Allegory

Police in Marseille, France, recovered a Monet landscape and three other paintings that gunmen had stolen in August from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice, judicial officials said. The paintings were discovered in a parked utility vehicle, the prosecutor's office said. Together, they are worth about $1.55 million, police have said. The paintings were Monet's 1897 "Cliffs Near Dieppe," the 1890 "Lane of Poplars at Moret" by fellow Impressionist Alfred Sisley and Flemish master Jan Brueghel the Elder's 17th century "Allegory of Earth" and "Allegory of Water."

FX's "The Americans" was inspired by a true-life incident: The arrest in 2010 of 10 people who allegedly spied for Russia for up to 10 years while posing as ordinary civilians. The drama stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Russian spies posing as a suburban Washington couple in 1981. Joe Weisberg, an executive producer on the show, said Wednesday that the timing of the show was key, that a series like "The Americans'" would not have been possible during the height of the Cold War. "Trying to tell a story about Al Qaeda now would be pretty much impossible now," he said.

Regarding "Slaughter of the Soul," Kristine McKenna's profile of artist Sue Coe (Aug. 4): Coe bravely crossed the threshold of hell to depict what devastation is wreaked upon our fellow critters in the slaughterhouses. She rightly quoted Dante, who said: "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality." Dante's Inferno was an allegory; Coe witnessed a true inferno. There are unlimited alternatives to the ghastly habit of meat eating, a cornucopia of health-giving fruits, grains, seeds and vegetables to rival the Garden of Eden.

Children murder one another in a multitude of gruesome and memorable ways in "The Hunger Games," deploying spears, arrows, rocks, venomous wasps, mutant wolves and their bare hands in a televised gladiatorial death match. The juvenile slaughterfest depicted in the film and its source material, Suzanne Collins' trilogy of bestselling young adult novels, may give audiences (particularly parents) pause — is this what contemporary entertainment has come to? But violence committed by and against children has a long, grisly tradition in literature — as an allegory for adult cruelty, a representation of the emotional volatility of adolescence and a tension-raiser for audiences.

FX's "The Americans" was inspired by a true-life incident: The arrest in 2010 of 10 people who allegedly spied for Russia for up to 10 years while posing as ordinary civilians. The drama stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Russian spies posing as a suburban Washington couple in 1981. Joe Weisberg, an executive producer on the show, said Wednesday that the timing of the show was key, that a series like "The Americans'" would not have been possible during the height of the Cold War. "Trying to tell a story about Al Qaeda now would be pretty much impossible now," he said.

Among the epigrams that introduce "Bone by Bone" is a line from John Keats: "A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory, and few eyes can see [its] mystery." The man in question--at least for Peter Matthiessen--is Edgar J. Watson, a sum of more parts than many Southerners combined. The descendant of a proud line extending back beyond the Confederacy to Thomas Jefferson, Watson was born at Clouds Creek, S.C., on Nov. 7, 1855, and died on the shore of Chokoloskee, Fla.

Between Wednesday and Feb. 12 the Monica and Town & Country will present "A Salute to New French Cinema," consisting of 15 features as yet without U.S. distribution. They're not all masterpieces, of course, but there are some gems among the first dozen. "Viva la Vie" (Monica on Wednesday, T&C on Friday), a Claude Lelouch variant on "Close Encounters" with anti-nuke sentiments, lets down after a mysterious and exciting start.

"The Hunger Games," the teen action-adventure film that is opening to big numbers this weekend, is, without question, a parable of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's also a cautionary tale about Big Government. And undeniably a Christian allegory about the importance of finding Jesus. Or maybe a call for campaign-finance reform? Like the Suzanne Collins bestseller on which it is based, the movie about a teenage girl fighting for her life in a televised death match in a dystopian post-apocalyptic country that has replaced America has a whiff of political content.

The sound of voices interlaced with organ will fill the sanctuaries of two area churches this weekend as the Ventura County Master Chorale continues its 10th anniversary season with "Allegory and Acclamation." Artistic director Burns Taft will lead the 75-member chorale through a program of selected compositions for chorus and pipe organ. Saturday's 8 p.m. performance will be held at First Presbyterian Church in Oxnard, Sunday's 4 p.m.

The 25 best L.A. films of the last 25 years "Los ANGELES isn't a real city," people have said, "it just plays one on camera." It was a clever line once upon a time, but all that has changed. Los Angeles is the most complicated community in America -- make no mistake, it is a community -- and over the last 25 years, it has been both celebrated and savaged on the big screen with amazing efficacy. Damaged souls and flawless weather, canyon love and beach city menace, homeboys and credit card girls, freeways and fedoras, power lines and palm trees . . . again and again, moviegoers all over the world have sat in the dark and stared up at our Los Angeles, even if it was one populated by corrupt cops or a jabbering cartoon rabbit.

It's the allegory, stupid. It's a brand-new ballgame, sports fans, and I'm not sure how to watch it. In this opening season of the post-steroid era, I feel like a betrayed spouse determined to make the relationship work, struggling to balance experience against hope. Are my guys really clean now? If not, can I live with it? And I can't shake the feeling that baseball isn't baseball anymore; it's just another fading allegory for everything else. In 1954, deep into the Cold War, a leading historian of our national character, the French-born Jacques Barzun, famously declared, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."

Since the days of Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, American authors have had a penchant for sweeping allegory, for tales that examine universal human qualities through the presentation of stylized and generalized characters. This tradition is carried on today by authors such as Cormac McCarthy in his novels "The Road" and "Blood Meridian," Toni Morrison in "A Mercy" and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist M. Glenn Taylor in his novel "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart."

Genesis, Sigmund Freud, "The Odyssey," Flannery O'Connor, "The Sopranos," Carl Jung, "Dr. Strangelove" -- Wednesday night's season finale of "Lost" was so chockablock with archetype, mythology and cultural references it was like watching Joseph Campbell on crack. It opened with a man (in a cave, so throw in Plato) hunched over a spinning wheel (Penelope at her loom? Or just a reference to the Blood, Sweat and Tears song?) then cut to two men on a beach.

Written in 1970 (the same year its author was elected to the French Academy), Eugene Ionesco's "Killing Game" is hardly hearty holiday fare. But if you like your humor dark-hued, the production at Unknown Theater might be your ticket. The play opens on a sunlit village square as its denizens go about their business. The halcyon scene is rudely interrupted when twin infants are found dead in their perambulator. Dire as they may seem, those deaths are just a precursor. Panic erupts as a mysterious plague sweeps the city.

Police in Marseille, France, recovered a Monet landscape and three other paintings that gunmen had stolen in August from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice, judicial officials said. The paintings were discovered in a parked utility vehicle, the prosecutor's office said. Together, they are worth about $1.55 million, police have said. The paintings were Monet's 1897 "Cliffs Near Dieppe," the 1890 "Lane of Poplars at Moret" by fellow Impressionist Alfred Sisley and Flemish master Jan Brueghel the Elder's 17th century "Allegory of Earth" and "Allegory of Water."

We all know pretty much what we're in for when a private equity-funded gangster movie bills itself as a collection of interlocking "fables" inspired by a Chinese proverb, right? I mean, we could just leave it at that?

An ominous undercover policeman. An obsessive human rights lawyer. A juggling junkie. An irreconcilably estranged wife. A rabbi of conflicted interests. A reluctant police informant. A prototypical urban park where their seemingly coincidental destinies collide, leading to an overpopulated afterlife. These archetypal elements form the foundation of George F. Walker's 2000 "Heaven," receiving its local premiere at Sacred Fools.

Genesis, Sigmund Freud, "The Odyssey," Flannery O'Connor, "The Sopranos," Carl Jung, "Dr. Strangelove" -- Wednesday night's season finale of "Lost" was so chockablock with archetype, mythology and cultural references it was like watching Joseph Campbell on crack. It opened with a man (in a cave, so throw in Plato) hunched over a spinning wheel (Penelope at her loom? Or just a reference to the Blood, Sweat and Tears song?) then cut to two men on a beach.

In one of his most talked-about lectures, Buddhist monk Ashin Nyanissara tells the legend of a king who ruled more than 2,500 years ago. The king believed that spitting on a hermit brought him good fortune. At first, it worked like a charm, but before long his realm was annihilated under a rain of fire, spears and knives.

Reporters had a message this week for the producers of ABC's new comedy "Cavemen": Ugh. Spun off from a celebrated series of commercials for the Geico insurance company, "Cavemen" may have formidable built-in recognition factor for a new series. But at the Television Critics Assn.