Once your premium cable series has exhausted human-trafficking plotlines, auto-erotic asphyxiation jokes and jerk sock monologues, you might as well buckle up for several months of agonizing brainstorming sessions. Just ask Jenji Kohan & Co., who were faced with this challenge when dreaming up the fifth season of Weeds, which concluded last night. Miraculously, Kohan's writers successfully ransacked their unconscious (or corrupt plot generator) so that Nancy Botwin's camp could endure the strangest, most morally bankrupt season yet. In honor of this accomplishment, we offer you the nine most bizarre Weeds scenes from season five.
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If we've learned anything from Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's that the blond bad boy always comes out ahead in a genre love triangle. Perhaps, then, it shouldn't be a surprise that Alexander Skarsgård popped this summer as True Blood's insinuating (but crucially restyled) vampire sheriff Eric Northman; to judge from the fan worship thrown his way online and at Comic-Con, I'm sure that Sookie's not the only one fantasizing about him.
Good thing that Movieline's a font of Skars-knowledge! Here are nine facts that should help you appreciate this 33-year-old Swedish "newcomer" even more:
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We thought it couldn't get any more revealing than when he shared the fact that his favorite movie of the past 17 years is the underrated Woody Allen gem, American Pie Presents: Little Stifflers, but Quentin Tarantino's all-access media assault in support of Inglourious Basterds continues, making a stopover yesterday at Howard Stern's Sirius studios. And in typical Stern style, the disarming radio host coaxed more out of the genre-obsessed auteur than any interviewer to come before. David Carradine's final gasps; sexual attraction to Kathy Griffin; his thing about feet: they hit it all. We run down the most fascinating for you now, with much help from the Internet's leading Stern summarizer, marksfriggin.com:
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The third season of Mad Men is on its way Sunday at 10 p.m., and if you're a regular viewer, then you know you have some questions left over from the spotty, cliffhanger-y second season. Pregnancy! Corporate takeovers! Gays! Of course Movieline would love to hear all of them -- I'll even go first (with spoilers, alas, for any season-two latecomers) after the jump.
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First Farrah. Then Michael. Now an American Idol worth watching. If we weren't sure that God was dead before, we now have conclusive evidence. With Kara DioGuardi standing atop the spinning Idol gyroscope, exhaling a powerful gust of fire-laughter as she triumphantly lifts a Coca-Cola-branded pitchfork to the smoky vortex that was once the sky, we thought we'd look back at some of the greatest moments in the Golden Reign of Paula Abdul.
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Ben Silverman's departure today from NBC Universal marks the end of a particularly volatile era at the network, but not necessarily due to any fault of Silverman's own. As you consider life after Ben -- including some of the outgoing executive's more mercurial moods collected after the jump -- you'll come to realize this guy was always more chameleon than peacock. And you'll miss him more than you probably think.
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Obviously, The Ugly Truth will be a distant runner-up to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in the final box-office tally. But it lags behind that blockbuster in another, perhaps less-expected way as well: According to Rotten Tomatoes, the nation's movie critics seem to prefer the much-loathed Michael Bay epic to Katherine Heigl's latest romantic comedy but a nearly two-to-one margin. The hate isn't quite as acidic for Truth, but there's no denying it's ugly. Read on for a vivid sampling:
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Movieline wants to wish everyone a very Happy Fourth of July Weekend. We'll not be posting tomorrow -- save for Part 5 of our Sundance Labs series -- but will be back on Monday ... with a very special surprise! (No hints, sorry.) In the meantime, we thought we'd celebrate America's birthday with something of a listy standby: a round-up of terrible, weird, and generally noteworthy performances of "The Star-Spangled Banner." We've eliminated some of the clichés from the regular rotation of greatest patriotic, ear-raping hits (sorry, Roseanne), and thrown in a couple of curveballs.
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Much has been made about the fact that Michael Bay outfitted one of his robots with wrecking ball testicles in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but really, it's Bay who has the giant cojones. There are so many utterly shameless moments in this film that I could have filled another Movieline Nine with Bay's wacko, unfettered hubris, but for now, I'll stick to the movie's first hour and try to be non-spoilery.
So what exactly do I mean by "shameless"? Well, have a look at the very first item on our list and I think you'll get the picture:
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You've seen the trailers, you've read the other summer preview articles, but the buzz stops here. Behold, a run-down of films for those of us who cherish summers full of uplifting movies that do not involve guns, explosions, unromanticized drug use, tweens, death or Tony Scott's able direction. Whether you are a female cinephile or just a guy hoping to defile his girlfriend in the back of a cinema, consider this your summer cheat sheet.
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Terminator Salvation director McG and co-star Common sat recently for one of MySpace's Artist on Artist conversations, eschewing all the dick-measuring and governor-digitizing talk of recent weeks for a more organic process of creative discovery. And while their film will no doubt speak for itself when it opens tomorrow, this chat (after the jump) provides a compact, revealing addendum to their bigscreen effort -- in ways both good and bad. For starters:
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9. Cardinal Carlo Bagnasco, tied to the Arch of Constantine with his pockets filled with birdseed, and pecked to death by ravenous pigeons who'd been starved for two weeks by the nefarious hand of the Illuminati.
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Fresh off its triumph-ish premiere this week in Rome, Angels & Demons last night made its first appearance for the New York press. A full review is no doubt forthcoming, but my first impressions have proven difficult to shake on the day after, thus requiring immediate digestion (and perhaps a few mild spoilers) in the latest installment of The Movieline Nine.
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In Backlash, Susan Faludi argues that Fatal Attraction -- the gold standard of a certain kind of Hollywood thriller in which a deranged woman invades the life of a happily married couple to reap violent destruction upon their lives -- was not just an anti-feminist film, but was rather crafted with the express purpose of delivering an anti-feminist message. She's probably right, but I loved it anyway, and will likely sit through any domestic intrusion movie (ooh -- great title. Domestic Intrusion, starring Halle Berry and Kiefer Sutherland) so long as there's at least one decent wife-on-murderous-slut catfight in its third act. Yesterday, we wondered what we might expect from the latest addition to the canon: Obsessed. In its honor, then, we premiere our slightly truncated spin on the classic top ten, The Movieline Nine...Crazy White Bitch Edition.
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