Portrait

Emma Watson will strip down to raise environmental awareness, even though she won't do it for the "Fifty Shades of Grey" movie. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" star tweeted her support for James Houston's book of celebrities posing nude to raise environmental awareness. The book's proceeds will go to Global Green USA, a nonprofit focused on sustainability. PHOTOS: Hermione Granger through the years "My friend is supporting GlobalGreenUSA with his book Natural Beauty.

MEXICO CITY - President Obama on Friday painted a sunny picture of a modern Mexico emerging from its past troubles, an attempt at rebranding that serves the political aims of both governments but clashes with the realities of a country beset by violence and poverty. On his second day of a swing through Latin America, Obama emphasized optimism about Mexico's economic future and offered a broad endorsement of President Enrique Peña Nieto's reform agenda. Speaking to a crowd largely made up of high school and college students, Obama pushed the next generation of Mexicans to continue to demand change.

  Talk about a long, strange trip. Such is the journey of legendary drummer Ginger Baker, whose outsized life in - and often out of - rock and jazz music's most vaunted circles is deftly chronicled in the entertaining documentary "Beware of Mr. Baker. " Writer-director Jay Bulger combines warts-heavy interview footage of Baker with vivid archival bits, concert clips, jaunty animation and chats with various musical greats to paint a lively portrait of yet another brilliant but wildly self-destructive artist.

In a grassy backyard in the small town of Griffin, Ga., about 25 miles south of Atlanta, actor Aden Young is rehearsing a fight scene for the upcoming Sundance Channel series “Rectify.” It's early August, and the steam heat has crew and onlookers grappling for the scant amount of shade available. But Young is practicing a series of complicated stunt punches and undercuts. Later in the air-conditioned lunch trailer, the only respite from the suffocating heat, the actor makes light of his working conditions.

It's a small painting as paintings go, quite demure by the salacious standards of its artist, but, oh, the fuss it caused. As detailed in Andrew Shea's fascinating documentary "Portrait of Wally,"Egon Schiele's haunting 1912 painting of his mistress and favorite model Wally Neuzil had a complicated, extremely dramatic history as well as a legal and cultural significance that can't be overestimated. The battle to return this heartfelt painting - half of a de facto artist and model double portrait - to the family of the woman who originally owned it jump-started the current international art restitution movement that reunites misappropriated objects with their original owners.

Ah, the male nude. From the classic proportions of Greek sculpture, to the gathering power of Michelangelo's "David," to the amputees and dwarfs by contemporary photographer George Dureau, the male figure has been portrayed variously by artists throughout history. At the Photowest Gallery downtown, the more decorative aspects of form prevail in an exhibit of 42 images by San Diego photographers David Eliot and Jeff Palmer. Called "Interpretations of the Male Nude," the exhibit of black and white photographs might also be titled "Formal and Sensuous" or "Warm and Cool."

Influential English album cover designer Storm Thorgerson, whose album covers over a 45-year career included work for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and dozens more, has died after a battle with cancer, his family has announced. The designer's work individually and with the design group Hipgnosis (which he co-founded) helped define the visuals of rock starting in the late 1960s, when album covers were the primary canvas of music and a catchy 12-by-12-inch image could reach an audience of millions.

Mesmerizing and haunting, "The Jeffrey Dahmer Files" is an inside-out serial killer movie, lacking in gore or cheap psychology and made in part for those who think they never want to see another serial killer movie. A hybrid of documentary and fiction, the film is directed by Milwaukee-based Chris James Thompson in his feature debut. Rather than indulging in exploitation kicks, the film engages more with Dahmer's impact on the community. The fictional footage features Andrew Swant as the notorious Dahmer, who murdered and dismembered 17 people; he seems to be a bland, weird-but-harmless blank slate.

I want to commend you for the article about the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer ("Whose Art Is It Anyway?" by Anne-Marie O'Connor, Dec. 16). I was fascinated to read about the political climate during World War II, when the Nazis stole precious jewelry and paintings from the homes of Jewish families. I have been to Maria Bloch-Bauer Altmann's home many times because I buy my dresses and suits from her. I have always admired the copy of the famous painting of her aunt and heard about Altmann's attempts to get it back.

For all his fame and cinematic brilliance, Alfred Hitchcock remained an enigmatic figure - prolific on the screen, private off it. The new biopic "Hitchcock," starring Anthony Hopkins as the eponymous director and Helen Mirren as wife Alma Reville, attempts to shed some light on the master of suspense by dramatizing the making of his fabled 1960 chiller "Psycho. " According to many film critics, however, "Hitchcock" offers more speculation than illumination and fails to bring its subject to life.

Influential English album cover designer Storm Thorgerson, whose album covers over a 45-year career included work for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and dozens more, has died after a battle with cancer, his family has announced. The designer's work individually and with the design group Hipgnosis (which he co-founded) helped define the visuals of rock starting in the late 1960s, when album covers were the primary canvas of music and a catchy 12-by-12-inch image could reach an audience of millions.

Portrait studios at Sears and some Wal-Mart stores - the scenes of innumerable family photos - have unexpectedly closed as their operator, CPI Corp., goes out of business. The portrait provider said in a statement on its website that all of its U.S. locations have shut down “after many years of providing family portrait photography.” The St. Louis company has been making photo keepsakes for more than 60 years and offered its services at more than 3,000 North American locations, mostly in Sears and Wal-Mart stores.

David Sutherland is the director of three remarkable documentary films - I should say at least three, having seen only the last three - notable for their length and their depth: "The Farmer's Wife," from 1998, a 61/2-hour look at a farm family in crisis; the six-hour "Country Boys," from 2005, about two teenagers in Appalachia; and now "Kind Hearted Woman," set in North Dakota, Minnesota and southern Canada, which follows a Native American woman and...

The short and sweet documentary "Hava Nagila (The Movie)" is a lively portrait of what is arguably the most ubiquitous Jewish song or, as one observer wryly puts it, "the kudzu of Jewish music. " Though perhaps best known to recent generations as that infectious, hora-accompanied staple of bar mitzvahs and Jewish weddings, the tune has a significant 150-year history that's warmly tracked by director-producer Roberta Grossman, with an assist from writer-producer Sophie Sartain.

Once there was a little boy who rode Henry Huntington's trolleys. He was 4 when he first took a Yellow Car all by himself, along Vermont Avenue to nursery school. His mother handed him off to the motorman and said he was going to the end of the line. Now that little boy is 88, his mother and the trolleys long gone. PHOTOS: Los Angeles' Pacific Electric Red Cars So is his grandfather's Rialto orange grove, where he was sent to help weed come summer. So are the horse-drawn wagons that used to deliver his morning milk.

For the last week or so, I've been dipping in and out of a long-forgotten piece of Southern California literature: Timothy G. Turner's short story collection “Turn Off the Sunshine: Tales of Los Angeles on the Wrong Side of the Tracks,” published by the Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho, in 1942. If you've never heard of the author, book or publisher, you're not alone; a Google search reveals little except for various online booksellers offering digital copies for download.

If you were a former president of the United States and the time came to have yourself recorded for posterity in an official oil portrait, would you choose to be portrayed next to a smooth-talking horse thief fleeing a lynch mob? How about pillaging bandits? Or maybe the minions of rapacious timber barons? Probably not. Unless, that is, you are George W. Bush. The official portrait of the 43rd president of the United States by Austin, Texas, painter John Howard Sanden was unveiled at a White House ceremony Thursday.

Fashion stylists once worked behind the scenes, their faceless names relegated to the credit pages of magazines. But lately some have been stepping into the spotlight (hello, Rachel Zoe), gaining recognition for the important role they play when it comes to trends, the red carpet and popular culture. Artist Kimberly Brooks became so enamored of stylists that she has dedicated an entire exhibition to the trade. "The Stylist Project" opens with a public reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday at Taylor De Cordoba in Culver City, and the fashion world will be watching.

Miriam Katin's “Letting It Go” (Drawn & Quarterly: 160 pp., $24.95) is my kind of graphic memoir: loose, impressionistic, a portrait of the artist's inner life. Keyed by the decision of her adult son Ilan to take up permanent residence in Berlin, it is, in part, the story of her coming to terms, at long last, with her legacy as a survivor of the Holocaust. But without minimizing this part of the story, “Letting It Go” is much more than that - a meditation on love, on family, and an inquiry into art. Functioning in some sense as a sketchbook, Katin's story is delightfully open-ended, less a look back at a particular situation than a series of reflections from the trenches of her life as it is lived.

When photographer Steve Schapiro first arrived on the Lower East Side set of "The Godfather" in 1971, there were rumors floating around that Marlon Brando was not well. Moving closer to the action, he noticed an old man in an overcoat and hat talking to an assistant director with this gravelly, sick voice. The rumors must be true, he thought. "Suddenly," Schapiro recalled, "Brando turns to the crowd with this enormous electricity shooting out of his eyes and in his best 'On the Waterfront' accent said, 'I think there's someone with a camera out there.'" That stunning transformation was just one of many Oscar-worthy moments Schapiro has witnessed in his 50-year career working on the sets of such groundbreaking films as "Taxi Driver," "Midnight Cowboy" and "Chinatown.