Best Hikes with Dogs: Las Vegas and Beyond is the latest publication from the Mountaineers Books.
Number of trails listed: 50
Travel time: three hours maximum
Essentials for people: 10
Essentials for dogs: 10
Mentions of water: 69
By Kimberly Lewis, Paula Jacoby-Garrett
$16.95
The Peanut Butter & Jelly Critic |
Despite allegedly being sweetened with honey, this month's peanut butter selection, Arrowhead Mills Crunchy Peanut Butter, has a strangely bitter taste. It's also crunchier than any peanut butter I've ever tasted—the chunks are nearly whole peanuts, while the peanut butter itself is thin and oily. It's balanced out by this month's jelly, St. Dalfour Strawberry Conserves, which is sweet and pleasant. It's fruit-filled but not lumpy, and has a nice strawberry flavor that's almost enough to drown out the disappointing peanut butter. (2.5 stars)
More info:
www.lovepbj.com
DVDs |
Style Wars (NR) (4 stars)
$27.95
Graffiti: art or vandalism? That question has been debated for decades, especially in cities where taggers have turned entire transit systems into a) mobile galleries, or b) rolling eyesores, depending on your point of view. Made in 1982, this provocative documentary may have been the first serious attempt to fairly present both sides of the debate. It introduces the most prominent taggers of the day and argues that graffiti, breakdancing and hip-hop music all were a slice of the same Big Apple pie. A second disc updates viewers on the fates of the B-boys, offers a photo gallery of their work, and adds previously trimmed material.
Layer Cake (R) (4 stars)
$26.96
Anyone looking for a stylish British gangster thriller such as Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels need search no further then Layer Cake. Matthew Vaughn produced both of Ritchie's movies, and only volunteered to direct Layer Cake after Mr. Madonna turned down the assignment. The plot involves a misdirected cache of ecstasy, and the efforts of several powerful crime bosses to claim it, but it hardly matters. What counts is the performance by Daniel Craig as a fitful drug dealer desperate to get out of the game while the getting's good. There hasn't been a more dynamic performance by a male star all year.
Bliss: The Complete First Season (R) (3 stars)
$24.95
This erotic, Canadian anthology series is shown here on the Oxygen channel, usually after Talk Sex with Susan Johanson. Unlike Showtime's pioneering soft-core Red Shoes Diaries, its tales of horny gals of various ages, backgrounds and emotional states are the products of women directors and writers, and theoretically, are intended primarily for Oxygen's target female demographic. Despite the show's proximity to the "Sex Grandma" though, the prudes at Oxygen have decided Americans are less mature than Canadians when it comes to exposed nipples. The DVD's producers share none of the same qualms.