Ladder

THERE has never been anything sedate about tango. After all, it originated in 19th century Buenos Aires with macho men dancing and brawling in brothels in order to work out frustrations or vie for the favors of wanton women. But it gets an added jolt when danced by Julio Bocca.

Kevin Reilly gambled his job on his own "Office" pool. Last year, Reilly, NBC's entertainment president, decided to renew "The Office," a corporate satire featuring "The 40 Year-Old Virgin" star Steve Carell, despite first-season ratings so low they made the rest of the network's tottering schedule look good by comparison. Reilly's move drew disbelief and even derision from skeptics inside and outside the company.

Stepping up efforts to help endangered steelhead trout make a comeback in Southern California, a state wildlife agency on Thursday agreed to pay for a $1.2-million fish ladder in Orange County that will enable the trout to swim upstream and spawn. The ladder will help fish migrating from the ocean to swim through a concrete culvert under Interstate 5 on Trabuco Creek in San Juan Capistrano. Currently, fish swimming upstream can go only as far as a large pool at the bottom of the culvert.

"Bonjour Laziness" is an exhilarating complaint against work. At first it seems strange that a French person, who has a workweek limited to 35 hours and gets five weeks' annual vacation by law, along with numerous religious and secular holidays, would have any complaint against work. But on reflection: who better?

It's tempting to turn "The Twins of Tribeca," the new novel about a junior publicist at an independent movie studio run by a pair of brash, badly behaved brothers, into an impromptu game of "Guess Who?" Even without being told that the book's author, Rachel Pine, once spent three years as a publicist at Miramax Pictures, anyone with a passing knowledge of Hollywood will sniff out the roman a clef.

Re "How Just a Handful of Setbacks Sent the Ryans Tumbling Out of Prosperity" (Dec. 30): "I'm kind of embarrassed we didn't take better care of the money," said Kim Ryan. You should be! "Nowhere is there a hint of unbridled spending," writes The Times. Really? A Saab and a Volvo, a six-bedroom Victorian, a vacation in the Bahamas, a fancy social life, three children and private school tuitions and a second mortgage to pay off still more debts. How did this high-earning, college-educated couple of blue-collar parents somehow never absorb the concepts "save for a rainy day," "don't borrow, pay as you go," or even "an IRA might be a good idea"?

There was a time when Art Willis wouldn't have thought twice about scrambling up a ladder to hang Christmas lights. Come November with the holiday approaching and his wife getting antsy, Willis would routinely perform the manly ritual of stringing the roof with lights. "I did it for years," the Brea resident said. Not anymore.

"Ladder 49," set in present-day Baltimore, marshals the talents of Joaquin Phoenix, John Travolta and a series of exploding fireballs to tell the story of Jack Morrison, a dedicated firefighter and family man who, upon getting trapped in a flaming warehouse, uses the downtime until rescue to celebrate the moments of his life. As a loving tribute to the courage and sacrifice of firefighters, it's first-class. As a movie, it's a TV show.

Director Jay Russell's edict on "Ladder 49," his 9/11-inflected tribute to the workaday lives of firefighters, was to keep the blazes as furiously lifelike as possible. Visceral, pulsating and intensely smoky, the fires in "Ladder," which stars John Travolta and Joaquin Phoenix, were choreographed over many months, with Russell aiming for the gritty realism of Ridley Scott's 2001 war film, "Black Hawk Down."