BEAGLE RAMIFICATIONS

A happy May to all! Check out the May issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

…for my “Four Corners” column on Valley restaurants that have re-started after closing or moving.

Also…

…this is Roxy, the beloved beagle of my late pal Dewey Webb (named, of course, after Erica Gavin’s character in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). She is sweet and affectionate, and needs a new home. I’d take her gladly, but we have three McNugget-sized Chihuahuas that make this out of the question. She’s active, and might be a nice fit for a family with older kids. Get in touch if you’d be interested in adopting her, or know somebody who would.

Her glamour has been captured here, by the way, by the great, award-winning San Francisco-based photographer Timothy Archibald, formerly of New Times.

BEYOND THE VALLEY

RIP to one of the very few superstar movie critics, Roger Ebert, passed on at 70 after a bravely public decade-plus struggle with cancer.

Because Ebert was so familiar as a personality, it could be overlooked that he was a truly fine writer—the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism—with an un-showy but elegant style. He had a wonderfully sensible, unpretentious fondness for a good movie, and recognized that good movies came from all genres and levels of ambition. And, of course, he wrote the screenplay for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

All that said, I think that his finest hour may have been playing himself, opposite his old pal Gene Siskel, on this episode of the animated comedy The Critic from the mid-90s. If you’ve never seen it, I promise you it’s worth the half-hour of your life…

TYPO NEGATIVE

Out on DVD this month is Atlas Shrugged: Part One. This filming of part of Ayn Rand’s doorstopper for douchebags was numbingly amateurish, almost unwatchable—you can read my review here—but the stories surrounding its production & marketing have been highly entertaining. This may be the funniest of them, however: The packaging for the DVD mistakenly used the word “self-sacrifice,” in place of “self-interest.” Appalled at the very idea that they might be promoting self-sacrifice, the producers are offering a replacement.

RIP to sad-eyed Cynthia Myers of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, one of the most glorious of the Russ Meyer stars, passed on at 61.