Entertainment [5]

If Leonardo DiCaprio's 28th-birthday bash was just another party, the Titanic was just another boat.

  

What's your bag?

Here are some things you should know about celebrity chronicler Bill Zehme:

Patricia Cornwell thinks she has gotten her man.

Starring as mustachioed millionaire Texas private eye Matt Houston in the eponymous 1980s series, Lee Horsley's facial hair was his trademark. Today the actor has a more complicated relationship with his on-again, off-again whiskers.

About Schmidt, a dark comedy from the brilliant mind of Alexander Payne, will undoubtedly earn Jack Nicholson his 12th Academy Award nomination, which will add to his current record as the most nominated actor ever. It may be a year for oft-nominated actors: Meryl Streep is likely to earn a 13th nomination for either The Hours or Adaptation.

Adaptation is about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman who is hired to turn a book called ''The Orchid Thief'' into a screenplay.

The old saying that sequels rarely live up to the originals has become a cliche. But there's often a lot of truth to cliches.

Denzel Washington, an ensemble player on the popular 1980s hospital drama ''St. Elsewhere,'' didn't quit TV the minute he began making a name for himself in film. Rather, the actor stayed loyal to the medium that launched him, chose his movie roles with finesse, and grew, gracefully, into the marquee star he is today.

The long-anticipated Catch Me If You Can, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, was well worth the wait.

Drumline does more than capture the excitement of marching bands; it gets their clockwork beauty as well.

It will probably be a long time before another movie pairs Euro-cinema princess Isabella Rossellini with XXL Latino rapper Fat Joe, yet that's precisely the personality split that makes Empire so compelling.

The epic legend of The Lord of the Rings continues -- and the second installment, The Two Towers, is an utter triumph.

Sandra Bullock often plays a spunky all-American charmer whose beauty is only thinly covered by a scrim of depressed shlumpiness, nothing the right guy couldn't peel away.

While other working stiffs on the subway riffle through their tabloid newspapers in the instantly discardable romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan, Marisa Ventura (Jennifer Lopez) pores over Alice Miller's cult-fave psychological treatise ''The Drama of the Gifted Child.''

Kids and crime -- it's a combination that often leads to tragedy. And, occasionally, to comedy.

''Finnegans Wake,'' the unreadable James Joyce novel, is a logorrheic logjam of high modernist name-checking and smug trilingual puns.

The cardinal rule of criminal detection was carved in stone more than a century ago. It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes intoned. It biases the judgment.

It's been 30 years in the making, but Martin Scorsese has created a cinematic masterpiece with Gangs of New York.

We in the trade like to think of the celebrity interview as an art. And art it most certainly is: The art of strategic insinuation, the art of preserving relationships while tickling readers with innuendos, the art of (how to put this diplomatically?) pasteurized honesty. But, as the late Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) once observed to the Onion A.V. Club, The idea ...

In an exotic city percolating with intrigue, an American bar owner works all the angles. Even as war clouds gather, he's playing every side against each other. No one knows where his loyalties lie, but everyone is sure he will always look out for himself. In the end, he will surprise them all. And himself.

While international crises like the Spanish oil-tanker spill have captured the world's attention, another disaster has gone largely unreported: the global exclamation-point shortage.

''I've worked too long and hard to get where I am -- and I am not going to wear swastikas on my [breasts],'' kvetched one ''Springtime for Hitler'' chorus girl while rehearsing for the musical centerpiece of Mel Brooks' directorial debut, The Producers.

Beth Orton doesn't like to talk about her songs. She prefers to let them speak for themselves, she says -- partly because they express feelings she can't put into conversation.

Some people take a walk around the block to clear their heads, but Art Garfunkel has taken that notion to a new level: The singer likes to walk across continents to find inner peace, picking up where he last left off with each new weeklong voyage.

The first time, they say, is the toughest.

Bruce Feiler's work wasn't finished.

To borrow a lyric from Ervin Drake, it was a very good year.

As always, the Golden Globe nominations were a mix of the expected and the surprising. Here are our top five surprises and sure things:

In this, the ''American Idol'' era, it sometimes seems that every other red-blooded teenage girl wants to be a diva. Public acclaim, designer clothes, lots of loot, celebrity beaus, acting opportunities -- what's not to like? Well, not to trash anyone's dreams, but all those aspiring Kelly Clarksons out there might want to stop and consider the downside.

Every sport has its Greatest Game. NFL fans would probably point to the 1958 championship between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts, an overtime affair that vaulted the professional game into the modern age. Baseball fans, who have plenty of choices, might single out Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, a 12-inning affair that revitalized interest in the sport.

For anyone who remembers the golden era of punk -- roughly 1976-1979 -- it's got to be slightly disconcerting to see what punk has become. Let's face it: The happy-face, let's-all-jump-around-and-act-silly music of acts like Sum 41 and blink-182 seems pretty lightweight when stacked up against that of the Sex Pistols or the Dead Boys.

Wanted: twentysomething woman to bring a dose of attitude and a modern age philosophy to a daily roundtable dish on politics and culture. Must swoon with dignity over male celebrities and worship the ground that Barbara Walters walks on. Pays well.

The meter is a crock.

The musical Chicago danced away with eight Golden Globe nominations Thursday -- more than any other movie -- including one for best musical or comedy film and acting nods for stars Richard Gere, Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones for their lead roles.

Costarring with Macaulay Culkin in 1991's My Girl, Anna Chlumsky got a taste of the pampered life of a child star.

The tour manager of the Girl's Aloud -- currently number one in the UK singles charts -- has died in a car crash.

The season finale of HBO's hit series The Sopranos was a ratings winner Sunday, though it saw its audience size shrink from the beginning of the season.

U.S. actor and director Sean Penn, on a three-day visit to Baghdad, has said he wanted more insight into this frightening conflict.

After sixteen NBA seasons, he never won a title, still no one doubts that Sir Charles Barkley is one of basketball's elite.

A hand-written teaser card by author J.K. Rowling containing just 93 words of the eagerly awaited fifth Harry Potter adventure has sold at auction for £28,680 ($45,231).

Get the boot!

Those choreographed dance moves. Those shiny shirts and candy-coated lyrics. Hordes of adoring teenage girls scrambling for front-row seats and autographs. Honestly, where would the music world be without boy bands?

Comic Ali G had a narrow escape after a bullet zipped through his hotel suite as two men shot themselves in a double suicide pact in the next room.

It's not just for the UPS guy anymore.

Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple formed the spectacular backdrop to what was billed as a 'once in a lifetime' event -- a charity gala featuring legendary Spanish tenor Jose Carreras.

Chuck Barris created TV classics such as The Dating Game and The Gong Show. And in his autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, he also claims he was a CIA agent.

Joe Strummer, lead singer for seminal British punk band the Clash, has died at the age of 50.

Joe Strummer, the lead singer for the landmark British punk band The Clash, has died at the age of 50.