Movies

I was a little Spokane Indian boy who read every book and saw every movie about Indians, no matter how terrible. I'd read those historical romance novels about the steroidal Indian warrior ravaging the virginal white schoolteacher. I can still see the cover art.

They were planning to spend nearly $500,000 on a home theater. What was an additional $35,000 to show first-run movies? When Ken and Carol Schultz began remodeling their 10,000-square-foot San Diego-area residence, they spared no expense on a screening room. The couple tricked it out with custom-built armchairs with heat and massage functions, and a Runco 3-D-capable projector with a price of about $100,000. But the most unusual feature of the theater is a $35,000 device that offers 24-hour rentals of first-run movies.

There are two kinds of extremes at play in the brutal, medieval action drama "Ironclad": sword-fighting gore of the splitting-a-human-in-half kind, and Paul Giamatti's snarly outrage as bloodthirsty 13th century English ruler King John. Huffing and puffing between scenes of grueling warfare is a muscular if cheesy tale of resistance heroism, made for teenage boys interested in "300"-style violence and chest-heaving martyrdom on a more rough-and-tumble scale. Director Jonathan English, working from a blunt script by himself, Erick Kastel and Stephen McDool, focuses on a band of rebel knights led by James Purefoy's stoic warrior and assembled by Baron Albany (Brian Cox)

It was an inspiring story of selfless heroism: A stubbornly patriotic football player walked away from fame and a multimillion-dollar contract when he joined the Army immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. It was also a story whose tragic ending brought a nation to tears and inflamed wartime passions: Spc. Pat Tillman had charged up a hill in Afghanistan under "devastating enemy fire," according to his Silver Star citation, and was killed defending his fellow Rangers. The problem with the story was that much of it just wasn't true.

Is Banksy in town, doing some unique publicity stunts for his Oscar-nominated documentary, "Exit Through the Gift Shop"? Street-art buffs and bloggers have been abuzz this week with sightings of new paintings that appear to be the work of the mysterious British graffiti master. There's the one in Westwood that's been dubbed "Crayola Shooter," on the back of an Urban Outfitters in the UCLA neighborhood. Then there's one known as "The Charlie Brown Firestarter," spotted on Sunset Boulevard, that features the Charles M. Schulz-created character with a cigarette in his mouth and a can of gasoline in his hand.

Ads call Madonna's new movie "the erotic thriller of the year." But anyone under age 17 can see the pop star bare her breasts and make steamy love to Willem Dafoe in "Body of Evidence"--if they are accompanied by an adult. It's rated R. On the other hand, the movie industry's toughest warning to parents was given to the upcoming "Wide Sargasso Sea," an art-house film that has only modest lovemaking scenes compared to "Body of Evidence" or last year's R-rated "Basic Instinct."

Maintaining privacy in the digital age is no easy feat ? particularly if you are the subject of a movie. And yet Angela Wesselman-Pierce, the woman who holds the key to the mystery at the center of "Catfish," has remained a quiet enigma for more than eight months since the movie became a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival. She's avoided requests for interviews about the film, which is being marketed as a documentary thriller and has taken in more than $1.6 million at the box office since its Sept.

It's appropriate that the first major Pro-Am PGA golf tournament of the year, the Bob Hope Classic, which begins Jan. 17, was created by a comedian. Because let's face it, the only really good movies about the sport are funny ones. The serious ones tend to be double bogeys with audiences, critics and golfers alike. "When you are sending golf up, the stuff is great," says golf journalist Jeff Silverman, who has written for such publications as Sports Illustrated and is working on a book about Pennsylvania's famed Merion Golf Club.

Seven years before she dazzled international audiences as the amoral Lulu in G.W. Pabst's 1929 German masterpiece "Pandora's Box," Louise Brooks was a willful, intelligent and beautiful 15-year-old girl living in Wichita, Kan. Summer 1922 changed Brooks' life. She left home accompanied by a provincial 36-year-old housewife named Alice Mills and traveled by train to New York City so she could attend the Denishawn school of modern dance run by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Mills returned that summer to Wichita and vanished from the life of Brooks, who would shortly become one of the icons of the silent screen.