Time Warp

If Madonna's "Material World" was the theme song for consumer values in the '80s, Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" may turn out to be the tune for spenders in the '90s, if you believe data released in a survey conducted by Grey Advertising, a New York-based advertising agency. The survey, dubbed "Households of the 1990s: America's New Grown-Ups," asserts that time has replaced money as the currency for this decade.

"Bullet to the Head" is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice. Mayhem mavens Sylvester Stallone and director Walter Hill ("48 Hrs. ") make their debut as collaborators on this New Orleans shoot-'em-up, based on a graphic novel about a double-crossed hit man named Jimmy Bobo (Stallone) teaming with a young, idealistic cop (Sung Kang) to investigate a murder. ("Investigate" in these instances is a loose euphemism for "kill until no one's left")

In Jody Zellen's engaging new work at Richard Heller Gallery, time is warped and text explodes. A 19th century painting salon is filled with post-conceptual language games; the altar of a Gothic cathedral receives the Word; and a gallery in the Hermitage Museum looks like MOCA during the recent John Cage show.

Vice President Joe Biden carried on the Democratic ticket's full-court press for the women's vote Wednesday, calling Mitt Romney's answer to a debate question on equal pay "sketchy" and mocking his comment about using "binders full of women" when naming officials in his Massachusetts Cabinet. "Folks, the idea he needed to go and ask where a qualified woman was, he just should have come to my house," Biden told an audience in Greeley, Colo. "He didn't need a binder. " Biden invoked his daughter and granddaughters, as well as President Obama's two daughters, to say the two of them believed "to our core" that women are entitled to "every single, solitary opportunity; every single, solitary thing my sons are and my grandsons are, without exception.

Cape May, a seaside resort even in pre-Revolutionary days, is caught in a time warp. Sitting at the southern tip of New Jersey, where Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic, it may be the Victorian capital of America--with more than 600 classic Victorian homes, one of the largest collections of preserved and restored 19th-Century structures in the country.

A hard and heavy rain was drowning Tinsel Town. But all the dark and wind and wet outside only made it seem cozier and warmer in Musso & Frank Grill, Hollywood's oldest and most immutable restaurant/time warp. Musso's--whose 1919 origins make it L.A. primeval--is as much a part of Hollywood lore as the hand prints in the cement in front of Mann's Chinese Theater up the Boulevard. It's where Faulkner and Hemingway and their writer cronies hung out during their screenwriting days.

There's not a glimmer of light in a CBS production of "The Sunshine Boys." After sitting on the shelf for a couple of years, this laborious version of Neil Simon's 1972 play delivers a flat thud, with Peter Falk and Woody Allen lacking chemistry as a crotchety, creaky pair of former vaudevillesque comics whose attempted reunion for a TV special is doomed because of their unreasonable antipathy for each other.

Watching "Satisfaction" (citywide) sometimes feels like being dropped into a time-warping Vegematic. This is a movie--supposedly about an '80s rock band--where the songs date from the '60s, the language and sexual attitudes suggest the '70s and the plot is pure '50s. The basic idea has some unrealized promise: an all-girl garage band, with a hastily added male classical keyboardist, is hired for the summer at an Atlantic Ocean beach resort.

I thought nothing could top February's Club Make-Up anniversary bash--which gave the Hollywood scene a well-needed dose of electric-eclectic shock rock therapy. But to call Saturday's tribute to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" off the hook would be to sell it short. It was out of this world. The El Rey Theatre, where Club Make-Up is housed each month, was sold-out by 10 p.m. The line curled down Wilshire Boulevard farther than I've ever seen it go.

The traffic outside stretched for miles, past bible stores and chicken joints and rain-soaked hustlers begging for tickets. "We are a private club ... " said Hootie Johnson. The crowd inside numbered thousands, filling the courtyard, wallpapering the fairways, lining up two dozen deep for the men's room. "A group getting together periodically for camaraderie...." There were camera towers in the pine trees and microphones in the azaleas and satellite dishes in the parking lot.

The Sunset Strip holds a special place in the heart of one Saul Hudson, better known as the guitarist Slash. "In the 1970s, my family moved from England to the Laurel Canyon area, and my parents were very much dialed in to the whole Sunset Strip scene," said the rocker. "They were both in the music business, and the whole reason we lived where we did was because of the recording industry. So I have very vivid memories of the Rainbow and the Roxy, and the Whisky was a huge point of interest at that time.

The remarkable charm of the city of Orange, whose Old Towne is the largest district on the National Register of Historic Places in California, is the result of its steadfast refusal to change with the times. Walking through its 140-year-old central plaza or strolling nearby neighborhoods with their immaculate Craftsman bungalows, it's easy to feel you've been sucked into a time warp. Of course, as residents Quan and Angelina Ha discovered, living in a time warp can have its drawbacks.

Question: I'm trying to develop a time schedule to take some medications every 12 hours. I will be traveling from Atlanta to Melbourne, Australia, by way of Los Angeles, for about 10 days. Do you take the medication according to the time where you came from or where you are going? Let me know, and I will set my alarm in my phone accordingly. Kwietha Bolden Atlanta Answer: It's 3:48 p.m. on a Thursday as I write this. Quickly, what time is it in Manila? (6:48 a.m. Friday.

"Land of the Lost" is a silly contrivance of a comedy set in a strangely surreal world populated by fast-moving T. rexes, lumbering big-eyed lizardy Sleestaks, a tribe of monkey people and a random assortment of prehistoric wildlife. There are three moons floating above and a desert below, artfully littered with half-buried remnants of important cultural artifacts: a Big Boy statue, a piece of the Bay Bridge, an ice cream truck, a motel swimming pool and a Viking ship to name a few.

Madonna is standing before a packed crowd at the Palladium in New York. Stage lights beam overhead. Legions of plastic bracelets dangle from her slender wrists. Her disheveled locks are pulled away from her face. Clutching onto the microphone stand, she glances to her right. Click. The flashy scene from 1983 stands still forever with the help of a guy and his camera. At the Grammy Museum at downtown's L.A.

As a fan of the original British "Life on Mars," whose American makeover begins tonight on ABC, I approach the redo at a disadvantage. John Simm as time-shifted police Det. Sam Tyler and Philip Glenister as his rough-tough superior, Gene Hunt, are for me nearly inextricable from the characters they play. But I will try to pry them apart -- we don't judge Liev Schrieber's Hamlet against Richard Burton's, or Burton's by Barrymore's. There is room for variation.

Alexander H. Pope, former Los Angeles county assessor, has written a paper, as yet unpublished, proposing that we drop one minute from each hour. Pope is now managing partner of Mayer, Brown & Platt, a law firm, which evidently gives him time to ponder such notions. He feels that we have not already adopted the 59-minute hour simply because we have a tendency to go on doing things the way we always have.

It's one of pop's most familiar sights and sounds: Carlos Santana tilting his head back, eyes closed, deftly reeling off squealing guitar leads that slice through his band's polyrhythmic jams. This rockin' ritual was presented Thursday at the Wiltern Theatre, as it has been since some members of the audience were in diapers--the show was part of a tour to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the guitarist's career.

IF YOU were building brand-new restaurants at the land end of Malibu Pier, chances are they wouldn't look like the just-opened pair that currently boast that priceless view of the surf. That's precisely the point, said James Newland, supervising historian with the California State Parks, who helped oversee the restoration of the Malibu Pier, which recently reopened to the public. The casual dining Malibu Pier Club and the finer-dining Beachcomber Cafe -- each had to be built within the footprints and remains of structures that dated back to the pier's early days.

Like a grandparent's birthday, the Sci Fi Channel's fourth season finale for "Doctor Who" reeled back in its children. Characters from the cult hit show's two BBC spinoffs, "Torchwood" and "The Sarah Jane Adventures," pitched in to help the Doctor (well, two-and-a-half Doctors, really! Long story!) save the whole universe from certain doom.