Love

It's the kind of house Hancock Park is famous for: unemphatic but impressive, with a perfect lawn, fresh coat of paint and ivy crawling up the walls. By Los Angeles standards, this is old-school cool. James Ellroy, all 6 feet 3 of him, is stomping across that manicured lawn, sporting a Hawaiian shirt and golfer's cap and pretending to walk a nonexistent dog. He mimics staring into the window, then simulates masturbating to what he sees inside. "Just like that," he offers.

Short of someone inventing Smell-o-Vision before Oct. 28's global rollout of the feature documentary "Michael Jackson's This Is It," fans will never get to know one of the most visceral aspects of working with the King of Pop. "He had this amazing fragrance," said Mekia Cox, one of 11 backup dancers who worked with Jackson between April and June on "This Is It," his series of 50 sold-out concerts scheduled to start taking place at London's O2...

Ben Foster is standing on a boulder in a field in Armenia. That's not some trendy new Zen practice and he's not shooting a scene (although he's there working on "Here," his next film); he's just trying to manage some decent cell reception. Normally soft-spoken, he gamely shouts into the wind about his turn as an Army casualty notification officer in Oren Moverman's "The Messenger." "If you can remove the filter of war, it's about feelings we all have -- falling in love with someone in a difficult situation; we've all experienced loss; we will make the phone call to loved ones and have to break the news.

Love and Summer A Novel William Trevor Viking: 212 pp., $25.95 That William Trevor has not yet received the Nobel Prize in Literature strikes me as a shame. Surely his absence from the list of laureates has more to do with the politics of national identity than a clear-eyed assessment of merit; no author writing in English today can claim a more extensive or accomplished body of prose. Trevor has published 14 novels and 12 collections of short stories as well as plays, works of nonfiction and the novellas "Nights at the Alexandra" and "Two Lives" (which contains the incandescent "Reading Turgenev" and "My House in Umbria")

To their legions of fans -- Sasha Obama and Snoop Dogg included -- the Ugly Dolls are anything but ugly. With names such as Babo, Big Toe and Puglee, the creatures look more like impish cartoon monsters than adorable Beanie Babies. Millions of these odd, squishy misfits have charmed their way into buyers' hands since David Horvath began doodling them eight years ago on letters to his college sweetheart, Sun-Min Kim. Manhattan Beach residents Horvath and Kim had dreamed about creating toys that could tell stories and make kids happy.

"New York, I Love You" is a cinematic salon where the topic is the serendipity of romantic possibilities to be found in Manhattan's coffee shops, restaurants, shops, bars and backrooms. Eleven directors (and even more writers) have turned up for the party, offering up 11 distinct tales of the city. While they ramble on, we sit perched like pigeons with a bird's-eye view of the proceedings, sampling the crumbs thrown in our direction. A few of the movie morsels prove delicious, particularly those from directors Yvan Attal, Shekhar Kapur, Jiang Wen and Fatih Akin; a few of them seem half-baked; and most are never quite enough to completely satisfy, a case of story interruptus, wouldn't you know.

To better understand Meg Stuart the artist, here's a clue: By the time she was an 18-year-old dance major at New York University, she had thoroughly crisscrossed the country, living in at least 27 homes. "Moving around a lot, I learned to feel comfortable in the in-between spaces," she says. Stuart wound up forging an internationally successful career based on reveling in flux and the unknown. Since founding her Brussels-based company Damaged Goods in 1994, the now-44-year-old American expat choreographer has consistently eschewed comfort and familiarity in favor of attempting to artistically challenge herself with every new project she embarks upon.

Although you might feel a need to duck and run for cover, it's still worth seeing Michael Moore's new documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story." As he is wont to do, Moore takes on the big guys responsible for the country's current financial ills, at one point putting up yellow crime scene tape around Wall Street. This time, though, he's after the little guys too, as he makes his case for the ways in which our desire to join the ranks of the rich is the real problem. It's never easy to argue for more taxes, though he tries, and it does leave you wondering about Moore's own wealth, which "Capitalism" will no doubt increase.