Whether new to the Bible or looking to refresh the ol’ memory, Edward Falzon’s book provides readers with a fun and accessible pathway to reading and understanding one of the world’ most influential texts. Much like Ben Akerley’s X-Rated Guide to the Bible shows us the Bible’s sexual side, Being Gay Is Disgusting serves as a guide to the Bible’s violence.
‘The King’s Speech’: Music to Our Ears
Label a movie “feel-good” and “triumphant,” and you’re liable to conjure visions of a hard-luck sports team elevated by tough-love ministrations or cute animals in danger who win the day through sheer pluck.
An Enchanting Dance Recital by India’s Rama Vaidyanathan
After the evening’s performance at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Center, Shakti Dance Company founder and Bharata Natyam guru Viji Prakash took to the stage and articulated what I had been thinking all along. While the music and dance are richly rewarding for people well-versed in the compositional intricacies of classical Indian music and the kinetic language of Bharata Natyam, the novice aficionado can just as easily and fully be elevated, inspired and moved. The vernacular gives way to the universal, the senses become engaged in the music and costumes, and cultures comes together in a shared experience of beauty.
Monsters: When Giants Walk Among Us
To the list of up-and-coming directors with a keen understanding of what makes science fiction such a scintillating canvas for thoughtful speculation — a list that includes Duncan Jones (Moon) and Neill Blomkamp (District 9) — one can now add, with some reservation, the name of Gareth Edwards.
If You Value Freedom, Make Pot Legal
You don’t have to smoke pot or approve of smoking to make it legal because the issue isn’t really about that controversial little plant. The issue is freedom.
Hereafter: Deathly Dull
What Shakespeare described as the undiscovered country from whose borne no traveler returns is also something less poetic: the subject of a turf war among theologians, charlatans, New Age fabulists and other opportunistic metaphysicians. Like the true believer, Clint Eastwood's latest – with the unsubtle title “Hereafter” – aims to prove itself of a modern, post-Enlightenment mindset by exposing various con-artists out to exploit the grieving through the pretense of communicating with the dead. In an amusing bit of mockery, various kinds of mediums — channellers, spiritualists and Electronic Voice Phenomena technicians — are paraded and punctured.
Protest Against Animal Cruelty: Jennifer Peterson vs. Barkworks (Part 2)
Re “Protest Against Animal Cruelty: Jennifer Peterson vs. Barkworks”
In the conclusion of my interview with Jennifer Peterson, the animal activist discusses the horrors of puppy mills and how Barkworks’ business promotes and, in her opinion, sustains cruelty for profit.
Protest Against Animal Cruelty: Jennifer Peterson vs. Barkworks
Last December, I wrote about an ongoing effort to shut down the Barkworks pet store at Westside Pavilion on account of its sick animals and association with cruel and inhumane breeders
Break the Whip Whips it Good
The Actor's Gang, one of L.A.’s most consistently magical troupes, can always be relied upon to deliver theatre that channels our era's nebulous zeitgeist.
ICT’s ‘The Clean House’ Is a Funny Place to Live
Matilde, a Brazilian live-in maid with an inconvenient disdain for housecleaning, would have been right at home in World War II efforts to weaponize humour. That is, if she occupied a vintage Monty Python sketch instead of Sarah Ruhl’s new play “The Clean House.”