Okay so if you even pretend to like movies and you’ve missed the last six nights of the New Beverly Cinema’s Wright Stuff Film Festival, I will forgive you. In fact, I may even take pity on you. Edgar Wright (director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) has been screening his favorite movies over the past two weeks, and along with those movies he’s invited a the directors and the stars to the theater to meet the fans and talk about their work.

Tonight’s final double feature is a can’t miss. You’re going to get Raising Arizona followed by Evil Dead II, followed by a super top secret “gonna have to kill you if I tell you” midnight movie. You don’t have anything to do tomorrow morning, right??

Again, three movies and special guests…. All for seven dollars. The first show starts at 7:30pm tonight.

Bite me Arclight.

The New Beverly Cinema
7165 West Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 938-4038

[more podcasts will be up soon, I swear!]

But not really. Just a balmy night at an outside cafe at the Grove watching the fountains dance around. Gotta love it when you can eat outside in December and see reindeer flying around.

Tonight is the “Atwater Village Best Christmas Decoration Contest”!

Residents of Atwater: don’t forget to turn on your Christmas lights tonight after 5pm. The contest judges will be driving around the neighborhood and selecting the 2007 winners.

They will choose one winner per area: South, Central, and North. (I had no idea Atwater Village was so big as to warrant “areas.”) Winners will be notified, and info will be provided to where to pick up their prizes. This contest
is organized by the Atwater Village Residents Association, is free, and there is no need to fill out entry forms or anything.

And an idea: If you’re stuck in that god-awful accursed line for the DWP Festival of Lights, try flipping a u-turn and popping over the bridge to Atwater to peep some holiday lights at a far more reasonable rate. I’d much rather see holiday light displays in a cute neighborhood that people have worked hard on for years to up the cheese factor, than sitting in an endless line of cars breathing exhaust fumes while I creep through at .5 mph.

Xmas lights pic chez Ian Wilson.

Dear Annoying Couple Sitting in F-17 and F-18 at the December 15th 8:30pm Showing of I Am Legend at ArcLight Sherman Oaks,

You are douche bags. Huge, unbelievable douche bags. You not only discussed every trailer as it ran, you chatted through the entire movie. Non-stop. An impressively irritating 101 minutes. It was as if you have never been to the movies before. Maybe you had never even been out in public before. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh my God. Oh Sam. Oh Sam. Oh Sam.”

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

Seriously. What is this, AMC Burbank? Stop talking to the screen. You are the reason people stopped going to the movies in 1990.

I’m not trying to hate. I’m trying to help. I want you to know how stupid you sound so you can do something about it. I don’t want you to be sitting at your house on New Year’s Eve wondering why none of your friends came to your party. Yes, it’s because they don’t like you. You grate on their every nerve. Let’s work on that for ’08. Mmmkay?

Sincerely,

F-16

The El Monte police report that the number of vicitims in the debit card scam as grown to 70 vicitms as of Friday. Potential loss to Arco customers could reach as high as $100,000 as reported in the 12/5 edition of the Pasadena Star News.

I did a quick cruise through the ARCO web site and there was nothing said on what they are doing to protect and prevent fraud to their debit using customers. Nothing. Does anyone else find it odd that they have noting to say on the topic?

I love typos, this guy is after my own heart. It is what it is and we move on with a little smile.

Thanks to a new state law (SB-250), you, as a California consumer, will no longer be stuck with all those leftover gift cards. Now, if you have a gift card worth less than $10, the store has to give you the balance – in cash. No longer will you be making donations to a retail empire: between 2005 and 2006, some companies cleared more than forty million (nationally) in unused gift cards. This is particularly great news with the holiday season coming up, because now you know your loved ones will be able to get every last penny back out of your gift to them.

This story comes from consumercal by way of consumerist

Ask Tai about his most popular ice cream flavors and he’ll tell you that people love Oreos. And who doesn’t? Over 490 billion Oreo cookies have been sold since 1912! Looking back on all those years, one will find almost every variation imaginable on the original Oreo design has been produced: Oreo WaferStix, Uh-Oh Oreos, Golden Oreos, Double Delight Oreos, Flavored Oreos (peanut butter, chocolate, mint, caramel and strawberry milkshake creme), Double Stuf Oreos, Big Stuf Oreos (316 calories and 13 grams of fat!), White Fudge Oreos, Milk Chocolate Oreos, 100 Calorie Pack Oreos, Shrek Oreos, Oreo Cakesters, and Oreo Pizza.

Now it’s Scoops turn! Here’s the lineup for this weekend. I can’t wait to try the Oreo Strawberry!

Oreo Mint
Oreo Maple
Oreo Banana
Oreo Chocolate Stout
Oreo Cheese Cake
Oreo Strawberry
Bacon Chocolate
Avocado Banana

Cookie-riffic photography by mihoda.

Los Angeles baseball just got a heavy injection of heat by signing Japan’s Hiroki Kuroda to a three-year deal in the ballpark of $40 million.

Kuroda went 103-89 with a 3.69 ERA in 244 starts with the Hiroshima Carp of the Japanese Central League.

The Dodgers are looking to put Kuroda in the third or forth spot of their rotation, and they’ve already welcomed their newest pitcher with a special “care package” to help enhance his on-field performance.

Take the Blue pill.

Take the Blue pill.

Take the Blue pill.

When you think of L.A,’s great noir writers, Shane Black’s name may not come to mind. But it should.

As Edgar Wright said before introducing him at the New Beverly Cinema last week, Black is “underappreciated, but certainly not underpaid,” referring in part to his million dollar pay day for the screenplay of “The Last Boy Scout,” which began a double feature celebrating his work. Both “Boy Scout” and the film that followed “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” are modern day noir films making extensive use of Los Angeles locations, with deeply flawed private investigators as its protagonists. “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” not only written by Black but also his directorial debut, goes one step further using titles of Raymond Chandler stories as chapter breaks throughout the movie.

(The screenplay that put Black on the map, “Lethal Weapon,” arguably also fits within the noir genre, with a suicidal LAPD detective as one of its heroes. And on a side note, both “Weapon” and “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” are set during Christmas time in Los Angeles.)

In this podcast from the Shane Black double feature, part of “The Wright Stuff Film Festival” at the New Beverly Cinema, Black talks candidly with Edgar Wright about no longer being the screenwriter flavor of month, getting botox in his mid-forties, casting a temporarily subdued Val Kilmer and an eternally humbled Robert Downey, Jr., and how a disgruntled studio exec is responsible for “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’s” commercial failure.

[or download here]

…photo of Shane Black (c) 2005 WireImage.com, via iMDB…

The infamous Treat Street is up and running again, just in time to relieve all your holiday stress – through sugar!

Starting right now – 10am – and ending when the goodies are gone – it’s on Luclie north of Sunset (check their site for the map).

Tonight is Machine Project’s annual fryolater-fueled fundraiser…continue reading.

I covered the East LA Xmas Parade and the Highland Park Xmas Parade here at b.la but I keep most of my posts related to Lincoln Heights over on my own site, so if any of you are interested in seeing my take on the LH Xmas Parade, go ahead and click here. Don’t worry, I run an ad-free site, so your traffic means nothing to me. And since you’re just cruising along reading random stuff from random blogs, you most likely have some minutes to burn, don’t pretend you’re working. Click here already and get ‘er done!

Sound artist Phil Kline’s been creating Unsilent Night every year since 1992, and this year its critical mass of sound collage takes place near The Grove. And you can be a part of it!

A beautiful, mobile piece of ambient public art, Unsilent Night can be compared to a holiday caroling party–except that participants each carry an ordinary boombox playing a separate cassette, CD or MP3 that becomes part of the piece. Kline and his co-performers become a huge, moving sound system. In the echo chamber of the city streets, Unsilent Night reverberates off cars and buildings, resulting in a drifting cloud of shimmering, echoing sound. The 43-minute piece includes sounds of chiming bells, choral voices and various electronic effects. (Kline cites Brian Eno and Charles Ives among his influences.)

Kline’s performed Unsilent Night in New York City every year since 1992. In San Francisco last year, some 500 people took part. And now you can too! Participants are invited to bring a boombox to Unsilent Night at Pan-Pacific Regional Park, 7600 Beverly Blvd., this Sunday the 16th at 7pm. After Kline distributes tapes and CDs among the players, the group will begin the piece, strolling a mile-long route though the Mission, Noe, and Castro districts. It’ll happen rain or shine.

“Unsilent Night immerses the listener in suspended wonderment, as if time itself had paused inside a string of jingle bells.” –Jon Pareles, The New York Times

If CA DOT is correct some 10,000 people a day pass this non-descript little restaurant on Foothill Blvd in Arcadia as they attempt to avoid the jam packed 210 Freeway. Most have no idea that “Zelo” is Italian for “Zeal” as in “Zeal for life”. Even fewer know that it is one of the best Pizza’s in the SGV if not the whole city.

What make’s it special? Corn meal in the crust. Not corn flour but corn meal for that wonderfully sweet, slightly corn bread nutty crunch. Not chewy or yeasty and a nice alternative to the thin crust, thick crust debate.

More after the jump.
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