Runaways

The problem with "The Runaways," a street-level snapshot of the creation of the groundbreaking '70s all-girl rock band, is that they went with the wrong girl. Instead of training the lens on the Runaways' artistic rebel who hung around and became legend, rocker Joan Jett, played with serious punk grrl power by Kristen Stewart, the movie focuses on the one who actually ran away, lead singer Cherie Currie, a kohl-eyed and sullen Dakota Fanning. The look is there. Writer-director Floria Sigismondi, who cut her teeth in the music video world and is making her feature debut, used her shoestring indie budget to great effect, creating a grainy documentary feel that nails the hard knocks and raw existence of the I-wannabe-a-rock-star crowd hovering around the edges of the Hollywood music scene.

What if they picked a pope and he went AWOL? That's the premise of Nanni Moretti's new film, a gentle fable whose humanist heart beats in Michel Piccoli's nuanced performance. As a man of faith facing a secular crisis — over a life unfulfilled — the seasoned actor is stirring. Yet "We Have a Pope" ("Habemus Papam") is too gingerly to be persuasive. In his imagining of the papal conclave, Moretti aims for basic verisimilitude but avoids grounding topicality. There's only the slightest reference to contemporary troubles in the Roman Catholic Church, and no sense of politics or ambition among the cardinals assembled to choose a new pontiff.

The men of rock 'n' roll started many major style trends throughout the '60s and '70s — think Beatles and mop tops, Sex Pistols and spikes, KISS and face paint. But women are represented on that list as well: among them, the members of the Runaways, who showed the pop culture universe of the 1970s how strong, smoky eyes and a feathered mullet could rock just as hard as the guys. In the film "The Runaways," which is scheduled to open Friday, lead makeup artist Robin Mathews went for a mix of punk and glam-rock for Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, who portray Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, the best-known members of the all-girl band.

Kim Fowley pulls DVDs, fliers, CDs, a hospital admission slip and more DVDs out of a jumble of media on the mixing board of a drab Hollywood strip-mall studio. Per usual, the infamous pop schlockmeister has a beautiful young woman by his side. Fowley wants to transform Snow Mercy, a scientist-turned-dominatrix/performance artist, into his latest star. But he's got a dozen other hustles going on too, and he hands a reporter one copy after another of B-minus movies. They all feature Kim Fowley.

All parents of children from babes to kindergarten age should take heed of the story of Carmen Ponce ("A Mother Discovers the System Doesn't Work for Runaways," Nov. 15). As a kindergarten teacher (now retired) in the East District of Los Angeles School system, I saw children with faces that revealed friendly love, but I saw more with fears, anxieties, hates, rebellion. Almost with certainty I could predict the dropouts, the runaways. An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of improbable cure.

In the opening scenes of "The Runaways," Floria Sigismondi's ode to the all-girl hard rock band, the characters played by Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning could be almost any teenage girls living in the Valley circa 1975. Fanning is sitcom-cute in a plaid shirt, miniskirt and knee socks; Stewart sports a T-shirt and jeans. But then Stewart's character walks into a rockabilly boutique, dumps a bag full of change on the counter and demands "what he's wearing," pointing to a guy in a black leather motorcycle jacket and leather pants.

Dakota Fanning's porcelain-doll features were swathed in exotic makeup and her blond hair coiffed into a feathery shag; she raised her umpteenth shot of sake and cast a knowing glance at Kristen Stewart. The "Twilight" star held Fanning's gaze briefly and toasted back, looking every inch the tough rocker chick, with her matching black shag hairdo, spiked bracelet and razor-blade charm necklace. The actresses clinked glasses and giggled. With downtown Los Angeles' Kyoto Grand Hotel standing in for a bustling Tokyo sushi joint last summer, the teen stars were on the set of the coming-of-age drama "The Runaways" -- in character, with Fanning as Cherie Currie, the wild-child lead singer of the titular all-girl rock group, and Stewart portraying Joan Jett, its electric-guitar-wielding, 'tude-copping founder.

Patricia and Rico Montenegro should be putting up Christmas decorations and lights at their Placentia condominium. Instead, they are putting up flyers with a picture of a smiling teen-ager. Their frequent trips to area shopping centers and strip malls highlight their attempt to find their 14-year-old daughter, Alita, who left home the day before Thanksgiving. Alita is one of many who run away from home during the holidays.

Becky was self-destructive, sometimes violent and suicidal. Her parents put her in a private mental hospital for therapy, but when the money ran out, the county was their last resort--and "worst mistake." Harriet and Brian Brooks of La Verne say they haven't seen their 13-year-old daughter now since March 27, when she jumped out of a county car taking her from MacLaren Children's Center in El Monte to a court appearance. But that wasn't the first time Becky had run away.

Two years ago a 14-year-old boy playing basketball in a Louisville, Ky., park pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and told a friend he was going to kill himself. The boy's father, a minister, had been planning to send him to an out-of-state school because of behavior problems, and the youngster was depressed about leaving his home and his girlfriend. His friend persuaded the boy to walk to a nearby food store where a Safe Place had been established to help young runaways reach overnight shelters.

In deep, cold space, nearly a million miles from Earth, a giant telescope later this decade will scan for the first light to streak across the universe more than 13 billion years ago. The seven-ton spacecraft, one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in U.S. history, is under construction for NASA at Northrop Grumman Corp.'s space park complex in Redondo Beach. The aim is to capture the oldest light, taking cosmologists to the time after the big bang when matter had cooled just enough to start forming the first blazing stars in what had been empty darkness.

The jury in the murder trial of the driver of a runaway big rig that killed a 12-year-old girl and her father two years ago in La Cañada Flintridge reported Thursday that it had reached verdicts on the two counts of second-degree murder but was deadlocked on the lesser charges of involuntary manslaughter. The Los Angeles County Superior Court judge sent the jury back to deliberate on the involuntary manslaughter charges against the driver, Marcos Costa, 46. The verdicts on the second-degree murder charges were not announced.

There had been bigger beasts loose in New York City. Ming the tiger, for example, who lived undetected in a Harlem apartment until he bit his owner's leg in 2003 and was moved to a sanctuary. The coyote who led city officials on a 24-hour chase through lower Manhattan last spring before being caught and sent back to the wild. The baby alligator found huddled beneath a car in Queens in August. But they didn't become Twitter stars with tens of thousands of followers, like those who catapulted a missing Egyptian cobra to fame before it was recaptured Thursday, six days after vanishing from its Bronx Zoo enclosure.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators whistled, chanted, drummed and marched their way through the heart of London on Saturday to protest massive government spending cuts that threaten to leave almost no part of British society untouched. It was one of the biggest public demonstrations in Britain since 2003, when antiwar rallies were held across the country before the invasion of Iraq. Organizers said up to 250,000 people participated in the march, whose carnival-like atmosphere was briefly marred by black-clad anarchists who smashed a few shop windows, flung paint bombs and attacked luxury icons such as the Ritz Hotel.

Our television screens are filled this month with the breathtaking exploits of young men in short pants and tattoos, and for their dramatic efforts we call them heroes, and, really, we have no idea. You want March Madness? How about an old man saving the life of a little girl by throwing himself in front of a frightened horse? You want one shining moment? It happened a couple of weeks ago, when longtime Santa Anita paddock guard John Shear, 90, tossed a 6-year-old girl out of the path of a runaway horse just in time to be trampled.

Marie Massa calls the gardeners together for a meeting, and so they amble over, removing gloves and shaking off dirt as they form a half-circle. The group's treasurer, Garrett Broad, reports that their finances are good and they can afford a new 8-foot fence behind the tool shed. Kids have been hopping the old one to smoke marijuana when nobody's around. Pot smokers are not as destructive as the opossums, Broad says, but still ? Geraldo Martinez is there with his wife, Marlene De Leon.

Autumn is the beginning of a dangerous season for the youngest victims of the sex trade. Sports championships, beginning with the World Series in October, are magnets for traffickers. In upcoming weeks, authorities say, dozens of children will be transported as prostitutes to the National Football League playoffs, the Super Bowl and, in the spring and summer, the NBA finals and other tournaments. But these days, along with the teams and the fans, the FBI will be there too. Most Americans have heard about children forced into the sex trade, but the recent arrest of 60 suspected pimps and the rescue of 52 children from organized sex rings across the United States should end the illusion that this terrible crime happens only in other countries.

Workers struggling to contain radioactive releases from the Fukushima power plant face two critical tasks to avoid turning a nuclear disaster into a catastrophe: preventing a runaway chain reaction into the nuclear fuel and maintaining a massive flow of seawater through the damaged pools and reactor vessels. There are few options, none of them good. "The most imaginative engineers in the world couldn't have dreamed up a situation like this," said Najmedin Meshkati, a USC professor and nuclear power expert.

Maurice Jones-Drew is a running back, and always has been. But by John Madden's thinking, the Jacksonville star is pro football's best "corner" back. "I've always had that theory that in the NFL as fans we kind of forget the teams on the corners of the map ? Buffalo, Seattle, Jacksonville," Madden said in a phone interview Thursday. "I think the Jaguars are the most underrated team in the NFL. " Said Jones-Drew: "In Jacksonville, if we don't win games in a dramatic fashion or don't do something crazy in a game, you really don't see us on 'SportsCenter' or NFL Network.