After months of cryptic trailers and hype in the US, Cloverfield turns out to be almost comforting in its simplicity. It's a short, efficient, terrifying monster movie, no more and no less.

Obama's Hispanderama

Now I can shape the national political debate. The only way I could exert more influence would be if I were president."

"Jeez. Why are you spending so much time on Kos," I'm often asked by exasperated readers. "We come to your site for Burkle." Good point! ... In this month's Los Angeles, Steve Oney takes you inside Team Burkle as PR man Mike Sitrick and his billionaire client have a conference call to decide whether to tell the truth. ... P.S.: It turns out Burkle didn't actually write the WSJ op-ed piece that appeared under his name. It was "ghosted by Sitrick." Who knew? Needless to say, the piece called for stricter journalistic standards of ethics.

Sony NSC-GC1 Net-Sharing Cam

The final word: While the NSC-GC1 cannot hope to compete with a dedicated camcorder, it provides an affordable introduction to video sharing over the internet. If you plan to screen your video creations exclusively online, you won't be disappointed.

With an RRP of just $299, the NSC-GC1 is very much a bare-bones device, aimed squarely at casual users who aren't overly fussed by fancy features or high resolution.

A Journey Through The Local Pinup Revival Scene

In a suburban basement in Parkville, women are taking off their clothes. They're ducking behind a sheet strung up by the minibar and wriggling out of thongs and elasticized bras, only to clamber quickly into the fortified lingerie of a previous generation--girdles, cinchers, bustiers, corselets, all as stiff and formidable-feeling against the body as the designation "foundation garments" implies. Nearby there's a rack of fur shrugs, cinched-waist dresses, feather boas, and half and full petticoats, their hems hovering over a jumbled pile of strappy platform heels and winklepicker pumps ranging in vintage from the Truman to the Kennedy administrations. Underneath the velvet Elvis painting to the right sits a card table arranged with delicately scented silk hair flowers, ersatz tiger lilies, and hibiscus blooms as bright and Technicolor luscious as the illustrations on vintage produce crates.

PTL Beauty Editor Lori Geiger

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Romero revitalizes ‘Dead’ with youth-savvy intellect

The film-industry press tends increasingly to hail Pittsburghs George A. Romero as the godfather of gore, in a smirking nod to his new picture, Diary of the Dead, and to the persistent influence of Romeros breakthrough film of 1968, Night of the Living Dead. The tacit, too-easy assumption here is that Romeros films rely more upon visceral shock value than upon narrative ferocity or scathing social criticism qualities that constitute his larger impact as a filmmaking artist.

The medium is horror, of course a popular genre that had embraced gratuitous gore as a ticket-selling commodity several years before Romero had seasoned Night of the Living Dead with such incidental excesses. The message, however, is Romeros continuing usage of the genre as a vehicle for bigger and more troubling ideas about the fragile state of civilization.