Antichrist

An 18-year-old man was arrested Sunday on suspicion of attempted murder after a Brea couple told police they woke up to find him standing over their bed with a knife. The couple awoke about 3:30 a.m. and saw a naked man, identified as Arthur David Macias of Brea, who said the antichrist had sent him to kill the family, said police Sgt. Jack Conklin. The husband and his 15-year-old son were able to disarm the intruder and hold him until police arrived, authorities said.

Taking a page from President Obama's political playbook, Michele Bachmann has formally left a church in Minnesota accused of holding anti-Catholic views. According to CNN , the church that Michele Bachmann and her husband Marcus had attended for more than a decade, Salem Lutheran in Stillwater, Minn., granted the couple's request to be released from their membership last month, a week after Bachmann told a national audience that she would run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Oh, that Lars von Trier, what will he do to women next? If his new film "Antichrist" is any indication, it will be off-with-their-heads and all their erogenous zones, but slowly, painfully and with a very dull knife. The psychosexual side of women never fares too well in the filmmaker's vision of the world. There was his 1996 treatise on sex as penance for Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves," then there was sex as punishment in 2003 for Nicole Kidman in "Dogville." And now comes "Antichrist": Female sexuality has evolved into pure evil here with Von Trier looking ever so much like the Marquis de Sade of filmmaking.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Universal, $29.98; Blu-ray, $39.98 Equal parts imaginative and aggravating, Edgar Wright's adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's "Scott Pilgrim" graphic novel series stars Michael Cera as the dim, self-centered Canadian indie-rocker, who has to fight the seven super-powered exes of his would-be girlfriend Ramona (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Why does Scott like the mumbly, charmless Ramona? Why does Ramona like the childish, thoughtless Scott?

With the millennium upon us, God and Satan are scheduled for a battle royal, though we skeptics suspect that the winner will be the super-hero who can pull off the most successful vanishing act. So far it's a lopsided match. Evil is all the rage, and Good, the frail blessing of a decamped deity, is clearly in need of a new press agent. In magazines, on television, the radio and the Internet, pundits accustomed to the meaty certainties of politics and policy have been wrestling with imponderables, explicating Saint Augustine and "Pulp Fiction" to get at predestination and free will.

Residents worried that their address at 666 Jackson St. was the sign of the Antichrist have been granted a new street number. More than 100 people at the 140-unit senior citizen's apartment complex signed a petition requesting the change. The Gary Housing Authority will change the address in January to 650 Jackson St. The number 666 is referred to in the New Testament (Rev. 13:18) as a sign of the Antichrist.

Taking a page from President Obama's political playbook, Michele Bachmann has formally left a church in Minnesota accused of holding anti-Catholic views. According to CNN , the church that Michele Bachmann and her husband Marcus had attended for more than a decade, Salem Lutheran in Stillwater, Minn., granted the couple's request to be released from their membership last month, a week after Bachmann told a national audience that she would run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Two court-appointed psychiatrists testified Wednesday that a delusion-plagued homeless man was legally insane when he stabbed his therapist to death. The testimony came in a Santa Monica courtroom during the first day of arguments to determine the sanity of David Scott Smith, 28, who was convicted Tuesday of first-degree murder in the Feb. 21, 1989, stabbing of social worker Robbyn Panitch. If Smith is ruled insane, he will be committed to a state mental hospital.

Six Army soldiers who deserted their military intelligence post in West Germany and were arrested in Florida told other soldiers they were leaving to find and destroy the "anti-Christ," it was reported today. The European edition of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, citing Army sources, said the six soldiers destroyed or gave away all of their personal belongings before leaving their 701st Military Intelligence Brigade in Augsburg, West Germany, earlier this month.

An American religious leader who calls himself the Antichrist canceled a visit to Guatemala after the Central American country barred him as a security risk. Puerto-Rican born Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda wears the number 666 tattooed on his arm and claims a following of 2 million people, most in Miami, where he lives, and in Colombia.

Oh, that Lars von Trier, what will he do to women next? If his new film "Antichrist" is any indication, it will be off-with-their-heads and all their erogenous zones, but slowly, painfully and with a very dull knife. The psychosexual side of women never fares too well in the filmmaker's vision of the world. There was his 1996 treatise on sex as penance for Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves," then there was sex as punishment in 2003 for Nicole Kidman in "Dogville." And now comes "Antichrist": Female sexuality has evolved into pure evil here with Von Trier looking ever so much like the Marquis de Sade of filmmaking.

During a water-skiing accident in 2007, Charlotte Gainsbourg suffered a blow to the head, resulting in a cerebral hemorrhage similar to the one that caused the tragic death of actress Natasha Richardson this year. Emergency brain surgery saved the now-38-year-old actress' life, but it took her nearly a year to recuperate. For her return to the big screen, Gainsbourg chose "Antichrist," opening in Los Angeles on Friday, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier's staggering and surreal examination of grief, faith and sexuality.

His hallucinatory horror film "Antichrist" elicited derisive giggles and howls from an irate media audience. Later, he was booed at his own news conference. But Lars von Trier is insisting, as he so often does, that he never intended to play the provocateur. "If somebody asked me to make a provoking film, I wouldn't know how to do it," Von Trier said in an interview at the Hotel du Cap, a luxury resort up the coast from the bustle of the Croisette.

Cannes is upping its "Q" score. The official selection for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival was announced Thursday morning in Paris, and while it will be hard to beat last year's excitement of a whip-cracking Indiana Jones on the Croisette, Quentin Tarantino's take-no-prisoners personality may just be big enough to give old Indy a run for his money.

An American religious leader who calls himself the Antichrist canceled a visit to Guatemala after the Central American country barred him as a security risk. Puerto-Rican born Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda wears the number 666 tattooed on his arm and claims a following of 2 million people, most in Miami, where he lives, and in Colombia.

An 18-year-old man was arrested Sunday on suspicion of attempted murder after a Brea couple told police they woke up to find him standing over their bed with a knife. The couple awoke about 3:30 a.m. and saw a naked man, identified as Arthur David Macias of Brea, who said the antichrist had sent him to kill the family, said police Sgt. Jack Conklin. The husband and his 15-year-old son were able to disarm the intruder and hold him until police arrived, authorities said.

A man who broke into Ronald Reagan's Bel-Air estate last July 4 told the federal agents who arrested him that he believed the former President was "the Antichrist" and must be killed, a prosecutor told jurors as the man's trial opened Tuesday. The federal court jury trial for Gregory S. Gordon got under way before U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie with brief opening arguments by the prosecution and defense.

Cannes is upping its "Q" score. The official selection for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival was announced Thursday morning in Paris, and while it will be hard to beat last year's excitement of a whip-cracking Indiana Jones on the Croisette, Quentin Tarantino's take-no-prisoners personality may just be big enough to give old Indy a run for his money.

This is supposed to be the safest place in America. Good water table. Tillable land. Lots of protein running wild in the hills. No nearby military installations. And the closest big city--if anybody would call Boise a big city--is 274 miles away. Want to make it through the dawning of a new millennium, the Y2K bug, the end of the world? Go to the place created by the dynamic duo of survivalism, Bo Gritz and Jack McLamb.

The leaders of several small warring countries and a giant in the computer industry have all been singled out as suspects, but so have the World Bank, NATO and the credit card system. Now that the time of tribulation is near, at least by some calculations, the finger pointing has skipped from El Nino's end-of-the-world weather to the Y2K computer virus that threatens havoc at the turn of the century.