Dave Perkal Movies

Former Married. . .With Children costar Christina Applegate returned to television in the slightly schizophrenic ABC sitcom Samantha Who? Applegate played title character Samantha "Sam" Newly, who after being stuck down in a traffic accident, awakened from an eight-day coma suffering from "retrograde amnesia," with no memory of who she was nor what she'd been. Slowly but surely, Sam confirmed that she was 30 years old, the vice president of the real-estate firm Chapman and Funk, and the ex-girlfriend of a photographer named Todd (Barry Watson). Sam's post-coma personality was one of pure "sweetness and light"--which greatly confused her friends, family members, and business associates, who recalled the pre-coma Sam as mean, overbearing, manipulating, vitriolic, and a hard-drinking, promiscuous party animal. It was up to Sam to remain as nice and pleasant as she now was, or to revert to her previous nastiness. Helping her put the pieces together was apartment-house doorman Frank (Tim Russ), who had often been the recipient of the "old" Sam's bitchiness and had a lot trouble reconciling himself to the "new" Sam, but was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Others in the heroine's orbit were her resentful mother Regina (Jean Smart) and her too-affable-to-be-true father Howard (Kevin Dunn); her best friend Andrea (Jennifer Esposito), an accomplished conniver and back-stabber in her own right; and her former childhood buddy Dena (Melissa McCarthy), who had her own special reasons for hanging around to see which of the "two" Sams would ultimately prevail. Cocreated by novelist Cecilia Hearn, Samantha Who? premiered October 15, 2007. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Academy Award-winning Exorcist director William Friedkin scuttles deep into the darkest recesses of the traumatized human psyche with this tale of a lonely bartender haunted by the long-ago disappearance of her young son, and the paranoia that emerges when she enters into a tentative relationship with a deeply disturbed drifter. Adapted from the off-Broadway play by Tracy Letts, Bug centers on Agnes (Ashley Judd), who tends bar alongside pal R.C. (Lynn Collins), and has recently moved into a shoddy roadside motel in hopes of avoiding her menacing and recently paroled ex-husband, Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.). Upon making the acquaintance of subdued former soldier Peter (Michael Shannon, repeating his stage role), a veteran of the first Gulf War, Agnes finally senses that things are looking up. Quietly charming despite his melancholy aura, Peter soon reveals to Agnes that he contracted a "bug" while serving in the Middle East, and that it may have been deliberately administered as part of a secret military medical experiment. Convinced that the microscopic insects are quickly multiplying just under the surface of his skin and that they have now infected Agnes as well, Peter soon descends into a psychotic rage as he resorts to increasingly desperate measures to purge himself of the offending subdermal arthropods. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide