Another January dud. Broken City drops hot-shot actors in a quicksand of clichés and watches them sink. Like last week's Gangster Squad, Broken City thinks its Chinatown. Talk about delusional. Mark Wahlberg stars a Billy Taggart, a New York cop forced to resign after a controversial shooting. But Mayor Nicholas Hostetler (Russell Crow) has his back. He hires Billy, now a private investigator, to catch Mrs. Mayor (Catherine Zeta-Jones) screwing around. What seems like a simple adultery case opens a rat's nest of political corruption. Allen Hughes, going solo as director without his brother Albert (oh for the glory days of their Menace II Society), is totally sidetracked by a caffeinated script by newcomer Brian Tucker that runs the gamut from hyper to frenzied. Wahlberg stays solid as the movie goes kaflooey. But I kept wishing his recent costar Ted, the trash-talking bear, would show up and set this movie straight. I mean someone needs to call bullshit on Crowe, struggling with a New Yawk accent, for playing the Mayor in a bad rug and a worse spray tan. This is a broken movie.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.