Charlottesville Breaking News

By RICHARD ROEPER

Given the wretched and sometimes wonderful excesses of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge, not to mention a trailer that gave the impression Luhrmann's interpretation of The Great Gatsby would be one extended anachronistic music video, it turns out Luhrmann's Gatsby is first and foremost F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby.   

Fitzgerald's heartbreakingly poetic prose wins out. Sometimes his work is literally right there on the screen– deceptively simple strings of a dozen words or so, as powerful and relevant now as they were nearly a century ago.    

This is not to say the 2013 version of The Great Gatsby isn't a cinematic hot mess most of the time. It's big and bold and brassy, filmed in crisp tones dominated by blues and reds (and, of course, a certain green light), and it fills every second of its 142-minute running time with images designed to take your breath away, whether you're marveling at the overhead shots of Manhattan circa 1922 or appreci...

Steven B. Deaton is gunning for the Democratic nomination for Charlottesville commonwealth's attorney– again– and on a rainy Wednesday, May 8, under the protection of the Pavilion's roof, he made his case.

"We have filled our jails and prisons with nonviolent offenders–it's time to reverse that trend," said Deaton, speaking directly about race in the matter by recommending the 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, which points out that the United States incarcerates 25 percent of the prisoners in the world, and that the majority of those in jail are African-American men.

Deaton is challenging current Commonwealth's Attorney Warner D. "Dave" Chapman, who unseated Deaton in 1993. Deaton says there's a need to scale down prison growth, an issue he says Chapman hasn't taken up. 

"Some people don't want to talk about this," said Deaton, who is now in private practice. "We need to stop the prison-industrial system and start something new. I think we can make much better use of our money."

As Deaton pointed out, the state has built a new $100-million prison in Grayson County, despite declining crime rates locally and nationally.

"The goal of the criminal justice system," said Deaton "should not be to fill up as many jail spaces as we can, but to see how many can be left empty. And we should strive to see how many jails and prisons are...