Hawke

Whatever happened to the 90-minute movie? Ethan Hawke is mulling that over, slouched in a dining chair inside a small empty ballroom at the SLS Hotel in Los Angeles, slightly rumpling his light brown three-piece suit. He's not playing the slacker anymore; at 39, he's a film veteran and he talks with a certain cinematic weariness. "I don't know what has happened to movies, but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long," he said. "It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic -- a movie about Gandhi; something with very important subject matters.

  ATLANTA -- Blake Griffin finished with 36 points and teammate Chris Paul added 34 points and eight assists, but it wasn't enough to prevent the Clippers from falling to the Atlanta Hawks, 109-102, at Philips Arena on Tuesday. The Clippers are now tied at 40-25 with the Memphis Grizzlies in the Western Conference standings, the team they will face in the Western Conference first-round playoff series. The Clippers have to defeat the New York Knicks on Wednesday night in their regular-season finale at Madison Square Garden to get the home-court advantage over Memphis.

Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke burst into tears during a memorial service Friday as he described the brutal shooting of civilians in China by the military. "I call on the Chinese government to withdraw its troops from deployment against unarmed civilians and to respect the will of its people," Hawke told 1,000 people at the service in the Great Hall of the federal Parliament. "To crush the spirit and body of youth is to crush the very future of China itself." Hawke read eyewitness reports of the killings, saying tanks "ran backwards and forwards over the bodies of the slain until they were reduced to pulp."

ATLANTA — Clippers Coach Vinny Del Negro wasn't happy with his team, going off on players after a lackluster effort against the Atlanta Hawks on Tuesday night. "They outworked us. They outrebounded us," Del Negro said. "They got loose balls. We didn't really give ourselves a chance.… I didn't think our starters were very good. I didn't think our bench was very good and that's what you get. " Blake Griffin (36 points) and Chris Paul (34 points) were the only starters to score in double figures.

Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke endorsed U.S. policy toward China during talks Tuesday with President Bush and said it would be counterproductive to impose economic sanctions on the world's most populous nation. "Our views are identical" on China, Hawke told reporters while posing for pictures with Bush in the Oval Office. "We completely, unequivocally abhor and condemn the barbarism, the murder, the execution, the suppression of legitimate human aspirations," Hawke said.

President Bush will meet with Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke and hold a state dinner for him June 27, the White House announced Wednesday. Hawke is coming to the United States June 24-28 for an official visit at Bush's invitation, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said.

A 6-year-old girl disappeared Saturday from her home in Tucson, launching a widespread search involving the U.S. Marshals and the FBI. First-grader Isabel Mercedes Celis was not in her room when her parents went to wake her up around 8 a.m. Saturday at their east Tucson home, said Tucson police spokeswoman Sgt. Maria Hawke in a telephone interview with The Times. Her family last saw her in her bedroom at 11 p.m. Friday. The neighborhood of single-family homes sits west of a shopping mall and east of a Catholic church.

At a time when so many people are trying to clean out their systems with detoxifying pads, pills and gadgets, let's take a moment to honor the liver, the best detox device a body can have. Without prompting, the liver breaks down and dispenses with all sorts of toxic compounds, including alcohol and acetaminophen. Anyone who is truly interested in removing poisons from the body should probably spend less time applying detoxifying pads and potions and more time protecting their liver. One way to give your liver a lift is to avoid bombarding it with too many poisons in the first place.

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.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking set off chatter in the scientific community in late April when he posited the existence of intelligent aliens on his new TV series, "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking" —adding that it would be best for human beings to avoid contact with them. Hawking speculated that such aliens would likely be nomads, living in ships after sucking their own planet dry of resources, and hopping from one interstellar refueling station to the next. Earth, he said, shouldn't do anything to encourage their visit.

A 6-year-old girl disappeared Saturday from her home in Tucson, launching a widespread search involving the U.S. Marshals and the FBI. First-grader Isabel Mercedes Celis was not in her room when her parents went to wake her up around 8 a.m. Saturday at their east Tucson home, said Tucson police spokeswoman Sgt. Maria Hawke in a telephone interview with The Times. Her family last saw her in her bedroom at 11 p.m. Friday. The neighborhood of single-family homes sits west of a shopping mall and east of a Catholic church.

For as much as the Clippers have played inconsistent basketball over the last 1 1/2 months, for as much as they have struggled on the road and at home, they still had not lost three consecutive games all season. That still is something the Clippers can hang on to after a 96-82 victory over the Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday night at Staples Center. The Clippers had lost four of their last five and the first two of a six-game homestand, leading to concern about how they would break free of the doldrums.

So this is what the Clippers look like when they share the ball? They opened Wednesday's game against Atlanta with guns blazing from all corners of the court, a balanced scoring blitz which helped them lead by as many as nine points in the first quarter and enter halftime with a 50-42 advantage. At the end of the first, Chris Paul and Mo Williams had five points apiece and Caron Butler, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan each added four points. As a team, they shot 70.6% from the field.  The only problem for the Clippers was that the Hawks weren't missing either.

When: 7:30. Where: Staples Center. On the air: TV: FS West; Radio: 710, 1330. Records: Lakers 16-12, Hawks 18-10. Record vs. Hawks (2010-11): 2-0. Update: This is the start of a five-game trip for the Hawks, whose 9-5 road record is one of the best in the NBA. Though guard Joe Johnson averages a team-leading 18.2 points, many consider Atlanta's best player to be well-rounded forward Josh Smith, who is averaging 15.6 points, 9.2 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 2.1 blocks.

Wars have come and gone. But for more than half a century, the CIA and U.S. military have relied on a skinny sinister-looking black jet to go deep behind enemy lines for vital intelligence-gathering missions. The high-flying U-2 spy plane was first designed during the Eisenhower administration to breach the iron curtain and, as engineers said, snap "picture postcards for Ike" of hidden military strongholds in the Soviet Union. And although the plane is perhaps best known for being shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 and the subsequent capture of pilot Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 continues to play a critical role in national security today, hunting Al Qaeda forces in the Middle East.

Dominant online video site YouTube has launched a lineup of sports channels featuring some of the biggest names in action sports — including pro skateboarder Tony Hawk, snowboarder Shaun White and surfer Kelly Slater. The four channels seek to tap into the rising popularity of action sports — especially among teens and twentysomethings — by offering clips, commentary and live events on YouTube. The original content represents another step in the site's efforts to augment its user-created videos with more professionally programmed offerings.

As the light turned red at the intersection of Crenshaw and Slauson, Brian Muhammad raised two pink pie boxes in his right hand and strolled up the sidewalk: "Bean pie! Bean pie!" A yellow school bus with only a few children onboard pulled up to the curb as the driver swung open the door: "Just a regular. " Muhammad, dressed in a slightly rumpled black suit and a navy bow tie, bounded up the bus steps and handed him a pie. Video: Peddling bean pies on a busy corner "My credit good?"

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow Bantam: 200 pp., $28 Robert Oppenheimer was fond of proposing that physics and poetry were becoming indistinguishable. In "The Grand Design," Cambridge theorist Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow seem to suggest that physics and metaphysics are also growing closer. They point out that the unified field theory that physicists, including Einstein, spent the better part of the 20th century trying to construct, probably can't exist.

Atlanta Hawks All-Star center Al Horford is expected to be out for at least three months because of a shoulder injury, a major blow to a playoff contender in the Eastern Conference. The team announced Thursday that Horford tore his left pectoral muscle in the first quarter Wednesday night against Indiana. The injury probably will require surgery. Horford, a two-time All-Star, could be out as long as four months, which would take his rehab deep into the playoffs — should the Hawks make it that far. He will get a second opinion before making a decision about surgery, but even the most optimistic projection would keep him out until mid-April.

Intel Corp. is trying to help physicist Stephen Hawking keep speaking. Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner told the Associated Press that the tech giant has a research team in Britain that is trying to come up with a new speech system for Hawking, who is severely diasabled by Lou Gehrig's disease. The goal is to keep Hawking's speech from continuing to slow. It's a tedious process for Hawking to speak. A tiny infrared sensor translates movement in his right cheek into words spoken by a voice synthesizer.