Aliens

In an annual rite known as Upfront Week, NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS, and the CW just presented their lineups for the 2012-13 TV season to advertisers in New York. The ceremonies took place in some of the city's most august concert Halls (Carnegie, Avery Fisher, Radio City Music) over four days. The broadcast companies introduced only 20 new series for the fall (down from 27 last season). NBC led the pack with six new shows. Fox and the CW had half that many. Like it or not, an awful lot of familiar faces will be returning in the fall.

The cocaine ring operated like a television "home-shopping network" for narcotics, many of its dealings carried out in Jamaican dialect, according to a prosecutor. "The four operators would man the phones, take orders, instruct the customers where the cocaine was being stored that day, and what the price was," Assistant District Attorney Stuart Haimowitz said. The buyers were wholesalers and street-level dealers who repackaged the drug for resale, he said. Nine of 10 people arrested Aug. 8 in raids on three West Philadelphia addresses, including the ring's alleged headquarters on 53d Street near Haverford Avenue, were yesterday ordered to stand trial on racketeering and narcotics charges.

In only two weeks, Aliens has scared up $25 million at the box office, but the man who created the powerhouse sequel came within 25 cents of not doing the film at all. James Cameron, the slightly built, 31-year-old Canadian now basking in rave reviews and listening to the busy jingle of the cash register, says the idea of topping Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) sometimes seemed more terrifying than the monster stalking the spaceship. "It was such a bind that I got the point where I was going to flip a quarter.

Topping this week's DVD releases are an animated tale for the family and what could be the launch of a sci-fi franchise. Gnomeo and Juliet, Grade C-minus: Two gnomes from the opposite side of the fence fall in love. James McAvoy and Emily Blunt provide their voices. It took 11 years to make the animated take on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet using garden gnomes. It feels more like it was made in days. The script lacks originality, the Elton John soundtrack feels forced, and the characters are more creepy than cuddly.

My anger rose over the contents of Meredith M. Henry's July 20 article "Kennett Square tense over workers' housing. " Did it ever occur to the officials doing the housing inspections to hire someone who speaks the primary language of the tenants to understand their needs and concerns? Of course not. These people don't deserve the same basic rights as the rest of us. After all, they're just aliens from Mexico. Why am I not surprised that the article mentions mainly the complaints of the residents of the area without attempting to find out what, I would think, are the valid and more pressing complaints of the workers themselves?

John Carpenter's latest nightmare, "They Live," is a lot of things. It's a little bit "V" and a little bit "Lethal Weapon. " A little bit "1984" and a little bit "Rambo. " It's got sledgehammer political satire, humor, goofiness and little bit of Wrestlemania thrown in to boot. Once the action get going, former pro wrestler Roddy Piper is terrific as John Nada, your average out-of-work citizen. Unlike his friend Frank (played to the hilt by Keith David), Nada "believes in America," and "follows the rules.

The aliens in "Mars Attacks" have come to destroy our way of life, and they are doing us a favor. At least in the decidedly eccentric opinion of director Tim Burton - his heroes, remember, include Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Pee-wee Herman - whose perspective on American culture is decidedly unique. His is a disaster movie with a twist: We are the disaster. The characters in this movie represent the worst from all walks of American life. They include an image-conscious president (Jack Nicholson)

Depending on whom you ask, Whitley Strieber is either a genius of make- believe, as evidenced by his Wolfen and The Hunger, or a true believer in parapsychological phenomena, as evidenced in Communion, a first-person account of his encounters with extraterrestrials. Because of their imagistic subjects, Strieber's books are eminently adaptable to the screen. Wolfen hypothesized new forms embodying the spirits of our Native American ancestors. The Hunger put a fresh face on vampires.

Any good farmer knows that corn should be knee-high by the Fourth of July. Apparently, movie producers know this as well. "Independence Day" has arrived, and corn is flourishing in this cheerfully goofy sci-fi epic about an intergalactic army bent on destroying the human population of Earth. A throwback to the B-grade science-fiction thrillers of the 1950s, and the C-grade Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970s (think "The Poseidon Adventure"), "Independence Day" throws a bunch of sort-of-famous actors into the path of a catastrophe while we wait around to see who dies.

James Cameron confronted a monstrous problem in more ways than one in making Aliens. And those members of the audience not hiding under the seats during this powerhouse sequel can only admire the solution. Cameron had the nerve to attempt an encore to one of the truly frightening films of the '70s, a landmark in the revival of screen science fiction in the last decade, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). Before bringing his celebrated visual prowess to the story of the ill-fated journey of the space freighter Nostromo, Scott clearly absorbed the structure and technique of another masterpiece in terror tactics - Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975)

On Star Trek , the aliens often look so human that crew members fall in love with them. But in real life, scientists in the field known as astrobiology can't be sure alien life would even be carbon-based like us, or use DNA to carry a genetic code. Some insight now is coming from earthly labs, where scientists are building alternative kinds of genetic codes, and showing how they can evolve. Whether life could be built with an alien biochemistry was among the more interesting questions that came up during a public event with famed biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of the book The Physics of Star Trek.

We've managed to acquire a remarkable family Hanukkah gift: a ship's manifest, an official passenger log that tracks my late mother-in-law's voyage to America in 1920. It's a taproot to family history, part of our clan's collective "Coming to America" story. Had she not made that voyage, nothing would be the same. Hinda Rubache came to these shores and through Ellis Island as a young woman of 22. She sailed from the city of Minsk in Russia, though her immigration papers say Poland because of the ever-changing borders.

Cue the spooky music. The Web's abuzz about government video that shows a giant bright spot near Mercury. "Wow. Wait till you see this," says UFO buff and YouTube channeler siniXster, narrating as a solar flare fills a view of the planet closest to the sun. "Holy smokes, look at that," siniXster says. "That is definitely some sort of manufactured object. It's cylindrical on either side. It has shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me. " Which is why the video is titled, "Amazing huge cloaked UFO next to Mercury.

Police have charged a 31-year-old man with sexually assaulting four women in knifepoint attacks in Kensington last month. Marcos Camacho was pulled over by police Tuesday night, hours after police at the Special Victims Unit announced that they were searching for a man matching his description and that of his car. Investigators initially said they were looking for a suspect in the attacks of three women, but the District Attorney's office...

Parks and Recreation 's Rashida Jones grew up around Michael Jackson and his siblings, given that her dad is music guru Quincy Jones . She tells Playboy she found Michael a bit odd. "He was definitely a little bit of an alien, for sure," she says. He was in touch with the inner child. "When I was young, it felt as if he was my age, not 18 years older," Rashida says, "but with just a little bit more pep . . . . Once, my sister [ Kidada ], Michael, Emmanuel Lewis , and I got in a car with Super Soakers and went by a movie theater and supersoaked the hell out of people waiting in line.

ISLAMABAD - Pakistani officials warned they could jettison the United States as an ally if American officials continue to accuse Islamabad's intelligence agency of assisting a leading Afghan Taliban group in recent attacks in Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar cautioned the United States against airing allegations such as that of collusion between Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency and the extremist Haqqani network, a blunt charge made Thursday by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

We don't usually hear the sound of silence when we're alone or with others - we hear our own thoughts. But in the theater, when we're focused on a world outside our own, silence can be poignant or funny, intense, rhythmic, or even startling. In Annie Baker's quirky play The Aliens , which opened Wednesday night in a meticulously acted production by Theatre Exile, the silence is downright risky. And not always understandable. Baker, a young playwright whose three-guy drama was an Off-Broadway success last year, has written the simplest of plots, and I'm not sure whether she uses the silence she mandates in her script because she wants the audience to think something through, because she wants her characters to do so, or what.

In Attack the Block, the feature writing and directing debut of British comedian Joe Cornish, an alien invasion occurs in a London public housing complex, and only a group of teenagers seems to notice. Pulsing with a rowdy energy, the film works as both a sci-fi horror flick and a teen adventure film. The greatest turn that Cornish pulls off is opening the movie with his protagonists mugging a woman (Jodie Whittaker) and still somehow making them seem, as the story unfolds, worth getting to know (while never excusing their nascent thuggery)

This week's DVD selections include one movie about weddings and two films about aliens. Jumping the Broom, Grade B-plus: Two families battle over wedding traditions. Angela Bassett stars. If you only look at the cast, it might appear this is a comedy aimed at an African American audience. But this sweet and funny story about how it's possible for two people to fall in love without falling into bed has universal themes. It shows how love conquers all. Elizabeth Hunter's script is a smooth blend of tough emotional moments with lighthearted comedy.

LONDON - Each of the young rioters who clogged Britain's courthouses painted a bleak picture of a lost generation: a 15-year-old Ukrainian whose mother died, a 17-year-old who followed his cousin into the mayhem, an 11-year-old arrested for stealing a garbage can. Britain is bitterly divided on the reasons behind the riots. Some blame opportunistic criminality; others say conflicting economic policies and punishing government spending cuts have deepened inequalities in the country's most deprived areas.