Underworld

"Underworld," by Don DeLillo. Scribner. 827 pages. $27.50.Don DeLillo's magnificent new "Underworld," at once among the finest works of American fiction of this century, opens at the Polo Grounds on Oct. 3, 1951. Behind Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, who vomits on Sinatra's shoe, and Toots Shor sits the sinister J. Edgar Hoover. On the same day Bobby Thomson hits a home run that breaks the hearts of the Dodgers and the Soviets explode an atomic bomb.DeLillo has produced in one rich volume a work which surpasses even John Dos Passos' three-volume "USA."

Each week, The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar -- another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. Use it in a sentence in a comment below, or at You Don't Say, and the best sentence will be featured next week. This week's word: CHTHONIC The Greeks always had a word for it, and this time it's an ominous one. Chthonic (pronounced THAHN-ick, rather like the drive-in restaurant by someone with a lisp)

With mob boss John Gotti trading in his silk suits for a lifetime of polyester prison garb, Tommy Gambino permanently banned from the garment industry and Vic Orena facing a murder rap, the current generation of Italian gangsters is mostly filed in the garbage can of New York crime history.Who will all those veteran detectives and FBI agents who built careers tracking the inner workings of the five families go after now? And what area of crime will those Hollywood producers glamorize next?

Marie Daramy calls it an "underworld war. " It used to be that her street in East Baltimore was full of drug dealers — they sat on the steps, hung out on the corners. Residents knew this, and when a shooting broke out, Daramy said, it was easy to chalk it up to the activity outside. These days, the street is typically clear, and the overt dealing is largely a memory. But the violence persists. "This place was full, and every house had a drug dealer," said Daramy, who has lived in her home for 20 years.

What a hollow, relentless mess is Underworld. Supposedly a horror-thriller about an age-long war between vampires and werewolves, it's really about dark cinematography, cool black costumes, bad hair and guns that shoot tons of bullets but hit nothing. Underworld is all sturm und drang, relentless firepower in pursuit of nothing other than an audience that thinks to itself, "Wow, ain't that cool." A few minutes of that, of course, goes a long way; even the most shallow of audience members is soon going to start thinking, "Hey, shouldn't there be a movie here someplace?"

MOSCOW -- It could have been Chicago in the Thirties. Any gangster worthy of his violin case was there for the underworld convention, talking tough, divvying up territory and scheming to get liquor sales moving for New Year celebrations.And then Eliot Ness had to crash the party.The latter-day Eliot Nesses -- in this case 150 members of the Moscow police department -- raided a hotel restaurant on the outskirts of the city this week and arrested 66 gangster chieftains and their bodyguards.

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.

If you were a "Twin Peaks" junkie, then David Lynch's movie prequel, "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," will be a wallow in Peak culture so intense your circuits will lock up. It may turn you into the Log Lady.If you didn't get it then, you're not going to get it now.Lynch's specialty seems to be conjuring imagery that is deeply unsettling, but in odd ways. He's not some twisted gross-out master; he likes to creep up on you, as if he's working sideways, insinuating his way into your consciousness until he's ready to completely disconnect you from reality.

I left New York in 1958 to become a reporter in Chicago, which then was the training ground and battlefield for the most aggressive and energetic journalists in the United States. I immediately began covering cops and crime and the federal courts for the legendary, now dead, City News Bureau, and then the Cook County Criminal Courts for the Chicago Tribune. I covered mob trials and watched legendary mobsters led silently in and out of grand jury rooms. I went on raids of operations of "the Outfit" -- a term proudly particular to Chicago, where "Mafia" was seldom used.

Step Up Rating -- PG-13 What it's about -- Kid from the streets finds some focus when he is sentenced to work, and dance, at a school for the arts. The Kid Attractor Factor -- It's all about kids, and hotties Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan star. Good lessons/bad lessons -- Talent trumps discipline, drive and ambition. Violence -- Fistfights and a shooting. Language -- Pretty clean, for a PG-13. Sex -- Suggested. Drugs -- None, not even in the underworld parties. Parents advisory -- It's got the Disney brand on it, but the message, a disdain for what it takes to make it in the performing arts, is idiotic.

FILM Joaquin Phoenix: in 'Two Lovers': Shaggy and sedate, Joaquin Phoenix made such a splash recently on the Late Show with David Letterman, it would be easy to overlook why he was there. He was supposed to be hawking Two Lovers, which isn't the hot mess that Phoenix's bizarre appearance insinuated. He delivers a complex, solid performance, playing an unbalanced but likable photographer juggling two very different women. And yes, he's clean shaven. In theaters Friday. CONCERT Mos Def: Actor, poet and political activist, the renaissance man of hip-hop can be unpredictable and headstrong, but he's never boring.

Today is the final day of the 10th annual Maryland Film Festival. Check out these highlights: For the chance to experience films the way your grandparents (and great-grandparents) saw them, see Josef von Sternberg's 1927 Underworld, a silent and one of Hollywood's first gangster flicks. The three-piece Alloy Orchestra, whose scores for silent films qualify as national treasures, will be on hand for the musical accompaniment. (11:30 a.m., Charles 1) Jeffrey Schwarz's Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, profiles one of Hollywood's greatest hucksters, the guy responsible for The Tingler, a 1959 Vincent Price flick where selected seats in the theater were wired, the better to elicit screams from the audience.

When police officers burst into a West Baltimore Street rowhouse on a hot August afternoon, their target was a suspected drug dealer, and the raid yielded a stash of cocaine, heroin gel caps and marijuana. But they found much more: a loaded revolver as well as two pit bull terriers and the weights, chains, homemade harness and other equipment that are telltale signs of dogfighting. That volatile mix - drugs, guns and dogfighting - has fueled a deadly subculture that is tearing at some city neighborhoods, police, animal enforcement and health officials say. Pit bulls, or "pits" as they are commonly called, are prized by drug dealers and other criminals for their loyalty, muscular beauty and aggressive nature, a characteristic that can be manipulated to sadistic extremes.

With the two successful Underworld films under his belt, director Len Wiseman was ready to talk turkey about his next project. Sitting down with some executives from Fox, he says, he was open to all sorts of suggestions. Save one. "I couldn't see myself doing a straightforward action cop film," Wiseman, 34, says over the phone from his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. "That's not really something I'm in to." What he was in to, or at least what he was known for, were Underworld (2003)

Falling Man By Don DeLillo Scribner / 256 pages / $26 Every great disaster, even at a distance, intensifies our sense of mortality, filling our nostrils with what W.H. Auden called "the unmentionable odor of death." Stunned as we were by the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001, we were also returned to a primal awareness: Old bets were canceled, new bets placed. Small surprise that so many novelists took up the challenge of representing the reconfigured present. In the short time since the disaster, John Updike, Claire Messud, Ian Mc- Ewan and several others have mobilized fictional premises around it. Provocative and engaging as some of these narratives have been, most have used the calamity as a plot element - an unquestionably powerful way to affect the characters and their situations.

Step Up Rating -- PG-13 What it's about -- Kid from the streets finds some focus when he is sentenced to work, and dance, at a school for the arts. The Kid Attractor Factor -- It's all about kids, and hotties Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan star. Good lessons/bad lessons -- Talent trumps discipline, drive and ambition. Violence -- Fistfights and a shooting. Language -- Pretty clean, for a PG-13. Sex -- Suggested. Drugs -- None, not even in the underworld parties. Parents advisory -- It's got the Disney brand on it, but the message, a disdain for what it takes to make it in the performing arts, is idiotic.

* ''Class Action'' Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio play father and daughter attorneys who find themselves working on opposite sides of a court case. A drama.* ''Guilty By Suspicion'' Robert De Niro plays a 1952 Hollywood movie director who is told he must appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee to ''clear'' himself of taint. A drama.* ''If Looks Could Kill'' Richard Greico plays a student who goes to Paris where he is mistaken for an undercover agent. Action, comedy.

Each week, The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar -- another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. Use it in a sentence in a comment below, or at You Don't Say, and the best sentence will be featured next week. This week's word: CHTHONIC The Greeks always had a word for it, and this time it's an ominous one. Chthonic (pronounced THAHN-ick, rather like the drive-in restaurant by someone with a lisp)

The Shadow Thieves Anne Ursu Ptolemy's Gate Jonathan Stroud Miramax/Hyperion / $17.95 / Ages 12-15 The final book in a series is often the most difficult to bring off. Jonathan Stroud is successful, largely because, from the beginning in The Bartimaeus Trilogy, he created a character, the genie Bartimaeus, whose witty overview and curmudgeonly interactions with the central characters are believable. Bartimaeus narrates some chapters, and we learn his history from the times of Ptolemy in much detail.

Queen of the Underworld Gail Godwin Random House / 336 pages / $24.95 If novelists are bound to write about "what they know," what happens when "what they know" is snore-inducing? A not very good novel, of course, which is exactly the kind of book Gail Godwin has now produced. The usually competent Godwin - whose previous novels, including A Mother and Two Daughters and Evensong, climbed best-seller lists and got nominated for prizes - cleaves too closely to events in her life with this latest offering.