Good morning, D.C. With much of the hot political action this week taking place at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, it’s our job to pull your focus away from trivial issues the mainstream media seem obsessed with, like global climate change, and bring it back down to what’s really important at the local level, like complaining about how gasoline could be about to get really, really expensive in Maryland. What’s that you…

>> Mark this day, D.C. It took a full 37 days for us to use the “Marion Barry in trouble with the law again” keystroke in 2007. Federal prosecutors are asking that the Councilman’s probation in his tax-evasion case be revoked. They say Barry has failed to meet the terms of his plea agreement by not paying back taxes and not filing again in 2005. After being convicted on federal charges of not paying…

MONDAY Marla Ruzicka, who was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq, was a dedicated peace activist who not only labored intensely for the victims of war, but sought to flip the peace movement’s entire paradigm by waging peace within the system, a move that set her apart from her colleagues, but also got results, including landmark legislation for the innocent victims of war and the respect of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle….

If last week’s review of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep was about a movie that tried to make real life look like a comic book, Christian Volckman’s first feature-length film, Renaissance, tries to make a comic book look like real life. The basis of the movie’s imagery is motion capture technology, by which the movements of an actor’s body are recorded by sensors attached to his clothing (used memorably by Peter Jackson in the…

Michel Gondry’s latest film, La science des rêves (The science of dreams), opened last Friday in Washington under its American title, The Science of Sleep. After an extended period working in the United States, notably in collaboration with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman on Human Nature and the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry has returned to his roots and set this film in his old stomping ground, the 18th arrondissement of Paris. As…

FRIDAY: >> We caught Echo and the Bunnymen in Lancaster, PA back in May, the night before HFStival, and it was one of the best shows we’ve seen all year. It’s too bad singer Ian MacCulloch’s voice didn’t hold up the next day at M&T Bank Stadium. But we’re willing to let the band off the hook for that, provided they play a great show tonight at the Black Cat. Recent European setlists have mixed…