Love Story

There's a story my father often told me. I imagine most boys hear stories from their fathers, but not this sort. It was about a bank heist in 1967, the burglary of half a million dollars in West Hollywood. He called it the Big Job, an elaborate crime he'd started plotting when he was first incarcerated. Prison, he liked to say, turned him into a professional. He went in a petty crook and left wanting to do the Big Job, not unlike the way I went to college to study writing and left dreaming of the great American novel.

"Snow White and the Huntsman,"starring a fierce Kristen Stewart and an even fiercer Charlize Theron as warring sides of good and evil, is a baroque enchantment filled with dazzling darkness, desultory dwarfs, demonic trolls and beastly fairies. It is an absolute wonder to watch and creates a warrior princess for the ages. But what this revisionist fairy tale does not give us is a passionate love - its kisses are as chaste as the snow is white. Perhaps they are saving the passion for the sequel, for it seems there is surely one to come after director Rupert Sanders' brilliantly inventive debut.

Justin Bieber and Masters golf champ Bubba Watson, BFFs? Who knew? "Justin Bieber is the only person I talked to on the phone that night after I won," Watson told E! News over the weekend. "He called me and I talked to him on the phone and he and Selena [Gomez] were congratulating me, and it was a big honor that they would both call me and talk to me," he said . Watson, who won the legendary green jacket a week ago Sunday, was part of the red carpet frenzy at the Tim Tebow Foundation Charity Celebrity Golf Classic in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., where on Friday he gave his No. 15-emblazoned Masters players badge to the man the event was named after.

The show tune unfurls grandly from the Roland Super Spinet organ out across antique Dodger Stadium, momentarily and splendidly turning a game of baseball into a ride on a calliope. You hear the familiar melody and think of one person, the composer of Chavez Ravine, the keeper of the Dodgers soundtrack, the franchise's most enduring three names since Pee Wee Reese, the organist known as Nancy Bea Hefley. Listen closer. Listen close enough to hear past her sophisticated chords to the Southern twang of a man standing by her side and softly asking, "Everything OK, dear?"

Although I never thought I would say these words in this lifetime, what I really missed was Celine Dion. While watching "Titanic," ABC's ill-paced, sanctimonious and overly stuffed four-part miniseries airing this weekend, it is impossible not to compare it with the James Cameron film of the same name. Completely unfair to screenwriter Julian Fellowes (creator of "Downton Abbey") or anyone else associated with ABC's "Titanic," but as the more than 1,500 folks who lost their lives on that fateful night 100 years ago could tell you, life is often completely unfair.

Madeleine Stowe drops the L-word frequently — L as in "love. " She is a woman who loves love. Not that you'd know it from her stark, unsentimental appearance: She is swathed in black, from her raven mane to her ankle boots. And her on-screen persona as the icy, detached Victoria Grayson on ABC's "Revenge" only adds to her image as a woman without an obvious soft spot. But the pensive tone in Stowe's voice turns ever so lively when romance enters the conversation — which is often.

Tim Tebow and Taylor Swift shared a meal together Monday, so clearly they're in a super serious relationship. On the real, whether the pair have a star-studded romance (?), friendship (?) or business partnership (?) has become an enigma, a viral comet of Internet lore. Since they've remained mum about their rapport, we can only speculate which of the country singer's songs best describes her relationship with the Denver Broncos quarterback. Here are a few options... "Love Story" (If you've been to a wedding recently, you've heard it.)

If you think designing costumes for a 21st century black-and-white silent film is tough, try designing costumes for the silent black-and-white film within the film you're creating. This was the rather odd challenge veteran costume designer Mark Bridges ("Boogie Nights," "The Fighter") found on his cutting table with the Weinstein Co.'s "The Artist," French director Michel Hazanavicius' love story set in a bygone era. And while there were few words or colors in the film to tinker with, Bridges' perfectionism remained steady.

The Odds A Love Story Stewart O'Nan Viking: 179 pp., $25.95 This is how we meet them: "The final weekend of their marriage, hounded by insolvency, indecision, and, stupidly, half-secretly, in the never-distant past ruled by memory, infidelity, Art and Marion Fowler fled the country. " This middle-age Midwestern couple doesn't go far: just to Niagara Falls, where they spent their honeymoon. There is a cache of cash involved and a desperate gambling plan that, if Art has his way, will make everything right.

Ben, Chon and O are Southern California dreamers — and in Oliver Stone's upcoming film "Savages," they run right into a Mexican drug cartel nightmare. The two young men and woman at the center of Don Winslow's novel that inspired Stone's film are green-thinking Laguna Beach entrepreneurs, but rather than fabricating solar panels or organizing compost classes, the comely trio farms and sells knock-your-socks off marijuana, a hybrid weed so powerful it quickly becomes the envy of less kindhearted dealers south of the border.