First, the tough love: For all of 30 Rock's single-camera comic supremacy, its season premieres have a tendency to be the worst of the season. In season two, we were treated to the misfired "SeinfeldVision" episode, and last season kicked off with the amnesia-laden "Do-Over," featuring a sullen, headmasterly Megan Mullally. Season four's premiere, which airs tonight, bucks the trend with a top-notch return, save for one strangely disconnected performance by a key cast member.
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You get one darling exchange between Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) and his young daughter before all bloody hell breaks loose in Law Abiding Citizen, a vicious thriller that can barely wait for the opening titles to end before getting the shitshow on the road. Clyde thinks he's opening the door of his Philly home to the Fed Ex guy, or the delivery guy -- some kind of innocuous guy -- but instead he gets a bat to the face and a knife between his ribs. Two assailants kill his wife before his eyes; he passes out just as his daughter is hauled off for the same fate. It's a brutal opener, and the utter randomness of the violence is supposed to help fire our sympathy for Clyde to a high, vengeful flame. I wish director F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job), had had a little more sympathy for the rest of us, particularly those just trying to finish their Fresca without choking.
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The opening scenes of Where the Wild Things Are capture a very specific moment in childhood anomie. It's a barely post-70's, post-divorce, snowflake sweater moment that is in fact so specific that it does that magic thing of flipping lanes over into the timeless, accessing some core of knowledge of what it's like to be a child raging against the total, flaming injustice of it all. Max (Max Records) is an emotional kid, a 9-year-old whose energy and feelings are constantly outpacing both his fearless little body and the people around him, namely an increasingly distant teenage sister and newly divorced mother (Catherine Keener). Allegiances have been broken, and Max responds with confused but insistent attempts to connect, which in this case means trying to connect a snowball to the head of each of his sister's friends when they arrive to pick her up. The friends respond in kind but the game quickly escalates beyond Max; his tears run hot as his sister, with a cool glance before she hops into the waiting car, leaves him bawling on the curb. She's found her new family, and Max is on his own.
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Like an American version of Michael Apted's Up series, the thirteen-year collaboration between Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau has produced a revealing look at the different stages of becoming a Hollywood player. Their 1996 debut, Swingers, hummed with the restless energy of young wannabes ready for their close-up, and when Hollywood subsequently offered the duo all the perks and shortfalls of the spotlight, the newly cynical sensibility it engendered ran a corrosive streak through their 2001 reunion, Made. The two men have seen their careers dip and stage a mighty comeback in the years since, and in their latest collaboration, the island comedy A Guitar Hero Commercial, we get an unpretty look at the fatty nonchalance of a newly minted Hollywood A-lister.
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The opening sequence of An Education, Lone Scherfig's classic if largely unremarkable coming-of-age story, features familiar images of uniformed schoolgirls being put through their finishing school paces. They glide with books on their heads, practice their waltz steps, and whip pasty batter to an expert smoothness. It's 1961, in Twickenham, England, and the notion of educating women has reached a critical juncture; despite making expansive gestures toward equal opportunity for girls, both the education and social systems are still most invested in preparing them not for life but for a man.
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Chris Rock's Good Hair, a documentary about the pernicious extra- and intra-cultural ideas that have sprung up around the care and presentation of black women's hair, has been generating chatter, lifestyle items, and last week, the crown jewel in any film's publicity campaign, an entire hour on the Oprah show. It also won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Rock and his director Jeff Stilson have clearly touched a nerve that was ready to blow; as it turns out, many of the conversations cropping up around the film are more interesting than the film that inspired them.
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When the combined star power of Couples Retreat rolls over the box office this week, what's also taking place is the second act of an American life. While the film's stars, producers and writers are indelibly Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (enthusiastically abetted by Kristen Bell, Jason Bateman, Malin Akerman and others), the man behind the camera is Peter Billingsley, best known to America as Ralphie Parker from 1983's A Christmas Story -- which in the quarter-century since its release has become the definitive yuletide classic.
That Billingsley has called the shots on such an A-list project as Couples Retreat comes down to his ability to transcend a childhood spent as a star and his enduring friendship with the film's drawcards. But an important factor is also Billingsley's barely known sci-fi horror film from 1993.
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This summer at the the Television Critics Association event for Three Rivers, the cast and creator Carol Barbee were aflutter with excitement for their new CBS medical drama. They had recently upgraded to an expensive hi-tech hospital set on the Paramount lot, attracted Alfre Woodfred as a supporting character and re-shot their admittedly terrible pilot. Barbee repeatedly thanked CBS for backing them while redeveloping the series, a process that including cutting characters altogether and redesigning the format of each episode. Critics were given an exclusive tour of the set by the lead actors and producers, as if to say, "See how much better this looks?" Unfortunately for CBS, while the pilot that will air this Sunday does look better, it still sounds just like the original.
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The words "lie," "truth," and "honesty" are never uttered in The Invention of Lying, save for the "L"-word's invocation during co-writer/director/star Ricky Gervais's cheeky, disembodied voiceover introduction. It's a brain-cramping conceit for much of the film, in which self-admitted "loser" Mark (Gervais) upturns society by instinctively formulating the world's first fib. It makes him a few hundred bucks richer and theoretically more powerful than any man on Earth. Of course, he has done more than simply invent lying; he has also imposed the deep, permanent wrinkle of morality on a populace without guile. It's not nearly as funny as Gervais thinks, but like all that's ostensibly moral, that might be a good thing.
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I'm going to take the advice of Rashi, the medieval French Rabbi whose epigram opens A Serious Man, and receive with simplicity everything that happens to me -- which in this case is the Coen brothers' latest exercise in gleeful moral nihilism. Simply put, it's a slog, mostly; expertly crafted and yet difficult to watch, it features a sympathetic central performance by a wonderful actor, and a host of provocatively repellent cut-outs of Jews, Koreans, and red-faced "goyim." But mostly Jews. Job-like trials are suffered by this main character, and he tries to figure out why bad things keep happening while the viewer tries to figure out why, as in, why did I come here. Then certain things resolve just as certain other, more serious things unfurl to their full, terrifying extension on the horizon. It all feels mean and hard and then, in the final moment, mean and hard and transcendent and right.
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The undead (and theme parks!) are back in the spotlight this week thanks to Zombieland. And vampires have Twilight and True Blood keeping them in perpetual vogue. And Aussies, always aces, are surging after a bloody ripper showing at Toronto. But how, how to tap all these zeitgeist-y elements into one package? Too late -- because Zombie Brigade got there in 1988.
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Who knew what to expect from Drew Barrymore after He's Just Not That Into You, a feminist snuff flick released earlier this year that Barrymore executive produced and in which she had a sort of boutique role. While her instincts as a producer are erratic, having fastened her to everything from Donnie Darko to Duplex, for a lot of Drew-watchers, He's Just Not That Into You was a dealbreaker; for years we have been watching her amass enough power to get interesting projects made, and waiting for her to use that power to further what seemed like a progressive agenda. Instead we got a pack of beautiful, sniveling grown women jockeying for pole position in one of the most painfully retro films of the year; had I slumped any further in my seat I would have been licking Skittles goo off the floor. Alas, it seemed Barrymore the businesswoman/free-spirited artist had lost to Barrymore the boy-crazy, seriously uncool ditz in the battle for aesthetic supremacy.
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Explosions: fun in theory, but truly a hindrance to the medical community. Just bear witness to NBC's new drama Trauma, which follows a group of first responders as they endure a horrifying mid-air helicopter explosion before racing right back into the field. Trauma's fiery spectacles are well-staged (another occurs halfway through the episode during a mammoth highway accident), but ultimately feel like compensatory measures for a show that wants to be more gripping, nay, explosive, than it actually is. We're flat-lining too!
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For a show called Lie To Me, we'd expect the second season to really ratchet up the falsehoods being batted around Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth), especially when it comes to his personal relationships. Instead, in tonight's second season premiere, all we get is an inconsequential falsehood served by Dr. Lightman's colleague intended to mask her feelings towards her divorce. While the opener is otherwise taking strides to upgrade the show to a memorable, bracing serial, tonight's episode would have benefited from some real world exercising of Dr. Lightman's lie detection skills instead of employing a B-plot that could have just as easily belonged to a series called Fib To Me.
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As for the second of CBS's gracious saves, the seventh season of Cold Case premieres this Sunday. Our swoopy-haired detective Lilly Rush (Kathryn Morris) testifies about the driver who ran her car off a bridge, a 40-year-old ship murder is investigated, and the heretofore secondary detective Kat Miller (Tracie Thoms) makes a big jump into the foreground.
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