Scarface Movie

WHEN "Scarface" came out 20 years ago, Brian De Palma's outlaw immigrant saga was greeted with scathing reviews ("one of the largest empty vessels to float on an ocean of celluloid," wrote the Los Angeles Times' Sheila Benson) and lukewarm box office. The picture was considered one of the lesser lights in the director's canon of works, which included "Carrie," "Blow Out" and "Dressed to Kill."

WHEN "Scarface" came out 20 years ago, Brian De Palma's outlaw immigrant saga was greeted with scathing reviews ("one of the largest empty vessels to float on an ocean of celluloid," wrote the Los Angeles Times' Sheila Benson) and lukewarm box office. The picture was considered one of the lesser lights in the director's canon of works, which included "Carrie," "Blow Out" and "Dressed to Kill."

In "Double Feature," his first exhibition with Honor Fraser, Mario Ybarra Jr. explores the probably universal impulse toward cinematic identification, playing with the ways in which we project ourselves into the roles we encounter on the silver screen - or the flickering pixels of late-night television, as the case may be. The work is not especially subtle. In "Transformer, " a short video projected in the back gallery, the artist offers a decidedly hammy performance combining elements of "An American Werewolf in London" with Michael Jackson's "Thriller . " A series of large, occasionally garish self-portraits in the front room depicts Ybarra in the iconic roles of Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The streets of South-Central Los Angeles that serve as the backdrop for the new police drama "End of Watch" are familiar turf for writer-director David Ayer. He grew up in the neighborhood, and over the last decade the 43-year-old filmmaker has specialized in telling gritty Southland cop tales. "I'm comfortable there," Ayer said in a recent interview at his house in the hills above Los Feliz, talking about his childhood home in a very different part of the city. "It's like my living room.

There was little left of Dave Mead's first home when he got back to it Sunday, except the bitter memories of being chased away by police as the flames approached. Only the front steps and a charred file cabinet, still holding the 35-year-old teacher's master's thesis and some student artwork, were recognizable in the rubble. Like many in the burned-out Del Rosa neighborhood of San Bernardino, Mead had desperately wanted to stay and defend his house.

Is there any event as brazenly inattentive to the coolness of Los Angeles as the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3) week? Like mayflies, armies of suited video game industry executives and programmers and all other manner of power-geek descend on L.A. to callous their thumbs testing newer and better ways of slaying aliens and fighting the Battle of the Bulge. "Hey, guys," one wants to yell at them, "we're trying to run a hipper-than-thou city here! At least put on a trucker hat!"