The list of Stuff From The 1960s That Doesn't Need To Be Relived just keeps getting longer: Beehive hairdos. Frankie and Annette movies. The Bay of Pigs. Fallout shelters. The Cowsills. And now the latest entry, The Prisoner. Though it would eventually be hugely influential, the original 1968 version went almost unwatched. AMC's new remake is merely unwatchable.
BIG SCREEN (PG-13) -- Sandra Bullock sets aside the ditzy romantic-comedy act for this drama based on Michael Lewis' nonfiction bestseller The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, about a homeless African-American teenager (Quinton Aaron) who is taken in by a wealthy white couple (Bullock and Tim McGraw) as part of a college-football recruitment program.
American films have been wallowing in erotic voyeurism for, oh, about 103 years, since Thomas Edison's film The Kiss. (Edison's own review of his 47-second film: ''They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.'')
BIG SCREEN 2012 (PG-13) -- Disaster magnet Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) returns to destroy our planet -- again. John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton and Amanda Peet are among the humans trying to make sense of the impending apocalypse. Remember when Irwin Allen made those star-studded disaster flicks in the 1970s? Those were awesome. Emmerich's, not so much. But they sure look awesome.
Call the Chamber of Commerce Police. Weird Florida: Roads Less Traveled is an egregious insult to our community, a vicious slight of our importance to the state and our role in making Florida a source of national dumbfoundment.
Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.
BIG SCREEN The Box (PG-13): -- After the spectacular failure of his ambitious second film Southland Tales, writer-director Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) goes the simpler, high-concept route with this thriller adapted from a tiny Richard Matheson short story, about a married couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) given a wooden box. Push its button, and you become instantly wealthy -- but someone, somewhere, drops dead. Would you do it? Come on, you know you would.
Let's be clear here: I am not saying FX's new sitcom The League isn't funny. I'm just saying it's not for everybody. If you're sensitive about deviant sex, for instance -- or even normal sex, if it's had in restaurant restrooms -- you might want to give the show a pass.
Michael Jackson: This Is It (PG) -- High School Musical director Kenny Ortega, who was collaborating with the singer on a series of London concerts, culls a concert film and cinematic memorial (with some sequences in 3D) from the hundreds of hours of footage taped during Jackson's rehearsals for the shows.
Bill and Betty Garcia moved from New York City to Charlotte, N.C., so their sons could grow up away from the grind and grime of urban life. Now they think they made a mistake.
BIG SCREEN A Serious Man (R) -- Iconoclastic directors Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men, Fargo) get personal with this comedy, loosely based on their middle-class Jewish upbringing, about a beleaguered college professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) who seeks advice from three rabbis on how to get control of his topsy-turvy life. As funny and bleak as anything the Coens have ever made, but without all the distancing stylistic tricks and irony.
I was concerned last year when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy began ripping one another's steaming entrails out in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a rewrite of Jane Austen's classic novel. I was downright alarmed when the American cinema embraced the sensuality of rotting ambulatory corpses in Zombie Strippers. And I began marking off the days until the Apocalypse after reading the public taunt a friend left her brother while playing last spring's ubiquitous zombie-combat game on Facebook: ``I sucked out your brains and spit them to the floor, you zombie dog!''
BIG SCREEN Law Abiding Citizen (R) -- An angry man (300's Gerard Butler) targets the Philadelphia prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) who orchestrated a plea bargain for the killer of his wife and daughter. Sometimes, words just aren't enough.
Third World governments come and go, trading monarchy for populism for military autocracy and even for the trappings, at least, of democracy. Yet the poor remain poor: from one to four billion of them, depending on whose estimate you accept.
You know it's late in the fall TV season when a network can't keep its genre cliches straight. CBS' Three Rivers, fall's final new show, has an irascible surgeon snapping at a hospital bureaucrat: ``Never get between a doctor and his donut!'' I haven't checked, but I'll bet over on CSI: Miami, Horatio Caine is brooding about the cost of malpractice insurance and the promiscuity of ER nurses.
BIG SCREEN Couples Retreat (PG-13) -- Four married couples (among them Vince Vaughn, Malin Akerman, Jason Bateman, Kristin Davis and Jon Favreau) vacation on an island that specializes in relationship counseling. More than specializes, actually: The therapy is mandatory. The cast is promising, and Favreau and Vaughn co-wrote the screenplay, so the movie should be funny. But the trailer looks deadly.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that Norman Bates isn't about to burst out of the bedroom and slice you like a Benihana filet.
Back to you: Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton's joint show didn't work out, but the sitcom vets return to TV tonight with new shows
The Hollywood writers' strike has been over for more than a year now, but Trauma seems to be some sort of final shot across the studios' bow: See, guys, this is what a show would look like if you tried to make it without screenwriters.
All you really need to know about Ken Burns' newest marathon documentary you can learn from the title: The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Really, the best? Better than the polio vaccine, air conditioning, the Internet, the airplane, liberal democracy, rock 'n' roll, bourbon and the abolition of slavery? Better than toilet paper?
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