Dexter

This week's DVD releases feature a very popular teen star, an emotionally tormented serial killer, and a reluctant porn worker. The Last Song, Grade C-: Any film based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks, from The Notebook to Dear John, is going to be sentimental. It's how the actors wade through the emotional bog that makes or breaks the film. In this film about an angry teen (Miley Cyrus) who spends the summer with her father, Cyrus doesn't have the acting skill to get through the bog. Finding Bliss, Grade B: It's hard to believe a film about an aspiring filmmaker (Leelee Sobieski)

Eric Dare says he deserves to keep Dexter the pug, because he has paid for his care and feeding for six years. Doreen Houseman wants Dexter, too, and has spent $20,000 fighting for him since she and Dare broke up in 2006. She has testified she gave Dexter chicken soup when he was sick, and dressed him in doggy Halloween costumes and festive Christmas outfits. Yesterday, a Superior Court judge issued a ruling in the unusual battle that will make at least one accessory mandatory for the 6-year-old dog: a travel carrier.

Take a dry-cleaning deliveryman who blunders gamely into a broadcast-news career and you have the giddy farce Livin' Large!, a hip-hop, happening, tabloid-TV Picture of Dorian Gray. Can an inner-city black youth make it on a lily-white Atlanta television station without selling his soul? It depends on how you define "making it," which in this seriously funny movie by Michael Schultz (Cooley High, Car Wash) means redefining establishment culture. Though Dexter Jackson (gifted newcomer Terrence "T.C.

Former Philadelphian Pete Dexter, author of three novels and many newspaper columns, has written his first telemovie, which will be shown on the Showtime cable channel sometime in April. The telemovie, Paris Trout, is based on Dexter's novel of the same name, which won the 1988 National Book Award. The title role of the murderer is played by one of Hollywood's most convincing villains, Dennis Hopper. Praising the star during an interview here Sunday, Dexter said, "Dennis, he just picks it up and walks off with it. It was an education to watch him work.

Four takes place in Hartford, Conn., on the Fourth of July, 1996, but only one figure in the four-person play the Azuka Theatre Collective presents at St. Stephen's Theater has cause to celebrate. That character, in Christopher Shinn's engrossing but ultimately unsatisfying play, is June, a 16-year-old gay teenager who has scheduled his first sexual experience for the Fourth. It will, in effect, be the day he makes his own personal declaration of independence, and becomes free to be himself.

"The Cure" is a loose, contemporary variation of "Huckleberry Finn," but its subject isn't racism - it's AIDS. In this contemporary story, a boy and his AIDS-afflicted friend decide to raft down the Mississippi River to Louisiana, where they believe they can find a miraculous antidote to the incurable disease. It's false hope born of youthful ignorance. Erik (Brad Renfro of "The Client") reads in a supermarket tabloid that a bayou scientist has developed a cure for AIDS. Erik is neither old enough nor savvy enough to distrust lurid tabloids, so he convinces his sick friend Dexter (Joseph Mazzello)

Doreen Houseman is happy that her battle to gain custody of Dexter the pug has won the support of pet lovers across the country. But that's not what's important to her. Her case has set legal precedent in New Jersey, but that doesn't impress her much, either. Houseman just wants her dog back. Tomorrow, a second trial on the custody of the nearly six-year-old brown pooch is set to begin. The Williamstown woman plans to testify again that her ex-fianc? broke an oral agreement to let her have the dog after she moved out of their house.

Eric Dare and Doreen Houseman broke up more than three years ago, but they still haven't worked out who gets Dexter. Yesterday, for the second time, the matter of the 6-year-old pug was before a New Jersey judge. And at the end of the day, it was still unclear where Dexter would be permanently hanging his leash. Dare yesterday testified that he bought Dexter but let his ex-fianc?e share the dog for a while after they split up, to make her feel better. He said he never intended to give Dexter to Houseman permanently.

The Cure, about the relationship between two misfit 11-year-old boys, one of them stricken with AIDS, is the movie equivalent of a Judy Blume or S. E. Hinton paperback - a story that tackles timely issues for a junior high school audience. And that's in no way intended as a put-down. A sweet, but only occasionally too-sweet, drama that borrows equally from Huckleberry Finn, Midnight Cowboy and a disease-of-the-week TV pic, The Cure is anchored by a pair of strong, unaffected performances.

LOS ANGELES - Dexter's social calendar this holiday season is chock-full of travel plans, party invites, new clothes, special meals and trips to see Santa Claus. Highlights for the 3-year-old cocker spaniel and his owner Carol Bryant, of Forty Fort, Pa., include a couple of car trips to look at light displays. A friend drives so Bryant can hold Dexter in the passenger seat as they drive by the lighted homes. "He especially likes the animation and wags his tail," she said. Like a lot of pet owners, Bryant makes her holiday plans around her dog. Bryant, the editorial, social media and public relations director for Fido Friendly Magazine, takes photos galore of Dexter in his holiday finest and uses them on Facebook, Twitter, her blog, and in e-mails to friends and Christmas cards.

In case you were wondering, the holiday season began on TV more than two weeks ago when that adorable little elf Justin Bieber sang "Fa La La," a song from his Christmas album, on Dancing With the Stars . That was the first flake. Here comes the blizzard. If you're not running amok through Best Buy on Black Friday, you can stay home and watch Jingle All the Way or The Elf on a Shelf . The week after that, the Rock Center tree gets lit in prime time (Please be my Santa, Al Roker)

Let's clear up one thing right away, shall we? Unlike her intense, hard-nosed character Deb Morgan on Dexter , who has a mouth like a riled-up merchant marine, Jennifer Carpenter is not a compulsive curser. The actress is articulate and cultured, a product of the Ursuline nuns at the Sacred Heart Academy in Louisville, Ky., and of the Juilliard School in New York City. Deb, the homicide-detective sister of the homicidal title character on Dexter ? That's a whole other kettle of profane.

After more than a year without a permanent city manager, Coatesville City Council voted Monday night to extend an offer to Gary Rawlings, the former manager of Charles Town, a city of about 4,000 residents in West Virginia. Council President Karl Marking said he was pleased to select someone with Rawlings' experience, which includes a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Notre Dame, a master's degree in public administration from the University of Hartford, and jobs as the city manager in Dexter and Coldwater, Mich.

I GOT A COUPLE of outraged e-mails last week from readers unhappy with the headline on an interview with Julia Stiles, who guest-starred this season on Showtime's "Dexter. " One came from a reader who believed it contained a spoiler about last night's Season 5 finale, something that wasn't likely, since neither I, nor the editor who wrote the headline, had yet seen the episode. Another reader's complaint, though, touched on an issue that's coming up more and more in the age of DVRs, On Demand and so-much-television-so-little time: She was behind on "Dexter" and didn't like seeing a reference to a plot point, even one a few weeks old. And, hey, I get it. I've been behind on "Dexter" myself a couple of times this season, having chosen to watch HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" in (mostly)

DEXTER. 9 p.m. Sunday, Showtime. THE TIMING was prescient. On Oct. 24, Showtime presented an episode of "Dexter" in which Julia Stiles, playing a woman who'd narrowly escaped being killed by a group of men who'd raped and tortured her, flinched her way through a pat-down from airport security, just a few days before the Transportation Security Administration set off a furor with a new policy calling for more travelers to receive "enhanced" searches....

I'M BROAD STREET BILLY - hyped up, psyched up, revved up for Red October - and now I need your help. I want you to get the 2010 playoffs-to-parade mojo going by sending your stories and photos of Fightin' Phils family histories, kids, man/woman caves and beloved pets - Choochuahuas! Docshunds! Rhodesian Lidgebacks! Rauladoodles! Great Shanes! - to me at: GOT NICKNAME? B-Street Billy is shocked that we are probably looking at the greatest Phillies team of all time - and they have no nickname!

This week's DVD releases feature a very popular teen star, an emotionally tormented serial killer, and a reluctant porn worker. The Last Song, Grade C-: Any film based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks, from The Notebook to Dear John, is going to be sentimental. It's how the actors wade through the emotional bog that makes or breaks the film. In this film about an angry teen (Miley Cyrus) who spends the summer with her father, Cyrus doesn't have the acting skill to get through the bog. Finding Bliss, Grade B: It's hard to believe a film about an aspiring filmmaker (Leelee Sobieski)

C. Dexter Schierenbeck, 88, of Gwynedd Valley, who ran his family's Lansdale manufacturing firm before developing a business at home making rosette lapel pins, died of Alzheimer's disease Monday at home. Mr. Schierenbeck was a cartographer in World II, serving in the Pacific, while his family business made parachutes for the war. The Dexdale Hosiery Mills had been founded by Mr. Schierenbeck's father, Ludwig, in the late 1920s. On his 24th birthday, he was on a landing craft when it was torpedoed.

Eric Dare says he deserves to keep Dexter the pug, because he has paid for his care and feeding for six years. Doreen Houseman wants Dexter, too, and has spent $20,000 fighting for him since she and Dare broke up in 2006. She has testified she gave Dexter chicken soup when he was sick, and dressed him in doggy Halloween costumes and festive Christmas outfits. Yesterday, a Superior Court judge issued a ruling in the unusual battle that will make at least one accessory mandatory for the 6-year-old dog: a travel carrier.