With apologies to my wife and the rest of the female population, can we all agree that actress Cyd Charisse simply had the best legs that ever walked the earth? If you don't believe me, just look at that amazing dance number in "Singin' in the Rain" when Cyd's...

As I write this, gay and lesbian couples all over California are only minutes away from being able to receive legal marriage licenses for the first time. That seems like a true miracle, especially when you remember that the way was cleared for them by the mostly Republican-appointed...

I think it's safe to say that John McCain is the last presidential candidate I'll ever see who is old enough to be my father. Born in 1936, he is the end of the line for pre-Baby Boomer candidates--members of my parents' generation who grew up during World War...

Have you heard that Brigitte Bardot was convicted this week in France for "inciting racial hatred?" Here's what the 73-year-old former sex goddess wrote about the Muslim population in France that landed her in hot water:

"I am fed up...

I was on my way to meet my wife at the movies the other night for a sold-out screening of "Sex in the City" when I ran into a couple I know from our neighborhood. When I told them where I was going, they looked at me with pity...

I see dead people. Or to put it more accurately, I often think about famous people just before their deaths, even though I have no idea they are ill. Although Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In hasn't crossed my mind in years, I found myself talking about one of my...

I was lucky enough to know Charles Nelson Reilly, one of the funniest people on the planet. Reilly died this weekend after a very long illness, and today is being mourned by his showbiz colleagues, the public at large, and his legions of former acting students. Charles' oft-stated concern that...

That insanely anachronistic bit of dialogue was uttered by Anne Baxter's Nefretiri to Charlton Heston in the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments. Cecil B. DeMille's second retelling of the Passover story (he first filmed the Biblical tale in 1923) is the campy benchmark against which all other cinematic depictions...

Dear Hank and Annie,

Hey, check it out! Showtime has been overhyping this hot new series about you two crazy kids that starts tonight. Shit man, if you added up all the commercials they've shown for The Tudors, it would last longer than your marriage, you know what I'm sayin'?...

What baby boomer wasn't obsessed with the space program? As a kid growing up in the 1960s I followed every Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launch with enthusiasm and wonder and created scrapbooks of the missions. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were cultural icons in my childhood the same way Elvis...

Had she lived, today would've been Janet Joplin's 64th birthday. Joplin died in 1970, three weeks after Jimi Hendrix and nine months before Jim Morrison. All three of these rock icons were 27 when they left the planet. What a waste.

I've recently been watching some of the old "Dick...

I was going into my junior year of high school the summer that Gerald Ford became President. I remember calling everyone I knew on that hot August day to gloat over Nixon's resignation. I was a few weeks away from turning 15 but I knew that it was a terribly...

The big Day-After-Christmas buzz in Hollywood is about how surprisingly well the new Bill Condon film "Dreamgirls" performed at the box office, earning $8.7 million in a single day and taking second place among the big-budget holiday movies even though it's playing in only a fraction of the theatres. There's...

I tend to be very cynical about the holiday hysteria but I notice that I haven't engaged in many anti-Christmas diatribes this year. What's the matter with me? Has my heart enlarged inside my body like at the end of "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas?" Nah.

This morning my daughter...

We're always hearing what a liability it is today for conservative celebrities to come out of the closet and admit they are die-hard Republicans. Yet in the 1950s, many of Hollywood's biggest movie stars were unabashedly aligned with the right. The ranks of Republican stars included John Wayne, Lou Costello,...

I know I should reserve my outrage for more important matters, but I just saw the new Gap commercial featuring Audrey Hepburn and my mouth is frozen in a silent scream. As part of their new "Keep it Simple" campaign, the Gap uses footage of the late actress from the...

Is it my imagination or is our ability to accept people who are different from ourselves plummeting to dangerous levels? It was bad enough to see the ugly rhetoric at play in the 2004 presidential campaign surrounding gay marriage. If we are to believe the pundits, a big reason Bush...

What is this country turning into, a Margaret Atwood novel? I was disgusted the other day when I read about the latest machinations of the holier-than-thou FCC. This government agency, funded by our tax dollars, proposed a $3.6 million fine against CBS for airing an episode of "Without a Trace"...

Maureen Stapleton, who died this week at the age of 80, was friends with Marilyn Monroe when they both studied at the Actors' Studio. Stapleton thought that Monroe had a lot of talent but that her looks prevented her from getting the parts she deserved. "I never had that problem,"...

I know I've lived in southern California too long when the natural aging process starts to seem like an abnormality. I just watched the newly released DVD of Ingmar Bergman's Saraband. It's a sequel of sorts to his great 1973 film Scenes from a Marriage and it is so expertly...