BIG SCREEN Australia (PG-13) -- Director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge) barely finished his epic drama about the wartime romance between a dainty aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) and a rough-and-tumble cattle herder (Hugh Jackman) in time to meet its release date. The 10-minute reel of footage distributor 20th Century Fox recently screened used snippets of music from Gone With the Wind, so you know Luhrmann is aiming for an Epic, capital E and all.
BIG SCREEN Twilight (PG-13) -- The wait is finally over for the legions of fans who have been anticipating director Catherine (Thirteen) Hardwicke's adaptation of the first book in Stephenie Meyer's series of novels about a teenage girl (Kristen Stewart) in love with a vampire (Robert Pattinson). Sort of like Wuthering Heights, with fangs.
SMALL SCREEN Dirty Money: The Business Of High-End Prostitution (10 p.m. Sunday, CNBC) -- The world's oldest profession is also one of the most lucrative, at least for one segment of the market. This documentary focuses on ''escorts'' -- women who make a staggering $12,000 to $100,000 a day. Which is even more than TV critics, and they don't even have to watch things like . . .
All Shook Up: Miami's Glory Days of Music, 8-9 p.m. Sunday, WLRN-PBS 17 One night in 1962, the silky balladeer Nat King Cole showed up at the Peppermint Lounge, the hip twist palace that had just opened on the 79th Street Causeway. The sedate Cole, who was a lot more likely to be seen on, say, The Dinah Shore Show than American Bandstand, had a surprising request: Could he play piano with the house band for a few nights? He wanted to get the feel of this rock 'n' roll stuff that his little daughter...
You could hear the oh-no-not-again! shudder in Wolf Blitzer's voice. CNN had just posted the first returns from Florida . . . and the vote totals didn't match up with the percentages. ''There's something wrong with those numbers,'' Blitzer said, visions of hanging chads and butterfly ballots no doubt dancing in his head. The graphic abruptly disappeared, seemingly along with any hope of a presidential victor being declared Tuesday night.
It could be a long, agonizing night of hanging chads and just-plain-wrong exit polls, or a short one that ends in a breathtaking landslide. Either way, television news executives say they'll tread cautiously Tuesday, keeping itchy fingers off the he's-won-that-state triggers.
It was, Brit Hume thought, about as low as things could go in Washington, that day in the spring of 1974 when the Watergate scandal was spinning toward its inevitable conclusion.
Brotherhood (8 p.m. Sunday, Showtime) If you're still lonely for Tony and Carmela and the gang, why not give Brotherhood a try? Kicking off its third season, this drama about a family of Irish Mafia and politicians (and yeah, it's hard to tell which is which) in Rhode Island is the most underwatched series on TV. Brilliantly written and acted, it's every bit as riveting as The Sopranos, and you don't need a dictionary of Italian swear words to watch it. As the season gets underway, the family pol...
I haven't seen Tru Loved, the picture that sent Ebert into meltdown, but I can sympathize. Eight minutes is about twice as much as I had seen of The CW's reality show Stylista before I knew that I wished slow, agonizing deaths on everybody involved. Believe me, I wanted to turn it off. I didn't, because . . . Well, I don't know, exactly.
JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE. Philip Norman. 822 pages. $34.95. Everybody from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro loves to remember John Lennon as the dippy Utopian of Imagine: Imagine there's no countries/It isn't hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too. Less remembered is the Lennon of Run For Your Life: Well I'd rather see you dead little girl/Than to be with another man. In Philip Norman's merciless biography, Lennon No. 2 is on full display, and the picture isn't pretty.
BIG SCREEN Zack and Miri Make a Porno (R) -- Writer-director Kevin Smith pushes the R-rating to its limits with this raunchy but also surprisingly tender comedy about a pair of longtime friends (Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) who decide to make an adult film in order to raise some quick cash.
Stressing out over your weekend spending? That's no fun. You can save a few bucks and still be entertained. Make fancy cocktails. Play a few games. Find new TV channels. Rediscover that being home doesn't have to be a bore.
Say what you will of Stylista -- brainless, vituperative, petty, ought to be clubbed like a baby seal; those would be a good way to start -- it makes no pretense of being anything else. Its essential shallowness is on display from the very start, when 11 contestants for a junior editor's job at the fashion magazine Elle are issued their first challenge: Bring the boss breakfast.
Vampire Princess, 8-9 p.m. Sunday, Smithsonian Channel Scream Queens, 10-11 p.m. Monday, VH-1 Every time I watch a presidential debate, I think the candidate we really need is Vlad Tepes, a prince who ruled a big chunk of what's now Romania back during the Middle Ages. Vlad once invited all the country's thieving noblemen to a big banquet where he locked them up and forced them to spend most of the next decade building him a castle. You think he wouldn't get this banking crisis straightened out in...
SMALL SCREEN Stylista (9 p.m. Wednesday, The CW) -- Eleven young fashion-obsessed twits compete to see who's the most insipid and irrelevant to the universe. The winner gets a job at Elle magazine for a year. The losers are parachuted into North Korea and forced to dress Kim Jong Il. And the viewers put their own eyes out with sharpened chopsticks.
Crusoe, 8-10 p.m. Friday, WTVJ-NBC 6 Let us introduce Crusoe with a series of good news/bad news jokes, one of the intellectual staples of the audience of 11-year-old boys for which it is intended. Good news: A ship has arrived to the desert island on which Robinson Crusoe is marooned. Bad news: It's full of pirates. Good news: One of the pirates is a chick who compares favorably to the coconuts Crusoe has been dating. Bad news: The last guy to hit on her got his eye ripped out. ''That sounds grim...
Just imagine if, when the TV cameras pulled back to show the audience during last week's presidential debate, Charles Gibson had breathlessly exclaimed: ''Uncomfortable chairs brought to you by Ikea!'' Or if, as the candidates ripped into federal mortgage agencies for causing the banking crisis, a reproving Katie Couric had decreed: ``Fannie and Freddie are totally not invited to my next pizza party!''
Soldiers of Conscience is about wars, those that men fight against one another and those they fight against their deepest human impulses. The latter are on display in the earliest moments of the show, in footage of U.S. infantry recruits learning to fight with bayonets.
My Own Worst Enemy, 10-11 p.m. Monday, WTVJ-NBC 6 When a sultry Russian double agent whispers her postcoital love to hard-boiled American spy Edward Albright, he warns her: ``Don't let an act of deception turn into an act of self-deception.''
BIG SCREEN W. (PG-13) -- Director Oliver Stone promises this biopic about the life of President George W. Bush (played by Josh Brolin) will be a ''compassionate'' look at the man. Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Scott Glenn and Richard Dreyfuss make up Bush's cabinet, while James Cromwell is his dad.
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