Hollywood

AH, THE OUTRAGEOUS behavior of Big Finance - we remember like it was only yesterday. Because it was. It's essentially only yesterday that Bank of America transferred all of its potential Merrill Lynch gambling debt to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the taxpayer, even as it tried to impose a $5 debit-card fee. Only yesterday that MF Global went bust after mingling investor money with the company's gambling account and making stupid bets, reaffirming the wisdom of Glass-Steagall, and exposing the lunacy of Wall Street compensation - MF head Jon Corzine tried to pay himself $12 million on the way out, after taking the stock from $7 to $1.50.

* COVERT AFFAIRS. 10 tonight, USA. * HOMELAND. 10 p.m. Sundays, Showtime.   IF OUR IMAGE of non-Jason Bourne-style CIA agents has expanded beyond men in dark suits, we probably have Valerie Plame to thank as much as anyone. The very public outing the former CIA operations officer (and Lower Moreland High grad) underwent in 2003 may have ended Plame's career at the agency, but it was a gift for Hollywood, now free to cast attractive women as spooks without even the hint of a wink.

They might be able to entertain a crowd, but can they design? That's the big question as new celebrity fashion collections fill stores this fall. The splashiest launch - Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony's lines for Kohl's - hits sales floors across America on Wednesday. Sofia Vergara's clothing and home goods will be in Kmart locations later this month, and the Kardashian sisters - Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney - recently unveiled their "Kollection" at Sears. These lines join a full field of offerings by celebrity designers, from Victoria Beckham and Beyoncé to Jessica Simpson and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

WHEN COLLEEN Begley was arrested with a box of weed in the trunk of her Jeep in South Jersey, authorities checked her social-networking sites and found a familiar friend: Ed "NJ Weedman" Forchion. The South Jersey native and frequent political candidate now dispenses marijuana at his Liberty Bell Temple, in Hollywood. He first met Begley when she was in high school and he was smoking a joint at the actual Liberty Bell. "I'm proud of her," Forchion said recently from California.

LOS ANGELES - It may seem odd, with "The Help" gobbling up box-office dollars, to lament the lack of movies about African-Americans. But the announcement Tuesday that Brad Pitt, Chiwetel Ejiofor and director Steve McQueen would collaborate on a new film called "Twelve Years a Slave" brought to the fore an uncomfortable reality: It may be a very good moment for movies about black history, but it's a terrible time for movies about the contemporary black...

OINT BLANK" will leave you breathless. Unfolding at a blistering clip from its slam-bang opening through its bravura close, it grips you at frame one and doesn't let go. A tiptop French thriller that's reminiscent of films from Alfred Hitchcock to 2006's "Tell No One," "Point Blank" is genre all the way. Its story of an ordinary man facing extraordinary peril doesn't go anywhere we haven't gone before, but seeing familiar material presented with such...

THOSE OF US who sometimes complain about the lack of realism in "reality" TV should probably be careful what we ask for. Because that's apparently what we're getting on Oxygen's "The Glee Project," where the disconnect between how the contestants perform in weekly challenges and how "Glee" creator Ryan Murphy deals with them can be, um, frustrating to watch. "But that's how the entertainment business is," said "Glee" casting director Robert Ulrich, who functions as a Tim Gunn-like mentor on "The Glee Project.

THE LINK BETWEEN film school and Sundance is famous (and often lamented), but there's something different about the students who made fest fave "Another Earth. " They went to Georgetown University, and they didn't study movies - they made them. "Another Earth" star (and co-writer) Brit Marling made short movies with her GU pals while working on her economics degree and interning at Goldman Sachs. In due time, Marling becomes, I suspect, the first actress in history to turn down an offer at Goldman Sachs to go to work in movies.

It's wartime in America. It has been for a decade, but as critics have pointed out, you wouldn't know it at the multiplex. Films about the war on terror have been few and far between. Audiences didn't exactly flock to theaters for World Trade Center (2006), Rendition (2007), Green Zone (2010) or Fair Game (2011). Our leaders told us to mobilize and make sacrifices during WWII, and Hollywood inspired us with exciting, patriotic, propaganda-rich pics such as Destination Tokyo (1943)

MIAMI - When he arrived on the scene, he was Hollywood Hamels. Sometimes that was meant as a compliment. Sometimes not so much. It spoke to his style and his good looks and the fluid, almost effortless, grace with which he seemed to throw a baseball. To his Southern California cool. To a future that seemed positively golden. At times, though, there was a nastier connotation. It implied a guy who didn't pitch as well in day games as he did at night. Who didn't like it when the weather was too hot or too cold.