L.A. Times - Entertainment News

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• Matthew McConaughey and Michael Connelly are playing the angles with 'The Lincoln Lawyer'
• Musicians feel the pull of cigar box guitars
• Critical Mass: 'Battle: Los Angeles'
• Of a Kind website tries to make a special connection with shoppers
• Film focuses on remote museum in Uzbekistan
• Abbas Kiarostami returns to narrative form with 'Certified Copy'
• Cultural Exchange: A native son brings his Hollywood animation know-how back to Nepal

Matthew McConaughey and Michael Connelly are playing the angles with 'The Lincoln Lawyer' Posted: The actor and the author ride around (though not in a Lincoln Town Car) for a freewheeling discussion. Matthew McConaughey has just cracked open his second Corona when the man wearing Mardi Gras beads and a Village People policeman's cap approaches his car.

Musicians feel the pull of cigar box guitars Posted: The community keeps growing as musicians like Hymn for Her and ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons get drawn into the lure of an old-style sound. The community keeps growing as musicians like Hymn for Her and ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons get drawn into the lure of an old-style sound.

Critical Mass: 'Battle: Los Angeles' Posted: 12 Mar 2011 11:41 AM PST There's nothing like a terrible science-fiction action flick to bring out the creative writing skills in a film critic.

Of a Kind website tries to make a special connection with shoppers Posted: The makers of the merchandise include personal information and back stories about the limited-run goods in hopes of creating a personal tie to consumers. Reporting from New York — It was over e-mail, in coffee shops and at the kitchen tables in upper Manhattan and Brooklyn that Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo first tumbled into their idea. Longtime college friends whose undergraduate boyfriends played basketball, they had bonded over a love of fashion. But they found that the items they perused online and the sample sales they haunted in the city ultimately felt a little hollow. It wasn't the act of commerce that bothered them, specifically, it was the lack of personal connection they felt with the clothing they purchased.

Film focuses on remote museum in Uzbekistan Posted: Avant-garde art housed there is out of favor with government. Back in 2000, USC film professor Amanda Pope and a former student, Tchavdar Georgiev, were traveling in Russia and some of its satellites, working on a series of short portraits of emerging leaders in the post-Soviet world. The two were in Uzbekistan when Pope heard about an amazing collection of Russian avant-garde art in a remote museum deep in the country's desert.

Abbas Kiarostami returns to narrative form with 'Certified Copy' Posted: Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami focuses on art and romance in 'Certified Copy.' He says shooting it outside of Iran was a form of protest. Widely hailed as one of the world's most exciting filmmakers during the 1990s, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has spent most of the last decade seeming purposefully on the margins, making documentaries and experimental films. With "Certified Copy," which opened in Los Angeles and New York on Friday and will be available on cable video on demand March 23, he returns to narrative feature filmmaking while staking out bold new territory.

Cultural Exchange: A native son brings his Hollywood animation know-how back to Nepal Posted: Disney-trained Kiran Joshi has founded an animation studio in Katmandu in an effort to raise the profession's profile at home and bring Nepali stories to the world. In something of a classic immigrant story, the boy from Nepal arrived in America at age 19, attended Cal State Long Beach, studied computer science and got a job in the early 1980s at then-struggling Disney, which was just beginning to use computer graphics.

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