Characters

In an odd yet understandable marketing strategy, the folks behind E!'s new reality show "Mrs. Eastwood & Company" have spent a lot of pre-premiere publicity time explaining what the show isn't. Which is to say, Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor and director will appear in but a few episodes and then only briefly. He will not, for instance, be slamming doors or engaging in filmed therapy sessions with his wife, Dina, around whom the show revolves (see title.) That doesn't mean the show is not about Clint Eastwood; it is. If the principal characters -- Dina, her 15-year-old daughter Morgan and 19-year old stepdaughter Francesca -- were not related to him, there would be Absolutely No Reason to watch this, which, by reality show standards, promises to be tame to the point of sedation.

There's a flicker of uncertainty in Danny Burstein's friendly brown eyes as he greets a reporter backstage at the Ahmanson Theatre, as if he half-expects her to step around him on her way into the dressing room of one of his "Follies" costars. "When I heard that The Times wanted to talk to me, I said, 'Are you sure?'" he says, after being persuaded that he, and not Ron Raines, Victoria Clark, Jan Maxwell,Elaine Page,or any of the show's other big guns, is meant to be the subject of this interview.

If you're thinking of visiting a Disney park in Anaheim this summer, be warned that the price is about to jump by between $7 and $150 depending on the ticket deal. The annual summer price hike for tickets to Disneyland and the Disney California Adventure Park were announced Friday and take effect Sunday. For example, a ticket for one day at either Disneyland or California Adventure had cost $80 for parkgoers who are 10 or older. The new price, starting Sunday, will be $87, up nearly 9%. The biggest increase will hit people who buy the premium annual pass that includes parking.

SAN FRANCISCO - In 1958, the Gallup Poll asked Americans whether they approved or disapproved of marriage between blacks and whites. The response was overwhelming: 94% were opposed, a sentiment that held for decades. It took nearly 40 years until a majority of those surveyed said marriage between people of different skin colors was acceptable. By contrast, attitudes toward gays and lesbians have changed so much in just the last 10 years that, as Gallup reported last week, "half or more now agree that being gay is morally acceptable, that gay relations ought to be legal and that gay or lesbian couples should have the right to legally marry.

There's so much to praise in the blissful Broadway revival of "Follies," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre on the heels of its numerous Tony nominations, but let's pay homage first to the sheer sophistication of the show itself. After experiencing "Follies" again - an adult entertainment if ever there was one - I flat-out refuse to accept any more jukebox substitutes. One doesn't often talk about architecture when writing about musicals, but the most impressive thing about "Follies," beyond Stephen Sondheim's bejeweled score, is the ingenious way it is constructed.

"Battleship"is not the first major motion picture to be based on a board game - who could forget 1985's benighted "Clue"? - but it is surely the most expensive. With every superhero more celebrated than Amazing-Man or the Chameleon already spoken for (ditto for hot toys like Transformers), Hollywood has fallen back on popular games as likely fodder for action epics. If "Scrabble: The Movie" or "Qwirkle or Death" appears on a future marquee, don't say you weren't warned. As its north-of-$200-million budget indicates, "Battleship" has been expanded considerably from its origins as a pre-World War I pencil and paper game to include a major alien invasion that puts the very fate of the human race at stake.

What if we had the technology to miniaturize people and objects? That's the central premise behind "Micro" by "Jurassic Park's" Michael Crichton and "The Hot Zone's" Richard Preston. Crichton wrote one-third of "Micro" before his death in 2008 - which third seems largely irrelevant, as the entire novel functions as a well-oiled but oddly soulless machine. All of the edges have been sanded off of prose that is supremely functional and most of the workmanlike characters seem resigned to being transformed into actors on a movie screen.

About three years ago, producer Graham Broadbent visited the offices of Peter Rice, who was then running Fox Searchlight Pictures. Stacked near Rice's DVD player were discs of the senior citizen comedies "Cocoon" and "Cocoon: The Return. " "There have to be movies for older audiences," Rice told Broadbent. "There have to be. " Broadbent replied, "I think we may have something for you. " The movie Broadbent pitched that day was "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,"a comedy starring Judi Dench and Bill Nighy about a fledgling retirement home in India.

Once fleet and ephemeral, defined as much by time and season as strawberries or sweet corn once were, television is undergoing a similar transformation in genetics and packaging that is neatly summed up by the Netflix new original series "Lilyhammer. " That Netflix got into the original programming business was to be expected — eventually, you have to actually make something. That the entertainment company would premiere all eight of its episodes at once was in its own way not surprising either.

Belabored best describes the humor of "The Supporting Cast" by George Furth, and the current production at Westminster Community Theatre plays right into all of its manufactured laughs. The forced feel of this play starts with the premise: A writer summons four friends to her Malibu beach house to read her new novel, which features all of them as thinly disguised characters. When they discover that she has revealed confidences and described them in less than flattering terms, they feel betrayed.

Behold a scene of lust and betrayal between a young woman and another woman's fiancé, on top of a kitchen table. Make that on top of a birthday cake. On the betrayed woman's birthday. Oh, and the women are roommates. Then discover that it's not only excusable behavior but also actually a kinky act of kindness. And that's just the opening scene of "Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23," ABC'ssubversive midseason addition to the quirky-girl comedy trend, which has its season finale Wednesday.

In One Person A Novel John Irving Simon & Schuster: 426 pp., $28 Late in John Irving's 13th novel, "In One Person," the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It's the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period, a time when people seemed, literally, to evaporate, to become, in the words of the late David Wojnarowicz, "a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice … glass human[s]

George Lindsey, the Southern-born character actor who played dim hayseed Goober Pyle, the genial gas station auto mechanic on "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Mayberry R.F.D.," died early Sunday morning. He was 83. Lindsey, who later was a regular on the long-running country music comedy show "Hee Haw," died at a healthcare center in Nashville after a brief illness, said his manager and booking agent, Carrie Moore-Reed. "George Lindsey was my friend," Andy Griffith said in a statement.

Insurgent A Novel Veronica Roth Katherine Tegen Books, 544 pp.: $17.99, for readers age 14 and up There's no questioning the impact of "The Hunger Games. " Its success has given birth to an explosion of dystopian young adult literature that invariably unfolds in some environmentally compromised, governmentally bizarre future version of the United States. The more successful books in the genre rearrange society in ways that are unfamiliar and inventively oppressive, creating a perfect petri dish for young heroines to rise up against their circumstances in ways that not only reveal their inner strengths but lead to romance.

George Murdock Character actor often played the 'heavy' George Murdock, 81, a veteran character actor who had a recurring role as Lt. Scanlon on the television sitcom "Barney Miller" and played God in the 1989 film "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," died Monday at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, said his close friend and fellow actor Jennifer Rhodes. He had cancer. Murdock's craggy facial features and booming bass voice helped him land a steady stream of "heavy" parts in theater, film and television productions.

"The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"is an affectionately told comedy about a bunch of English retirees who trade a bleak British future for an elegant retirement hotel in the middle of India, one that promises to make those final years truly golden - and for a fraction of the price at home. Sounds like a dream, or a scheme, and in truth it's a bit of both as neither life nor the "Marigold Hotel" turn out exactly as one might wish. But when the bags are packed with pride, prejudice, problems and prospects by some of Britain'sbest - including Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Maggie Smith - it makes the trip worth taking.

P.G. Sturges has led many lives. Sitting on a bench on a warm weekday morning outside the Page Museum in Mid-Wilshire, he elaborates on a few: Navy submarine crewmember, Christmas tree grower, screenwriter, metrologist. Now, at 57, he's added novelist to the résumé, with the release of "Shortcut Man," a hard-boiled mystery with a comic (or, at least, ironic) edge. Narrated by Dick Henry, known as the shortcut man because of his ability to cut to the heart of a problem, it unfolds, as such works tend to do, in a peculiarly Los Angeles sort of netherworld, suspended between wealth and want and full of corruption on every side.

For some, not even the heartbreaking finesse of Jeff Bridges' broken country singer Bad Blake can eclipse the pièce de résistance of "The Big Lebowski's" the Dude back in '98. Others would point to "Starman" or "The Last Picture Show." For me, it was 1992's "American Heart," another broken man stumbling toward recovery. But nearly everyone agrees that after five nominations, Bridges was long overdue for his Oscar, and "Crazy Heart" was as good a time as any to recognize one of the finest, most versatile and most authentic actors around.

About three years ago, producer Graham Broadbent visited the offices of Peter Rice, who was then running Fox Searchlight Pictures. Stacked near Rice's DVD player were discs of the senior citizen comedies "Cocoon" and "Cocoon: The Return. " "There have to be movies for older audiences," Rice told Broadbent. "There have to be. " Broadbent replied, "I think we may have something for you. " The movie Broadbent pitched that day was "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,"a comedy starring Judi Dench and Bill Nighy about a fledgling retirement home in India.

LONDON — Over 60 years, Rupert Murdoch built a media empire using his properties and their profits not just to break down the doors to the British establishment, but also to control it. So Tuesday's scathing declaration by a British parliamentary committee that Murdoch is "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company" may mark the moment when the once-tamed establishment lost its fear of the country's most powerful...