I wasn't going to review I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, but then I checked out the Rotten Tomatoes page for the adaptation of Tucker Max's testosterrific memoir romp. "Might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film," groans one wag. "Rarely fails to be excruciating," sniffs another. And of course, "If ever a movie needed a restraining order issued against it, it's I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell." Clever, but hold it just a minute, fellas! We've got a lowbrow milestone, no doubt. But on that basis alone -- not to mention that Beer in Hell is fitfully entertaining -- I wouldn't send Max off to the Hague just yet.
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Medium's jump from NBC to CBS commences tonight with the sixth season premiere episode "Deja Vu All Over Again," which sees a relatively quick return to normalcy for research medium Allison DuBois (Patricia Arquette) after she recovers from a three-month coma. This follows a breakneck fifth season where the sullen protagonist's soul transferred into a dude named Todd. Fancy! Now she's back on her feet, making risky efforts to return to work, and wondering what happened to her psychic power.
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In Bright Star, Jane Campion conjures a nineteenth century world into which many of us would happily slip: people behave beautifully, dress carefully, spend afternoons dancing minuets and evenings perfecting their harmonies, quote poetry to each other with complete unselfconsciousness, and fall in love like absolute champions. Aside from non-existent plumbing and the mortal threat posed by everything short of a hangnail, it's positively idyllic. Keatsian, even.
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Like a drunken, philosophical freshman at Chico State University, ABC's FlashForward wonders what would happen if everyone on Earth blacked out at the same time. The dystopian series premieres tonight, and if you can handle the cluttered melodrama that comes standard with a dark, sci-fi pilot, FlashForward may rejuvenate your ninth-grade crushes on Joseph Fiennes and Aldous Huxley.
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"Unconventional" family units are the most reliable hallmark of the modern sitcom, like it or not. I Love Lucy's interracial marriage led to the single-parent bliss of My Three Sons, which beget The Brady Bunch's sprawling step-family, which led to the tense divorce situation of One Day at a Time, which went on to nearly kill us with that horrible dead parents show On Our Own. The next chapter, ABC's Modern Family, gives us both a gay couple and a May-December second marriage, and it may represent a glimmer of ingenuity in the joyless tundra of new comedy in 2009.
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Fun Fact about network medical dramas: We apparently need more of them! Did you know? I didn't, but NBC had an inkling and will premiere its new nurse-focused hospital show Mercy tonight. A majority of critics have noted how Mercy pales in comparison to Showtime's compelling Nurse Jackie, but the only real problems with this watchable melodrama are its complacency with piling on cliches (prepare thy jazz-hands for... a defibrillator mishap!) and its shameless retooling of Grey's Anatomy characters as homogenized, dysfunctional romantics.
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[Editor's Note: Please welcome Michelle Orange, a former Movieline guest film critic turned staff critic today. She'll be contributing two in-depth reviews per week.]
No one makes me want to go back to Canada more than Michael Moore. Not even Bush II, frequent subject of Moore's clammy wrath: Where W. had a (crude, acrid) way with doctrine, some profound, core certainty within -- call it my sanity -- wouldn't let me believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that his brand of horseshit would get over; Moore, meanwhile, crafts his agit-prop with the sort of populist finesse that slides right home.
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Despite having a miraculous 8.8/10 user rating on IMDb, this week's Pandorum has been hidden away from critics more efficiently, say, than an alien egg in the chest cavity of a British character actor. Which led me to prowling the archive's ventilation shafts in dismay until I kicked across a copy of It! Terror From Beyond Space, the schlocker that inspired the whole stalked-on-the-spaceship genre, leading to Alien and countless imitators -- from Horror Planet and Event Horizon to this week's creature feature in which Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster and Cam Gigandet perhaps stir themselves from cryosleep to face the horror of mutants aboard!
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When we meet Agent G. (Chris O'Donnell) in the NCIS spinoff NCIS: Los Angeles, he doesn't know what his initial stands for, and within the first hour his quaint boss Hetty (Linda Hunt) even calls him an orphan. It's an ironic motif, because for all of NCIS: Los Angeles's determination to establish its identity through a shootout on Mulholland Drive or close-ups of the Santa Monica pier, this drama feels nameless.
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Julianna Margulies was the only ER cast member to win an Emmy, which makes it all the more surprising that her career after leaving the show in 2000 is so sparse. Now, following the quick demise of her 2008 show Canterbury's Law, Margulies stars in another lawyer-centric drama, The Good Wife, a recovery tale of a shamed politician's wife who returns to work as a defense attorney to save face and support her kids. While this show boasts none of the urgency or originality of ER's legendary first episode, there's enough in tonight's premiere to suggest that the onetime Carol Hathaway could become a fixture in living rooms yet again.
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Perhaps I'm spoiled by the dizzying plot speed of Melrose Place, but the fifth-season premiere of CBS's How I Met Your Mother is nearly unassuming. The episode, "Definitions," which airs tonight, follows Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin (Cobie Smulders) as they refuse to define their affair, much to the detriment of Lily (Alyson Hannigan), who discovers their relationship and eggs the couple into having "the talk."
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If there's one thing The Informant confirms, it's that Steven Soderbergh has got a serious fetish for the mundane. Give him a story that sounds like a knockout on the page -- the tale of a high-class call girl, a murder mystery set at a doll factory, or the story of Che Guevara -- and he'll sprinkle it with as many quotidian details as possible. On the page, The Informant has a plot that is a twisty, psychological surprise. On the screen, The Informant really wants you to hear the buzzing of fluorescent lights in office scenes.
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Joel McHale is a winsome, smart-ass altar boy as host of The Soup, the improbably hilarious E! program that skewers all daytime programming but specializes in the insanity of Tyra Banks. Having conquered comedic quips on the Seacrest network, McHale now ventures to NBC with his new sitcom Community, which follows a group of community college students with storied pasts and plenty of pent-up ambitions. Some have called this the season's funniest pilot. Is it?
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Even as Tom Ford's writing-directing debut A Single Man was always destined for the hype (and distribution deal) attending its Toronto Film Festival debut, it seemed equally bound to be beautiful, elegant and, well, good. It is all of those things and not a whole lot more -- a showcase for Ford's eye and Colin Firth's chops, a perfect storm of unfailing taste. Christopher Isherwood's source novel about a gay professor (played here by Firth) grappling with the death of his lover in the 1960s Los Angeles rewards both men's efforts with a substance they wouldn't have otherwise, and the results yield the awards-ready class that will sweep enlightened audiences (and, presumably, the Academy) off their feet. Beyond that, however, the primary impact that will stick with most viewers is how much more Man could have been.
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Dogtooth is a delightfully twisted little fable from Greek filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos, with all the markings of a cult classic. Alternating between the banal, the hilarious and the downright horrifying, it's the tale of three young adult children, cut off from all civilization by their psychotically controlling father (Christos Stergioglou, reminiscent of Dan Hedaya) and their passive accomplice mother. The family passes their long days in a rural Athenian suburb -- a landscape interchangeable with Southern California's -- in a modern ranch home with a sparkling swimming pool and meticulously tended yard. Surrounding the compound, however, is a twelve-foot fence from which only dad is ever permitted to emerge for his work as a factory manager.
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