In concert: Guns N’ Roses at Fillmore Silver Spring

A. There are many stops on the trail of an Oscars campaign. Nominees do face time at the galas for the various guilds (writers, directors, producers). And then there’s the daytime meet-and-greets at American Film Institute and the nominees luncheon for the Academy Awards themselves. But the clothes get louder where the cameras get brighter at the Golden Globes and later the SAG Awards. A highly subjective ranking of how stars showed up and showed off.

B. “Act of Valor” blends fiction and realism, casting active-duty service members as Navy SEALs (the babes and the bad guy are actors). But some critics question whether the Pentagon has played too large a role in this big-budget Hollywood picture.

C. In her best, loosest moments, Twyla Tharp choreographs the way Woody Allen writes – with a keen understanding of personality, idiosyncratic rhythm and the essence of the performer. In much the same way that Allen crafted the title character of “Annie Hall” (1977) to distill perfectly Diane Keaton’s offbeat hesitancies and craziness Tharp created the leading male role in “Push Comes to Shove” (1976) to tease out the contradictions, playfulness and sexual tension coiled up inside ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov. The portrait still feels right all these years later, even when danced by another man in entirely different circumstances.

D. America’s favorite quiz show “Jeopardy!” is coming to Washington again for a Power Players Week. It’s only the third Power Players Week in the show’s 28-year history; the first time was in 1997, and the other time was in 2004. The syndicated hit’s producers haven’t announced who will compete this year, but don’t expect a lot of politicians who are now in office.

E. The new Mob Museum in Las Vegas, which opened Feb. 14, is a late-generation design that uses many of the same tools and techniques one finds at similar venues focused on subjects where popular culture and history are too complicated to be understood. Think of the International Spy Museum or the Crime Museum (billed as “a must-see for CSI fans”), both in Washington and both conveniently located in a neighborhood near the Mall where the white marble of history blends into the neon lights of food, drink and fun.

F. And yet as you wander through this exhibition of 77 works by 35 (mostly unknown) artists, many of which have never been seen outside of France, there’s always the possibility that something more is happening. The show is heavy with portraits, in part because female artists were allowed to pursue portraiture as a form more in keeping with gender expectations. Yet many of these relatively conventional portraits are uncommonly interesting, especially those of male sitters. Is there a psychic reversal here, an inversion of the usual power dynamic between the “male” gaze and the submissive “female” subject?

G. The public of the previous years loved celebrities – their generals, athletes and film stars – but until New York Daily News photographer Harry Warnecke put them on the Sunday Magazine. Most people only knew shapes and shadows of famous faces awash in smudged newsprint. Dwight Eisenhower and Roy Rogers came to life in bright tricolor prints, a process so rare and complicated few photographers used it. That’s one of the reasons why the National Portrait Gallery is exhibiting “In Vibrant Color: Vintage Celebrity Portraits from the Harry Warnecke Studio,” which opens on Friday.

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In concert: Guns N’ Roses at Fillmore Silver Spring

Guns N’ Roses stepped onto the Fillmore Silver Spring stage a few ticks after midnight on Friday morning and didn’t pack it up until 3:04 a.m. It wasn’t a rock concert. It was a hostage situation.

Where did these guys even find the dare to call themselves Guns N’ Roses? Led by the band’s only original member, frontman Axl Rose, this unfocused eight-man crew pranced and preened with the enthusiasm and talent of a tribute band. For three torturous hours, the guys sucked the life force from some of the most anthemic rock songs ever written - “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Paradise City” and “November Rain” among them.

To call it a train wreck wouldn’t be right. Train wrecks are fast and violent. This was like being stuck in gridlock traffic behind a garbage truck in August.

Since Guns N’ Roses’ beloved original lineup dissolved in the mid-’90s, Rose has become a master of this brand of show business. Fans stuck around him for 15 years but the 2008 opus only proved how far he had fallen. Now, at age 50, Rose is touring with this version of Guns N’ Roses as the band prepares to take part in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April.

Dreamers dreamed that this warm-up tour of relatively intimate club dates might include some of the band’s early members - guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin, bassist Duff McKagan, drummer Steven Adler - that fantastic collision of characters that made Guns N’ Roses so magnetic 25 years ago when its album “Appetite For Destruction” gave rock-and-roll its last massive injection of sex and danger.

Instead, Rose has surrounded himself with sloppy, unimaginative players that make him sound dated, safe and sexless. They had no command of pace or rhythm on Friday morning. Drum fills were dashed off. Guitar leads were hurried. And anytime Rose left the stage for one of the dozens of breathers he took throughout the set, the band would wander off into instrumental dead zones, as if trying to discover the intersection of pathetic and insulting.

Vocally, Rose sounded battered but not beaten. And he made up for any botched notes with those iconic moves, furiously pacing the stage, leaning against phantom walls, doing that snakey thing with his hips. His physicality was the only thing connecting him to a more glorious past.

So why did he keep leaving the stage? It only served as a repeated reminder of the Guns N’ Roses we weren’t seeing.

A 7 Guns N’ Roses started the show at twelve sharp.