Love Story

Molly Shore It's a love story that spans nearly eight decades and 14 U.S. presidents. When Juanita and John Ross married in 1928, Calvin Coolidge was in office and the 18-year-old bride wasn't even old enough to vote. On Tuesday, the Burbank couple celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary with a luncheon at Burbank Gardens Retirement Home, where they have lived since moving out of their home on Avon Street. The couple are founding members of the First Southern Baptist Church of Glendale.

Comedies using sexual humor as their central theme usually appeal to a very narrow audience or are willing to alienate a large portion of potential moviegoers. Two films have already been released this summer that were willing to suffer an R rating, rather than tone down the content enough to receive the more commercially viable PG-13. The first of these is the very funny "Wedding Crashers," which is hilarious despite profiling two rather despicable characters who curse enough to embarrass a longshoreman.

“Mary’s Wedding,” the new play at The Colony Theatre in Burbank, has no gowns, no “Bridezillas” and no family shenanigans, as one might expect. What it does have is thunderstorms and explosions and a large wooden circular horse, as one might not expect. It is a love story set in the Canadian prairies and European battlefields around the time of the World War I. “Mary’s Wedding” plays out in a unique blend of dreams, reality, flashbacks and flash-forwards, woven together with impressively smooth transitions.

The sixties swept the nation and our youth recreated for themselves their own way of thinking and believing. Sexual freedom, emancipation, individualism and void of traditional and social expectations, the country was in movement. David Keepish was drawn in, seduced by the rapid disconnection from the norms of American "life" and while he was not part of the youth, in fact not even close, this middle aged professor left his wife and son to join the new and exuberant culture. He justified his "escape" by and with his own incredible intellect backed by agreeing remark from Yeats and his late night soul defining discoveries by the lure of Haden's music.

HAPPENINGS Hello, surf cat More wave action is on the horizon for the Huntington Beach Pier, and this time it's all for the wahines. B1 ALSO: Can a restaurant thrive after just a month? John Volo says yes. B1 A love story and a thriller provide good late summer movie-going. B2 CITYSCAPE Who's Surf City? The battle between Huntington Beach and Santa Cruz heats up, and this time a third city is involved: Sacramento.

Paul Andersen DOWNTOWN -- The lead characters are among the most familiar historical figures in Western civilization, but their 2,000-year-old tale is one that hasn't been presented in this manner before. At its core is a timeless love story and a world going through all sorts of changes. Ultimately, it is a story that could easily take place in the here and now of our current world in upheaval. Welcome to "Mim," the new musical love story of Mary and Joseph.

Vivid account of tragic event Michael Fairman of Glendale is an actor who appeared as Adlai Stevenson in "Thirteen Days" about the Cuban missile crisis. I thought "Pearl Harbor" a vivid and exciting account of the surprise attack that brought the U.S. into World War II. The suddenness, horror and devastation are truly captured by the cinematography and special effects; and I thoroughly experienced what must have been the terror and confusion of that Sunday morning.

Darleene Barrientos What do you get when you mix a community theater group's actors and an Academy Award-winning star as their coach? Find out Friday when the Stepping Stone Players presents its production of "West Side Story," after weeks of coaching help from George Chakiris, who played both "Riff" and "Bernardo" in previous stage and film versions of the love story. Chakiris won an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his performance as Bernardo in the 1961 film.

I admit that this latest work by director James Gray took some warming up to, but once I did, I began to feel the kindness of this story and sorry that I had resisted for as long as I did. ?Two Lovers? is certainly not the most conventional of love stories but that is the difference that lends to its charm. Leonard, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is a brooding, troubled, 30-ish man who is facing some problems getting his life together. Still living at home and working in his father?

“Mary’s Wedding,” the new play at The Colony Theatre in Burbank, has no gowns, no “Bridezillas” and no family shenanigans, as one might expect. What it does have is thunderstorms and explosions and a large wooden circular horse, as one might not expect. It is a love story set in the Canadian prairies and European battlefields around the time of the World War I. “Mary’s Wedding” plays out in a unique blend of dreams, reality, flashbacks and flash-forwards, woven together with impressively smooth transitions.

The subjects of life, death and love are (literally) tripping through writer-director Darren Aronofsky's mind in his latest film, "The Fountain." Set, more or less, in three different eras ? Spain during the Inquisition, present-day New York City, and sometime in the future ? Aronofsky's tale is an ambitious one amid so much of today's safety-first movie-making. That Aronofsky comes up short of his wild ambitions is not the story of a movie gone bad, but one with elements of wild-eyed interest and too much of the just plain ordinary.

Most love stories unfold in a similar fashion. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back. Or girl meets boy, girl doesn't realize boy is perfect for her, but after much trial and tribulation, boy and girl end up living happily ever after. In reality, it's usually a lot more complicated. Lanford Wilson's "Talley's Folly" is an example of a worst-case scenario. It makes love feel like invasive dental surgery performed without anesthesia on an impacted wisdom tooth. That's not to say this season-opening show from the Syzygy Theatre Group isn't entertaining.

The pitfalls associated with adapting one's own novel for the stage are graphically displayed in the Sidewalk Studio Theatre's world premiere of "BANG! A Love Story." Author Anthony Mora's attempt to transfer his rarely intriguing story from the printed page to a three-dimensional realm is fraught with problematic missteps. Somewhere in this mishmash lurks the tale of Janie, a teenager whose desire to join a fringe Los Angeles religious group is intercepted by John, a New York journalist specializing in cults.

Presented as a fantasy, "The Lake House" is a warm, sincere, love story that immediately engages the audience and flows charmingly right up to the final scene. Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are reunited on screen and it is the chemistry between these two that makes this film work. Last seen together in "Speed," the early-'90s thriller, Bullock and Reeves are far more appealing these days as they both near their 40th birthdays. They've never looked better. Bullock plays Dr. Kate Forester, a resident in the emergency room of a large Chicago hospital, who has recently moved from a modernistic, glass house built on the shore of Lake Michigan.

The sixties swept the nation and our youth recreated for themselves their own way of thinking and believing. Sexual freedom, emancipation, individualism and void of traditional and social expectations, the country was in movement. David Keepish was drawn in, seduced by the rapid disconnection from the norms of American "life" and while he was not part of the youth, in fact not even close, this middle aged professor left his wife and son to join the new and exuberant culture. He justified his "escape" by and with his own incredible intellect backed by agreeing remark from Yeats and his late night soul defining discoveries by the lure of Haden's music.

"Brokeback Mountain" wins big at the 63rd Annual Golden Globe Awards. The film about two gay cowboys struggling with what is expected of them and what they truly feel won Best Picture in the drama category, Best Director Ang Lee, Original Song "A Love That Will Never Grow Old" lyrics by Bernie Taupin, music by Gustavo Santaolla and Best Screenplay by Larry MacMurtry and Diana Ossana. Lee's acceptance speech showed humility and class with his hope that movies may make a change in attitudes.