Short Cuts

Hollywood's glamour girls are getting snippy with it lately, trading in their flowing manes for short, kicky 'dos. And we say it's about time. Long-and-sleek locks feel about as fresh as a "Rambo" sequel. Victoria Beckham's manicured bob sparked short-hair mania for the masses last fall, with stars such as Renee Zellweger saying adios to their long tresses soon after. Now it seems that every red carpet features a freshly shorn celeb or two. Here's how the new cuts stack up.

The House of Representatives refused to either endorse or curtail U.S. involvement in Libya, delivering a mixed message Friday that highlighted deep divisions surrounding the issue. By an overwhelming margin, lawmakers refused to sanction U.S. participation in a NATO campaign of airstrikes in the North African country, a vote that amounted to a rare, bipartisan rebuke of a president's foreign policy during an active military conflict. Minutes later, however, a Republican-led effort to try to curb financial support for U.S. involvement also failed.

Women with extremely long hair finally have a salon where they aren't the object of curious stares, aren't made to feel out of step with fashion and aren't hounded to get their manes cut short. The new George Michael of Madison Avenue in Beverly Hills is dedicated to the care and feeding of long, long locks. "You don't see women with long hair in other salons because they're afraid to go," says owner Jessie Lynn Martinez. "They're afraid they're going to get all chopped up.

The top financial advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Wednesday that the city would need to stop hiring police officers if the City Council abandons plans to lease nine public parking garages to a private operator. City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana issued his warning as he recommended that council members press ahead with plans to find a company to run the garages, including three in Hollywood, for the next 50 years. Officials had hoped to secure up to $300 million from the deal.

When are people going to realize that a filmmaker's examination of misogyny does not make the director a misogynist ("Robert Altman's 'Short Cuts' Is a Blunt Attack on Women," Nov. 29)? I saw "Short Cuts" and walked away very disturbed. Admittedly, I got really tired of looking at female pubic hair (especially when the absence of male pubic hair was so noticeable). However, what disturbed me was the sad distance women as a sex have come. It stands to reason that, as the physically stronger sex, men in this century will only allow the women to go so far before they reign them in with violence or antipathy.

Kenneth Turan, in his review of Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," raises concerns about the extensive female nudity in the film, which he terms gratuitous ("Robert Altman Finds His Way to Carverville," Calendar, Oct. 8). I was pleased to see that this was a concern of his, since after seeing the film, it concerned me as well. But after thinking about it for a while, I came to the conclusion that nudity was not, in fact gratuitous, but that it was included for a purpose.

There are "major names committed" and "even a waiting list of actors" for maverick director Robert Altman's next movie, "Short Cuts," which will begin shooting in late July on Los Angeles locations. But a spokeswoman for the director said Wednesday that it will be a while before the cast of 27 roles is finalized, since the production deal for the long-delayed project was only announced Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival. At the festival, Fine Line Features, a division of New Line Cinema Corp.

Fine Line Features' President Ira Deutchman might want to practice what he preaches. In a recent letter to members of the Writers Guild of America promoting Robert Altman's movie "Short Cuts," Deutchman stresses how the "contribution of the screenwriter is one of the most difficult to assess and therefore frequently overlooked."

The first thing you notice about Criterion's wonderfully inventive and informative laser-disc edition of Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" ($125) is that it is anything but short. Arguably more layered, intricate and artfully crafted than the 1993 film itself, the three-disc set requires you not only to just spend time with it, but also to work at it. It's not something you're going to curl up with on Saturday date night.

In Nov. 29th's Counterpunch "Robert Altman's 'Short Cuts' Is a Blunt Attack on Women," UCLA grad student Sandy de Grijs chastises Robert Altman's film "Short Cuts" for its use of female nudity in a "disturbing pattern," portraying men as "powerless in the face of women's sexuality and (as a result) women are to be resented and blamed for this." She uses this observation to argue that the film is riddled with misogynistic overtones. This is not the case.

Senate Republicans on Thursday once again blocked legislation to reinstate long-term unemployment benefits for people who have exhausted their aid, prolonging a stalemate that has left more than a million people without federal help. With the Senate apparently paralyzed by partisan gridlock, the fate of the aid, as well as tax breaks for businesses and $16 billion in aid for cash-strapped states, remains unclear. California and dozens of other states are hoping for federal aid to help balance their budgets.

Where you've seen him Tom Waits had small parts in films such as "Rumble Fish" and "The Cotton Club" before he got his first major role in 1986 as a jailhouse escapee in director Jim Jarmusch's "Down by Law." He spectacularly embodied the demented Renfield in Francis Ford Coppola's lavish 1992 feature, "Bram Stoker's Dracula"; the following year he starred opposite Lily Tomlin in Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver tales "Short Cuts" and, more recently, he earned critical raves as a streetwise guru in the 2006 dark comedy "Wristcutters: A Love Story."

Like many Chinese peasants of his generation, 53-year-old Wang Zhengnian had never seen a cow until he reached adulthood. He certainly never drank a glass of milk. The fact that Wang now spends his days tending 400 cows on a farm near Beijing says a lot about the way China created a dairy industry out of thin air. But in their haste, the Chinese made mistakes that left six babies dead and hundreds of thousands ill from tainted milk. Milk is not part of the traditional Chinese diet.

Last January, in a classic "American Idol" preseason meltdown, the hyper-emotional Josiah Leming was sent home -- which in his case meant his car. Now, less than a year later, in one of "Idol's" unlikely turns of fate, the high school dropout who'd left his ailing mother, out-of-work stepfather and eight siblings in Morristown, Tenn., is back, living the high life in Los Angeles and poised to release his first album on Warner Bros. Records.

Hollywood's glamour girls are getting snippy with it lately, trading in their flowing manes for short, kicky 'dos. And we say it's about time. Long-and-sleek locks feel about as fresh as a "Rambo" sequel. Victoria Beckham's manicured bob sparked short-hair mania for the masses last fall, with stars such as Renee Zellweger saying adios to their long tresses soon after. Now it seems that every red carpet features a freshly shorn celeb or two. Here's how the new cuts stack up.

BOSTON graphic artist Karl Stevens, 27, has found a way to get his foot in the door of the museum world -- the back door. Stevens, who dropped out of two prestigious art schools to pursue his career his own way, is also a guard for the Harvard University Art Museums. His favorite parts of the job are the Tuesday and Thursday late shifts, 7:30 to 11 p.m., when he can be found fortifying the back entrances of the Fogg Art Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, respectively.

The old lion can still roar. Though tradition holds that there are no second acts in American lives, writer-director Robert Altman, never much of a traditionalist, embarks with "Short Cuts" (Cineplex Odeon Century Plaza) on the fourth or possibly fifth act of a remarkable career. Both building on what has gone before and extending outward to new boundaries, he has made a rich, unnerving film, as comic as it is astringent, that in its own quiet way works up a considerable emotional charge.

IN A PERVERSE way, I'm hoping that "Crash" sweeps the field at the Academy Awards ceremony. Not because it's good -- quite the contrary. But I figure that turning up the spotlight on the movie's vision of Los Angeles as a simmering, racist hellbroth might finally stem the flood of Canadians and New Yorkers who keep driving up local real estate prices. It was a Canadian, Paul Haggis, who conceived this fantasia in which Angelenos are high-strung and shouty.

When I sat down to get my hair cut short, it had nothing to do with sex, politics or sexual politics. I intended no message to men or to other women. It was just time, I thought. But later, as I held a bag full of caramel-colored, fuzzy curls that once dangled sassily from my head, I realized that that was shear naivete. Some men, like a friend, Joe, believe women cut their hair short for two reasons: to signify a breakup with a guy or to mark the breaking away from men altogether.