Father And Son

Here's your unlikeliest feel-good story for Christmas week: Las Vegas' newest rising celebrities are four local guys who have been quietly running a family-owned pawnshop downtown for years. This summer, the History Channel launched the reality show "Pawn Stars" to focus on their Gold & Silver Pawn Shop and its boutique-museum hodgepodge of items people have pawned. There are Rolexes and motorcycles (of course), but also two-century-old rifles, a centuries-old samurai sword, a 1920s surgical chair, a Super Bowl ring, Olympic medals and an 1830 gold-gilded Ormolu clock known as "The Death Clock," because gilders handled deadly mercury to craft it. "It's 'Antiques Roadshow' with cash," says Corey Harrison, the youngest of the family.

A manhunt was underway for a father and son suspected of shooting two hunters to death near Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area on the Utah-Wyoming border, then stealing their pickup. Police disabled the truck with road spikes Sunday near Price, Utah, but the men escaped on foot. The victims, Brad Goss and Kelly Carter, were both from Uintah County, Utah. The suspects are Lewis Heffelfinger, 53, and Michael Heffelfinger, 23, both of New Mexico. Police say they are armed and dangerous.

British filmmaker Ben Wheatley has come up with a new way to direct: by using a stopwatch. Faced with a shoestring budget and an eight-day shooting schedule, it was the only way he could make his first feature, the darkly comic "Down Terrace," which opens Friday. "I would say, 'We are going to shoot this now,' and I would start the stopwatch," said Wheatley, whose previous work consists mainly of British TV comedies. "It feels impossible, but when you do it, it's perfectly feasible.

"Starman" is surely one of the most imaginative characters in all of television. I especially like the affectionate byplay and mutually protective relationship between father and son. And what a role model for a teen-ager--a peaceful, gentle, friendly man who is a very strong personality, most definitely not a wimp. The subtle humor is really refreshing. Jean Cohn, La Mesa

Barry Holmberg's son died in his arms late last week in the chilly, storm-stirred ocean off British Columbia as the lights of their would-be rescue ship flickered just minutes away. For several hours, the Studio City man and his 23-year-old son, Rob, had clung to a piece of floating plywood, a pair of life jackets and each other after their tuna seiner capsized in heavy seas around 1 a.m. Friday, about 200 miles offshore in the Queen Charlotte Sound.

A 28-year-old Covina man who admitted shooting his father to death in the Veterans Administration hospital in Sepulveda, saying God had told him to prevent his father from carrying out a death threat against his mother, was sentenced Monday to five years' probation. Van Nuys Superior Court Judge James A. Albracht, who had found Christopher Michael Mazurek guilty of voluntary manslaughter in a non-jury trial, granted him probation, saying he could see no purpose in sending Mazurek to prison.

Father and Son The popular actor/director Ben Stiller and his father have appeared together in such films as "Zoolander" and in the ill-fated 2007 remake of "The Heartbreak Kid"-as you guess it-father and son.' Sitcom Dad Jerry Stiller has also gone solo in films and television including playing Frank, the loud-mouth father of George Costanza on "Seinfeld" from 1993-98 and as Carrie's eccentric dad Arthur Spooner on the 1998-2007...

The father and son of this warm 1994 Australian film strike us as typical Aussie blokes who have an especially close relationship. Jack Thompson's widowed Harry, however, is extroverted while Russell Crowe's (right, with John Polson) Jeff seems understated in comparison to his life-force father who is eager to see his gay son in a loving relationship (Cinemax early Sunday at 4:45 a.m.).