Script

The need to have a hearty laugh is the only reason to see "Single White Female," another farcical comedy masquerading as a suspense thriller. The picture stars lanky Bridget Fonda as a young woman who kicks a cheating boyfriend out of her Manhattan apartment, advertises for a new roommate, and gets Jennifer Jason Leigh, a psycho in sheep's clothing. "Single White Female" is directed by the unbelievably sardonic Barbet Schroeder, who made a hero out of Claus Von Bulow in "Reversal of Fortune," while at the same time presaging the development of crusading defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz into an egomaniac.

One of the obvious differences between The Dictator, the new Sacha Baron Cohen comedy, and Borat and Bruno, his 2006 and 2009 endeavors, is that the latter two, of course, were real. That is, they presented themselves as documentary-like affairs, with Baron Cohen's Kazakh TV personality and Austrian fashion journalist, respectively, inserting themselves into real-life situations with real-life people. Unscripted. Let the fur fly. In The Dictator, Baron Cohen plays General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen, the ruler of a fictional North African republic.

Jason Statham was on holiday, as he and his fellow Brits like to say, when he flipped open a script sent for his perusal. It was by Lewis John Carlino , it was about a cool hit man whose specialty was making his kills look like accidents - and it was cracking good. "I read it, and I loved it," Statham says of the screenplay, which was called The Mechanic - the same title as a 1972 action pic starring Charles Bronson . And as it turns out, he was reading the shooting script from the Bronson film.

Danny Glover came to Philadelphia yesterday to talk about his new picture, "To Sleep With Anger," but by evening, he'd had just about enough. Sprawled casually in the back of a limo, his painful shoes discarded and his bare feet resting on the floor, the actor was too tired after nine hours of interviews to talk about anything but football. The San Francisco-raised Glover was talking about his hometown 49ers, remembering fondly and pointedly the 49ers' comeback victory over the Philadelphia Eagles last season.

In Hit and Runway, a desperate, aspiring screenwriter dreams of penning a blockbuster action movie even though he has absolutely no discernible talent or qualifications. Given the prevailing standards in Hollywood, this should assure him a lifetime of work. But in Christopher Livingston's erratic comedy, which features a lot more misses than hits, Alex Andero, a Greenwich Village dishwasher, realizes his work is terrible. This kind of honest self-appraisal would in real life ruin his chances of a three-picture deal with Jerry Bruckheimer.

The film opens with Howard Stern - suspended over the stage, his buttocks bare - wondering whether he's doing the right thing as he prepares for his infamous entrance at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. It ends in a dream sequence, with Stern, in the same get-up, suspended over the stage at the Oscars, about to receive an Academy Award. "God . . . What a dream," Stern, now awake, says to wife Alison. "Good or bad?" "I don't know," says the exasperated jock who, in his dream, has just splattered onto the stage.

Seems like every year, at least one Fringe musical explores - or maybe exploits - the trials of an aspiring singer who looks for fame and love against all odds. Trite? You bet, but when it's good it connects. The Hoppers Hit the Road, about two singing brothers on a quest for the big time, is composed of a cast of Philadelphia improv actors who decided it would be fun to use a script. And it's good. If it can smooth out rough edges during this run, it will be better than that.

Arturo Brachetti appears before our eyes as a horseman, or possibly a royal mounted cop. Then he ducks behind a scrim. Poing! In a split second - not a full second, mind you - he's before us again, this time in full bumblebee getup. He disappears for an instant once more, then . . . He's back. As a sort of cartoon flower, in full splendor, pistils and stamens blushing in the stage lights. The talented Brachetti is a quick-change artist, and in his native Italy, he is a big star.

Seems like every year, at least one Fringe musical explores - or maybe exploits - the trials of an aspiring singer who looks for fame and love against all odds. Trite? You bet, but when it's good it connects. The Hoppers Hit the Road, about two singing brothers on a quest for the big time, is composed of a cast of Philadelphia improv actors who decided it would be fun to use a script. And it's good. If it can smooth out rough edges during this run, it will be better than that. Hoppers is classic Fringe, done with joy and a sense that everyone, audience included, is a conspirator.

Things haven't gone exactly as planned for the Eagles so far this season. Coach Andy Reid's original road map to Houston - site of Super Bowl XXXVIII - didn't include a malfunctioning passing game led by a quarterback with the NFL's worst passer rating and completion percentage. Or a defensive line and secondary ravaged by injuries. But at least one thing is still working as the Eagles reach the midpoint of their season with a game against the Atlanta Falcons this afternoon at the Georgia Dome.

When it comes to online video, men aren't the boss anymore. Rapidly growing in numbers and influence, female viewers are reshaping original programming at major platforms such as AOL, Hulu, and YouTube. WIGS, YouTube's popular women's channel, marks its first anniversary with the premiere Friday of the second season of Lauren , a powerful drama about rape in the military starring Troian Bellisario, Jennifer Beals, Bradley Whitford, and Raymond Cruz. Founded by filmmakers Jon Avnet ( Fried Green Tomatoes )

One of this spring's most anticipated TV shows isn't actually on TV. It's on Netflix. Hemlock Grove , a creepy werewolf thriller directed by horror maestro Eli Roth, will premiere April 19 on the subscription video-streaming site. It's part of a new wave of sophisticated, polished online scripted shows that - finally - have propelled online video into the big leagues. With backing from major studios and creative spark from Hollywood A-listers including Tom Hanks and Jerry Seinfeld, online platforms including Yahoo!

On the first day of 1863, as the Civil War raged on, President Lincoln proclaimed all the slaves in the rebellious Confederate states to be "forever free. " With his Emancipation Proclamation, whose 150th anniversary the United States celebrates this week, Lincoln made the end of slavery a Civil War goal. As PBS's ambitious documentary miniseries The Abolitionists shows, Lincoln's words came at the end of a decadeslong antislavery campaign led by a tiny group of activists whose fervor alienated them from the mainstream of American life.

LAYING FOR Keeps" is a perfectly pleasant romantic comedy completely lacking in novelty. This will leave many viewers unengaged, but may not be a disadvantage for its core audience. Genre fans, like children, love to hear their favorite stories again and again. They will find a comforting familiarity in this well-worn tale of a sensitive, immature hunk tamed by the love of - but I dare not reveal the ending. Gerard Butler stars as a former soccer star, now broke, divorced, and trying to learn how to co-parent his young son. When we meet him, he is shooting an audition tape for a job as a TV sportscaster.

When bankrupt Hostess Brands Inc. declared it would end its bakery business and potentially incinerate thousands of jobs with a liquidation move, I had the sense I had seen this movie already. Just two days before Friday's announcement, which set off Twinkie nostalgia while torching a nationwide strike by Hostess' unionized bakers, I had written a small blurb about another company that had faced precarious talks in Chapter 11 bankruptcy with its unions: The final three Super Fresh stores in the South Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia are being shut down by corporate parent Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., according to the union representing 155 clerks who will lose their jobs.

U.S. SEN. Bob Casey Jr. is not the first to confront this question: With political allies like Ed Rendell , who needs enemies? Casey is just the latest. Pennsylvania's former governor grumbled this week to the Scranton Times-Tribune that Casey is running a "non-campaign" for a second term against Tom Smith , a former coal-company owner from Armstrong County who has dumped $16.5 million of his own money into the race. To be fair, Rendell has a point. Casey has been running variations of one campaign ad on television, casting Smith as a radical tea-party guy who wants to privatize Social Security and convert Medicare into a voucher program.

BOSTON - A Harvard University professor on Tuesday unveiled a fourth-century fragment of papyrus that she said is the only existing ancient text quoting Jesus explicitly referring to having a wife. Karen King, an expert in the history of Christianity, said the text contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to "my wife," whom he identifies as Mary. King said the fragment of Coptic script is a copy of a gospel, probably written in Greek in the second century. King helped translate and unveiled the tiny fragment at a conference of Coptic experts in Rome.

Valley Forge-based drug-wholesaler AmerisourceBergen Inc. announced Tuesday that it has won a three-year contract, worth about $18.5 billion a year, to supply products to pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts. "We are honored that Express Scripts has chosen AmerisourceBergen to supply the brand pharmaceuticals it needs for its recently combined mail-order and specialty-pharmacy business," Steven H. Collis, AmerisourceBergen's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

On air, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), the news-anchor superhero at the center of HBO's The Newsroom, talks to America about important things while his staff looks on adoringly. Meanwhile, in his active dating life, Will is wont to assume a kingly hauteur when talking down to the very women he's trying to woo. This week, in the decisively bad fourth episode of Aaron Sorkin's wild pitch of a screwball, Will is more than once powerfully rude in denouncing the evils of gossip to his lady friends, and more than once his lectures earn damp feedback — the little liquid smack of a drink thrown in his face.

A hint of sleaziness hangs over Muriel Resnik's Any Wednesday, a sugar-daddy escapade and her only Broadway play, a highly successful one, running for two years in the mid-'60s. It's written to be appealingly scrubby-faced sitting-room comedy — although the living room is in the apartment of a guy's mistress. Any Wednesday, which is being given an excellent production that opened Saturday at Montgomery Theater in Souderton, came after the film The Apartment, which later became the musical Promises, Promises.