Indie icon Jim Jarmusch returns with "Broken Flowers," another ode to mysterious characters with deadpan deliveries

By Steven Rosen

LOS ANGELES -- "Broken Flowers," the contemplatively quiet, quintessentially indie film by writer/director Jim Jarmusch, has the kind of cast you might expect to see in a splashy, big-budget Hollywood comedy.

Bill Murray plays an aging, taciturn bachelor, Don Johnston. Spurred by the arrival of an unsigned letter that says he has a child, he reluctantly goes on the road to visit old girlfriends with whom he has lost touch -- Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange among them. Not always sure why he's doing this or whether he should, he's egged on by his boisterous Ethiopian neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright).

The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons DVD package revisits the music of the Woodstock generation

Review By Steven Rosen

A wonderful television moment -- and immortal one, maybe -- occurs midway through the June 25, 1970, Dick Cavett Show when Janis Joplin asks fellow guest Douglas Fairbanks Jr. if he knew F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Just moments earlier, sitting and regaining breath after performing wrenching, powerfully soulful blues-rock versions of "Move Over" and "Get It While You Can," Joplin had told Cavett, "I'm a big Fitzgerald freak." Fairbanks, 61 at the time and the well-traveled son of silent-era film star Douglas Fairbanks, recalled knowing him as a schoolboy. But what made a greater impression on him at the time, he says, was meeting playwright J.M. Barrie: "I was thrilled at meeting the man who wrote Peter Pan."

Book Review:

"Rock Around the Clock:
The Record that Started the Rock Revolution"
By Jim Dawson
Backbeat Books
$16.95; softcover

Review by Steven Rosen

Did Hollywood create rock 'n' roll?

That sounds like a strange, ridiculous and even offensive question to anyone who likes rock and all its musical derivations. After all, rock is fundamentally an indigenous, authentic American-heritage roots music. It's proud of its realness - shaped by country, blues, jazz and folk and popularized by streetwise, outsider rebels like Elvis, Little Richard, Bo Diddley and Jerry Lee Lewis. For American pop-culture lovers, that history of rock's creation has the same importance as the story behind the framing of the Constitution.