Real Life

Art sometimes imitates life. And then again, life often imitates art. Just ask Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave and her husband, Franco Nero. In the new romantic comedy, "Letters to Juliet," the 73-year-old Redgrave plays a widow named Claire who had left the love of her life, Lorenzo (Nero), 50 years earlier when she was a student in Verona, Italy. Before she had left, Claire did what numerous women in love have done over the centuries, write a letter about her love affair to the Shakespearean heroine, Juliet, and tack it on the wall of the courtyard where the fictional character had lived.

Tony Stark, alias Iron Man, is suave, brilliant, mega-rich and dripping with beautiful women. Sounds an awful lot like Elon Musk, the South African entrepreneurial wunderkind who spent his Tuesday shooting a rocket into space and making a major advance in electric vehicles. The 40-year-old served as an inspiration for the fictional genius billionaire in the "Iron Man"movies, according to director Jon Favreau. Musk even makes a cameo in one of the films.

I just wanted to say how I enjoy all the "true life" informative programs now on TV--most of all "Rescue 911"--and the rest, i.e., "Cops," "Unsolved Mysteries," "PrimeTime Live," "48 Hours," "America's Most Wanted," "20/20." I loathe the myriad of moronic sitcoms and unfortunately realize I'm in the minority since the networks base popularity on the inaccurate A.C. Nielsen ratings, which is wrong! Anyway, I'm afraid "911" will be canceled since it seems to me the repeats began very early.

While promoting the movie"Battleship"in Tokyo last month,U.S. ArmyCol. Greg Gadson found himself face-to-face with a stunned reporter. "He thought I was computer-generated," said Gadson, a burly former West Point football player who walks with the aid of futuristic-looking titanium prosthetics. "He thought my legs were movie magic. " There was no CGI needed for Gadson's performance as a wounded combat veteran in "Battleship" - both of his legs were amputated above the knee after he was injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2007.

** 1/2 Simple Minds, "Real Life," A&M. The group's first halfway-compelling album in six years shows there's some life left in the old Scots yet. The production, for starters, strikes a happy compromise between the dense impressionism of early efforts and the clear literalism of Jimmy Iovine's commercial breakthrough work: The influence of Pink Floyd and '70s soul ballads is felt throughout.

Crenshaw Boulevard's been cast as bullet-riddled territory before, but director Dan Wozniak and producer Christopher Molony wanted to tell another story. "There are regular people who live on Crenshaw, aspiring, achieving and accomplishing every day," Wozniak says. So they made the doc "Crenshaw Boulevard," 12 vignettes about those who live and work on the 24-mile stretch, including roadside vendors Victor and Lucia (pictured). 8 p.m. Fri., Warner Grand Theatre, San Pedro, $15, warnergrand.org

Leave it to a movie star to come up with a stunning plot twist. Arnold Schwarzenegger has to be credited with pulling off one of the biggest surprises in state political history by throwing his headband into the ring. It appears he deliberately misled some of his own political advisors, who had been saying that the actor was unlikely to run.

Peggy Fleming has breast cancer. Scott Hamilton has testicular cancer. Carlo Fassi died of a heart attack. Sergei Grinkov died of a heart attack (at 28). John Curry and Ondrej Nepela died from AIDS. Dorothy Hamill filed for bankruptcy. Oksana Baiul drove drunk. Tonya Harding did 500 hours of community service and was banned from professional figure skating for life. You don't need ice to feel a chill. Good thing Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski came along when they did, to turn up the warmth.

In the old days, he boozed with the best of them--William Holden, Robert Preston, Alan Ladd. And Macdonald Carey kept right on drinking through 17 years of portraying Dr. Tom Horton on television's "The Days of Our Lives," he confessed last week at the Balboa Bay Club. Then, nine years ago, it happened. "I discovered I had to drink to go on stage," he said. "And then I would drink while I was on. I knew that was it." So he joined a "little club" (Alcoholics Anonymous).

The Pope speaks, and the struggling continues. For the people in the largely Mexican-immigrant parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Santa Ana, no Pope's words are taken lightly, for this is a parish that reveres not only the Pope but the Catholic Church, says Father Anthony Palos. His is a working-class and low-income parish, where family heritages include large numbers of children.

Earnest and filled with self-doubt, "The Perfect Family,"starring Kathleen Turner, is a darkly comic family drama about the imperfect union between real life and the rigors of Catholic doctrine. Like Eileen Cleary (Turner), the hopelessly devoted Catholic mother at its center, the movie has lost its way. It makes an unsteady debut for director Anne Renton, and the screenplay by Claire V. Riley and Paula Goldberg is literal to a fault. The film's single saving grace is Turner, who channels that legendary Catholic guilt like there is no tomorrow.

When actress Kerry Washington was preparing for her role as Olivia Pope, the high-octane Beltway "fixer" on the new ABC series "Scandal," one of the first things she did was launch a Google search for Judy Smith, the real-life crisis consultant on whose professional life the series is based. Washington was somewhat perplexed by how little came up on the D.C. insider who had navigated through some of the thorniest public relations challenges of the past 20 years on behalf of her clients, including Monica Lewinsky, former Idaho Sen. Larry Craig and NFL quarterback Michael Vick, to name a few. There were no interviews and rarely even media mention of the public relations powerhouse.

Joining my 9-year-old daughter and a sizable slice of the American population, I queued up last week to watch"The Hunger Games. "My daughter had just read the book and was giddy with excitement. Reviewers had reassured me that scenes in the film showing children fighting each other to the death on orders of a totalitarian state had been carefully edited. Still, the movie turned my stomach - and not because of what I saw on the screen. What flashed through my mind were images of North Korea.

Johnny Ramirez got better grades during his second stint in high school. Unfortunately for him, this senior year didn't count. The undercover police officer posed as a high school student for eight months to aid a Central Valley drug bust. While he worked with investigators on the Police Department's payroll, he also did everything a student at Exeter Union High School would be required to do. "He would come into the narcotics investigations office and do homework," City Manager Randy Groom said.

She feared the worst at first. What if she tripped? What if she fell? What if she ran head-on into a wall? Blind for 16 years, Maria Perez still struggled getting around in her Santa Clarita home. And then someone came along and dared her to take the stage as an actress, under the lights, under the gaze of an audience. VIDEO: Blind theater troupe "There's no way," she thought. "No way I can do it. " That was two years ago, when she first joined Theater by the Blind, a troupe of actors who put on a show despite their disability.

"A Separation" Hopscotch Films, Golem Distribution U.S. release: September The premise Nader (Peyman Moaadi) refuses to leave Iran with his wife because his aged father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) suffers from Alzheimer's disease, causing a schism between the couple. She leaves him, and Nader hires a young woman (Sareh Bayat) to take care of his father, who is disoriented, incontinent and often wanders the street. When he returns to find his father on the floor, naked and barely responsive, he blames the girl and pushes her out of the house.

With the November ratings sweeps fast approaching, NBC moved Friday to shore up its faltering prime-time lineup by substituting the legal drama "Matlock" for its low-rated news series, "Real Life With Jane Pauley" and "Expose." "Matlock," a 5-year-old series that stars Andy Griffith, will be broadcast Fridays at 8 p.m. beginning next week, but "Real Life" and "Expose" will have one more airing together on Nov. 1.

Mel Gibson, the star of a string of blockbuster movies and one of Hollywood's top box-office draws, is going home to Australia "to lead my own life instead of someone else's." The star of the "Lethal Weapon" and "Road Warrior" series says he is so tired after years of nonstop work that he is incapable of making another movie. "I'm going to take off 10 months or a year, if for no other reason than people must be getting sick of the sight of me," he told Reuters in a recent interview.

Spending countless hours playing the video game Guitar Hero has fostered an illusion among many middle-age guys. It's not too late to be a guitar god. Then they discover something: There's a big difference between the colored plastic buttons on the guitar-shaped game control and the six strings of an actual guitar. But is the difference insurmountable? Gary Marcus set out to answer that question in "Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. " "I had a sabbatical coming up," says Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University.

Herman Yau's sumptuous historical epic "Qiu Jin: The Woman Knight of Mirror Lake" veers between preachy and poignant, but the conviction and skill of Huang Yi in the title role helps hold the film together. Qiu Jin became a national heroine — she was a leader in the toppling of the corrupt Qing dynasty in 1911, paving the way for the formation of the Republic of China — but her turbulent life recalls the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times. " By the time she was born in 1875 to a territorial governor and his wife, China, suffering defeat in the Opium Wars, had made many concessions to Western powers while its own imperial government became increasingly reactionary and tyrannical.