Pictureland

A perfectly natural first outing when on vacation in Los Angeles is to explore the abandoned zoo in Griffith Park.  Just as your first morning in the city some 15 years ago included an initial stop at the gift shop of the L.A. County Morgue.  As the morning's tide of traffic relentlessly sweeps west on Los Feliz Boulevard, you're happy to be moving against the tide, up Crystal Springs Drive and into the arid, hilly expanse of Griffith Park.    The Griffith Park Zoo was closed in 1966 in favor of the Los Angeles Zoo, a bit farther north in the park.  The animal enclosures, built right into the hillsides, were left behind, bars now (mainly) keeping humans out and not keeping animals in, a far more humane arrangement as it happens.   Now the abandoned zoo is a good place to hike a bit, pic-a-nic, or leave your graffiti mark. And while you're winding your way back to Los Feliz and Hollywood, why not loop around Silverlake, the actual reservoi...

"Are you alright?"  "Uh-uh."  This question and answer occurs between Ann and Richard Dane, not long after their home has been invaded and the husband has shot dead the intruder.  Unfortunately, the answer applies as well to Michael C. Hall, playing the everyman increasingly in over his head as director Jim Mickle's Cold in July proceeds along its dark and meandering way, something of a dangerous idea that almost makes sense. Employing Hall to labor beneath a starter mullet that enhances his already prominent brow, the producers of Cold in July would seem to have overshot East Texas of the late-1980's and placed him somewhere up (or down) The March of Progress.  He never quite finds the character of the framing store manager, rendered vaguely to begin with by writers Mickle and Nick Damici.  As with Emile Hirsch in another story of Texas mayhem, Killer Joe (2011), Hall is a non-entity with a half-hearted drawl at the center of the film.  This is unexpe...