architectural preservation tourist, it seems, is not one of them. "From the '30s?

" I ask hopefully. They squint across the street and scoff. "Fifties or '60s," one of them finally says.

Bummer. And welcome to the search for the Tijuana of the '20s and '30s the city that was Vegas before Vegas was Vegas, the city that some Tijuanenses pine for and others treat like incriminating evidence. This bygone Tijuana lives on in tattered postcards and historical-society monographs, its casinos paying off in American silver dollars, its horse-track bettors forever tempted by the prospect of a nightcap at the world's longest bar.

Looking for remnants of that place in 2007 is like diving for a Mexican Atlantis. Instead of checking out the hotels and fancy restaurants along the fast-growing Baja coast, you squint at history through a veil of border culture and discarded architecture, the whole scene scented with carnitas and beer. The casinos are the key.

If you persevere, you can learn why a Muslim mirage rises over the heart of Tijuana today and how two enduring trophies of 20th century high life, the Caesar salad and the margarita, were born or adopted here. And you can wonder: What if Baja's old casinos had endured? Would Vegas be Phoenix?

Would the strip run from Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas? Would Mexico be corrupted? (Oh, wait.

) By now the world takes for granted Tijuana's reputation as a den of forbidden thrills (or, as Krusty the Clown on "The Simpsons" puts it, "the happiest place on Earth"). Yet until I came across a new book by Los Angeles writer and preservationist Chris Nichols titled "The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister," I'd never thought much about the roots of that reputation or the Tijuana-Vegas connection. In the course of telling how McAllister landed the job of designing a long-lost resort called Agua Caliente at the advanced age of 19 Nichols sketched a bigger picture that explained a lot.

From 1919 to 1933, alcohol and casinos and prostitution and horse racing were all forbidden or tightly restricted in California, and all were easily available in Tijuana. Because of that, great pleasure palaces were built, including the city's fabled Agua Caliente casino, and countless Hollywood celebrities and their imitators crept south by car, rail, ship and small plane. One Times reporter, surveying the Agua Caliente casino in 1929, concluded that "there isn't another place on the continent, outside of a U.

S. mint, where you can see so much money piled up before your eyes at one time. Its only rival in the world is Monte Carlo.

" That casino was the crown jewel of the era. It opened in 1928, tiled and stuccoed, Moorish and missionary, vast and self-assured. It lay six miles south of the border, covered 655 acres and cost about $10 million at the time, the lion's share supplied by American investors.

It was "one of the most opulent resorts ever to grace the Americas," writes Nichols, "but more significantly, it was the inspiration for Las Vegas." Along with a casino offering roulette, baccarat and faro (but no windows or clocks), it featured about 400 rooms and bungalows, a horse-racing track, a golf course, a spa fed by natural spring water (hence the name), an Art Deco ballroom, various cocktail bars, tennis courts, a riding academy, a landing strip for small planes, a blue-tiled minaret and an iconic bell tower, a replica of which now stands at the beginning of Boulevard Agua Caliente. Charlie Chaplin and Gary Cooper came to the races.

Douglas Fairbanks sat on the board of directors. Jean Harlow tried the golf course. Bing Crosby and Clark Gable saddled up horses, and the showroom featured a teenage dancer, Margarita Cansino, who later changed her name to Rita Hayworth.

Architectural Digest gave it 16 pages in 1929. Hollywood gave it a movie "In Caliente," featuring Dolores del Rio and Pat O'Brien, shot on location in 1934. But by then the cards had started falling another way.

Nevada legalized gambling in 1931. The U.S.

ended Prohibition in 1933. Santa Anita racetrack opened in Los Angeles County in 1934. In 1935, newly elected Mexican President L zaro C rdenas banned casino gambling.

(One of the leading casinos of that era, historians say, was a downtown venue called the Molino Rojo. A school replaced it, but as the sign I saw attests, another entrepreneur has revived the name at a new location.) Tijuana kept attracting American thrill-seekers, of course, especially Navy guys from San Diego.

And sports betting and several other kinds of gambling have endured. But once the high-end gamblers left, thousands of service- industry jobs were lost and the palaces crumbled, burned or were retooled. I made two trips to Baja and enlisted three guides to help me find that lost Tijuana, all the while knowing that the star attraction of this journey would probably turn out to be a ghost.

At one point, as a guide and I waited in our car at a busy Tijuana intersection, a ball of flame erupted in front of us. Then another. Then I realized they were coming from the mouth of a roadside beggar.

Between fiery bursts, he raised a jug of God-knows-what to his lips. And then the light changed and my guide hit the gas without even bothering to shrug. "People breathe fire for money," he said in the tone of an indulgent urbanite tutoring a bumpkin.

Maria Curry, an architectural historian who led me through downtown on another day, takes the opposite tone. "This is a magic place," she says as we pass a workaday scene: the peppers and pi atas of the Mercado El Popo on 2nd Street. Then she explains its roots (in the market's case, the late 1920s and 1930s).

Curry, who was born in Mexico City and moved to Tijuana in 1993 after graduate school at Cornell, now splits her time between here and San Diego. For several years, she and other Tijuana and San Diego academics and architects have been trying to get more respect and protection for Old Tijuana. But it's no easy job.

Tijuana didn't declare itself a city until 1889 and didn't have 1,000 residents until about 1915, when its first horse-racing track opened. Most of the 2 million or 3 million people who live here now (estimates vary) have come from elsewhere in Mexico, and most of those hometowns can claim more history (and less feuding between drug cartels and law enforcement agencies) than Tijuana. As we walk and drive the city, Curry traces the outline of unspectacular Old Tijuana, such as the stately brick walls of the hilltop Alta Mira Cultural Center, which was built as a schoolhouse in 1930, or Teniente Guerrero Park.

This park was the city's first, founded just a few blocks from Revoluci n by a group of female activists in 1924. It served then as a haven for all social classes, from the wealthy merchants to the families of hotel and casino workers, and it's not much different today: chess players, kids wrestling on the ragged grass, ancient shoeshine guys, moms pushing toddlers on the swings, and over by the west end, those swarthy guys standing around with hammers. (Relax.

They're freelance auto repairmen waiting for fenders to bang on.) I move on to Hotel Caesar's and Caesars restaurant, at 5th and Revoluci n, and order salad. The story is told in various ways, but the consensus west of the Mississippi is that the Caesar salad was created in Tijuana in the 1920s and popularized by hotelier and restaurateur Caesar Cardini, who brought his businesses to this site in 1930.

The good news is that after changes in ownership and a lapse in salad-making in the early 1990s, the staffers in the restaurant still make a big deal of whipping up a salad while you watch. At $6, it's a good value. Also, in the hotel they're finishing a thorough renovation of the 46 guest rooms, which cost between $35 and $70 nightly.

The bad news is that they really renovated. Five years ago, a writer for Preservation magazine described the Hotel Caesar's lobby and rooms as a scene out of "The Sun Also Rises," full of atmosphere and reminders of the days when bullfighters bunked here. Not anymore.

Just about every hint of the '30s has been obliterated from the hotel and restaurant, inside and out. While it might be callous to say Christian Slater has nothing better to do than appear in..

.oh..

.we're just going to say it: the once great Christian Slater has nothing better to do than appear in a save Ellis Island campaign - along with other celebrities - called We Are Ellis Island. The campaign goal is to build support for saving the island and its crumbling architecture.

Callousness aside, the campaign is a nice effort at calling attention to a place through which millions of soon-to-be Americans passed and the legacy it left for the decedents of those who did pass through. Sponsored by Arrow and featuring Katharine McPhee, Joe Montana, Kristin Cavallari, Christian Slater, Richard Belzer, Elliot Gould, cast members of The Sopranos and others, two commercials, a print campaign and individual videos bring Ellis Island stories to life. The campaign was created by in-house agency PVH Advertising and Marketing Group.

The best part of the entire campaign is when The Sopranos ' Johnny "Sack" (Vincent Curatola) peers into the camera and semi-threateningly intones, "be a good idea to make a donation." Oh, to be clear, we love Christian Slater. Always have.

Always will. by Brian P. Turner As summer draws to a close, so comes to an end the 2007 Del Mar meet.

Over new Polytrack surface. While some racing fans have not approved of the surface suffered by horses over the course of the meet was greatly diminished. dispel this myth.

At the true sprint distances of less than seven furlongs, advantage. At route distances, horses closing from off the pace did perform better but that can be said of many race tracks regardless of the surface. Overall, the Del Mar strip played very fair for the meet.

at Del Mar but how they looked afterward. Simply put, horses either handle the competing over it. A great example of this is Flip the Penny (Fusaichi Accele), Mar but had never once visited the winner's circle.

After arriving at Del Mar, the gray reeled off three wins in a row and won each of them easily. recognizing those runners who handle these surfaces and those who don't. Championships.

There is little doubt that once more the southern California glory at Monmouth Park at the end of October. The question now becomes how well to the traditional dirt track of Monmouth. competing in the Pacific Classic (G1) on the Polytrack.

This gamble paid off but unspectacular competitor on the dirt. Should the connections decide to move Back), who invaded Del Mar to claim the victory in the Bing Crosby H. (G1) by a nose.

The dark bay had his greatest success prior to that start on the grass and which was also contested over Polytrack. One has to wonder if Clement will he will elect to take another path. in the Pat O'Brien H.

(G2), don't have as much reason for concern. The gray has score in the 2005 running of the Bing Crosby. Del Mar in the Clement L.

Hirsch H. (G2). Given that her three wins prior to her unknown when it comes to the dirt track.

(Van Nistelrooy) and Sorrento S. (G3) victress Tasha's Miracle (Harlan's Holiday), who have never competed on any surface other than a synthetic one. horses will actually excel on the dirt track.

Even those trainers who say they training over it. This is due to how much more sound the horse stays as well as how much more they seem to get out of the workout. One only has to look at Bob barn by training them at Del Mar before shipping them east to run at Saratoga.

on the Polytrack at Keeneland. As a matter of fact, each of the top three finishers in last year's Juvenile had their final prep at Keeneland. On This Day in History: August 22 Paramount’s Last Picture Show by Brooklyn Eagle ( edit@brooklyneagle.