I'm watching Hell's Kitchen UK right now - Fox's replacement for the Gordon Ramsay Hell's Kitchen, which ended last week with an entirely unconvincing win by Christina. The British show has a celebrity spin - instead of aspiring chefs, the contestants are celebrities - boxers, models, TV presenters and the like. The only names I recognize are Kelly LeBrock (anyone remember The Lady In Red?) and singer Paul Young (I'll never forgive him for his cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart.)

The chef in charge isn't Ramsay but his mentor, Marco Pierre White, a man whose reputation as an authoritarian and bully actually exceeds Ramsay's. White retired at the top of his game years ago, after realizing that his third Michelin star signalled how little fun he was getting from cooking, and retired to a montage of fishing and shooting - killing stuff, basically. He's a broody, unhappy looking man, redolent of curdled testosterone.

He's described by Piers Morgan of Celebrity Apprentice fame as "the only man, to my knowledge, who's ever made Gordon Ramsay cry."

"I didn't make Gordon Ramsay cry," White rumbles. "He made himself cry."

That's a line I've got to use, with almost limited variations.

"I didn't punch him in the face. He made me punch him in the face."

"I didn't crash that car. The car made me crash the car."

"I didn't make that owl extinct. The owl made me make it extinct."

Gold. Pure gold.

I arrive at my round table room fifteen minutes early to find that every seat at the table has already been taken, and that a second row of chairs have been dragged into the hotel suite, for a second tier of interviewers now hugging the walls. I haul another chair into the room and find a position off to the side, then settle into to listen to my fellow junketeers - faces I recognize from previous months of this sort of thing - gossip and complain. At one point, one of Warner's press girls comes in and summons the woman sitting directly to the right of where our subject will be sitting to come with her and move to another room.

As soon as she leaves the rest of the room explodes in relief - it seems that she's foreign press, not domestic, and notably unloved by the other junket veterans, who tell each other how much they were dreading her apparently aggressive questioning style and preoccupation with the more gossipy, personal questions that the European press lives on. One of the veterans - a white-haired older gentleman I see at most of these things - admits that he was the one who alerted the Warner press girls to her presence in the room and got her moved, for which he receives a round of congratulation. The junket press is an organism, timidly but functionally self-policing, which deals with threats and irregularities like an immune system, isolating infection in the interests of self-preservation.

Or at least that's how I see it. I wonder how long I'll be able to cultivate - at least for myself - a provisional outsider status on the junket circuit. I'm probably already fooling myself.

The afternoon goes smoothly, after the almost ritual 15-minute delay in starting. We get Dark Knight's producers first, then director Christopher Nolan, then the stars. Gary Oldman is funny, adopting a perhaps-calculated blokey persona peculiar to some English actors to a subtly distancing effect, and uses his familiarity with some of the veterans to buy himself some happily-proferred goodwill, just a little gesture of recognition flattering them into docile interrogators - not that an L.A. press junket is HUAC, exactly. Christian Bale is intense, his eyes hooded and almost expressionless, and he's clearly thought his way through his interpretation of his characters with a thoroughness that would do a critic proud. He's a real oddity in Hollywood today - someone known entirely for his work, with a personal life about which not a single detail comes readily to mind.

I've gotten used to discovering, with few exceptions, that too many female actresses are much prettier onscreen than in real life. The pounds - 10-20 depending on which truism is being invoked - that the camera really does add (it looks more like 30 to me, going by my handful of TV appearances) suggest flattering curves on actresses who look dangerously underweight in real life. I recall being surprised at how attractive Diane Lane was in person during a junket for Untraceable last year - she's done her level best to look haggard in several recent roles - and I have the same reaction to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has the sole female role of any real size in Dark Knight.

Onscreen, Gyllenhaal is often cast as the oddball - the eccentric girl, the smart and randy weird chick in a larger group of women (see Mona Lisa Smile.) At the junket, her appeal is as much personality as looks - she comes off as amused, engaged and confident, and the assembled press fall into the approved rapt attitude. She ends her stint in our room - her handlers practically tugging at her shirt - telling us that the Hollywood indie film is dead, and that there is no way she could make the films that made her name just a few years in today's harsh entertainment economy. An interesting statement to make at an event for a movie whose budget - never mind potential earnings - could probably fund a whole city's elementary school budget for a year.

Almost everyone makes a point of talking about the late Heath Ledger, whose absence is noted continually all afternoon, in nothing but the most glowing of language; many even conspicuously use the present tense when referring to him. All of them make a point of insisting that he didn't seem in any say depressed or emotionally fragile while making the film - there are rumours that Ledger's portrayal of the Joker absorbed him to an unhealthy degree. His death, they all insinuate, was misadventure - an accident, not a suicide. This is clearly a message we're supposed to take away from this afternoon.

Back in the '50s, and then again in the '70s, when the movie industry was suffering at the hands of television or simply in a creative doldrums, there was an explosion of new formats and gimmicks - VistaVision and CinemaScope, Technirama and Cinerama, 3-D and Sensurround. For some reason - which might be obvious - we're seeing that again, with the sudden viability of IMAX theatres and the return of 3-D. I couldn't help but think of this as I sat down in the The Bridge IMAX Theatre at the Howard Hughes Center to watch a screening of The Dark Knight.

At first, it looked like Chrisopher Nolan's sequel to Batman Begins was simply going to be a bigged-up print splashed across the centre of the IMAX screen, but then suddenly the frame expanded to fill the whole expanse in front of us, with an establishing shot that felt positively vertiginous. The film would do that again and again, returning to regular widescreen then blowing up again, with a noticeable change in image quality; anyone with a fear of heights should be given fair warning about one particular shot, with Christian Bale in Batman drag standing on the top of the Sears Tower while the camera swings around him, then settles next to him on the ledge. I actually felt a bit queasy myself.

In a summer full of box office monsters, Dark Knight is potentially one of the biggest of them all, and I see no reason to see why it won't. I also see no reason why it was given a PG-13 rating, considering that it's probably one of the darkest films anyone will see all summer - a 2 hour and 32 minute downer delivered at maximum volume and velocity.

It's also goin to get the late Heath Ledger an Oscar nomination, in all likelihood; a lot of pretty astounding things happen onscreen, but his performance is probably the most memorable thing overall. Nolan has managed to do what Ang Lee failed to do with The Hulk - depart from the essential silliness of the comic book film, but mostly by banishing anything resembling levity or satire; it's no surprise that the painted-on smile on Ledger's Joker is the closest thing to humour in all of its 152 minutes.

There was a crowd staring through the windows of an opticians' shop on North Beverly Drive yesterday, on my walk back to the hotel from the Paley Media Center. Some of the crowd had cameras - big cameras, with flashes - so I had to assume there was a celebrity sighting in progress, but I didn't stick around to find out more. The crowd was small, and I assume this sort of thing isn't uncommon around here anyway.

I'm in L.A. - again - for the Dark Knight junket, two nights at the Beverly Wilshire hotel and an afternoon of round table interviews with the stars. In the meantime, I'm here with a front row seat on Rodeo Drive, the white hot epicentre of conspicuous consumption on this side of the continent. In the meantime, I'm holing up in my hotel room with a copy of the Mad Men box set, hiding from the California sun with stories of early '60s ad executives in the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan at the dawn of the Kennedy administration.

The Paley Media Center was my only extracurricular destination on this trip - no lightning shopping excursions this time. There are two Paley Centers - one in New York, one here, whose lobby most people might be familiar with from a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry gets into a feud with Ted Danson about his anonymous donation of a museum wing. I shared a plane here with Norm Wilner, Metro's former movie reviewer, and we split a cab to the hotel and discovered we had hours to wait for our rooms, so after lunch in the hospitality suite, my trip to the Paley got bumped to the top of my schedule.

The Paley is a different sort of museum - its collection is mostly TV shows, stored in a library somewhere in the building accessible in a room of little TVs with headphones. You could probably lose yourself in this sort of thing - I know I could - but something tells me that the basic idea could be moved online at considerable savings in real estate and maintenance.

I don't think Norm wanted to hang around and share some vintage William F. Buckley with me, so he heads off to find the LaBrea Tar Pits while I start the Firing Line 20th anniversary special from 1991. A copy of Buckley's last book was a Father's Day present from my wife, so I'm on a bit of a Buckley jag these days - three months late, with my usual perfect timing.

If you go by what you read, Buckley's show was a political bull-baiting ring, and I have only the vaguest memory of ever seeing anything but glimpses of it during its long run. I think that reputation is probably due to Buckley's own reputation, which is based - for most people with the merest cursory knowledge of who he was - on a famous clip of him and Gore Vidal coming close to blows during their televised debates during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

The truth is far from the image. At least from the shows I watched at the Paley, the pacing of Firing Line wouldn't last on cable news today - it's slow, even leisurely, the pace set by Buckley himself, who checks his notes frequently, pauses to find the right word, and lets his guests hold forth for far longer than any news chat show would tolerate today - in one of my favorite clips, he smiles brightly as Alan Ginsberg picks up his little harmonium and chants a sutra.

Never mind how literate and substantial the show sounds now compared to, say, The Capitol Gang or The Daily Show, to name some very disparate examples - Buckley's cordiality is wildly at odds with his reputation for arrogance and high-handedness, especially when faced with less than politically sympathetic guests. It seems like an anomaly, unless you remember that his peers - interviewers such as Dick Cavett or David Susskind - employed the same sort of patient, convivial tone. No matter what you might feel about Buckley, you actually feel smarter when you watch the show, or at least feel a compulsion to rise to its level. More proof, if it were needed, that we are probably well down the steepening slope into grunting political inarticulacy.

Alright then - one more So You Think You Can Dance post. Can't help it - this and Hell's Kitchen are my shows of the summer, and if I can't devote as much space to either show as I'd like in my column, I might as well bore you to death with it here.

My beef of the night: I must really love this show, because most of the music is effing dreadful. I mean punch-to-the-temple, chopstick-in-the-ear dreadful. Tonight the lowlights on the elimination show were tunes by Ani DiFranco and Jason Mraz, chosen as the soundtrack to the routines the bottom six dancers danced to convince the judges not to eliminate them. The song choice alone would deserve a ticket home if I were Nigel Lythgoe. I'm just sort of a jerk that way.

Why does no one choose Dylan, or the Gang of Four, or Black Flag, or Tim Buckley if they feel an overwhelming need to seem sensitive or somesuch? Why is whiny, amelodic, rhythmic twaddle pop to the top of the queue when dancers choose tunes? It isn't a rhetorical question.

Totally off-topic post here, just to test out the system on our new address, but bear with me, people. (That is, if anyone is reading out there - you know you can leave comments here, if only just the occasional "Get bent, McGinnis" or "I hate your picture.")

I work at home, in an office that affords a second-storey inner-city view of trio of trees - a maple, a weed-like false sumac, and some third arbor of indeterminate provenance. In the winter, the view of leafless branches can be pretty bleak, but in the summer I have a nice, leafy canopy to gaze at while trawling for inspiration - a view that, until recently, was usually populated by squirrels and little else.

This year, however, has seen an explosion of bird life; the usual sparrows and grackles, but new additions like robins and blue jays and another stranger - a black bird, smaller than a crow, that reveals upon closer inspection an irridescent blue-green head. (Look, I'm no Audubon - that I can identify anything more than a seagull and a pigeon is a minor miracle.)

My wife swears it's the result of the city ban on pesticides - a sort of bird dividend. I've also noticed a lot more sightings of avian predators - hawks circling high overhead. I'm sure the local cat population is a lot happier, as well. Any theories, folks?

(UPDATE: A casual web search reveals that the black bird with the blue head is a common grackle. Just what the bird with the dark plumage covered in a lovely pattern of dots is remains a mystery to me. I've got to buy a book or something, I guess.)

Perhaps because I'll be watching So You Think You Can Dance three times this week, I'm getting a bit too into the show right now. Right now I'm watching as the likely standout routine of tonight's show is turning into this weird debate, based on the fact that Mia Michaels has misunderstood some very basic bit of information about the paralyzed daughter of the choreographer. For not the first time, Nigel Lythgow has felt obliged to step in and correct her, to which she's retorted something about "freedom of speech" that sounds more than a bit petulant. It's all dragging on a bit too long for anyone's comfort, particularly the choreographer and his wife.

I'm reminded how much I dislike Mia Michaels at moments like this - her routines, her attitude, her "it's all about me" worldview. That's the great thing about the media, isn't it? There's nothing like having strong, negative feelings about strangers.

My wife was nice enough to TiVo last week's results show for So You Think You Can Dance while I was in L.A., and we're watching it tonight. I know we're only in the first week of the finals, but I'm having a hard time remembering any of the names of the dancers this year. It doesn't help that there's a Chelsea and a Chelsie, a Courtney and a Kourtni, in addition to all these creatively spelled names - Kherington, Rayven, Katee. All those Ks and stray H's definitely aren't helping these names stick in my mind.

It also probably means that none of them are standing out for me from the first glance - there's no Benji Schwimmer in this group - though it looks like the girls are a stronger bunch than the guys. My wife is enjoying it, notwithstanding - I think this is her favorite show, ever. I definitely can't complain about watching it twice this week, and not just because of Cat Deeley.

I'm sitting here trying to get a column done on Swingtown, CBS' new summer sitcom with a quality cable kind of vibe. It's a post I've been meaning to write for a few days now, based on the critical response and the Parents TV Council's protests to the network, calling for it to be preempted. Of course I haven't actually tuned in to watch the thing when it debuted a week ago - I pride myself on watching as little TV as possible to actually do this job. Trust me, that would only make it harder.

Which brings me to the second most valuable tool I have to get this job done, after tvtattle.com - bittorent. I was able to find a massively-seeded copy of the first episode before I left for L.A., and I've literally just been alerted that episode 2, which aired this week, has just finished downloading. This would, no doubt, give someone at CBS a major case of the vapors, but it's made my job so much easier. YouTube used to fulfill this function, but you can only get so far on 5-10 minute segments, with spotty availability and YouTube's frequently dodgy connections, not to mention the big fat sunburned target they've become for the legal departments of the networks.

Still, as long as the studios refuse to build digital pressrooms, and cling obstinately to the ad-time revenue model, this is the best way to consume TV I can imagine right now. One day, somebody is going to get it.

Disliking L.A. is made eminently easier by the efforts of its main industry. I decide to spend my last night in Four Seasons making my way through the DVD set of season one of Californication, David Duchovny's Showtime series. Duchovny plays a writer, a transplanted east coaster lured out to L.A. by the promise of lucrative work after his latest novel is optioned for a movie. He's managed to lose his girlfriend and develop a ferocious case of writer's block in the time he's there, and is drinking and screwing his way to the bottom with a vengeance.

Duchovny does self-satisfied the way Cary Grant did charming, which is more than occasionally annoying. He also attracts women - attractive, even intelligent women - despite obviously being what one of them describes with pitiless accuracy as a loser. It's hard to believe that a raging alcoholic would look as good, or pull as effortlessly, but it's TV after all, and Hollywood is full of people who like to imagine that they'll look keep their looks and wits on the way down that they all fear is waiting for them up ahead.

Whenever he's given an opening, Duchovny's character describes L.A. as a wasteland, a soul-sucking hell-hole that kills talent and love, and implores his girlfriend, both before and after they've split up, to come back with him to New York. He ends up writing a blog for the website of something called Hell-A magazine, where he rhetorically asks why the city seems intent on destroying its young women, knowing full well that he won't get an answer, since that's simply what the city does, an essential part of its nature since Fatty Arbuckle rogered some poor starlet to death with a champagne bottle.

The city comes off a lot like Duchovny's character - a mixture of smugness and self-loathing that can probably go to its grave without doing anything to resolve the contradiction. I get hooked on the show at some point early in the morning, order room service breakfast and plunge ahead through all 12 episodes while packing, leaving with just enough time to make my flight.

My major sense memory of this trip will be two smells - pee and woodsmoke. For some reason, both odours linger over the city while I'm here, their scent thick in the air at the open air gym by the hotel pool, and as I'm driving through Culver City on the way to the airport. (Confronted by the smell of piss while working out, I wonder whether it might even be me, and discreetly sniff at my clothes and shoes when I'm back in my room. Getting old is murder.) Could there be some horticultural reason? Does the  urine tree bloom in early June in Southern California? I'll probably never know.

I am, nonetheless, haunted by the smell of wee-wee as I leave the city, knowing as I go that I'll be back again, in two weeks, for the Dark Knight junket.

Do not trust computers. Computers are stupid. Computers lie. Computers would have depleted my wallet and sent me to Orange Country. The hell with computers

Roundtables over, I only have one pressing obligation left in Los Angeles. My oldest daughter turns 5 on the day I fly back, and my absence has made a trip to American Girl Place to pick up her present less a possibility than an obligation. A very quick Google search tells me that it's located on something called The Grove; Google Maps gives me a location, which I quickly scribble down on a hotel notepad and head for the lobby.

I give the address to the cabbie, complete with nearest intersection and local landmark - something called Shaffer Park. He says it doesn't make sense and asks to see the address. We head out slowly into L.A. rush hour traffic while he checks map books during frequent stops, then tells me that, if I'm correct, this means a 45-minute trip all the way out to Orange County.

I say that makes no sense; I was assured that my destination was in Los Angeles, no more than a ten minute drive from my hotel. He tells me that there is a The Grove Drive, but there's also a mall called The Grove just a few minutes ahead of us, and then produces a map of the city and points out where in Orange County we need to go if my Google Maps coordinates are correct. He tells me to decide; I make a mental calculation and realize that I'll barely have enough money in my wallet to pay for the cab ride to Orange County, so I tell him to head for the mall; if it isn't there, we head back to the hotel, and I give my regrets to my daughter when she wakes up Sunday.

The Grove is a sprawling complex - an open air mall with its own streetcar line running through its streets, but as we make the first turn I see it up ahead: American Girl Place. I shout and point to the driver, who seems dubious - no doubt still hoping for a lucrative fare to Orange County. No, I say - this is it, right here, Google Maps was wrong, you were right. I realize how idiotic the sentence sounds as I say it, but I'm grateful to have avoided the worst case scenario of a disappointed little girl crying on a Sunday morning, her image of Daddy, world traveler and provider, eroding under the acid bath of her tears.

I pay and step out, take a few quick pictures of the exterior and head inside, taking a moment to orient myself. It's more spacious than either the Chicago or New York stores, and it takes me a moment to realize that what I need is spread over two floors of shopping - Coconut the Dog and his dog house, the Bitty Twins, and two books, one a present for one of Aggie's friends. A greeter sees me turning slowly on the spot to get the lay of the land and asks me if I need any help; no, I say. Just give me a minute, I'll be alright.

As with the other AG stores, there are groups of girls and moms, several of the former for each of the latter; up ahead I see one of the little girls from the movie with her parents and sisters and a brother who stands, hands in pockets, sullenly resigned to the ordeal ahead. I find Coconut and his kennel, then head up the escalator fo the Bitty Babies shop. Each character doll has her own room in the larger part of the second floor, with a fully-dressed diorama of furniture and accessories and, where applicable, her movie playing on a TV screen. There are neat shelves stacked with dolls and books, clothes, beds, desks, scooters, pets and whatever else the Mattel has produced to fill out their world.

With extra room to move, I notice that the girls on their shopping outing have this dreamy, dazed look as they move slowly through the rooms, taking in everything as if they're sleepwalking. In New York and Chicago, everyone seems more harried and intense, myself especially, as we churn around each other hunting down our quarry. In New York, each mom seemed to be in charge of an amalgamated group of daughters and their friends; in Chicago, there were more dads, negotiating with their daughters as they went through the store, trying to keep to the bare minimum of impulse purchases in addition to whatever particular doll or accessory was the reason for the trip.

I am always the only lone dad I see on each trip, an almost ghostly presence occasionally acknowledged with a curious stare. The L.A. store is no different, which goes a long way towards explaining why AG remains an almost underground phenomenon, despite its wild success; at least half the population is either unaware of it or tacitly excluded from its culture, second-class citizens in its culture by virtue of gender. There is, I'm sure, some unconscious payback for centuries of patriarchy implicit in this.

I find an empty cash, pay and bolt for the street. Like every other American Girl Place, the L.A. store radiates a force field that repels me, discouraging loitering or idle browsing. No matter - my task is accomplished, and a birthday saved. I head back to the hotel as the sun sets.

The concentrated 2-hour interview session for which we've all been gathered here kicked off almost twenty minutes late with the four little girls who were chosen from an open casting call to play Kitt Kittredge's best friends in the movie - four little girls of varying age, size and shyness with their moms waiting out in the hotel hallway while they were cycled from room to room to be grilled by a succession of journalists.

Grilling is, well, probably too harsh a term. Coaxed, perhaps, or gently quizzed. I can't speak for the other press rooms, but our was a pretty unthreatening bunch, with at least three members of the Christian media in attendance, which should say something about the market to which the American Girl movies play. Sitting across from them felt like a further test of my paternal potential - something AG seems fated to facilitate in my life. Ranging in age from 8 to 12, I couldn't help but regard the quartet of girls as a preview of some gallery of potential scenarios I'll be facing in a sampled range of alternate futures I might face. The smallest one - 8-year-old Erin - reminded me of a school friend of my oldest daughter. I hoped that they'd have a good time this summer - the summer of the Kitt Kittredge movie, as they'd probably look back on it for the rest of their lives - and discover, at the end of it all, that they didn't want to be in the movie business.

The strangest thing about becoming a father to daughters is the way it changes how you look at girls, even young women; suddenly you feel concerned, even protective. A year and a half ago I remember a round table in New York with Sienna Miller, who was still a focus of the tabloid press and paparazzi. Once upon a time, I might have seen a pretty girl, but on that day I found myself worrying about her, wondering what her parents were thinking, feeling sorry for them. It took real restraint not to begin my questions with a fatherly "Now, young lady..."

Wallace Shawn was next, looking and sounding very much like Wallace Shawn. Maybe it was just the group I was with, but I noticed that everyone was modifying their tone so that, even if there was an adult at the table, they asked their questions as if they were talking to a kid. I mostly wanted to ask Shawn about his father, who was the editor of The New Yorker, and whether he felt that Woody Allen typecast him for the rest of the film with his role in Manhattan. Another writer sort of edged around the subject with a question about whether he was happy with his career, to which Shawn replied that, if he knew that he was going to become an actor, maybe he would have done something about his speech impediment, which sounded refreshingly honest, especially if you've done a few of these things. He probably would have said more, but his handler was already motioning for him to move on to the next group.

Since the afternoon started late, each interview zipped by with what felt like a quickening pace. Abigail Breslin, the film's 12-year-old star, kept turning each question into a plea to her mother, sitting by the door of the room holding a well-behaved little Pomeranian, to get her another puppy. As they left, her mom came back to make sure we knew that she already had two dogs, and two cats, etc., etc., I was grateful when Julia Ormond, who plays Kitt's mother, took the initiative to contradict the day's perceived wisdom, which was that this film was somehow the first kid's picture ever to take on a realistic subject and hint at the presence of bad things in the world. Fairy tales, she reminded us, have that in abundance. It's always interesting to see how groups of strangers, assembled for some common task, can arrive at some common "truth" without discussion. There's something in there about the dark side of democracy, if I felt I had the energy to pursue it in the harsh morning light of Los Angeles.

Roundtables start in about an hour, and I've just finished up the lunch I picked up at the buffet in the hospitality suite. I've run into the film's director twice now in the elevators, and Wallace Shawn, who has a small part in the film, is in a room two doors down the hallway. I'm trying to get questions together, on the assumption that I'll be at a table where I'll have a chance to talk.

Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl is the fourth AG film, but only the first theatrical release, a co-production between the late New Line Pictures, Picturehouse and HBO. The first AG film aired four years ago, a Christmas picture based around Samantha Parkington, the Gilded Age doll, followed by TV movies featuring Felicity Merriman, the Revolutionary War doll, and Molly McIntyre, the WW2 doll.

Since I've become a parent, I've realized that there are movies I've seen now many more times than films that I'd call personal favorites. I have probably seen Molly: An American Girl On The Homefront more times now than The Maltese Falcon, If.... or Lawrence Of Arabia. I'm pretty sure I can say the same thing for Peter Pan, Finding Nemo and certain episodes of Dora The Explorer and Yo Gabba Gabba.

The Molly movie starred Molly Ringwald as Molly's mom - an irony that amused me personally, since Pretty In Pink was my wife's favorite film as a teenager. It's not a bad little film, and hardly saccharine - moms and girlfriends in the supporting cast keep getting "We regret to inform you..." letters and bursting into tears, and the sense of insecurity that saturated the home front during the war is very nicely evoked by director Joyce Chopra.

Kitt Kittredge would be a finishing high school by the time the Molly movie takes place - the character and the film are set in the middle of the Great Depression, as Kitt's family starts slipping out of the middle class after her father loses his car dealership to the bank. There's a crime that needs to be solved, so the movie - and the books that inspired it - are modeled after the Nancy Drew mysteries. There are also lessons to be learned about tolerance and jumping to conclusions, and in spots the film plays like propaganda for FDR's New Deal.

The franchise has gone big with this film, attracting a cast that includes Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine in the title role, Julia Ormond and Chris O'Donnell as her parents, and a supporting cast that includes Stanley Tucci, Joan Cusack, Jane Krakowski, Glenne Headly, Wallace Shawn and newly minted teen heartthrob Max Thieriot. Shot in Toronto, it also features locals like Kenneth Welsh and Colin Mochrie.

Most of them, including a trio of little girls who play Kitt's friends, will apparently be at today's roundtables. It's a decent enough little film - sweet and very earnest, and I can guarantee that my daughter and her friends will love it, and that by the time it's out on DVD, I'll probably have seen it more times than Citizen Kane, Casablanca or Patton.

I do not love L.A. Perhaps that would explain my viewing choices in transit to and upon arrival here in sunny California, where I've been hiding in my hotel room, the curtains drawn against the pitiless, bone-bleaching sun.

On the plane, when not napping, I watched some of the shows I've banked on my media player - a BBC documentary on Joe Meek, a Classic Albums show on the making of Motorhead's Ace Of Spades, and an episode of Life On Mars. Last evening, digging through the review DVD's I've brought with me to watch for next week's column, I settled on Grant Gee's Joy Division documentary, which Alliance is releasing alongside Control, Anton Corbijn's recent Ian Curtis biopic.

So - a paranoid, closeted, British music producer who killed his landlady and himself, the grungiest of all British heavy metal bands, a show set in '70s Manchester, and a portrait of the most depressing band ever produced by Northern England. Sunless, slate-grey skies, bad food, perpetual damp and despair as a way of life - this is my happy place, the comfort zone I'm retreating to when confronted by freeways, tan lines, fusion cuisine and celebrity culture.

My name is Irish, but my people are from the north of England - Birkenhead and Lanark, outside Glasgow. Tough places, or so I'm told, but I'd obviously rather be there - at least in my mind - than at the beach.

I've only ever gotten the briefest of glimpses of why people live in California. It was during my first junket here, when we were put up in a hotel in Santa Monica, right on the beach. It was a nice hotel, and very California - you'd have been certain that it was built in the '20s, in the Spanish mission style that's become the L.A. realtor's equivalent of art deco in Manhattan; a style that symbolizes the good life in the city's Golden Age. That is until you got up close to the exterior brickwork or examined the details in the room, at which point it was obvious that the whole place was pastiche, skillfully but recently built. In L.A., everything has the potential to be a movie set.

I ate my breakfast one morning in the dining room looking out over the beach, and watched surfers paddle out and ride in while a tractor drove up and down the sand dragging a huge rake that smoothed its surface like a zen garden. It was winter, and a fog kept rolling in and out from the Pacific; later that afternoon, after the roundtables were over and I had time to kill until my flight home, I took a stroll down the beach, to the Santa Monica Pier, which was wreathed in a thick fog. The boardwalk was full of joggers and bicyclists, and little groups - couples and families - would emerge from the fog by the waters edge, where the surf was rolling in and out over the glistening wet sand. The sun, diffused by the fog, bathed the whole scene in an eerie, shadowless light.

This, I thought, is why people live here. Granted, few of them can actually live right here, on the narrow strip where the land meets the sea; most, in fact, live in the sweltering valleys further inland, but this is probably the image they keep in their minds when the temperature rises into three digits and police helicopters shine their lights over their backyards. Their beach scene is my sunless, perpetual autumn.

06.13.08 3:36AM PST

One of the first things you learn when you have kids - after your gag reflex gets suppressed, your sensitivity to noise disappears, and you discover just how little sleep you can function on - is that children have a whole culture of their own that you can be totally unaware of if you either don't have kids or your kids have passed from one discreet age group to another.

Earlier this week, at the press screening of Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl, I ran into Steve Gow of The Movie Network, who also does movie writing for Metro. A single man without kids, Steve was completely unaware of the American Girl phenomenon. Knowing I'd definitely be making a trip to American Girl Place in Los Angeles while we were here, I gave him a little tutorial on the whole AG thing, and said he could tag along with me and confront the AG phenomenon full force. I told him that there was no way he could write about AG without this unique experience. Mostly I just wanted to be with someone who'd be even more disoriented while navigating the pre-teen churn that is an American Girl Place store. Being an enormous coward - like most single men - Steve has since reconsidered.

American Girl was founded in 1983 by Pleasant T. Rowland, a teacher and writer from Wisconsin, and began as a line of historical dolls meant for the pre-teen market that Rowland thought was ill-served by either baby dolls or Barbie. Each doll in the series has a backstory set in some significant period in American history - Revolutionary Virginia, the pioneer midwest, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression and World War Two. There are also dolls for what you'd crudely call the "ethnic" market - Kaya'aton'my, a Native American doll, and Josefina Montoya, a Mexican girl living in what would later become New Mexico after the Mexican-American War. (I really reccommend that you take a look at the Wikipedia page on AG - it's as detailed as anything you'd expect to find on, say, metallurgy, or the Bretton-Woods trade agreement.)

The company, owned by Mattel since 1998, added a 1970s American Girl doll just recently - Julie Albright, whose parent are divorced and whose backstory touches on ecology, feminism, Watergate and the Vietnam war. She also has a best friend doll, Ivy Ling, who you have to assume was meant to address the Asian-American market. My wife, who thinks a lot harder about these sorts of things, is certain that Julie was added to the line to appeal to mothers like herself who grew up in the '70s and kids going through a divorce today.

I was completely, blissfully ignorant of the AG phenomenon until I met my wife, who made AG part of our courtship. A few months after we started living together, she asked if I wanted to tag along on a business trip to Chicago, which happened to be one of the three cities with an American Girl Place - an emporium for the dolls, each with its own "doll hospital," tearoom and theatre. Childless, we toured the store, and sat in the fuschia-striped tearoom eating tiny sandwiches and drinking little cups of herbal tea while getting the hairy eyeball from the moms in the room who were justifiably dubious about this childless couple in their midst. My wife admitted years later that this outing was a test of my fatherhood potential, which I would have failed had I shown symptoms of a full-blown anxiety attack.

AG has become a teaching tool for U.S. history, and been applauded for its role in reinforcing self-esteem in young girls, and I've since discovered that its appeal extends far outside the U.S. as well - yes, even into Canada, with its venerable tradition of casual Yankee-phobia. Its line of books - inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne of Green Gables and Nancy Drew depending on the era - have made it "one of the top 15 children's publishers in the nation" - I'm quoting from the movie press kit here - and it has sold "more than 123 million American Girl books and 14 million American Girl dolls since 1986, and its award-winning American Girl magazine has a circulation of more than 620,000, making it the largest publication dedicated exclusively to girls ages eight and up."

It's like discovering that not only is there a subculture obsessed with dressing like glam rock bands, but that your sister, best friend and half of your co-workers are going to its next convention, and that it has a magazine that outsells Time and Newsweek put together. Or at least that was what I thought when first baptized in the AG phenomenon. Nowadays I simply nod heavily when my daughters drop the names of Samantha Parkington and Emily Bennett into conversation, as if they're kids they know from the Montessori. To paraphrase a line from an old blues lyric, the men don't know, but the parents of the little girls understand - and still owe money on VISA paying for it.

06.12.08 2:07 PST

Any hotel feels like heaven after the purgatory that is cross-continental plane travel, but the Four Seasons on Doheny is probably an upgrade, paradisically. It's a junket hotel, and after checking in, I emerge from the elevator at my floor to find a big poster for The Love Guru right in front of me, and a bunch of obvious security types - stocky builds, dark suits, aviator shades, earpieces - loitering in the hallway next to my room. I have a funny feeling that Mike Myers is near at hand.

There are, of course, worse ways to spend a few days every month than on a movie junket; the hotels are good, the work demanding only in a few hours-long bursts, and there's the chance to carve a few shallow notches on the bedpost of your travel resume. This is the fourth - fifth? - time I've been to Los Angeles since the year began. I do not love this city - sun-baked and utterly without a centre, it looks nothing like my mental picture of cities, and I always feel a bit dazed whenever I'm here. Shopping - usually for gifts for my daughters or wife - is the only distraction I usually allow myself. More on that later.

I love hotels. Back when I was a freelance photographer, I used to love getting sent away to do cover shoots for magazines. Arriving to find my room reserved and paid for, I'd place my gear carefully in a corner on on a chair, make a few phone calls to finalize arrangements, then unpack everything for cleaning and testing. As cameras and photography have a faintly military air - all the talk of "shoots" and "shooting," the matt black gear with its knurled knobs and rubberized brips - you feel like an assassin-for-hire, or at least I did, when I was a younger man. Perhaps that says something very sinister about me.

I mostly loved the anonymity and almost antiseptic nature of hotels, and how every room is basically the same, no matter the chain or city or quality of your accommodation; the big, easy-to-use clock radio, the TV remote placed thoughtfully on the bedside table, the selection of liliputian toiletries, the stacks of bright white towels - whiter than anything you could have at home, no matter how much bleach or Oxy Clean you'd use. I'm not at all surprised that the high-end boutique hotel look, all dull white walls and solid, simple but expensive-looking and masculine furniture, has become the gold standard on home makeover shows. With the explosion in business travel, hotel rooms have replaced cottages as the symbol of refuge and escape.