Leonardo Dicaprio

Some 800 to 1,000 of Baltimore's beautiful twenty- to fortysomething-year-olds turned out at the Meyerhoff last weekend for the BSO's "Symphony Rocks." The evening began with a concert that featured Mayor Martin O'Malley and Ravens kicker Matt Stover as guest "conductors." Later, guests could take a shot at conducting themselves, with a virtual conducting computer game that was one of several entertainment stations set up in the lobby during the party afterward. This wasn't a fund-raiser, notes event chair Sharon Nevins, but more of a friend-raiser.

"It's magic time," Jack Lemmon proclaimed right before he stepped into a take for one of his movies. As a movie critic, I say it to myself before the lights go down. It's a way of exorcising anything that might get in the way of enjoying the picture. In a media age that's taken the art of handicapping from sports to politics and fine-art auctions, it's impossible to walk into a movie without knowing whether it has "buzz." So why leave the buildup to studio flaks? Here's what some of the peaks and valleys look like when you have nothing to go on but the titles and the talent involved.

All boys' lives are different in details, but all are the same, too, in the larger outline. And the largest outline of all sooner or later belongs to that caricature of horror and terror, that buffoon and bully, that dark, unreachable tyrant, that stupid, uncool moron -- the father figure."

Bowie Community Theatre's production of Catch Me If You Can should prove a good catch for folks who enjoy sorting contradictory clues in a plot filled with twists and turns and figuring out who is real among characters with false identities. My first surprise was discovering that Bowie's offering is not related to the show I expected - the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio - but instead is a 1965 mystery/comedy written by Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert.

It's Europe Day! (Yeah, we didn't know that either.) Welcome to your trends report for Friday, May 10. You're not alone if you were in the dark about the EU's annual holiday: Apparently, very few Europeans know that it exists. Nonetheless, between that, soccer championships and some market-related news articles, Europe managed to get some major attention on Twitter this morning. Also getting heavy traffic -- mostly on Google search -- was the NBA. This weekend's matchups include Heat-Bulls and Warriors-Spurs.

The petite, pale Kate Beckinsale has been giving vampires a lot of thought these days, seeing as how she's playing one in Underworld (which opened Friday) - and a vampire's victim in the soon-to-be-releasedVan Helsing. "Vampire tales have always been about sex," Beckinsale says. "And vampires are very sexy. That whole love and lust and the illicit kiss on the neck cursing you, and giving you eternal life. "You kiss somebody, OK bite somebody, and you transform them, like having sex with someone and having that transform you into a pregnant lady.

Let's hear it for Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf!The unlikely leader in People magazine's Most Beautiful People poll has exposed online surveys for what they are - junk mail for the brain. And in the process, ol' Hank has provided more than a few laughs for Webheads around the world.If you haven't heard about this flap, it's a wonderful tale from the World Wide Theater of the Absurd. It started, of course, with the People Web site (www.people.com), which asked its surfers to vote in an online poll for Most Beautiful Person.

Capsules by Michael Sragow and Chris Kaltenbach unless noted. Full reviews at baltimoresun.com/movies. Apocalypto -- pits a spotless young man, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), the son of Flint Sky (Morris Birdyellowhead), a Mayan jungle chieftain, against evil marauders led by their majestically efficient captain Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo) and the satanically sadistic Snake Ink (Rodolfo Palacios). Although it's told in a Mayan dialect, with English subtitles, the movie is just an arthouse film for jocks.

Not since Robert Downey Jr. in Chaplin has a star grown as an actor and grown up within a role as excitingly as Leonardo DiCaprio does as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. And The Aviator zooms light years beyond Chaplin as a movie. DiCaprio leaps onto the screen as a 21-year- -old moviemaking tyro and airplane nut mounting an unprecedented spectacle, Hell's Angels (1930), with the largest private fleet of biplanes in the world and a number of cameras that provokes disbelief even from Louis B. Mayer.